An Introduction to the Blog, and Himself, by Eric Drummond Smith

My name is Eric Drummond Smith.  I'm a political scientist and an artist.  I was born and raised in a town named Bluefield that straddles the West Virginia-Virginia state line, and grew up in the former and attended middle school and high school in the latter, spending summers in rural Bland County, Virginia, tucked between Bluefield and Wytheville.  I went to college at Emory & Henry College, just outside of Abingdon and only a few minutes from the Tennessee line, majoring in political science, art, and geography, and studying as much theology as I could get in to boot.  Then I snagged a masters in East Asian studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in the Blue Ridge Mountains, followed up by a doctorate in political science at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in the Smokey Mountains.  Now I work at the University of Virginia in Wise, a stone's throw from eastern Kentucky and live in Abingdon.

I have always loved traveling up and down the mountains as often as I can, haunting museums and concert halls, bars and restaurants, camping and visiting friends and making new ones, painting and drawing and reveling in the wonders of what I genuinely believe is the Appalachian Renaissance, a rebirth of a land and a people after more than a century of exploitation and de facto colonization.  I love the cultural diversity of this place, like all mountain places (the Andes, the Himalayas, the Alps, the Caucasus, and so on).  I love its history, and its prehistory, its natural splendor.  It is by no means the only place on this world I love or that has awed me, but it is my place and its people, more than any other, are my people - no matter their faith or religion or ethnicity, whether their folk have been here for centuries or they moved here and began to become my folk only yesterday.  I love this place and I love celebrating it.  

This isn't my first effort to do so - I was one of the cofounders of a blog called Hillbilly Savants - we haven't worked on it for some time, but it is still there, a heavy and beautiful bookshelf of essays and weblinks woven together by some wonderful men and women, but it was broad-spectrum - anything and everything Appalachian, sometimes very serious.  We stopped working on it, I think, because it became too heavy to bear, and there were other things that took up our time - work and families and the sorts of things that bear down on folk in middle-age, unsurprising since, in particular, it was about everything (everything) Appalachian.  

That isn't what this blog is.  This blog is about food and drink, art and music.  A few people, my friends, writing or talking about things that make them happy.  I can't predict the final format, or number of participants, the length or even format of entries, but I think it should be interesting. Sometimes it'll read as reviews, I suppose, but always it will be, essentially, about sharing. 

I'll let my co-creators introduce themselves, and link to them here as they do.