The Hall Hill Epistolary is dedicated to bringing stories and essays from Southeast Appalachia to Substack. While some of these stories are biographical in nature concerning my own life in the mountains, I will also examine various cultural, historical, and economic phenomena in Appalachia to draw awareness to this special region that I call home.
This blog will also function as an outlet for my scholarly interests, which include poetry/poetics, literary studies, and the literature and languages of the medieval North. I am particularly interested in the ecological aspect of literature; that is, how landscape and environment inform both the creation and understanding of literature.
I fundamentally believe that literature is alive, and that interacting with a text bridges past and present in a timeless reality. In many ways, the past IS our present, and I have always been drawn to the medieval Germanic North because of the many parallels it shares with the culture of the traditional rural/mountain South.
But you, dear reader, need not come to that same conclusion.
I only hope you will enjoy these stories and essays.
