TRAMPOLINE

Imagine the vibe of the movie Napoleon Dynamite told with prose like Charles Portis' but set in a bleak, rural Winter's Bone-like setting - Trampoline tells the story in words and pictures of Dawn Jewell, a fifteen-year-old unstoppable force of a girl.

She gets in bruising fights, speaks her mind, goes straight through things that get in her way. She is relentless, like a truck with its breaks cut barreling down the highway, and so is the plotting. It moves with an extraordinary amount of energy, but the book still manages to be hysterical, heartbreaking and true. Dawn lives in Appalachia, in eastern Kentucky with her addict mother and her grandmother, Mamaw, whose opposition to the coal companies is legendary and rare in their small community.
But Trampoline is about much more than the fight against strip mining, the struggle of drug addiction and the push to give voice to the problems of rural America. It's an utterly original coming-of-age story about love, family and violence, graced by Robert's unique drawings that are impossible to get out of your head.

Robert Gipe won the 2015 Weatherford Award for outstanding Appalachian novel for Trampoline. His second novel is Weedeater. Both novels were published by Ohio University Press. He has an essay in Appalachian Reckoning, published a couple weeks ago and reviewed in the New York Times this week. From 1997 to 2018, Gipe directed the Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College Appalachian Program in Harlan. He is a producer of the Higher Ground community performance series; has directed the Southeast Kentucky Revitalization Project, which trains workers in fields related to creative placemaking; coordinated the Great Mountain Mural Mega Fest; co-produces the Hurricane Gap Community Theater Institute; and advises on It's Good to Be Young in the Mountains, a youth-driven conference. Gipe formerly worked at Appalshop, an arts center in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Gipe resides in Harlan County, Kentucky. He grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee.