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 and first began as a songwriting project Anna began in 2023. The seedling of an idea is now growing into an expansive, living extension of the original intention.
In times like these, we hunger for connection and for kinship. Thinking Like a Mountain was conceived from that hunger, inspired by Aldo Leopold’s words and the chapter essay of the same name.
This project aims to sow a seed of solidarity and sustain hope within the landscape of Appalachian artists and those who bear witness to the harvest of the works created in its spirit.
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. We use the phrase “thinking like a mountain” as our creative prompt. This prompt serves as a compass, directing our attention back to the land and the tenets of artful living that inspire and motivate us to take positive action in our respective communities.
Our voices continue to give voice to the legacy of Appalachian artists who carried a torch of stewardship for the land and the people around us.
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, to be a helpmeet, and to use our work as artful acts of intention so that we can be better neighbors within our communities and be 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, raising our voices in harmony to echo throughout the hollers.
What can one artist do alone? Perhaps little.
What can we do 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 in this act of thanksgiving,
burning bright with Furnace Mountain conviction,
to fuse our lives, blessing by blessing, with the bonds of kinship—
which, by its very definition, arises from awareness of a shared ground of origin,
a kudzu collective,
spirits searching like spring spores in sandy loam,
bound with the ties of communal growth:
a song and its chorus,
blood harmony thick,
a dialect coagulated with patterns of speech,
Pine Mountain lookout in quilted relief,
Houndstongue, whose skin it pricked,
each snap of a green bean.
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.
Look above to our skyward scripture,
birdsong-verse swallowed whole in communion with one another,
a prayer-balm for the black lungs
of the Appalachian mother mound.
We rise in collective breath, a swelling creekbed
smoothing each other’s edges,
this frayed yet resilient flock,
into a carefully stacked cairn of slick river rocks.