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Leah Weiss is a Southern writer and novelist born in North Carolina and raised in the foothills of Virginia. Her debut novel, If the Creek Don't Rise, was released in August of 2017. Her short stories have been published in The Simple Life, Every Day Fiction and Deep South Magazine. She retired in 2015 from a 24-year career as Executive Assistant to the Headmaster at Virginia Episcopal School. She now pursues writing full time.
Leah Weiss's website
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All the Little Hopes
Eastern North Carolina comes alive throughout the book. How do you give the landscape a voice?
I was born in the land where this book is set, and lived there until I was ten years old. Then we moved five hours north to Virginia to be with my daddy's people. In those early years, I was surrounded by Mama's sprawling family of fifteen siblings, my aunts and uncles who begat cousins. They were a kind and hard-working lot who stayed close to their roots. Only Mama moved away. I remember featherbeds, the outhouse, the ice box, the hand-cranked ice cream, and "putting in tobacco." Dinner was at noon, supper was at six, and everybody had well-tended gardens. Recreating the book's setting was as natural as breathing.
What inspired this book?
Before Mama died in 2005, I had begun "interviewing" her about her childhood years. My first published stories were about her memories. But, specifically, it was her comment about German POWs helping at tobacco markets in '44 that planted the seed for All the Little Hopes. I learned that between 1942 and 1946, forty-five states had POWs working farms, fertilizer plants, and in timber and canneries. Wikipedia estimates half a million prisoners were shipped to camps and governed by...
Linda Scott DeRosier has published two memoirs of her life growing up in Appalachia, Creeker and Songs of Life and Grace. She received the Appalachian Writers Association Awared for non-ficition and the Thomas D. Clark Award... (more)
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If the Creek Don't Rise
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Creeker
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Amy Greene was born and raised in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, where she lives with her husband and two children. Her second novel Long Man will be published by Alfred A. Knopf February 25, 2014. Her first novel ... (more)
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If the Creek Don't Rise
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