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TRAMPOLINE

Robert Gipe

An Illustrated Novel

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.
Available products
Book

Published 2015-03-15 by Ohio University Press

Book

Published 2015-03-15 by Ohio University Press

Comments

Black-and-white drawings make an impact in this poignant tale with an almost visceral sense of place. ... Jagged, dark, and honest, Trampoline is a powerful portrait of a place struggling with the economic and social forces that threaten to define it or destroy it. Read more...

Trampoline is a truly new sort of novel, one in which the masterful prose and intimate drawings work together to tell a powerful story. In Gipe's hands, Jewell's voice is musical and honest, her language and syntax brooking no nonsense and yet capturing the beauty and nuance of mountain life that others around her miss. Read more...

Dawn Jewell is one of the most memorable and endearing narrators I have ever read. She's like a combination of Scout Finch, Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield, and True Grit's Mattie Ross, but even more she is completely her own person, the creation of an author who has given us a novel that provides everything we need in great fiction: a sense of place that drips with kudzu and coal dust; complex characters who rise up off the page as living, breathing people we will not soon forget; and a rollicking story that is by turns hilarious, profound, deeply moving, and always lyrical. I think Trampoline is one of the most important novels to come out of Appalachia in a long while and announces an important new voice in our literature.

Author Beth Macy is a huge fan. She wrote a piece about him for the The Oxford America Read more...

Here's a short YouTube video about Robert and his work Read more...