Sherry Chandler

From the Crossroads of the World

I need to tell you that Wind Publications has just released You Can Go Anywhere: From the Crossroads of the World, a collection of newspaper columns and other essays by my friend of many years, Georgia Green Stamper.

Georgia and I started at the same crossroads more than a few years ago, though our journeys have taken us over a different set of highways and byways. We were both born and raised in rural Owen County, she in the south end and I on the east, and we both write out of that foundation.

In her introduction to the volume, Leatha Kendrick says:

All literature is local, and the more intimately it knows its locality, the more stunningly universal and enduring it can become. …Edward Abbey says in Desert Solitaire, ‘This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.’

Georgia and I write out of the same home and, as we have done since we were girls, we share our thoughts and our news and our writing. I can’t give you a review of this book. Although I can’t go so far as to say that I’ve served as midwife to any of these essays, I think it fair to say that I stand as godmother to many of them. I’ve seen them, to stretch my metaphor to the breaking, take their wobbly baby steps and I have had my say about the path they took.

Not that Georgia’s writing has ever needed much in the way of godmothering. As Leatha continues:

Only a few writers, however, can make us understand why we long for a place with the passion and precision of an Edward Abbey describing his desert or a Jane Austen reporting on the interior landscapes of her world. Georgia Stamper is one of those writers.

But every writer needs a few trusted readers and I have been privileged to be such a reader for Georgia.

Georgia is one of the kindest people I know. She sees the good in every soul she meets and in You Can Go Anywhere, she shares her compassionate insights into Owen County souls from the colonial period to the attacks of September 11. In her stories, a grandfather does his Christmas shopping in the local village after the tobacco is sold and he has a little cash money and a modern wife finds herself lost and disoriented in the overabundant material diversity of a modern mega-store, a high school basketball coach integrates a rural team peacefully, farmers hold their places together with baling wire, grandchildren test the limits of their courage, and a young girl learns how to be an adult woman with gentle guidance from a village (if I can steal a bit from Hillary Clinton) of grandparents, parents, teachers, and friends. Georgia laughs with them and cries with them. Not many writers can do both.

Many of these essays have appeared in the Owenton News-Herald, and Georgia has read many of them on WUKY. Her essays have received the Emma Bell Miles Award for Essay from Lincoln Memorial University’s Mountain Heritage Literary Festival, the Carole Pettit Creative Writing Medallion and Legacies Award from the Carnegie Center, the Leadingham Prose Award from the Frankfort (KY) Arts Foundation, and from The Appalachian Writers Association and Green River Writers.

Georgia will be promoting her book throughout the spring and summer. You can find her schedule here. Go and hear her read if you get a chance. You’ll be glad you did. And treat yourself to a copy of this book.

1. The Emma Bell Miles Award for Essay
2. Stamping Grounds
3. 2006 Jesse Stuart Writing Symposium
4. Henry K. Leadingham Prose & Poetry Reading & Reception
5. An evening with Georgia Green Stamper

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