An Appalachian Artists Collective: A project of kinship and community-building
Thinking Like a Mountain takes its name from Aldo Leopold’s essay in A Sand County Almanac. In times like these, we hunger for connection and for kinship. The project was conceived from that hunger, inspired by Aldo Leopold’s personification of the mountain.
This songwriting project began in 2023 and is still in progress.
I aim to sow a seed of solidarity and sustain hope within our creative community, with the Appalachian artists who bear witness to the stories and traditions that shape us—and lift our voices as a testament to the ones still unfolding.
Thinking Like a Mountain is both a writing prompt and a state of mind. Our voices reflect the legacy of Southern Appalachia while carrying a shared sense of stewardship for its land and people.
This prompt serves as a compass, guiding our attention toward the ways the landscape shapes our creative work, the lives we build, and the work we do within our communities. We explore the relationship between the outer and inner landscape—how place informs what we write and how our work carries and informs the evolution of the artistic traditions of this region.
The initial seedling of an idea is now growing into an expansive, living extension of its original intention. Gathered together are songwriters and musicians, poets, painters, and craftspeople who grew up in these mountains or those who have come to call Appalachia home.
For now, participation is intentionally kept small and by invitation only, to ensure the project remains intentional, sustainable, and deeply connected.
We believe:
That land is a community to which we belong.
That collaboration is the thread that binds us.
That song, story, and art are acts of stewardship.
That the art we create together matters.
This collective is both a beacon and a shelter. It is a practice in fellowship, a call to walk alongside one another with a shared purpose and to use our work as artful acts of intention so that we can be better neighbors within our communities and better ancestors for our future.
We honor the mountains and each other as kin. We walk together, threading our presence of memory, resilience, and imagination on the waiting page or canvas of our choosing, raising our voices to harmonize across the ridges and hollers. The mountains sing our chorus.
What can I do alone? I hardly know. Together, we can move mountains.
““...one often had the feeling, riding into some flower-spangled cove, that if anyone had been here before, he must of necessity have sung a song, or written a poem.” ”
Kinship
by Anna Kline
Friends
and fellow pilgrims, we gather together
burning bright with Furnace Mountain conviction, to
fuse
our lives with the bonds of kinship—an
awareness of a shared ground of origin, a
kudzu
collective, spirits searching like spring spores in sandy loam,
elm and ash companion growth, a
song
and its chorus, blood harmony thick,
a dialect coagulated with patterns of speech, each
snap
of a green bean, Houndstongue barbs that cling,
Pine Mountain lookout in quilted relief.
Take out your hymnals and turn to Highway 11. Let us
sing
the first and fifth verses and live
into all the rest of them, let us
rise
a collective breath, a swelling creekbed
smoothing each other’s edges, this frayed yet resilient flock, to
stand
a carefully stacked cairn,
a trailhead, a prayer.