Mary Hood's fictional world is a world where fear, anger, longing—sometimes worse—lie just below the surface of a pleasant summer afternoon or a Sunday church service. In "A Country Girl," for example, she creates an idyllic valley where a barefoot girl sings melodies "low and private as a lullaby" and where "you could pick up one of the little early apples from the ground and eat it right then without worrying about pesticide." But something changes this summer afternoon with the arrival at a family reunion of fair and fiery Johnny Calhoun: "everybody's kind and nobody's kin," forty in a year or so, "and wild in the way that made him worth the trouble he caused." The title story in the collection begins with a visit to clean the graves in a country cemetery and ends with the terrifying pursuit of a young girl and her grandmother by two bikers, one of whom "had the invading sort of eyes the woman had spent her lifetime bolting doors against." In the story "Inexorable Process" we see the relentless desperation of Angelina, "who hated many things, but Sundays most of all," and in "Solomon's Seal" the ancient anger of the mountain woman who has crowded her husband out of her life and her heart, until the plants she has tended in her rage fill the half-acre. "The madder she got, the greener everything grew.
Although Hood is considered a "Southern" writer, her sensibilities are universal. In this impressive collection of short fiction, she uses simple phrases to capture a character perfectly; at the same time, she knows when to unleash her controlled prose, freeing it for poetic evocations of landscapes or moments. Above all, she tells good stories. "After Moore" traces the dissolution of a marriage as told to a marriage counselor by all the family members. Hood manages to be both funny and perceptive as she adopts the voice of each character in turn. The title piece is an ambitious novella in which Hood's experiments with time do not quite work, but she deftly renders a family's complex relationships and at the same time creates the ambience of a mill-town community. Hood, who won the 1984 Flannery O'Connor Award for her first book of stories, How Far She Went, is a talented writer with a distinctive, memorable voice.
As war rages in Afghanistan, a job at a Southern cotton mill offers community and solace to a military mother in this heartfelt novella. When Irene Morgan returns to Frazier Fabrics, a family-owned cotton mill in the hardscrabble heart of Ready, Georgia, she joins an eclectic group of women workers sharing their interwoven lives inside and outside the factory. Under constant surveillance and beholden to production quotas and endless protocols presented under the auspices of “American Pride,” the women sew state-of-the-art camouflage for U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan, one of whom is Irene’s son. As Irene toils under the stress, she comes to embrace the camaraderie of her peers, some of whom play on the mill’s bowling team, the Seam Busters. She comes to know Coquita, a shaky veteran returned from three tours in the Middle East; Kit, an angel-haired rule breaker unlucky in love; the stoic Hmong woman Sue Nag; the beaten but not yet defeated K’shaundra; and Jacky, a well-intentioned fool determined to be heard. When the shadow of death travels from the war front to the home front, Hood deftly braids the threads of these disparate lives into a lifeline for Irene.
Mary Hood is a lifetime resident in the rolling hills of Central Texas.She has always had a great love of animals of all kinds.Being the wife of farmer and rancher, Charles Hood, she has had the opportunity to care for all kinds of livestock. On their ranch they keep a running herd of 250 to 300 Dorper-cross sheep that Mary plays a fulltime part in feeding, doc- toring, and caring for. Every spring and fall lamb- ing season she usually ends up with a small group of "bottle" babies to feed. Naturally, they become very special to her. In all the daily feedings and handling of the sheep, certain happenings and events give Mary ideas that would make an interesting picture. Having a little spare time while traveling with her husband, Mary began sketching little scenes that she had observed while watching the sheep. In making the sketches, she tried to convey some of the thoughts that might be in the mind of a sheep instead of our human view. These sketches have been formed into this book in the hope that other people who love sheep can enjoy some of the funny, heart warming , and daily events that happen in the life of a sheep.
A Clear View of the Southern Sky reveals women in the twenty-first century doing what women have always done in pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. In each of the ten tales from southern storyteller Mary Hood, women have come—by circumstances and choice—to the very edge of their known worlds. Some find courage to winnow and move on; others seek the patience to risk and to stay. Along the way hearts, bonds, speed limits, fingernails, and the Ten Commandments get broken. Dust settles, but these women do not. In the title story, a satellite dish company promises that happiness—or at least access to its programming—requires just a TV and a clear view of the southern sky. The short story itself reveals the journey of a Hispanic woman whose mission is to assassinate a mass murderer, an agenda triggered by post-traumatic stress wrought by seeing the murderer's cynical grin on a news program. We follow her into the shadow of an enormous satellite dish on a roof across the street from the courthouse and ultimately into a women's prison English-as-Second-Language class where she must confront her life. She has slept but never dreamed, and now she wakes. In other stories Hood introduces us to a kindergarten teacher, stunned by a student's blurted-out question, as she discovers her deepest vocation and the mystery of its source. We meet a widow who befriends a young neighbor, only to realize they must keep secrets from each other and hold fast to their hope. A woman trucker discovers the depth of her love as she imagines her cell phone calls—and her sweetheart's own messages—winging their way, tower to tower, along her interstate route. Two stories deal with one man and two of his wives and how they learn the lessons only love can teach about the reach and limitations of ownership and forever. The collection concludes with the novella "Seambusters," in which a diverse cast of women workers in a rural Georgia mill sew camouflage for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. The women are part of a larger purpose, and they know it. When the shadow of death passes over the factory, each woman and the entire community find out what it really means to have American Pride. New York Times best-selling writer and Story River Books editor at large Pat Conroy provides a foreword to the collection.
