After earning an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from The Writing Seminars at Bennington College I received a fellowship at the National Sporting Library in Middleburg, Virginia. The result of my fellowship is The Great Hound Match of 1905; Alexander Henry Higginson, Harry Worcester Smith and the Rise of Virginia Hunt Country (Lyons Press, 2015), nominated for the Library of Virginia’s 2016 People’s Choice Literary Award.
I have also published in The Boston Globe, Science News, Science Digest, Middleburg Life, and The Bennington Review and online at Cagibi, and Women Writers, Women[‘s] Books. My essay “The Reluctant Sexton” won Honorable Mention in The Bellevue Literary Review’s 2018 Literary Contest.
I am now hard at work on Mary Lee Settle’s literary biography.
On our farm in the northern Shenandoah Valley of Virginia we have raised three boys, and a bunch of animals—Connemara ponies, mini-donkeys, cats (who refuse to catch mice), hundreds of baby pheasants and quail, pigs (who decided to dig up our septic system), and a steer or two every-other-year.
books…
The Great Hound Match of 1905
A metaphoric battle in America’s coming of age ~ psychic independence from Britain’s lingering shroud at the turn of the 20th century.
In November 1905, the peak of foxhunting season: two tiny towns in Virginia’s Piedmont, poor and nearly forgotten after the Civil War and a recent depression, saw the coming of illustrious foxhunters to raise their hopes. There was to be a contest, a Great Hound Match, between two packs of foxhounds, one English and one American…
Mary Lee Settle (1919-2005)
I am hard at work on Mary Lee Settle’s (1918-2005) literary biography, under contract with West Virginia University Press.
Settle was a native of my hometown, Charleston, WV. Winner of the 1978 National Book Award,
Author of fourteen novels, four memoirs, award winning short stories, and dozens of essays, Settle is perhaps best remembered for her The Beulah Quintet, five volumes of historic fiction about the first white settlers in West Virginia.
musings…
The Turning Year
Mary Lee Settle’s World War II experiences lead to her life as a novelist.
Mary Lee Settle (1918-2005)
A Great American Author
Mary Lee Settle’s Kanawha River Valley
The notion of place is paramount in Mary Lee Settle’s writing.
What to do with a pig’s ear?
Anything that smells like this, if it had any sense at all, should run.
Death of Wheeler
It’s a touchy subject, a white man writing in the Jim Crow years, to address his love for a “colored man”.
The Cad~ II
“A Western Union boy came up and handed me a telegram. It was from Mrs. Smith: ‘Don’t ride, get best professional possible,’ signed, ‘Mildred.'”
KUDOS
∗2012, 2014, and 2016 John H. Daniels Fellow at the National Sporting Library and Museum ∗2016 Library of Virginia People’s Choice Literary Award Finalist for Great Hound Match of 1905∗Guest panelist, 2016 Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville: ∗Guest panelist, 39th Appalachian Studies Association festival, Shepherd College, Shepherdstown, WV. ∗Keynote Speaker, 2016 Virginia Foxhound Association luncheon, Warrenton, VA.
Find me on the Web:
She Writes: Martha Wolfe
Good Reads: Martha Wolfe
Amazon Author Page: Martha Wolfe