This series, in collaboration with the Black Mountain Public Library of Buncombe County, explores novels, poetry and historic nonfiction focused on Appalachian experiences and Swannanoa Valley history through discussions and visits from regional authors.
When & Where: Book club events take place once a month on Friday mornings, April thru August at the Education Room of the Black Mountain Public Library (105 N. Dougherty Street). A book club discussion takes place from 10:00-10:30am, followed by a short break. The author then conducts a reading and takes questions from 11:00am to noon.
Cost: Swannanoa Valley Book Club Series events are FREE to the public, but registration is required for all events, and donations are encouraged!
Accessing Books: The Black Mountain Public Library will order and hold SVM Book Club books ahead of time for check out by book club members. Some books are available for purchase through the Swannanoa Valley Museum, and others are available at a discount through local bookstore Sassafras-on-Sutton. Scroll down for more details.
2024 Upcoming Events
April 26th: The World Beyond the Redbud Tree, with author Madison Brightwell
The world as we know it is built upon choices. If different choices had been made in the past, we might be living in an entirely different world. What if the so-called Lost Colony of settlers in North Carolina were in fact not lost at all but instead merged happily with the Native American tribes to create a new people and unique society? Sixteen-year-old Charli is living in a pandemic-ravaged 2020 America when she stumbles upon the parallel world of the Q’ehazi. Drawn to these peaceful people, whose constant joy and optimism provides a stark contrast to the suffering and violence in her own life, Charli wants nothing more than to stay with them forever-but first, she must learn to attain a state of grace. Can she forgive her mother’s abusive boyfriend? Can she learn empathy for her mother? In The World Beyond the Redbud Tree, Charli’s inward and outward struggles will lead her to a discovery she wasn’t even looking for: the beauty of her own world.
This book is available to order at a 20% discount from Black Mountain book store Sassafras-on-Sutton. Let SoS staff know that you are ordering the book for the Swannanoa Valley book club.
May 24th: Appalachia on the Table: Representing Mountain Food and People, with author Erica Abrams Locklear
When her mother passed along a cookbook made and assembled by her grandmother, Erica Abrams Locklear thought she knew what to expect. But rather than finding a homemade cookbook full of apple stack cake, leather britches, pickled watermelon, or other “traditional” mountain recipes, Locklear discovered recipes for devil’s food cake with coconut icing, grape catsup, and fig pickles. Some recipes even relied on food products like Bisquick, Swans Down flour, and Calumet baking powder. Where, Locklear wondered, did her Appalachian food script come from? And what implicit judgments had she made about her grandmother based on the foods she imagined she would have been interested in cooking?
Appalachia on the Table argues, in part, that since the conception of Appalachia as a distinctly different region from the rest of the South and the United States, the foods associated with the region and its people have often been used to socially categorize and stigmatize mountain people. Rather than investigate the actual foods consumed in Appalachia, Locklear instead focuses on the representations of foods consumed, implied moral judgments about those foods, and how those judgments shape reader perceptions of those depicted. The question at the core of Locklear’s analysis asks, How did the dominant culinary narrative of the region come into existence and what consequences has that narrative had for people in the mountains?
This book is available to order at a 10% discount from Black Mountain book store Sassafras-on-Sutton. Let SoS staff know that you are ordering the book for the Swannanoa Valley book club.
June 28th: A Short Time to Stay Here, with author Terry Roberts
The summer of 1917 should have been a summer like any other. Stephen Robbins should have been doing the same thing he’d been doing for years past. As a young boy he’d fled his life in a secluded mountain cove and risen through the ranks to become the manager of the South’s finest resort, the elegant Mountain Park Hotel. By all rights, he should have spent this summer as host to some of the wealthiest gentry on the East Coast. Hans Ruser, German Commodore of the world’s largest and most luxurious cruise liner, Vaderland, should have been sailing yet again with his elite passengers to the far corners of the world. And Anna Ulmann, captivating and beautiful, should have been at home in her New York mansion planning yet another lavish dinner party for her famous husband and his rich and powerful friends. She should have idled away her spare time by taking perfectly staged photographic portraits of the very same people.
But war will change everything that should have been in that summer of 1917― the U.S. enters WWI and the Mountain Park Hotel is pressed into service as an internment camp for over 2,000 German nationals, including Ruser and his men. This sudden collision of lives and cultures in the small town of Hot Springs, North Carolina is both frightening and exhilarating. And the unlikely alliance that forms between Hans Ruser and Stephen Robbins will force each to decide just how far they are willing to go to keep peace in the beautiful and isolated mountains. Feisty Anna Ulmann, seeking to assert her independence in a male-dominated world, mysteriously flees south to devote her life to documentary photography. When she steps off the train at the Hot Springs depot one sultry summer day, she could not have imagined the passionate journey that will result when she matches wits with Stephen Robbins. Haunted by demons both past and present, they will face heartbreaking tragedy. Yet together they will discover the true meaning of imprisonment and escape.
This book is available to order at a 20% discount from Black Mountain book store Sassafras-on-Sutton. Let SoS staff know that you are ordering the book for the Swannanoa Valley book club.
July 26th: Family of Earth: A Southern Mountain Childhood by Wilma Dykeman, with Wilma Dykeman Legacy President Jim Stokely
Discovered as a typewritten manuscript only after her death in 2006, Family of Earth allows us to see into the young mind of author and Appalachian native Wilma Dykeman (1920–2006), who would become one of the American South’s most prolific and storied writers. Focusing on her childhood in Buncombe County, Dykeman reveals a perceptive and sophisticated understanding of human nature, the environment, and social justice. And yet, for her words’ remarkable polish, her voice still resonates as raw and vital. Against the backdrop of early twentieth-century life in Asheville, she chronicles the touching, at times harrowing, story of her family’s fortunes, plotting their rise and fall in uncertain economic times and ending with her father’s sudden death in 1934 when she was fourteen years old.
This book is available to order at a 20% discount from Black Mountain book store Sassafras-on-Sutton. Let SoS staff know that you are ordering the book for the Swannanoa Valley book club.
August 23rd: McMullen Circle, with author Heather Newton
The twelve linked stories in McMullen Circle explore the intertwined lives of faculty families at the McMullen Boarding School in Tonola Falls, Georgia in 1969–70. The school community is isolated and idyllic, yet issues of race and the Vietnam War still intrude. Does heroism require physical prowess, or is there valor in a cafeteria worker enduring a cluttered, needy life with her four young sons, or an elderly librarian caring for her disabled lesbian partner? What does it take for a young African American girl to find the courage to assert her right to attend the all-white private school? The stories in this collection ask what, and who, are the real heroes.
