Exclusive Cover Reveal: Daughters of Muscadine

Appalachian Review is pleased to reveal the cover for the debut book by Monic Ductan, Daughters of Muscadine: Stories, which will be published by Fireside Industries, an imprint of the University Press of Kentucky and Hindman Settlement School, in November.

The nine linked short stories are connected by a 1920s lynching and the drowning of a high school basketball player in the 1980s. The two events forever shape the place and the people of Muscadine, a rural community in Northern Georgia. Covering the last one hundred years, these are stories of people whose voices have been suppressed and erased for too long: Black women, rural women, Appalachian women, working class women. 

The daughters of Muscadine are sometimes outcasts due to their race, but they are also estranged from those they love. A lonesome woman tries to connect with the child she gave up for adoption; another, deep in grief, attempts to help a violent felon.  Two sisters love each other deeply even when they cannot understand one another. A little girl witnessing her father’s slow death realizes her own power, and lack of it.  A single woman weathers the excitement—and rigors—of online dating during the pandemic.  

Ductan presents the extraordinary nature of everyday lives in the tradition of Alice Walker, Crystal Wilkinson, James McBride, and Dorothy Allison.

Bestselling novelist Silas House, who is the series editor for Fireside Industries, says he first noticed Ductan’s talent while reading an essay by her in a 2018 issue of Appalachian Review. “I loved the energy and assuredness of her sentences in that piece, and then I started seeing her showing up in other publications, like Oxford American, Shenandoah, Still: The Journal, and other leading journals and magazines.” House wanted to read more, so he asked Ductan about the possibility of a book of short stories. Luckily, she had enough stories for one. “As soon as I read the collection I knew we had to publish it,” House says. “Her stories are so tightly written; there is not one unnecessary word, yet they are full and descriptive. They’re so readable, but also, she’s writing about a part of the region that is rarely written about, and she’s writing about people’s lives in a complex, interesting way. She has such a strong voice.”

Here is the remarkable cover, designed by Kathleen Lynch, of Black Kat Design.

Ductan says the cover provided exactly what she wanted.

“The cover artist was able to capture an essential element of these stories—that place, specifically a place called Muscadine, lives in these women and is inextricably a part of them,” Ductan says. “The cover is both delightful and creative.” 

Daughters of Muscadine will be published by Fireside Industries on November 14, 2023. You can pre-order it here.