Small Acreages

by Georgia Green Stamper

" ‘I've come to believe that love, like light, keeps moving through time and space long after it leaves its point of origin,’ Georgia Green Stamper proclaims at the start of Small Acreages. A durable love that celebrates resilience fuels this book, in essays that range from satire to self-reflection, humor to history.

Stamper's clear, graceful style and passion for place bring Wendell Berry's work to mind. But Stamper fills a space that Berry cannot: she writes a woman's experience of family, community and landscape, as housewife, historian, teacher, daughter, thinker, and mother. Her writing, rooted in her native Owen County, Kentucky, performs the essayist's task of locating where and how the personal intersects the communal.

Keeper of others' stories and teller of her own, Georgia Stamper does not so much memorialize as transmit the culture of her 'small stretch of road. Armored with a love that marvels at how we have survived, the essays in Small Acreages shed light on who we are — all of us — and how we might proceed from here.”

— Leatha Kendrick, author of And Luckier