Dog Days and Dragonflies
Dog Days and Dragonflies is a book primarily about stories from an Appalachian childhood, and life lessons learned during that childhood. It includes stories (fiction and nonfiction) and poetry. Recurring themes or topics include family, friends, church, and education.
Praise for Dog Days and Dragonflies
Chrissie Anderson Peters takes us into the complicated, dark, and beautiful heart of contemporary Appalachia with these intriguing stories, essays, and poems.
– Silas House, author of Same Sun Here and Parchment of Leaves
These stories and poems by Chrissie Anderson Peters are a real delight, full of nostalgia but also a hard reality of strong, tough women and broken men. And the facts are wonderfully vivid, from the smell of crayons in a box to the grandmother who holds a lit match to let a little girl blow it out.
– James Whorton, Jr., Author of Angela Sloan
If you’re looking for brave vision in a new voice, Dog Days and Dragonflies is the book for you. Chrissie Anderson Peters’ stories of friendship, hardship, family love and betrayal will stay with you long past the last page.
– George Ella Lyon, author of She Let Herself Go
Dog Days and Dragonflies” is Chrissie Anderson Peters’ tribute to the people who made her, especially her mother and her grandparents. She writes for her life in these personal essays, short stories, and poems, detailing a childhood world of both hardship and tragedy and also love and contentment. Many in these stories and poems are maimed in some way, the walking wounded, but they showed her how to not only survive, but thrive. This book is the story of all kinds of salvation, how all the old verities-family, church, community, work, and nature—are all finally the only important things. Dog Days and Dragonflies reminds us to be always hopeful and to wait for our “red bird wishes” to come true.
– Rita Sims Quillen, author of Her Secret Dream and a finalist for the Poet Laureate of Virginia for 2012
Imagine learning to drive an old pickup in a hayfield, your grandpa teaching you. But instead of riding beside you, Grandpa walks in front of you. Which of those three pedals do you press to stop? That tension and humor will pull you along through Chrissie Anderson Peters’ Dog Days and Dragonflies.
– Jim Minick, author of The Blueberry Years
Sample Pages
