Author Archives: wendywelch

The Camel’s Nose Under the Tent

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maddy 1This is Maddy, Maddy Prior. She is our newest (and only) foster in the bookstore. Jack and I like rescuing kitties, but over the past summer we looked up one day and found ourselves knee-deep in the little rascals. And their by-products.

Our customers are loyal, kind-hearted people, but we do kinda have to run a business, y’know? So we agreed, once the book touring started, that we would not foster again until we finished. And that we would not get overwhelmed by the need and go nuts.

Then, with one gig to go (tonight at 7 in St. Louis at Left Bank Books, and btw they have an adorable staff cat named Spike) my friend Stacy–curse her except she has the flu so she’s already cursed–started posting Facebook pix of kitties in our overcrowded local shelter.

Jack looked at them, looked at me, and said a really bad word.

So this is Maddy; I pulled her from the shelter Tuesday, and we left for St. Louis Thursday. She’ll be staying with us until someone wants her for life. Once she got a clean bill of health from the lovely Dr. Beth up the road, we let her socialize with our cats, but she really prefers lounging in her own little bed, occasionally rising with a yawn to walk over and down a mouthful of Cat Crunchies before returning to repose.

It’s good that she gets exercise.

I want to get Maddy a good home right away because there are three more kitties (probably about 12 weeks old) in the shelter, a yellow fluffball of incredible intelligence, and twin tortoise shells. All are in danger, as the shelter fills up fast just before Christmas, and right after the Holidays, adoptions screech to a “no money, bad weather” halt. maddy 2

Jack says one cat at a time, this is the camel’s nose under the tent, we can’t save them all. Yes, I know. I saw the look in the fluffball’s eyes as I carried Maddy out of the shelter, felt his little paw try to grab my finger, convince me to take him too.

So I hope someone who’s been looking for a healthy, six-month-old, gorgeous, litter-trained cat who aspires to a life of as little exertion as possible will soon give Maddy a happy home. She has a lot of love and purrs to offer. And so do the cats waiting in the shelter.

Country Cousins: 3 Books About Rural Living

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Today’s blog is Wendy’s essay up on NPR Books. You can see it on the NPR page at the link below.

http://www.npr.org/2012/12/12/166479169/country-cousins-3-books-about-rural-living

December 12, 2012 7:00 AM

As a small-town girl, I love depictions of rural living when they’ve got a little style and sass in their makeup. Replete with enough quirks and quaintness to choke a mule, small towns are timelessly fertile ground for writers. But the best authors ignore — or even play with — stereotypes to tell truly compelling stories.

Cold Comfort Farm

Cold Comfort Farm

by Stella Gibbons

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Paperback, 233 pages

Stella Gibbons has plenty of sass. She was writing in the 1930s, when the “local color” movement glossed all things rural with sentiment, and farms were described without even a whiff of manure. Her comic novel Cold Comfort Farm stuck a pin in the balloon of idyllic country living. Featuring the Starkadder family, the cast includes oversexed farmhands Seth and Reuben, crazy Great Aunt Ada in the attic, and their sensible city-dweller cousin Flora Poste, who is capable of “every art and grace save that of earning her own living.” In one of the loveliest meta-storytelling devices ever, Gibbons marks her best passages with one or two asterisks, for the reader’s enhanced enjoyment. This book makes me laugh out loud every time I read it, which is at least once a year.

Homestead

Homestead

by Rosina Lippi

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Paperback, 210 pages

Fewer laughs and more tears come from Rosina Lippi’s Homestead. A series of linked stories, it chronicles six generations of women in an Austrian mountain village, starting about 1909. Her characters are drawn with casual grace, and her understated writing is insightful and beautiful. In one tale she describes the interaction between a man and a woman negotiating sexual politics, as “Francesco had feared to ask too much of her, and saw, too late, that he had asked too little.” Quiet stories, and gentle ones, they depict the inner longings and outer strength of mountain women everywhere.

Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed

Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There

by Philip P. Hallie

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Paperback, 303 pages

Through the influence of the charismatic pastoral couple Andre and Magda Trocme, the isolated village of Le Chambon became a “city of refuge” for Jewish people in Vichy France. Philip Hallie tells the story in academic language peppered with anecdotes and first-person interviews. Any small town has rivalries and factions, and these played into simultaneously creating sanctuary while dooming some rescuers. Le Chambon is part of that era’s larger story: the daily interactions of one small town set against the backdrop of hell come to earth.

These three writers reached into the enclaves of mountain villages, subsistence farms and human hearts — and gave us funny, sweet, sorrowful insights into small-town lives lived large.

Wendy Welch is the author of The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap.

Three Books…is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Rosie Friedman with production assistance from Annalisa Quinn.