A compelling coming-of-age narrative. Part murder mystery, part family saga, and the chronicle of an Appalachian honed by habits and customs that often bewilder. Greezy Creek is a story for both young and mature readers alike, its characters possessive of the threads that run through us all. Its universal appeal lies in its authenticity, where readers are taken behind the vei of a culture all but gone, but a time and place worth remembering.
MY STORY
I was born in Pikeville, Kentucky, in 1944, in the old Methodist Hospital that sat halfway up a mountain on the backside of town...its buildings now converted into classrooms as part of Pikeville University. My mother went there just long enough to have me, then like any good mountain woman, swaddled me up and headed back to Greasy Creek as soon as she could stand. That's where we lived up until I was four, until my daddy decided that running moonshine across the Kentucky/Virginia line carried more risk than reward.
Detroit is where we ended up (where the work was anything but coal mining), and living in a one-room flat with a shared toilet down the hall. And though removed from the sights and sounds we knew as home, the inherent richness of Momma and Daddy's storytelling kept me tuned to the mountains, moreover to Greasy Creek and its hardscrabble ways.
Daddy was the oldest of twelve and Momma from a family of faith healers and Primitive Baptist preachers. Together, their accounts of Greasy Creek wove a tapestry as real and rich as the earth itself. It's from their accounts that I know firsthand what rails within its deep green valleys; what rankles and inspires; what causes us to seethe and what begs for our forgiveness; what shakes us to the core of our funny bone; and what shamefully fastens itself to those who would embrace it. It is this background that I bring to Greezy Creek, that allows me to take readers into a world only few can know intimately.
Greezy Creek Background
Kentucky’s Appalachian Highlands (circa. 1930’s) is a world where habits and customs often bewilder: where the ties of kinship and ancestry hold to unswerving lines, and where enduring love stands as a bulwark against those hell-bent on opposing it.
A compelling coming-of-age narrative, part murder mystery, part family saga, Greezy Creek tells of an Appalachia honed by the unacquainted ways of the Scot-Irish hybrids cloistered in its deepest regions; where moonshiners leave incipient trails and the strains of hard times too often coalesce into the empty-eyed face of hardscrabble. It’s also a place where two childhood friends, Bobby Yonts and Rubin Cain (as good as brothers), come of age and test the limits of things new and out of bounds. But it’s the odious hand of cruelty that underscores the unraveling of their naivety and binds them to the unwritten code of the mountains, one which guarantees you’re going to get what’s coming to you.
Character driven with rich historical insights, Greezy Creek takes readers behind the veil of a family known for its fierce ingrained independence; a family bound by self-determination and all that’s necessary to survive. Yet, even from their bittersweet and ill-famed existence comes the imprint of their wit and wisdom, the uniqueness of their wilderness ways, and what it means to be bound by blood.
author footnote
In the telling of Greezy Creek, it was my objective to introduce readers to a time and place as authentic as America itself; to tell of an Appalachia seeded with both fault and forgiveness, with as much mystery as candor, where bloodlines are not to be dismissed, and its people as hard-knocked as the crags and hollows they know as home. Having been born to its austerity, I grew up knowing that it was a world set apart, one in which only a few can claim to know intimately…and one in which I felt obliged to bring to the page and to the world.