Telling the tales

Working Lives Series.
They had me at the title. Before becoming an academic, I was a factory worker, doughnut maker, waitress. I have made hay and made jelly, raised cattle and berries, cut wood, doctored sick dogs, instructed a first-time hunter on how to go about gutting the deer he'd downed. My first building project was a dam across an unnamed creek in our "gully," but after that I built fence and built fires, help erect one house and one barn, then renovated another house.
Now I put one word atop another and help other writers do the same.
But Working Lives...
Yesterday I received an acceptance from Charles Dodd White, one of the co-editors of From Hill to Holler: Stories of Contemporary Appalachia. Bottom Dog Press Inc. will publish this anthology next year.
As it's described, this is fiction "about what it is to live and struggle in Appalachia today. The short stories included will be sharp, vivid evocations of a place and a culture, fictions that chart new territories between the mountains, its valleys and the people who inhabit them. We don't want sentimental treatments of Grandaddy's rocking chair. Think instead of the “mud, the blood and the beer” of the area—realistic, unsparing portrayals. Both Northern and Southern treatments of the Appalachian theme are encouraged."
I was pleased that Charles and co-editor Page Seay wanted to reprint "Worth," a story about trout fishing and marital loyalty that opened my collection Fidelities - a collection that I think has much in common with the call for this anthology.