Longlisted for PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY -PENAmerica
Selected for NEW BOOKS BY GREAT KY WRITERS 2022-23 SERIES - Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning
Small Acreages
by Georgia Green Stamper
Small Acreages completes a trilogy of connected essays told in Georgia Green Stamper’s unique Kentucky voice. In Small Acreages, readers are returned to Stamper’s Eagle Creek world and its colorful characters, but her voice has both deepened with time and widened to include her journey beyond Natlee.
Many of the essays in this new collection are reflective or as Stamper phrases it, she hopes “to add a handful of words to the ongoing conversation about what it means to be human.” Her wry humor endures, however, popping into even the most poignant of pieces, grounding her, cutting through the absurd as her daddy taught her to do, reminding her as her mother did that “you might as well laugh.”
Small Acreages introduces new essays to her readers and collects some of Stamper’s most requested and popular essays from her earlier books. Returning readers will not be disappointed as they reconnect with Stamper’s unique world. New readers will delight in discovering this authentic Kentucky voice. Both will find her voice true as she weaves effortlessly between the lyrical to the vernacular, from sublime topics to the mundane. With wisdom and humor and compassion, Stamper reminds all readers that if we strive to unite with the universe, we must pay attention to the “small acreages that have been entrusted to us” for safekeeping.
Available To Purchase From:
Poor Richard’s Bookstore (Frankfort, KY)
Joseph-Beth Booksellers (Lexington, KY)
Carmichael’s (Louisville, KY)
The Bookstore At The Berry Center (New Castle, KY)
Praise for Small Acreages
“… a master of this genre, and she has a passionate feel for it demonstrating a truly authentic voice. You get the notion real fast that Small Acreages is something special.” - Steve Flairty, Northern Kentucky Tribune. Click here to read Steve Flairty’s full review of Small Acreages
“Georgia Green Stamper’s essays do that most important thing that only the most accomplished writers are sometimes lucky to do: capture and preserve a place, a time, and its people. Stamper’s eye is sharp, and her pen is doubly so. Here is a book brimming with poetry and wisdom.” - Silas House, author of Southernmost
“ ‘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
“Georgia Green Stamper is a Kentucky treasure.” - Steve Vest, Kentucky Monthly Magazine
“Georgia Green Stamper's Small Acreages does what only the very best kind of book can do: it allows the reader to recognize him or herself on almost every page. Like the author, I feel a sense of kinship, continuity and just plain gratefulness each time I use one of the "treasures" from my family's past--in my case, the old, sometimes chipped cups and repurposed jelly jars I managed to save from the inevitable estate yard sale when my grandmother passed away. When I read the line “A man had to be almost fifty years old before he can appreciate his family,” I cried at the truth of it. My mother, who suffered from mental illness all her life, passed away when I had just entered my fifties and had just really begun to know how much I truly, truly loved her, despite the pain her illness sometimes caused. The story of the author’s move from her hometown to Ashland was my story, too—except in reverse. I moved from a large city to a tiny town that barely had a grocery store. Still, the feelings described—fear of the unknown, tinged with excitement and a determination to find a path—they were my feelings, too. I supposed that’s what I love most about Small Acreages—it does such a wonderful job of telling the story of the author’s journey—of being human, with all of the sad and funny and devastating and wonderful moments along the way—that it somehow has the ability to make readers feel as if the stories are their stories, too.” - Mollie McClure, Writer and Director of Women Writers Circle Retreat / Goodreads
Kirkus Review of Small Acreages
Insightful, clever, and amusing ruminations on the joys of home and family.
READ REVIEW