An elderly black woman berates the mayor on television. Snow continues to fall around them, the squawk and flash of emergency vehicles filling the space that remains. The Blitz is on to clear the city in the aftermath of the fourth worst snowstorm to ever hit the region. Still, the villagers are [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Pennsylvania’
Summer Summary
Summer got the best of us here at County Line Press, and, unfortunately, garden-tending seems to have taken precedence over blog-tending. But, with fall on the horizon, we’re ready to get down and dirty in the virtual ground.
Pittsburgh’s first Small Press Festival was also our first Small Press Festival, and it was a success on [...]
SPF Pittsburgh
Visit County Line Press July 18th and 19th at SPF Pittsburgh, which is being held at the Regina Miller Gallery on the Carnegie Mellon Campus! We’ll have plenty of rural goodies and, of course, mint poetry!
In Roads
The Mason Dixon Ramp Festival last weekend offered many pleasing amenities and attractions for its attendees. The palate was delighted by ramp dogs, ramps and potatoes, ramp wine, homemade jams, and fresh ramps to take for cooking. (The deep fried ramp disappointed, though, and left some with aching stomachs.) The gathering presented some exotic examples [...]
Grateful for Ramps
Well, last Saturday, my ramp festival dreams were realized. Fellow County Line Press collaborators Jessica, Patrick, and I left Pittsburgh for the Mason Dixon Ramp Festival in Mount Morris, Pennsylvania, and, one hour later, we were marveling at the variety of ramp delicacies and the enthusiasm of the other ramp lovers at the festival.
We spent [...]
A County Line or a Scar
It seems that America has a preoccupation with putting things in place. We connect people, animals, structures, occurrences, and ideas with spaces. We imagine that they have somewhere to belong, that that space is their home or destination. Silos in the country, skyscrapers in the city. But some things roam where they please. Living in [...]
Ramped-Up
Every spring, all throughout the Appalachians, ramps–the garlicky cousins of the onion–abound. Also ubiquitous are ramp festivals, held in many rural municipalities, where ramps are served up raw, fried with bacon, or layered on sandwiches.
It has become my very recent dream to attend a ramp festival this spring, and I have been searching for [...]
Roadside Memorials
There is a very large rock near the bottom of Snake Hill that runs through the villages of Acme and Kecksburg in the Laurel Mountains. Positioned at the apex of a hairpin curve, it stands nearly six feet high and its broad, flat face points directly at motorists descending the hill, looking something like a [...]
Alligator Arson
For me, one of the most dynamic aspects of rural life is the amount of agency retained by non-human forces. As opposed to the urban environment, which is subject to primarily human action, rural spaces see a more democratic distribution of agency between humans and their surroundings. Take this fire, for instance. [...]