Lost & Found: Tin House Generously Remembers My Horace Kephart Essay

It was thrilling to hear from Emma Komlos-Hrobsky last week that my Lost & Found essay, originally published in the pages of that terrific literary magazine, Tin House, had been, well, found, and would be replayed on the Tin House blog today.  I include the opening lines of the essay here.  I hope you will follow the full trail here.

Beth Kephart brings us a tale of Appalachian wanderlust in this Lost & Found on her great grandfather Horace Kephart’s book, Our Southern Highlanders.
Growing up, we understood that we’d been entrusted with a name.  ”You go down south to Bryson City and you say ‘Kephart’ and you let them tell you who you are,” our father’s father would instruct us solemnly.  My sister, my brother, and I would sit in stiff obedience on his plastic-protected chairs, watching each other beneath raised eyebrows.  We might have had a storied name, but we could not imagine how it mattered.  We were northerners and not soon headed for a town called Bryson City.