Elizabeth Damewood Gaucher is a writer living with her husband and young daughter in Virginia USA.
Growing up in Charleston, West Virginia, meant town and country storytelling all of the time. Her mother’s father was one of ten children, born to a coal miner in the New River Gorge. Her father’s mother mowed the grass in high heels on Virginia Street in Charleston into her nineties, having been a young adult cutting more than few rugs in the Roaring Twenties. It was, as they say, always on.
Gaucher’s essay, “Farm Dogs,” received a Judge’s Choice award in 2014 from Silas House’s literary journal, Still. Her published work appears in books by Westminster John Knox Press and Visibility Press, as well as in The Pikeville Review. Various online essays and op-eds appear on River Teeth, Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, Hippocampus Magazine, Life in 10 Minutes, The Revivalist: Word from the Appalachian South, Essays on Childhood, Esse Diem, Haven, Mud Season Review, and The Charleston Gazette. You can find her via @ElizGaucher on Twitter.
Gaucher holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from WV Wesleyan College. Her own online publication, Longridge Review, published its first issue in October 2015. She reads, writes, edits, creates, and dreams of her publication date in the New York Times. Her essay, “Allons, Enfants: A Young Appalachian in Paris,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016.
We all leave pieces of our hearts in West Virginia when we go. Looking for them is foolish, irresistible, dangerous.
— Elizabeth Gaucher, “West Virginia in Sunlight and Shadow“
Header art by Jesse Corlis
Elizabeth Gaucher 