Clinch Mountain Girls; A Community Memoir uses story-telling to illuminate the experience of moving to the country to establish a more sustainable and peaceful lifestyle. 

The back-to-the-landers who moved to East Tennessee in the 1970s thought they had found the best possible place to establish a homestead, and after 40 years of living there, they still do. They had no idea about the challenges ahead, but found themselves in a green and beautiful land of friendly strangers. The reason I know this is that I was one of them. Turning their stories into a book has been an enlightening and enjoyable task. My goal is to share these stories with millennials, historians, and the public who are curious about the seventies and eighties, hippies, the empowerment of women, and the back-to-the-land movement and its outcome. 

This project contributes to the social history of modern Appalachia, and it lands in the midst of present concern about the Anthropocene Epoch, including the Industrial Age and consumer culture, and all that it has wreaked on the natural world. This book presents an honest attempt by 24 women and their families to minimize their environmental impact to live simple lives. It delineates their struggles to establish the life they envisioned and the cultural conflicts and accommodations between the newcomers and the isolated rural population of the mid-to late-twentieth century.