About Me

IMG_0933a My name is Suzanne McMinn. I live on a farm. I grew up in the suburbs of D.C. and southern California then lived everywhere from Texas to the Carolinas. A few years ago, I moved with my three children to a slanted little house outside a tiny town in West Virginia. My family history here goes back over 200 years. After living in a 100-year-old farmhouse for two and a half years, we built a new farmhouse a few miles over the hill on our own farm on forty acres so remote you have to drive through three creeks in one direction or ford a river in the other to even get there.

We have Nigerian Dwarf goats and Fainting goats, Cotswold, Jacob, and Dorset sheep, chickens, ducks, miniature donkeys, and a Great Pyrenees livestock guardian dog. I make cheese and candles. I love to bake bread and grow my garden. I’m learning to spin wool and knit. I also love to crochet. It’s all fun. I love my life.
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You can find out more about our farm and the historic community that once thrived here by reading Stringtown, West Virginia: A Brief History of a Pre-World War II Rural Community. We named our farm Stringtown Rising Farm in honor of that history.
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I have a slight fixation with sheep.

I have a lot of cats.

I also like to take pictures of outhouses. I write books, too. You can find out more about my romance novels here. My books have been translated into dozens of languages and published all over the world.
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Welcome to our journey into the simple, often vanishing, life of rural America in the country outside one tiny town in the Appalachian foothills as we find the true meaning of home–and life–beyond the noise of suburban sprawl and suburban conveniences. I post daily in my farmhouse journal chronicling my photography, (sometimes silly, sometimes serious) stories, recipes, crafts, and sentimental thoughts on the history, people, life, and beauty of rural Appalachia. Use the menu bar at the top to find the archives of our experiences and lessons learned in farming, cooking, simple living, and more. This blog has been featured in Living Appalachian, Antique Weekly, the Roane County Times Record, Graffiti, the Charleston Daily Mail, and numerous other newspapers across the state of West Virginia. In January 2009, I started writing a column based on my blog for the Charleston Daily Mail. Chickens in the Road was a finalist for “Best-Kept Secret” in the 2009 Bloggies.
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If you’re new to my site, a great way to find out what it’s all about is to start with A Chickens in the Road Sampler.

A few of my most popular posts from the past year include:

Lord Willing and If the Creek Don’t Rise
Pear Pressure
On an Early Autumn Weekend
Ruckus
Kitten’s Great Escape
A Cautionary Tale
Cheesecake Cookies
Sausage and Patty
Escaped Goat Leads Stringtown Farmer on Slow-Speed Chase

You can listen online to a couple of recorded interviews:

Go here for my interview on West Virginia Public Radio.

And click the Play button below to hear my interview on BlogTalkRadio right here.

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Other handy links:

Follow me on Twitter.
Friend me on Facebook.
Join the Chickens in the Road fan page on Facebook.
Watch me on YouTube.
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Your company and your comments are appreciated. If you like, please join in at the Chickens in the Road forum–make friends, ask questions, have fun! Feel free to email me using the contact link below, or drop a note in the blog. You can also subscribe to my newsletter–see sample newsletters here.