Silas House Silas House: The History of Every Country

2010 schedule of events

Sept. 10 - Oct. 3


Anthology of Appalachian Writers Photographic Art, Scarborough Library Exhibit, Scarborough Reading Room.

Monday, Sept. 27


Screening of In Country with Bruce Willis, 7:00 p.m., Reynolds Hall, sponsored by the Shepherdstown Film Society. Following the screening will be a discussion of the social and political issues addressed in the film: “Soldiers at War and Coming Home.”

Tuesday, Sept. 28


“Another Kentucky Muse and Readings from the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Volume II,” 7:00 p.m., Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies, Reception and book signing will follow in Scarborough Reading Room.

Wednesday, Sept. 29


Bobbie Ann Mason Visits with Martinsburg, Jefferson, Musselman, and Berkeley Springs High School students at Martinsburg High School, 9:00 a.m. in Martinsburg; “Mason Reading” at Martinsburg Public Library and Reception, 10:30 a.m. “Writers Master Class with Bobbie Ann Mason, 3:00-4:30 p.m., Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies; "The Critic’s Corner, with Bobbie Ann Mason," 7:00 p.m., Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies.

Thursday, Sept. 30


Scarborough Society Lecture and Awards Ceremony, “In My Country: the Fictional World of Bobbie Ann Mason,” 8:00 p.m., Erma Byrd Hall. Bobbie Ann Mason will receive the Appalachian Heritage Writer's Award and present a reading from her work; the WV Fiction Competition Awards will be presented by Bobbie Ann Mason.

Friday, Oct. 1


Evening reading of award-winning work of fiction at The Appalachian Heritage Festival Concert, 8:00 p.m., Frank Theater.

Saturday, Oct 2


Appalachian Heritage Festival activities and demonstrations, events, and evening Festival Concert, 8:00 p.m., Frank Theater.

Bobbie Ann Mason's Works

Shiloh and Other Stories

Shiloh and Other Stories
2001

"These stories will last," said Raymond Carver of Shiloh and Other Stories when it was first published, and almost two decades later this stunning fiction debut and winner of the PENHemingway Award has become a modern American classic. In Shiloh, Bobbie Ann Mason introduces us to her western Kentucky people and the lives they forge for themselves amid the ups and downs of contemporary American life, and she poignantly captures the growing pains of the New South in the lives of her characters as they come to terms with feminism, R-rated movies, and video games.


In Country

In Country
2005

In the summer of 1984, the war in Vietnam came home to Sam Hughes, whose father was killed there before she was born. The soldier-boy in the picture never changed. In a way that made him dependable. But he seemed so innocent. "Astronauts have been to the moon," she blurted out to the picture. "You missed Watergate. I was in the second grade." She stared at the picture, squinting her eyes, as if she expected it to come to life. But Dwayne had died with his secrets. Emmett was walking around with his. Anyone who survived Vietnam seemed to regard it as something personal and embarrassing. Granddad had said they were embarrassed that they were still alive. "I guess you're not embarrassed," she said to the picture.


Nancy Culpepper: Stories

Nancy Culpepper: Stories
2007

Nancy is on a lifelong quest to understand her place in the world. Returning home to the family farm, she searches for photographic evidence of an ancestor bearing her own name. Still in her jeans, she brings home strange ideas and an assertiveness she learned up north. Always adventurous, Nancy travels far and wide–searching, seeking. The narrative sweep of her life traverses the turbulent sixties, the Vietnam War, the eighties and the foreboding death of John Lennon, and finally the new millennium–when a self-assured Nancy finally emerges. These humorous and often touching stories recount her courtship and marriage to Jack, her relationship with her precocious son, and the deep, loving bond between her parents, Spence and Lila Culpepper.


Clear Springs

Clear Springs
2000

In this superb memoir, the bestselling author of In Country and other award-winning books tells her own story, and the story of a Kentucky farm family, the Masons of Clear Springs. Like Russell Baker's Growing Up, Jill Ker Conway's The Road from Coorain, and other classic literary memoirs, Clear Springs takes us back in time to recapture a way of life that has all but disappeared, a country culture deeply rooted in work and food and family, in common sense and music and the land. Clear Springs is also an American woman's odyssey, exploring how a misfit girl who dreamed of distant places grew up in the forties, fifties, and sixties, and fulfilled her ambition to be a writer.


Atomic Romance

Atomic Romance
2005

Reed is an engineer at a uranium-enrichment plant near a riverside city in heartland America. He has deep roots in this community: He was raised there; his father worked at the very same plant before him. And it was here that Reed met, married, and then divorced his wife. Reed spends countless nights camping at a local wildlife preserve, gazing at the stars, fishing and hunting–that is, until deformed frogs are discovered at the site. Though his father was killed in a tragic accident at the atomic plant years ago, Reed stays on, proud to perform demanding and dangerous work for the benefit of the nation. As for the radioactive “incidents” he has endured, Reed prefers to think about other things–Hubble photographs of distant galaxies, Albert Einstein, his dog.


Midnight Magic: Selected Stories of Bobbie Ann Mason

Midnight Magic: Selected Stories of Bobbie Ann Mason
1999

In her signature style, Mason moves quietly through the lives of her Kentucky characters, capturing their tangeld aspirations and buried disappointments. Men and women struggle with the ironies of modern life in a traditional rural society, trying to cope with fractured families, television evangelism, women's lib, and MTV.


Feather Crowns

Feather Crowns
1994

Christie is suddenly thrown into a swirling storm of public attention. Thousands of strangers descend on her home, all wanting too see and touch the "miracle babies." One visitor crawls right in through the window! The fate of the babies and the bizarre events that follow their births propel Christie and her husband far from home, on a journey that exposes them to the turbulent pageant of life at the beginning of the modern era.


Spence And Lila

Spence And Lila
1998

Since the night they eloped as teenagers over forty years ago, Spence and Lila have spent a lifetime together. Now Lila has been diagnosed with breast cancer and faces surgery. Spence visits her in the hospital, but the notion of losing his wife is sometimes more than he can bear. He retreats to his fields, to his dog, and to the garden Lila has tended so lovingly through the years. While the children rally to their mother and the neighbors stock the refrigerator, Spence and Lila each recall moments, spent together and apart, that have infused their shared life with subtle, unspoken meaning. Harmoniously, their strands of memory twine into a single narrative, revealing the humor, perseverance, and faith essential to turning two ordinary people into one enduring and happy union.


Understanding Bobbie Ann Mason

Understanding Bobbie Ann Mason
2000

An analysis introducing Mason's nonfiction prose, short stories and novels. Price sheds light on the writer's distinctive style and thematic concerns in her writings about contemporary Western Kentucky.


Missing Mountains: We went to the mountaintop but it wasn't there

Missing Mountains: We went to the mountaintop but it wasn't there
2005

This book addresses Kentucky's most serious environmental threat -- mountaintop-removal mining and the destruction of the Cumberland Mountains. In this collection of essays, fiction, and poetry, 35 Kentucky writers explore mountaintop removal mining in Kentucky. The goal of this book is not cessation of all coal mining, but a demand for responsible mining practices and an end to the unnecessary destruction to the land, people, and economy of the eastern Kentucky coalfields and the planet caused by mountaintop removal. Every day many thousands of Kentuckians and residents of the Mississippi valley drink the water from streams that originate in the coal mining region of Kentucky. It's not just a local problem.