Back to Abnormal: Surviving with an Old Farm in the New South Paperback - 2010

~ The intertwined essays in BACK TO ABNORMAL: SURVIVING WITH AN OLD FARM IN THE NEW SOUTH spin out from author Dana Wildsmith's daily life on an old farm in the foothills of the north Georgia mountains, to the regional world of the ESL classes she teaches, to the national scope of her work as a writer and a teacher of creative writing. They create a web of connections between the actions of the individual and her relation to the wider world. The chapters read like a string of summer front-porch evenings with the author - talking about her past, her work on the farm, the people she lives among, and the eternal puzzle of how to make sure her time on this spot of earth continues whole, healthy and life-sustaining. Environmental writer Jeff Biggers calls BACK TO ABNORMAL "a testimony to what we risk to lose." Philip Lee Williams, a Georgia Author of the Year, says, "The rural world needs all the friends it can get, and it has here found the champion it deserves." Novelist Karen Salyer McElmurray notes: "Wildsmith's stories are sacrament. They are the wildness we need to keep our souls alive." Writer & teacher Darnell Arnoult says BACK TO ABNORMAL is "a sharp and compassionate anthem and prophetic elegy to the pastoral standing ground against the hungry and devouring teeth of suburban sprawl." www.MotesBooks.com ~