OK – this isn’t food related at all, but I wanted to write a small post about a new novel that is out by a friend of mine. Anne Powers was my college art professor and, more than anyone else, influenced my style of fine art art (whenever I get the whim to do ‘fine art’ these days). She has written a dark Appalachian novel entitled Smoke From Small Fires. I was floored when she asked me to do the typography for the front and back cover! What an honor. I haven’t actually read the whole book yet, but it sounds like a literary version of her artwork…. quirky, dark, humorous, and rooted in honesty. To describe it in Powers’ own terms for us Foodies, she says “It’s like poisonous, tart, spiny barbed tidbits served on a bed of grits and southern mountain nostalgia! Yummy.” Here’s the Amazon blurb. I would encourage you to check it out:
It’s the 1950s. Picture Blackshale, Tennessee, with its home fires, small town ways, and postwar innocence – the perfect place for a girl to grow up. From her earliest days, an artistic spark has been smoldering in Anna Grace Tollett, and when the mountain turns dark and unnerving, creativity is all she has to weather the hard times. As an adult, she describes her art: It is about the rituals of our lives, we who live in the tribes of Appalachia, and the spook in the hollow, the voodoo of the mountains. In Smoke from Small Fires, happily off-tilt characters, bizarre events, and the gamut of human emotions stack up like a collage layered thick with compelling details. Rendered in visually rich prose, courageous Anna Grace and her quirky band of kin and friends rise above poignant trials that will color your mind’s eye for a long time.
Anne Powers is a lifelong artist who has delighted in all kinds of traditional media, multimedia and digital media. In past adventures she was the head of Roane State Community College’s Art Department/Computer Art and Design program in Tennessee, taught 3D Animation for Digital Media Academy for five summers at Stanford University, and conducted training in Cinema 4D for television networks including HGTV, DIY and Country Music Television. She has been the recipient of national awards in watercolor and digital media, including the American Watercolor Society and Best in Show in New York City’s MacXibition. Examples of her work in traditional and digital media can be seen on her website at www.ANNIEMEDIA.com.