Humankind confronts its fraught relationship with the natural world in the stories of Ring of Earth, where William Woolfitt traces the history of survival and resistance in his home region of Appalachia. Woolfitt’s characters find ways to reclaim, repossess, and re-sacralize what’s been taken from them, to reckon with the destruction of their environments, cultures, homes, and bodies. “The Sinks of Gandy” is based on historical accounts of a woman who shot one of the last eastern elks near Spruce Knob in the 1830s; in “Fire Season,” a dying father watches through his window the red spruce forests burning. Clay eaters, orphans, child miners, immigrant laborers, and the victims of illegal sterilizations are among the survivors in Ring of Earth who bear witness to our broken land as they search for the hope and the mystery that might still be “running and running ben­eath the shell of the earth.”

Table of Contents

    1  What the Beech Tree Knows

    4  Wax Museum 

  12  Fire Season

  29  Velvet Knob

  37  Sons with Apples in Their Hands

  49  Crow Stories

  58  Only the Wind

  71  Bad Blood

  75  The Algebra of Longing

  91  In the Hollow

102  The Labor of Her Hands

104  Daughter with a Star on Her Brow

115  The Sinks of Gandy

126  June Drop

141  Ring of Earth

151  Acknowledgments

153  About the Author