Smoke to See By is a collection of 21 essays and stories, many never before published, written by award-winning essayist and columnist Ben Moyer. The collection tracks the writer’s quest for intimate knowledge of, and personal connection to, the natural features of his home region, the foothills and ridges of Northern Appalachia.

Listeners will follow Moyer along mountain streams and through native woodlands to insightful encounters with rare salamanders, wild trout, rattlesnakes, bears, songbirds, and bobcats, through a hurricane that turned to a blizzard, and working with troubled adolescents in a therapeutic camping program. In this selection of works, ranging from long to short, Moyer reveals the meaning, and connection to place, he finds in butchering a deer in a freezing garage or in gathering blackberries amid summer’s heat. He also laments the loss of some familiar parts of the living landscape, unnoticed by many, as the region’s ecology absorbs onslaughts from invasive species and responds subtly to climate in transition.

But overall, Smoke to See By is a quietly joyous celebration of the ecological resilience and diversity of a region those without Moyer’s perception might categorize as “unspectacular,” yet which harbors its own marvelous natural wonders, offered to those who would know them up close.

WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING:

Foremost Appalachian essayist Ben Moyer does not take for granted Emerson’s adage that for everything you gain, you lose something else. The sensuous prose here, in his finest writing on place—actually the finest literature on place in the northern Appalachian idiom—confronts us with how our losses exceed society’s yardstick for gain the more we tune out the miracles at work in this book’s simplest, lovingly evoked experiences: tasting the juicy lusciousness of a homegrown tomato; seeing the hourly theatrics of the ridges in our periphery; feeling the cycles of our earth through the bracing scratches of blackberry thorns.