Appalachia Book Company publishes emerging and established authors with deep connections to central and rural Appalachia.
CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
THE GENERAL STORE: COMMUNITY AND MEMORY IN CENTRAL APPALACHIA
Edited by Jacob Stump
Published by Appalachia Book Company
Anticipated publication: Spring 2028
Appalachia Book Company seeks contributions for The General Store: Community and Memory in Central Appalachia, a richly illustrated, multidisciplinary book documenting the history, culture, and continuing significance of the region’s general stores.
Edited by Jacob Stump, the book will bring together essays, photographs, oral histories, archival materials, and personal reflections. Its geographic focus is Central Appalachia, particularly Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, Southwest Virginia, East Tennessee, and Western North Carolina.
We welcome proposals from writers, photographers, historians, store owners and employees, community elders, musicians, farmers, cooks, collectors, archivists, scholars, journalists, and others with knowledge of or meaningful connections to Appalachian general stores. Contributors do not need academic credentials. We are especially interested in work grounded in firsthand experience, careful research, or sustained relationships with the communities represented.
POSSIBLE APPROACHES
Contributions might explore:
Memories of shopping, working, gathering, or growing up around a general store
Portraits of individual stores, storekeepers, customers, and community figures
Informal credit, barter, running accounts, and the economic role of country stores
How stores connected local households and producers to wider markets
General stores as gathering places for music, storytelling, news, and everyday social life
The store’s role in sustaining traditional foodways by supplying staples, seeds, feed, tools, canning supplies, and locally produced foods
Seasonal food traditions and practices such as planting, harvesting, milling, sugaring, drying, pickling, and canning
Family ownership, generational succession, adaptation, closure, and preservation
Store ledgers, signs, advertisements, photographs, buildings, and other artifacts
What the disappearance of general stores means for rural economies and community life
WE WELCOME
Creative nonfiction, personal essays, and reported essays
Oral histories and edited interviews
Historical and cultural essays written for a general audience
Documentary and artistic photography
Archival materials and short reflections centered on a person, place, food tradition, memory, or object
Work informed by scholarship is welcome, but submissions should be accessible to an educated general readership. We encourage contributors to resist both caricature and uncomplicated nostalgia. The book aims to represent general stores as complex institutions shaped by community, commerce, necessity, adaptation, and change.
HOW TO PROPOSE A CONTRIBUTION
Deadline: Nov. 30, 2026
By the deadline, email the following to editor@appalachiabook.co with the subject line “General Store Book Proposal”:
A proposal of up to 500 words summarizing the contribution’s form, content, and central idea.
A résumé or CV describing relevant writing, research, professional, or community experience, if available.
A biography of up to 200 words addressing your connection to Appalachia and to the store, community, food tradition, or materials you propose to document.
One relevant writing or photography sample, if available.
For archival materials, a description of the items, their approximate dates, ownership, and any known reproduction restrictions.
Full-length work is optional at this stage. Please identify the relevant store, town, county, and state whenever possible. Collaborative proposals and work incorporating multiple community voices are welcome.
The collection is currently in the proposal and early-development stage. Selected proposals will help shape the book’s final scope, contents, and structure. First-round decisions will be communicated within two to three weeks of the submission deadline.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The General Store: Community and Memory in Central Appalachia is planned as a 220-page illustrated hardcover published by Appalachia Book Company. The book will weave together contemporary and archival photography, essays, interviews, artifacts, and personal reflection.
Across these forms, the book will examine the general store as social and economic infrastructure: a place where commerce, foodways, memory, labor, music, storytelling, and mutual dependence met. It will preserve the histories of endangered institutions while asking what their disappearance means for the future of rural community life.
Questions and informal inquiries are welcome at editor@appalachiabook.co.
Please share this call with individuals, families, historical societies, cultural organizations, and communities whose experiences should be represented.
Made In Appalachia — Open for fiction and nonfiction submissions from November - March 2027
The editors seek submissions of previously unpublished fiction and nonfiction for our recurring chapbook series, Made In Appalachia. This series is for emerging and early career writers with a connection to central Appalachia, the Appalachian subregion as defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission. We look for writers from our region, who have lived in or visited our region, and/or whose writing is set in our region. Each chapbook runs 20-30 pages.
Fiction. Short story series or novellas. Your submission should run at least 5,000 words.
Literary Nonfiction. Your submission should run at least 5,000 words.
Submissions should be made via our Submittable page. Previously unpublished submissions only. Simultaneous submissions are allowed. We ask that you notify us immediately if your work is selected for publication elsewhere. Please allow up to three months for response.