The secret ingredients of a timeless recipe — Growing up, my Granny Conn’s chicken and dumplings were my favorite dish. She always asked what I wanted for my birthday dinner, and that was the answer I gave her every time. I became a vegetarian at the age of fifteen and missed about three years’ worth of chicken and…

And all the things children will pick up along the way — After he started taking pills in earnest, my dad was pretty concerned about cleanliness and swept the porch constantly. Or maybe he was just wrestling with the demons that inevitably reawakened every time the pills wore off — he always told me that the Lortabs he snorted were the poor…

When past, present, and future collide You’re driving down a two-lane divided highway. The heat of an August day surrounds you; kudzu chokes the road, threatening to spill into your path. The wet air hangs from the sky. It’s Tennessee. You’re singing along with your daughter and the radio. She…

And the care we gave each other — One night, I dreamt that my granny was lying on her couch and I was sitting beside her, and I knew in my dream that she was dying. It was the couch in her living room, where she napped after fixing me Sunday supper for the first twelve years of…

Prayers from a childhood lost — While I was still in middle school and for a short time in high school, I attended the youth-group meetings at our church every Wednesday night. Granny would be upstairs, having Bible study, singing and praying, while I was downstairs with a room full of kids and an adult or…

Notes from the tenth circle of Hell — I had a crush on one boy in the fourth and fifth grades, the son of one of our elementary school teachers, though I was never in her class. I adored him and, at the same time, learned to despise him because his family had money, according to my dad…

A ghost of Christmas past — Growing up, I learned that although holidays were the best thing ever, there was also a very real chance that something would go wrong anytime we gathered for a family meal or opened presents. We went to Grandma Wright’s on Christmas Eve, but we went to Granny Conn’s house for…

A series of excerpts from my memoir, In the Shadow of the Valley, as I share some of my favorite snippets. From the Prologue, and shared with permission: Life was different in our holler, I came to learn. And we were definitely living in a holler, not a hollow like…

Our hearts live in these hills, bound to these hollers — The Appalachians are among the oldest mountains on Earth, born of powerful upheavals within the terrestrial crust and sculpted by the ceaseless action of water upon the surface. — Encyclopedia Britannica Those mountains still stand, mostly intact, though smaller now than they must have been in the Precambrian era, or…