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Hitting Below the Bible Belt Down Home Press Michael Chitwood draws on memories of growing up in the shadow of the Blue Ridge mountains with anvil-tough women and fox-clever men as well as his encounters with the computerized and rapidly changing New South in these pointed, and often touching, essays. Ranging over subjects as diverse as the silliness of evangelical politicians, growing tobacco, hunting deer with his brother, a hilarious outdoor wedding, and the deeply moving loss of a beloved grandmother, Chitwood stands at the intersection where the dirt road of the rural South crosses the information superhighway, and, like any smart bluetick hound, he's looking both ways.
From the foreword by Lee Smith: “ ‘Which is more real,’ Chitwood asks us, ‘an idea or an acre?’ “It’s a question he will ponder throughout this collection, a question which reflects the Southerner’s classic preoccupations with place, with the past, with family and home. Who are we, when we don’t (can’t) live there anymore? What can we keep from the past? What should we jettison? Can anything ever take the place of what we must inevitably lose?”
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