Beyond the valley’s hills that define the mill town of Furnass is another world. A world of rolling hills and fields of wheat and oats and corn. A world of isolated farmhouses keeping company only with their barns and outbuildings. A world of open vistas and skies that go for miles even on a gray day. A world where the land if left untended goes quickly back to forest where the wild things are. At times the life of the farmlands intersects with the life of the town-at the supermarkets and superstores in the shopping malls, at the shops and restaurants and dealerships along the streets of Furnass. But soon enough the people of the farmlands return home to where they’re known and understood. Proud of who they are, and who they are not.

FURROW AND SLICE is a book of short short stories and attending photographs-some of the stories standing their own, others as chapters in larger works-portraying the people in the farmlands of upper Appalachia. In tracing the seasons of growth and decay, planting and harvesting, reaping and sowing, as found on the farms of Southwestern Pennsylvania, FURROW AND SLICE portrays the spirit of an indelible people and their way of life, and helps flesh out the fictional world of the Books of Furnass