“Depth of Winter,” by Craig Johnson

Reviewed by Phyllis Wilson Moore In Craig Johnson’s fourteenth novel, Depth of Winter (Viking, 2018), Sheriff Walt Longmire is far from Absaroka County, Wyoming.  He is in Mexico on a desperate lone-wolf mission to rescue his only daughter from a vicious drug cartel. He has no authority. He has no passport. He is about to experience […]

“Weedeater: An Illustrated Novel,” by Robert Gipe

Reviewed by Phyllis Wilson Moore Robert Gipe’s Weedeater, the much anticipated sequel to his 2015 Weatherford Award winning first novel, Trampoline, has a problem common to some sequels; while it does expand the previous work, it teeters on the edge of too much, too soon, too similar. It is gritty, contemporary, and includes Gipe’s illustrated […]

“Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel,” by Robert Gipe

Reviewed by Phyllis Wilson Moore Back in 2015 I received an advanced copy of Robert Gipe’s novel Trampoline and proceeded to read it. The author, Robert Gipe, was new to me and the first-person story featured some of his line drawings scattered in appropriate places. They were different. I’m not a fan of illustrations in […]

Phyllis Wilson Moore

Phyllis Wilson Moore, an avid reader of books set in the South, is a native of Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. In 1953 she moved across the Mason-Dixon Line to attend nursing school and college and stayed. Like Robert Gipe, she is a product of the Hindman Settlement School Appalachian Writers Workshop. A poet and writer, she researches West […]

A conversation: “Walk Till The Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden in Appalachia”

Silence can be “an unfortunate and even dangerous act of submission,” editors Adrian Blevins and Karen Salyer McElmurray write in the preface to this collection of thirty-two essays, Walk Till The Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden in Appalachia (Ohio University Press, 2015). They speak of the enormous expectation from their “workplaces, families, and […]