Song of Moving Water by Susan Schmidt, Kakapo Press, 2015, is a wonderful novel set at the intersection of Bath and Highland Counties, VA. It's partly about the damming of Back Creek and Little Back Creek to create the Bath County Pumped Storage hydroelectric power plant, a project that displaced the subsistence community of the flooded valleys. Schmidt, an environmentalist Quaker (editor, professor, and sailor) calls them "Jack" and "Little Jack" Creeks and "McDowell County." The protagonist is a 17-year-old woman whose aunt farms the place left to the young woman by her father. The land and water are characters as well, set in the early 1970's, the area described so familiar to me from years of visiting. Schmidt gently describes the internal and external conflicts along with the grief over fighting for a land inscribed in one's bones.
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