I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.

Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.

After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.

It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.

A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past