A Wheel and a Way: Land, Loss, and What It Takes to Remain($17.65Value)

Description

A Wheel and a Way begins with a body and a life brought to a breaking point. After years of illness, betrayal, and the quiet loss of land she believed would hold her family’s future, Jody Denny follows an unmistakable call south—not toward escape, but toward truth. What opens as memoir is not confession for its own sake, but orientation: a careful accounting of what endurance costs when silence is mistaken for virtue, and of what becomes visible when survival is no longer theoretical. From that ground, the book turns outward. Moving between Appalachia and the South Carolina coast, A Wheel and a Way examines how land and water carry memory, labor, and consequence—often long after profit and attention have moved on. Indigenous stewardship, African agricultural intelligence, and settler extraction histories converge across rivers, wetlands, farms, and kitchens, shaping both ecosystems and the cultures expected to live within their limits. Interweaving personal narrative with environmental, agricultural, and cultural history, Denny traces how foodways function as infrastructure, how women’s labor absorbs unseen cost, and how responsibility is deferred through distance, delay, and denial. Pottery wheels, tidal marshes, heirloom seeds, and family farms become sites where pressure reveals design—and where healing requires restraint rather than speed. Clear‑eyed and unsentimental, A Wheel and a Way asks what it means to live responsibly on land we did not create, within systems we did not design, and among people who will inherit the consequences of what we choose to ignore. It is a book about survival that refuses nostalgia, about faith that does not bypass truth, and about learning—at last—how to stay present when the wheel is still turning.