The Long River Home: A Novel

by Larry Smith

Overview

A family sage set in the heartlands of Appalachia

"In this fine Appalachian novel, Larry Smith chronicles four generations of McCalls, their joys and sorrows, their sins and their nobility. Such regional fiction has always been about people: their connections with one another, their home place, their struggles to survive and to prosper. It is all here, set, in the grand tradition of Wendell Berry and Conrad Richter, against the Ohio landscape: its hills and its rivers, its frontier beginnings and its later industrial development. We care about the place and its people. Finishing the novel, we understand ourselves and our nation with a deeper knowledge." -Annabel Thomas, author of Stone Man Mountain

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933964317
Publisher:	Bottom Dog Press
Publication date:	08/14/2009
Series:	Working Lives Series
Edition description:	paperback
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Larry Smith is a native of Mingo Junction, Ohio, in Appalachia s Panhandle region of the Ohio River Valley. Smith has worked as a steel mill laborer, a high school teacher, a college professor, and a writer and editor. A graduate of Mingo Central High School, Muskingum College, and Kent State University, he is the author of seven books of poetry, a book of memoirs, two books of fiction, two biographies of authors Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Patchen, and two books of translations from the Chinese. Now a professor emeritus of Bowling Green State University s Firelands College, he is the director of the Firelands Writing Center there and of Bottom Dog Press. Smith has received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council, and a Fulbright Lectureship in American Literature to Italy. The author is a requested speaker on creative writing, publishing, American Transcendental writers, Zen Buddhist writings, and working-class literature. Smith is the father of three adult children, and is married to Ann Smith a family counselor and professor emerita of Nursing at the Toledo University of Ohio. This is an autobiographical novel.

Read an Excerpt

Andy was only six when his father came in from the fields at dusk and disappeared from his life the next morning. There were few words between them but enough, Boy. Silent looking up. I m goin off to this war. Take care of your ma and the farm. That spoken, he disappeared into the shed leaving the boy to stare at the side boards. The next morning, his father shook his hand for the first and last time and walked off down the fence row, out onto the trail that threaded through the trees and out of sight. Andy stood there a long time in morning fog looking out onto the field of stubble corn, the ragged patch of cabbage and squash, the low-lying trees before the hills. The morning mist was lifting, and there was hoeing to do. Inside the cabin, his mother was sleeping the sleep of the sick and weary. She d been that way for over a year now since she lost baby Davey at birth. Andy was in the first year then at the wood-frame school house down in Dog Holler. Now gazing out in solitude and abandonment, he remembers the day of his being called out of class his father standing in overalls and mud caked boots on the school stoop, a look of pain on his face as though he d just broken an ankle. He had taken Andy by the arm and walked him down the dirt road the half mile to home. Nothing was spoken till they stood a yard s length from the house. Baby come dead, fell upon his schoolboy head. Go in to your ma. And he did, a young boy receiving her cries and tears like a man, the same cries and tears he received now that his father had gone off, down the same dirt road to the train east. Only now his mama lay there in tortured blanket calling out her sorrows to him and the air, crying out at the least moment a change of wind, a thunder cloud, the coming of day or night asking right questions that no one could answer. Why? Why? Why? was the sense of it all, echoing a fear and doubt that filled the darkened room where they lived.

Interviews

This book comes closest to home for me, my family and home country provide the back story for this family saga of the McCalls. In particular I wanted to treat the silences of men...their wisdom and their cost. I trust the readers will find themselves in this book that comes from the heart.

Editorial Reviews

The Long Winding River, Larry Smith's latest novel, traces the growth of the McCall family tree from rural Southern Ohio to the industrial Ohio River Valley. Andrew McCall, orphaned by the Civil War, is the tap root of the family. Wild and conflicted, he brings sons into the world who bring sons into the world who bring sons again, each as trapped by the McCall ancestry as he is buoyed by it. This novel is untamed at times, tender at times, and at all times, truthful and deeply human. -Jeff Vande Zande, author of Landscape with Fragmented Figures

From the Publisher