By Jo Carson
“Jo Carson is one of the nation’s premier playwrights and storytellers. Her roots as a writer reach back to the American traditional narrative styles, and her dramatic works drawn from American frontier history are brilliant in their originality.”
Gurney Norman, author of Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories
“Jo Carson is one of Appalachia’s most gifted and original playwrights.”
Journal of Appalachian Studies
“Carson deftly leads the Teller Tales audience through the thicket, occasionally and suddenly bringing us out into a linguistic clearing before plunging us back into the laurel. This narrative inventiveness makes reading Teller Tales an exhilarating experience.”
Appalachian Journal
“This work is not a standard history text. Instead, it is an engaging, almost poetic, pair of narratives that relate historic events told as though the reader is a guest at a kitchen table. Perfect as an easy supplemental read for high school or college history classes, or for any history buff.”
Jill Oxendine, managing editor of the Encyclopedia of Appalachia
“All my work fits in my mouth,” Jo Carson says. “I write performance material no matter what else the pieces get called, and whether they are for my voice or other characters’ voices … they are first to be spoken aloud.” Following an oral tradition that has strong roots in her native Tennessee, the author of Teller Tales invites the reader to participate in events in a way that no conventional history book can.
Both stories in this book are set in East Tennessee in the mid-eighteenth century and share certain characters. The first narrative, “What Sweet Lips Can Do,” recounts the story of the Overmountain Men and the battle of King’s Mountain, a tide-turning battle in the American Revolution. “Men of Their Time” is an exploration of white-Cherokee relationships from early contact through the time of the Revolution.
Although not well known to the outside world, the stories recounted in Teller Tales are cornerstones in the heritage of the Appalachian region and of American history. In ways that will appeal to young and old alike, Jo Carson’s irreverent telling will broaden the audience and the understanding for the stories of native Americans, settlers, explorers, and revolutionaries of early America.
Jo Carson is a writer and performer from Johnson City, Tennessee. She is the author of The Last of the “Waltz Across Texas” and Other Stories, Stories I Ain’t Told Nobody Yet, and Spider Speculations.
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History · American History · Appalachian Studies · Ohio and Regional · Appalachia · United States · North America · Americas
Paperback
978-0-8214-1754-6
Retail price: $18.95,
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Release date: March 2007
144 pages
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5¼ × 8¼ in.
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Hardcover
978-0-8214-1753-9
Retail price: $29.95,
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Release date: March 2007
144 pages
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Electronic
978-0-8214-4237-1
Release date: November 2014
144 pages
Rights: World
The Magic World
American Indian Songs and Poems
Edited by William Brandon
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Introduction by William Brandon
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Preface by William Brandon
Traditionally, the legends, myth-cycles, tales, rituals, songs and poems of Native Americans (both North and South) have been treated as ethnological data or as curious objects. William Brandon believes that the songs and poems in this volume will, in time, be accepted as representatives of one of the world’s great literatures.
Tales Never Told Around the Campfire
True Stories of Frontier America
By Mark Dugan
Ten outlaws, ten states, ten stories of nineteenth-century fugitives remarkable because the events really took place. Mark Dugan’s latest outlaw chase reins in enough evidence to corral the cynics. There is new information on the strange relationship between Wild Bill Hickok, his enemy and victim, David McCanles, and the beautiful Sarah Shull of North Carolina. Was Tom Horn a hired killer for the big cattlemen in the unsolved Wyoming ambush? How much do we really know about Deputy U.S.
American History · Literary Studies · Biography · Western Americana · History · Creative Nonfiction
