Something Is Growing in the Mountains

A first look at The Hollow Ground, my novel in progress

I have been writing fiction long enough to know the difference between a story you are telling and a story that is telling you. The Hollow Ground belongs to the second category. It arrived with a clarity and an insistence that I have learned, over the years, to respect rather than argue with.

I am deep in the manuscript now. The bones are laid, the architecture is solid, and the writing is surprising me at regular intervals. I am not ready to give you a publication date. I am ready to tell you what this book is, and why I think it is unlike anything I have written before.

A Woman. A Mountain. A Journal That Has Been Waiting.

Eleanor Cane, who goes by Nora, drives north from Atlanta in late August with everything she owns in the back seat of a Subaru and nowhere she particularly needs to be. She is thirty-seven years old, a cultural anthropologist who specializes in foodways, the study of how communities express identity through what they grow and prepare and eat. She has spent fifteen years being extraordinarily good at reading people and communities and she got it catastrophically wrong once, in both her professional and personal life simultaneously, and she has been living inside the wreckage of that for eighteen months.

She is going to the North Georgia mountains to settle the estate of a great-aunt she met three times in her life. She has no plan beyond that. The plan is the absence of a plan, which is where you sometimes have to begin.

The property is in the Blue Ridge corridor of Gilmer County, in the mountain terrain that most fiction about this region ignores in favor of more frequently visited landscapes. The house that waits for her is serious rather than charming. The refrigerator is empty. The creek is audible from the bedroom at night. And on the kitchen table, placed there with unmistakable intention, is a journal.

The journal spans two hundred years and multiple generations of her family. It documents the foodways of the hollow ground, those places on the property where something older than agriculture is working in the soil, producing ingredients whose flavors have no equivalent in any conventional culinary vocabulary. It is part recipe book, part field manual, part accumulated wisdom from people who understood that this land asked something of the people who lived on it.

Nora the anthropologist reads it as a primary source document. She begins cooking from it with professional curiosity.

The mountain has other plans for her.

What Kind of Book Is This?

The Hollow Ground is three things simultaneously, and it is serious about all three.

It is a mystery. People have been disappearing from this property for decades. The official record is thin because there was never evidence of foul play, never a body, never a crisis. Just people who walked away from their lives one day and did not come back. Nora the investigator builds a case. The case she builds is completely correct about the facts and entirely wrong about the meaning, which is the most interesting kind of investigation to write.

It is a novel about a woman returning to herself. Nora arrives broken in a way that makes her uniquely vulnerable to what the mountain is going to do to her, and what the mountain does is not cruel. It is patient. It has been waiting for her for thirty-seven years and it can afford to be patient.

And it is a genuine cookbook. The thirty recipes embedded in the novel are real, executable, approachable by any home cook, and rooted in the extraordinary larder of the North Georgia mountains: ramps, chanterelles, spicebush berries, pawpaw, muscadine grapes, sourwood honey, leather britches, sochan, hickory nuts, the full forgotten richness of what grows in these hills. Each recipe is written in Nora's voice, intimate and dry and occasionally revelatory. Each one tells you something the chapter could not.

The recipes are not decorative. They are how the story is told.

The Mythology: What the Mountain Actually Is

The supernatural architecture of The Hollow Ground is built on real foundations. I want to be honest about that because the traditions it draws on belong to real communities and deserve to be treated with care.

The oldest layer is Cherokee. The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Georgia were Cherokee land for millennia before European settlement. The Cherokee tradition of the Nunnehi, spirit people who lived inside the mountains themselves, is documented in ethnographic records going back to James Mooney's fieldwork with the Eastern Band of Cherokee in the late nineteenth century. The Nunnehi were understood as protectors, but also as beings who sometimes absorbed people into the mountain's interior life, not as a predatory act but as a transition into a different relationship with the land. The Trail of Tears in 1838 and 1839 forcibly removed the Cherokee from this landscape. The novel does not look away from that history. The wound at the center of the mythology is that wound.

The second layer is Scots-Irish. The settlers who came to these mountains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought with them the concept of thin places, caol ait in Scottish Gaelic, locations where the membrane between the visible world and whatever lies beyond it is unusually permeable. They also brought the tradition of the second sight, the hereditary capacity to perceive things that are not visible to ordinary perception. These traditions are documented throughout Celtic folk history. In the mountains of North Georgia they found landscapes that the people who carried these traditions immediately recognized.

The third layer is German. The Pennsylvania Dutch tradition of powwow and Braucherei is a folk practice that came south with German settlers into Appalachia. It understands certain preparation sequences, combinations of physical actions performed in a specific order, as having effects that go beyond the purely practical. Some of the journal's instructions carry this tradition's fingerprints. The understanding that how you prepare something is as significant as what you prepare it from.

The fourth layer is Welsh. The concept of hiraeth, that particular grief of separation from a place that holds part of your soul, is the Welsh element of the mythology. Characters who leave the hollow ground carry something with them when they go that cannot be recovered anywhere else. The Welsh settlers who came to these mountains brought a tradition of landscape as a repository of accumulated memory, places that hold the weight of everyone who has ever lived in them. They would have recognized the hollow ground immediately.

The fifth layer is Hoodoo, the syncretic American folk practice that developed in African American communities in the South, drawing on West African spiritual traditions, European folk magic, and Native American plant knowledge. Hoodoo understands certain places as accumulating the presence of the people and events associated with them over time. When a keeper goes to the land in this novel, they become part of what the hollow ground holds. That understanding comes from this tradition.

What the mythology makes of all these layers is something genuinely of this place. The southern Appalachians were never a monoculture. The fiction that treats them as one misses the reality entirely. The hollow ground in this novel has been encountered by multiple traditions across multiple centuries, each seeing it through their own framework, none of them wrong, none of them complete. What they all agree on, across every difference of language and practice and belief, is that the land is alive, that it remembers, and that certain people belong to it in ways that cannot be undone by distance or time.

What I Am Cooking

I am writing this novel from the mountains of North Georgia, where I live. The larder in The Hollow Ground is the larder outside my door. The chanterelles that grow in the hardwood hollows behind the house, the muscadines on the fence lines, the spicebush berries I found on the understory shrubs last October, the sourwood honey from a farm down the road. This is real food that most food writers have never touched. I want to give it the attention it deserves.

Every recipe in this novel can be made by a careful home cook. Some require a trip to a farmers market. Some require a walk in the woods with someone who knows what they are looking at. All of them taste like somewhere specific, which is the only thing food that matters ever tastes like.

Nora begins the novel eating jarred marinara over a gas station sausage in a stranger's kitchen. She ends it making a preparation that takes most of a day and uses ingredients she collected herself from the hollow ground of her birth. The distance between those two meals is the distance the novel travels.

It is a considerable distance. I am grateful to be making the journey.

More soon.

Marc Wisdom

North Georgia Mountains