Deep & Wild: On Mountains, Opossums & Finding Your Way in West Virginia

by Laura Jackson

Overview

Essays chronicling the beauty and awe of Appalachia through the eyes of a lifelong West Virginian.
 
Winner of the 2023 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize, Deep & Wild is the debut essay collection of Laura Jackson. Jackson, a lifelong West Virginian, employs her knowledge of and curiosity for the region to describe life in West Virginia as it actually is while dismantling stereotypes portrayed in popular media with humor and tenderness. Jackson works to describe what is special about her home, looking head-on at all the ways life in West Virginia may be wonderful and terrible, beautiful and ugly. Moving beyond all-too-common Appalachian stories of hardship and poverty, Jackson’s collection revels in joy, family, and nature.

Through her essays, Jackson invites readers to peer under creek rocks for crawfish, look a little more fondly at opossums, a road trip to an annual ramp festival, and learn why not to trust a GPS along West Virginia’s rugged roads. From her living room to Appalachian hollows, Jackson approaches the sublime, seeking truths in the removal of a stump from her backyard and in John Denver’s famous song, “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781637680988
Publisher:	Autumn House Press
Publication date:	10/18/2024
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 5.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Laura Jackson is an environmental writer and humorist. Her work has appeared in such publications as Terrain, Brevity, Hippocampus, Still, and Bayou Magazine, and she writes regularly for Wonderful West Virginia and West Virginia Living magazines. Her essay, “The Imperfect Aquarist” was listed as notable in Best American Essays 2021. She works at West Virginia University as a research writer, rescues homeless animals, and spends time with her sons on mountains and in rivers.
 

Table of Contents

To Catch a Craw
Being West Virginian
Ain’t No Copperhead
Country Roads: A Brief Primer
Oh, Possum
The West Virginia Brown Dog
Poor, Illiterate, and Strung Out
Pure, Unadulterated Garbage
Finding My People
Dear Richwood
Blink, Chirp, Buzz: A West Virginia Invertebrate Index
Intruder Alert
Behold, the Caddisfly
Snagging a Spot for Stumpy
The Value of Wind
The Place We Belong, Described in Relatively Accurate Terms
The Pursuit of Everything
It Never Snowed
The Flat Earth

Editorial Reviews

Essayistic and investigative, yearning and reaching, Deep & Wild lurks in the dark and deep to clutch at treasures beneath. An examination of the self intersected within small unknowns, there is nothing small that is not significant. This is a cultural reckoning and illumination, a compilation of layers of time and place alongside hidden and invisible losses and epiphanies, Jackson writes with the brilliant meanderings of a true essayistic mind, taking her time, leading us into the ‘deep, dark eyes’ of what she witnesses inwardly as we watch.

Jenny Boully

Deep & Wild stretches beyond the cliches of possums, moonshine, and John Denver’s country roads to fully embrace West Virginia’s contradictions, its beauty, and its wild wonder. Jackson’s essays are hilarious, insightful, and wise, and will have you reading along with a wide grin.

Dinty W. Moore

"Wide-ranging and marvelously specific, Jackson's charming book will give readers insight into a misunderstood state."

Booklist

Jackson shatters Mountain-Dew-hillbilly stereotypes (and takes down fancy-pants-ers like Bette Midler, who spread such Hollywood-centric nonsense on social media) to show the true, complicated, deeply-rooted truth of Appalachia—a place, Jackson writes, ‘of beauty and misery . . . of people who worship nature and people who tear it apart.’ Weaving personal narrative and a whiplash wit with deep research, Jackson brings readers into her world where rage-filled but helpless crawdads, shy rattlesnakes, less-than-bucolic country roads, and, especially, the lowly opossum—a creature, Jackson writes, ‘an exhausted God might have thrown together . . . (from) leftover parts’—abide.

Lori Jakiela