Deep & Wild: On Mountains, Opossums, and Finding your Way in West Virginia

"Wide-ranging and marvelously specific, Jackson’s charming book will give readers insight into a misunderstood state." - Booklist

"Laura Jackson’s Deep & Wild stretches beyond the cliches of possums, moonshine, and John Denver’s country roads to fully embrace West Virginia’s contradictions, its beauty, and its wild wonder. Jackson’s essays are hilarious, insightful, and wise, and will have you reading along with a wide grin." - Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire

Deep & Wild is the debut essay collection of Laura Jackson. Jackson, a lifelong West Virginian, employs her knowledge of and curiosity for the region to describe life in West Virginia while dismantling stereotypes portrayed in popular media with humor and tenderness. Jackson works to describe what is special about her home, looking head-on at all the ways life in West Virginia may be wonderful and terrible, beautiful and ugly. Moving beyond all-too-common Appalachian stories of hardship and poverty, Jackson’s collection revels in joy, family, and nature.

Through her essays, Jackson invites readers to peer under creek rocks for crawfish, look a little more fondly at opossums, a road trip to an annual ramp festival, and learn why not to trust a GPS along West Virginia’s rugged roads. From her living room to Appalachian hollows, Jackson approaches the sublime, seeking truths in the removal of a stump from her backyard and in John Denver’s famous song, “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” As Jackson reflects, “As writers, we know it’s our job, not only to tell our stories but to tell the stories of those who came before us, who never had a turn at the microphone.”

Laura Jackson is an environmental writer and humorist. A lifelong West Virginian, she holds an MFA from Chatham University in Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in many places, including Terrain, Brevity, Hippocampus, Still, and Bayou Magazine, and she writes regularly for Wonderful West Virginia and West Virginia Living magazines. Laura’s essay, “The Imperfect Aquarist” was listed as notable in Best American Essays 2021. She lives in Wheeling, WV, where she rescues homeless animals and spends time with her sons on mountains and in rivers.