REVIEW:
DEADHEADING & OTHER STORIES
By Beth Gilstrap
(Red Hen Press, out now)
Reviewed by Adam Van Winkle
I haven’t thought about the steam sputter of a pressure cooker in a long time. But you mention pressure cookers filled with collard greens and fried okra, and I’m right back in Grandma Essie’s farmhouse kitchen in Texoma. I smell it. I feel the film of grease on the drawer and cabinet pulls built up from years of cooking with hog lard.
One of the great gifts of fiction is its ability, when it is well done, to give us visceral sensation. Beth Gilstrap’s southern fiction collection Deadheading & Other Stories, out now from Red Hen Press, makes me feel it, and is very well done.
And it ain’t just food Gilstrap makes you feel when you read this outstanding collection of southern stories. Set in the Carolinas, Deadheading introduces complex southern women, way beyond stereotypes, surviving in a threatening and dying landscape.
Relevant today, many of these women struggle with death and the threat of violence. For it, they are stronger and wiser, and any reader will respect the hell out of the struggle they’ve endured.
These women are fictional, but Gilstrap writes with such authenticity, such compassion for the place and people, such awareness of the southern struggle, you’d be hard pressed to read Deadheading and not imagine it all comes from somewhere very real.
Reading this collection, I thought of Grandma Essie cooking, of Grandma Essie chopping copperheads with a hoe, of Grandma Essie and all she endured on the farm. And isn’t that what we want, fiction that reconnects us with ourselves, with our own lived experiences? I know I do.
Buy, read, treasure Deadheading & Other Stories by Beth Gilstrap. Do it now.
DEADHEADING & OTHER STORIES
By Beth Gilstrap
(Red Hen Press, out now)
Reviewed by Adam Van Winkle
I haven’t thought about the steam sputter of a pressure cooker in a long time. But you mention pressure cookers filled with collard greens and fried okra, and I’m right back in Grandma Essie’s farmhouse kitchen in Texoma. I smell it. I feel the film of grease on the drawer and cabinet pulls built up from years of cooking with hog lard.
One of the great gifts of fiction is its ability, when it is well done, to give us visceral sensation. Beth Gilstrap’s southern fiction collection Deadheading & Other Stories, out now from Red Hen Press, makes me feel it, and is very well done.
And it ain’t just food Gilstrap makes you feel when you read this outstanding collection of southern stories. Set in the Carolinas, Deadheading introduces complex southern women, way beyond stereotypes, surviving in a threatening and dying landscape.
Relevant today, many of these women struggle with death and the threat of violence. For it, they are stronger and wiser, and any reader will respect the hell out of the struggle they’ve endured.
These women are fictional, but Gilstrap writes with such authenticity, such compassion for the place and people, such awareness of the southern struggle, you’d be hard pressed to read Deadheading and not imagine it all comes from somewhere very real.
Reading this collection, I thought of Grandma Essie cooking, of Grandma Essie chopping copperheads with a hoe, of Grandma Essie and all she endured on the farm. And isn’t that what we want, fiction that reconnects us with ourselves, with our own lived experiences? I know I do.
Buy, read, treasure Deadheading & Other Stories by Beth Gilstrap. Do it now.