Welcome to The Book Canopy: Read, Enjoy, Discuss.
Do you love to kick off your shoes, lean against a tree, and crack open a good book? Well then — Kick off those shoes, find some shade, and join authors and readers under The Book Canopy for virtual discussions about literature and life. Check below to discover our current selection, upcoming meeting details, and how to buy this month’s book.
March Selection
Diane Gilliam
Linney Stepp
Zoom discussion with the author on
Sunday, March 5, at 2:00pm EST. Sign up HERE.
Join us for an online discussion of Linney Stepp, a first novel by Diane Gilliam. The novel is set in eastern Kentucky in the early twentieth century and tells the story of sixteen-year-old Linney. Linney’s father trades her to a family of distant relatives, the Chandlers, for a boy who will be more help to him on the farm. In turn, Linney is meant to be generally helpful and to watch on Aunt Hesty, the grandmother of the Chandler family. Deeply betrayed and bereft of everything familiar, Linney resolves to be the one to say who she is and who she will be.
Diane will be talking with Breena Clarke — author of a number of historical novels including most recently Angels Make Their Hope Here — about history, fiction and fairy tales, and novels as maps for becoming.
Register Here.
Be part of Marh 5’s discussion of Linney Stepp.
Diane Gilliam
I was always a girl with a book. I carried my favorites around with me and read on the way to and from school. I wrote my very first novel in third or fourth grade, about an indentured servant named Anastasia who ran away--so I did think I could be a writer when I was very young. As I got older though and people started asking what I wanted to “do,” writing was not the best answer and over the years my answer changed to “teacher,” then “scholar.”
My shift to poetry happened as part of a mid-life correction after a number of unhappy years on the tenure track. Lucky for me, the Wick Poetry Program was housed just down the hall from my own office. I walked down there after a particularly difficult day and signed up for two week-long poetry workshops. I never got back on that tenure track, though it took a few more years to figure out how to leave that job behind. An MFA at Warren Wilson and three poetry collections followed—One of Everything, Kettle Bottom, and Dreadful Wind and Rain. After Kettle Bottom, a collection written in the voices of people living in the coal camps of the 1920-21 West Virginia Mine Wars, I was asked many times about plans for a novel. For years, I swore that was a thing that couldn’t happen. I was a poet. I was wired that way.
One of the high points of my writing life has been the Gift of Freedom, given to me for 2014-15 by AROHO, A Room of Her Own. In the Agape Center at Ghost Ranch in 2015, I sat with Marguerite Rivas, the two of us poets trying to decide whether we could learn to write prose in order to have more hope of making a living. In the course of that talk, I realized that I could tell some difficult aspects of my family story with the kind of distance fiction and history would give me. The next night on the plane back to Ohio, the main ingredients of Linney’s story came to me. Within a few days, I had the first couple of pages and over the next few months, Linney became my most purely pleasurable writing experience. That pleasure is deepened by Saddle Road Press--Ruth Thompson and Don Mitchell and their care in bringing my book out into the world. And that brings me up to now, somewhat surprised and very happy to have in hand Linney Stepp, my second first novel.
Breena Clarke
Breena Clarke is the author of three novels, most recently published, Angels Make Their Hope Here, set in an imagined mixed-race community in 19th century New Jersey. Breena's debut novel, River, Cross My Heart, was an October 1999 Oprah Book Club selection and was named by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the seven essential books about Washington, D.C. Her critically reviewed second novel, Stand The Storm, was named one of 100 Best for 2008 by The Washington Post. Her short fiction has appeared in Washington Post Magazine, Kweli Journal, Stonecoast Review, Nervous Breakdown, Mom/Egg review, The Drabble, Catapult, and Now.
Breena, who has survived the death of her only child, writes with depth and clarity about grief. Her work is marked by compassion and magnificent use of language. A graduate of Howard University, Breena Clarke is a co-author with Glenda Dickerson of Remembering Aunt Jemima: A Menstrual Show, which is anthologized in Contemporary Plays by Women of Color, edited by Kathy Perkins and Roberta Uno and Colored Contradictions, An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Plays, edited by Harry Elam, Jr. and Robert Alexander. Her short fiction is included in Black Silk, A Collection of African American Erotica, and Street Lights: Illuminating Tales of the Urban Black Experience. Her recollections of Washington, D.C. her hometown, are included in Growing Up In Washington, D.C., An Oral History, published by The Historical Society of Washington, D.C.
Breena Clarke retired from the Editorial Administration department at Time Magazine after sixteen years in Time Inc.’s New York corporate office. Breena credits having learned to swim after her retirement with changing her life. After completing a course of classes at New York's Asphalt Green Aqua Center, she has become a member of an aqua aerobics class, swims three times a week, writes each day and practices Qi Gong.
Breena Clarke is a founder and co-organizer of the Hobart Festival of Women Writers, an annual celebration of the work of diverse women writers. She was a member of the fiction faculty of Stonecoast MFA from 2013 - 2020. Breena is co-editor of NOW, an online journal of the Hobart Festival of Women Writers.
Join us.
Be part of March 5’s discussion of Linney Stepp.
Where to purchase Linney Stepp
Linney Stepp can be ordered from your local bookstore — and we’d love that — anywhere in the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
If you’d prefer to shop online — which is also just fine — follow one of the links below.
Diane and her publisher, Ruth Thompson of Saddle Road Press, after deciding on the title for Diane’s novel, Linney Stepp.
A taste of what’s to come….
"In Linney Stepp, acclaimed poet Diane Gilliam gives us the story of a girl who breaks free from the force-field of her family to become herself. When we meet Linney, she is about to be traded for her distant cousin Robbie so that he can help her dad on the farm and she can help his mother keep an eye on Aunt Hesty, who is prone to wandering and revelations.... Before this rich and profound novel is over, what they have learned in exile — how to claim their own authority — will have transformed their lives.
“Set in Appalachian Kentucky in the early 1900s, and illuminated by dreams, myths, and fairy tales, Linney Stepp offers its readers transformation, too. By the novel’s end, Linney has learned how to say NO to what would harm her. She has grown the strength to ask what she needs to ask and say what she needs to say. Her story shows how."
-George Ella Lyon, Kentucky Poet Laureate 2015-2016 and author of With a Hammer for My Heart
EXCERPT FROM LINNEY STEPP
Once I met a doe in the woods in that starving time right between the end of winter and the breaking through of spring. Not a bit of green nowhere, the whole world brown and dry as an old creek bed. The doe looked at me, the purest look you could ever imagine. There wasn’t no asking in it, nothing like that. Liked to broke my heart. I went to get her a cabbage out of the cellar, even though there was only four left and I knew Mama would know somebody’d took one. But the doe was gone when I got back.
I’d dreamed about her the night before Robbie come, and when I seen him standing there looking like that I knew why. I seen Mama flinch when Robbie turned his eyes on her once the wagon was out of sight. I tried to see what she was thinking, but she turned her back and covered her eyes with her right hand, how she does when she’s telling something sad or hard. Daddy had his farmer face on, looking at Robbie’s shoulders and back. Betts was fiddling with her dress and looking over toward the creek, like she’d just got out of all her chores.
They none of them ought to be doing him like that, is what I was thinking. I would never do him like that. I walked towards him real slow, trying to be easy, and picked up his stuff, all pinned up in a quilt, with my good hand.
I didn’t know yet what all was going on. I had seven days of watching Robbie and seeing what it looked like before they told me.
Register Here.
Join us for March 5’s discussion of Linney Stepp.