Cottage Curio April Event

The "Local Authors" section of the Cottage Curio.

Today, I joined writer Nancy Bondurant Jones and photographer Nadine Cobb at the Cottage Curio, owned by a fellow Valley Writer and Roanoke Valley Pen Women member, Peggy Shifflett.

Yours truly and Nancy Bondurant Jones (and our books)

Naturally, Peggy’s sister-in-law, Hilda Shifflett was in the kitchen to provide some of the authentic Appalachian cooking that Peggy wrote about in Mom’s Family Pie. Today Hilda made chicken soup to die for, hot rolls exactly like my Grandma Ruble used to make (and which I’ve been craving for decades!), and her wonderful apple dumplings.

Since retiring as head of the sociology department at Radford University, Peggy has opened a shop dedicated to Appalachian arts, crafts, literature, and cooking. Plus she has some nice antiques, too. Visiting her shop at 622 Colorado Street in Salem is like going home to Grandma’s.

Some of the neat stuff at Cottage Curio. I love that cow doll!

Nancy, who writes for Harrisonburg’s Eightyone magazine, had three of her books at Cottage Curio—Rooted on Bluestone Hill (a history of the first ninety years of James Madison University), An African American Community of Hope: Zenda 1868-1930 (underwritten by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities), and Jeremy the Wonderer (a delightful children’s picture book written in both English and Spanish—and brightly illustrated by Margot Bergman).

Nadine grew up in the Shooting Creek area of western Franklin County. Many of her photos are of old-timey stuff—the kind of stuff that I like.

Nadine Cobb and one of her photos—a window covered in Virginia creeper.

We were joined by Miranda Atkins, a Roanoke Times community journalist who covers the Salem news in both a Friday supplement and on a blog, So Salem. Coverage will be on the blog and next Friday’s print edition.

I had a great time visiting with the folks who came into the shop. At one point, some of us were laughing so hard, that Hilda came out of the kitchen to remark that whenever she heard so much cackling, she expected eggs. We cackled about her remark, too.

A wall of interesting clay masks.

Peggy will be doing a presentation at the Franklin County Library on April 15 at 6:00 p.m. as part of the library’s celebration of National Library Week. Look for my review of her two books, Mom's Family Pie and The Red Flannel Rag, in the Sunday, April 13th edition of the Roanoke Times. And one of these Thursdays at 7:30, you can hear Gene Marrano’s interview of her on Studio Virginia on WVTF-fm (89.1).

For somebody who's retired, she certainly stays busy.

The next Cottage Curio event is May 10, See y'all there?

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