“Wonderfully rich and beautifully written … the collection is also self-aware and articulate about storytelling as an art and as a profoundly human means of creating meaning. Glenn Taylor, author of The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart and The Marrowbone Marble Company Shake Terribly the Earth introduces us to a young writer mightily engaged with the world before her. “This is a book to rattle us awake and stir in our blood forgotten memories of family and faith, of fire and flood. Peter Balakian, author of Black Dog of Fate Disability checks, pizza, and Mountain Dew along with the Holy Spirit inflect this clear-eyed and moving portrait of a young woman’s coming of age in one deep corner of the American Landscape.” “The West Virginia childhood that Sarah Beth Childers gives us in Shake Terribly the Earth is hardscrabble, pietistic, and loving. Previously, she served as a lecturer at West Virginia University and as a visiting professor of creative nonfiction in the low-residency MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College. Sarah Beth Childers is from Huntington, West Virginia, and she lives and writes in Richmond, Indiana, where she is a writer in residence at Earlham College.
In a thoughtful, humorous voice born of Appalachian storytelling, Childers brings to life in these essays events that affected the entire region: large families that squeezed into tiny apartments during the Great Depression, a girl who stepped into a rowboat from a second-story window during Huntington’s 1937 flood, brothers who were whisked away to World War II and Vietnam, and a young man who returned home from the South Pacific and worked his life away as a railroad engineer.Ĭhilders uses these family tales to make sense of her personal journey and find the joy and clarity that often emerge after the earth shakes terribly beneath us. She heard them riding to school with her mother, playing Yahtzee in her Granny’s nicotine cloud, walking to the bowling alley with her grandfather, and eating casseroles at the family reunions she attended every year. Sarah Beth Childers grew up listening to stories. “Childers’s collection of carefully arranged family vignettes reveals a master storyteller sharing the tales of her yarn-spinning clan over the generations.”
“ weaves together complex characters, a culture shaped by faith and music, and vibrantly imagined settings to both capture and complicate an often misunderstood facet of Appalachian culture-fundamental Christianity.” “A clear hallmark of memoir is allowing the reader to experience the author's moments of realization with her as it happens, but it requires a brave writer to share something so raw and unfiltered, and Childers does so without pause.” “Beautifully written, nostalgic, and indeed unique, this work will be welcomed by those who enjoy memoir or American regional history and by anyone interested in Appalachian culture.”
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