Goshen Road

Bonnie Proudfoot moved to the Appalachian region in 1979 and has lived there since, teaching for many years at Hocking College in Nelsonville, Ohio. She is a fiction writer, a poet, and a glass artist. Goshen Road is her first book.

"[Bonnie Proudfoot] helps us enter into the realities of Appalachian life, how people both eked out a life, and really lived." (Bob on Books) "Proudfoot is a talented wordsmith, and her lyrical writing is the highlight of her debut novel. She details the landscape of the mountains and dirt roads with tenderness and detail, and creates complex, rich characters." (Booklist) "Proudfoot reveals the strength, nobility, and despair of those who want to climb out of the hollow yet find themselves at the bottom of a long, unkempt, winding road." (Ohioana Quarterly, Spring 2020) "Goshen Road is a rich, multigenerational tale exploring women's expanding roles in a rural environment. The women are afforded few opportunities here, and they often settle for much less than they deserve, but they are resourceful and ultimately as resilient and reliable as the untamable land." "Goshen Road is rich with life and characters who command our attention. These beautiful intertwined stories introduce a wise and wonderful voice." "Bonnie Proudfoot writes the kind of book that means something, a book that carries weight in a way that only serious fiction can. Her words delight and move, but they do much more than that. She interrogates the truth of the people and place of Appalachia. Her debut should be savored by those who admire timeless fiction." "(Goshen Roadcaptured me from the get-go…. Bonnie Proudfoot is exceptional at setting the scene, so I felt like I could envision what was happening…. If somebody asks you, 'Why don't working class Appalachians just move somewhere they can get a good job,' tell them to read this book." (Change Seven Magazine) "It takes no more than the opening sentence of Goshen Road to bring vividly to life the ruggedly forested mountains of West Virginia and the resolute people who make their lives among them. Told alternately through the voices of a family, Proudfoot does not merely allow readers to witness her characters' lives, but brings us among them as visitors. Her characters are not the "other," an archetype that is the bane of Appalachian Literature; they are not the meth addicts or oxycontin dealers that pollute so much of what is written about our region today. The community of Goshen Road is economically depressed, but it is not damned by impoverishment; its citizens do not suffer from 'learned helplessness.' They care for family and community and in their lives evoke the heroics of everyday struggle." "Goshen Road is like a detailed and lovely landscape painting, with much to draw—and keep—us in. With a fine attunement to the ironies of human behavior, Proudfoot treats her characters with dignity, honors their complexity, and renders them with poetry." "Bonnie Proudfoot's novel-in-stories unerringly drills down to the bedrock of human relationships. How do we love? How do we make a living? Proudfoot never bewails her characters' choices, but rather acknowledges their failures while admiring their dreams and creative, intelligent loyalty to each other and their West Virginia home." "As a deep dive into the lives and struggles of working people, the novel feels singularly capable—in a way that so many of the last four years' worth of newspaper and magazine articles were not—of explaining our troubled nation to itself. Largely because the book is built as a series of stories, it forces us to move through time in a jump-cut sort of way. The powerful affect Proudfoot achieves with this technique throws the impact of large-scale socio-economic changes on her characters into stark relief." (Pittsburgh Book Review)