Travel, and the exhilarating experiences it offers us, is the shared concern of these stories, which have been chosen from among the hundreds that have appeared in the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction series. More than seventy volumes, which include approximately eight hundred stories, have won the Flannery O'Connor Award. This stunning trove of always engaging, often groundbreaking short fiction is the common source for this anthology on childhood—and for planned anthologies on such topics as family, gender and sexuality, animals, and more. Travel can whisk us away to craggy mountainsides and sunny coastlines or bustling cities and mysterious jungles. Travel can excite and rejuvenate or intimidate and overwhelm. These sixteen stories reflect upon our immense, intriguing world and our explorations of it, whether you choose to follow the beaten path or abandon it.
Acclaimed writers, family, friends, and more pay homage to the celebrated Southern author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini. New York Times–bestselling writer Pat Conroy (1945–2016) inspired a worldwide legion of devoted fans, but none are more loyal to him and more committed to sustaining his literary legacy than the many writers he nurtured over the course of his fifty-year career. In sharing their stories of Conroy, his fellow writers honor his memory and advance our shared understanding of his lasting impact on literary life in and well beyond the American South. Conroy’s fellowship drew from all walks of life. His relationships were complicated, and people and places he thought he’d left behind often circled back to him at crucial moments. The pantheon of contributors includes Rick Bragg, Kathleen Parker, Barbra Streisand, Janis Ian, Anthony Grooms, Mary Hood, Nikky Finney, Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart, Ron Rash, Sandra Brown, and Mary Alice Monroe; Conroy biographers Katherine Clark and Catherine Seltzer; his longtime friends; Pat’s students Sallie Ann Robinson and Valerie Sayers; members of the Conroy family; and many more. Each author in this collection shares a slightly different view of Conroy. Through their voices, a multifaceted portrait of him comes to life and sheds new light on who he was. Loosely following Conroy’s own chronology, the essays herewith wind through his river of a story, stopping at important ports of call. Cities he called home and longed to visit, along with each book he birthed, become characters that are as equally important as the people he touched along the way.
Seasonal roads are defined as one-lane dirt roads not maintained during the winter. They function as connectors linking farmers to their fields, neighbors to neighbors, or two more well-traveled roads to each other. Some access hunting lands and recreational areas. Some pass by cemeteries, allowing people to visit and honor their dead. They can be abandoned as people move and towns fade. In every incarnation, the seasonal road touches the land in a gentler way than do other roads. Having traveled nearly every seasonal road in Steuben County, New York, Hood finds they provide the ideal vantage to contemplate the meaning of place, offering intimate contact with plant and wildlife and the beauty of a rural landscape. Each road reveals how our land is used, how our land is protected, and how environmental factors have impacted the land. As a literary naturalist, Hood reflects on endangered species and invasive species, as well as on issues of conservation and sustainability. From state forests to potato fields, from development along Keuka Lake to vineyards, from old family cemeteries to logging sites, Walking Seasonal Roads is a celebration and an honoring of the rural and the regionalism of place, illustrating the ways we connect to our home and to each other.
A comedy play. Robin, with the help of a Merry Man wannabe simply known as the Town's Guy, turns this once-simple legend into a hysterical trip through Sherwood Forest with surprises at every turn. Our charming-but-egotistical hero leads his band of familiar wood-dwellers as they battle the delectably evil Prince John and his haughty henchman, the Sheriff of Nottingham. Roboin's one and only love, the Lady Marian, remains true to her champion as she assists his crusade by wishing the prince and sheriff a rash of various skin afflictions. Incredibly, our model good guy Robin discovers that even heroes have a few important life lessons to learn.
The woman was distraught.You've got to save this cat, she said. But, ma'am, this is an ER. I know--emergency.That's why I brought him here. We only work on people, ma'am. This is a hospital for people. We don't treat animals, he said kindly. She started to cry, not cry, but howl. I'm sorry about your cat, the doctor said. She howled louder.It's not my cat, she said.I saw it get hit when I was driving down the street. With that, the cat scratched her arm, jumped from her lap, fell on the floor dead. She stopped howling. She looked at the black mass lying on her feet.Well, see what you've done, she said. He's gone and died. Fine hospital this is. She flounced away,leaving the cat behind. Okay, doctor, now what? Benay asked. He picked up a black garbage bag used for biohazard waste, put the cat inside and deposited all in the trash container nearby. One dead cat, he said. This amusing and wise book tells of one author's ER experiences told to her stepmother when she went to her aid after she tripped over her dishwasher door and broke her leg in three places. Growing warmth between the two women is a highlight as the stepdaughter pulls out all creativity stops to help her stepmom recover and become independent before she must return to her job in Ohio State University's hospital in Columbus. When the stepmom asked Benay why she was going to come, she replied, "Because you married my dad. A different kind of love story, indeed.
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