About Me

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. It’s all fun. I love my life.

(If you’d like to know more about our farm and the historic community that once thrived here, read Stringtown, West Virginia: A Brief History of a Pre-World War II Rural Community.)

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. And if you’re interested in my photography, you can read about my camera here.

I get excited about things like new farmgirl boots, thornless blackberries, and a perfect loaf of bread. I get especially excited about sheep. And outhouses.

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–outside 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 above to find the archive 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.

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. You can also listen to an interview here at the West Virginia Public Radio website.

Advertise on this site. You can also shop at the Craft Shops at Chickens in the Road.

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.

Love,