Some called her The Everywhen Woman. She claimed to be 321 years of age. After the big storm and the great flood and the bad times, in 2038 Betty Baach wrote these words down and sometimes spoke them aloud, at her homeplace on Freon Hill. She referred to them as songs. All stories are songs, she'd always say.
The Songs of Betty Baach collects these songs of trees and people and airplanes and birds and creeks and street corners and roads with hairpin turns, all converging, all becoming one. Set in West Virginia, this genre-bending novel is a magical guide to resisting despair, a compendium of wisdom and rhythms by which to fortify oneself. The lives of the Baaches of Keystone and the Knoxes of Mosestown twist and connect, offering the reader a kaleidoscopic map of this misunderstood corner of the world. Refusing the erasure of the lives of women, Indigenous peoples, and Black people who have always called this region home, this work is a necessary remedy for the continued distortion of a land and its inhabitants.
