Mark McClure
I write historical fiction set in Appalachia. The stories in my collection Kin span more than a century of life in the mountains of West Virginia and the surrounding hollows — coal camps, company towns, forge fires, tent colonies, and the people who held on.
My novel Coming to Scratch is a coming-of-age story set in late-1970s West Virginia.
From the work
They stood together in the white morning light, in the smell of the forge, which was also the smell of every morning he and Lucie had worked side by side in this shop before the well froze and the creek took her. Outside, on the rang road, a horse. Then a carriole—the runners’ familiar song on the packed snow.
“Forge Froide”
He had told a dying woman she was going to see her husband. He was fifty-one years old and he did not know when the lies had begun.
“The Fourth Type of Silence”
He writes in the ledger every evening after supper. The lamp throws his shadow against the wall and he bends over the page and the pen scratches and I have learned to sleep through it the way you learn to sleep through a hard rain. I have begun writing in the margins because he leaves them wide and because I have nowhere else.
“The Kept Woman of Marlinton”
You kept the smoke thin. You kept the path grown over. You kept your children’s mouths educated in the grammar of almost-nothing, the art of answering a question with not too much.
“Good People”
She noticed these things and did not mention them, as you do not mention the weather when there is nothing to be done about it. We were careful and the farm ran and the two years went by.
“As You Say It”
Get in touch
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