"In Stamper's third collection of essays, [she] recounts her experiences as a native rural Kentuckian...Greatly influenced and defined by place and "the culture as it has shifted around me," Stamper writes candidly about the "wise country people who raised me." She escorts readers to sprawling annual family reunion potlucks and introduces them to Uncle Murf, a resilient World War I military veteran who survived a mustard gas attack in the field and lived well into his 90s. The author mourns her beloved grandfather, who died on Father's Day when she was 9, and her mother, who passed from ovarian cancer after a Christmas Eve dinner...Stamper remains an honest observer and commentator throughout [and] is particularly witty in anecdotes about raising her three daughters, being a grandmother, growing up on a tobacco farm, and Queen Elizabeth.

"Some of the best entries are also the most intimate, like when Stamper finds profundity in everyday objects, like a quilt fashioned by her husband's late grandmother stricken with Parkinson's disease or her great-grandmother Hudson's delicate dessert dishes. What begins as a funny conversational essay on getting older ends up imparting sage, seasoned takeaways about better living: "I don't know about you, but I've spent most of my adult life wandering through a forest of very tall trees without a map-not exactly lost, but unsure of my way through. I assumed other people had the map. Now I'm not so sure they did." Stamper closes with impressively researched history about the two free Black enclaves that thrived near the family farm prior to the Civil War. As in previous volumes, [she] eloquently limns the ebb and flow of Southern life through a range of situations, moods, and perspectives. In their own way, each story imparts a gentle reminder on the importance of cherishing family, faith, and one's roots...With an enjoyable sense of humility, she contributes a wealth of knowledge and wisdom on aging, love, family, tradition, generational nurturing, and living a good, honest (Southern) life. Sentimental but never mawkish, Stamper's insightful, heartfelt anecdotes about "what it means to be human" will resonate with readers..."Insightful, clever, and amusing ruminations on the joys of home and family." -Kirkus Reviews

"I've come to believe that love, like light, keeps moving through time and space long after it leaves its point of origin," Georgia Stamper proclaims at the start of Small Acreages. A durable love that celebrates resilience fuels this book, in essays that range from satire to self-reflection, humor to history. Stamper's clear, graceful style and passion for place bring Wendell Berry's work to mind. But Stamper fills a space that Berry cannot: she writes a woman's experience of family, community and landscape, as housewife, historian, teacher, daughter, thinker, and mother. Her writing, rooted in her native Owen County, Kentucky, performs the essayist's task of locating where and how the personal intersects the communal...Armored with a love that marvels at how we have survived, the essays in Small Acreages shed light on who we are- all of us-and how we might proceed from here.

- Leatha Kendrick, poet, memoirist, essayist, and author of And Luckier

Praise for You Can Go Anywhere and Butter in the Morning

"Georgia Green Stamper's essays do that most important thing that only the most accomplished writers are sometimes lucky to do: capture and preserve a place, a time, and its people. Stamper's eye is sharp, and her pen is doubly so. Here is a book brimming with poetry and wisdom."

-Silas House, author of Lark Ascending