Wake Forest Magazine did a big long story about RG. It came out in 2017. Words by Tommy Tomlinson. Photos by Travis Dove. You can look at it here.
In March 2018, Bookpage published a thing RG wrote about the world of Canard County. A person can read it here.
In March 2018, The Knoxville News-Sentinel ran a review of Weedeater written by Michael Ray Taylor for Chapter16.org. One can read it here.
Roberta Schultz reviewed Weedeater for WVXU-FM in Cincinnati in March 2018 . A person can listen to that review here.
The Spring/Summer 2017 issue of Cold Mountain Review published an interview with RG conducted by Zack Vernon. One can read it here.
In the fall of 2017, Kris Truelson invited RG to tell stories about cheese on the Farm and Family Fun Time old time radio show on the station of the Birthplace of Country music in Bristol, TN. Here is a link to a recording of that show. The RG part starts about 17 minutes into it.
Carter Sickels did a nice review of Trampoline for Southern Spaces magazine. It was published around the middle of 2016. You can read it here. Thank you, Carter.
This is a video my friends Jason Edwards and Chase & Storm Branson made in the fall of 2014.
The literary blog Revolution John published an interview with me done by David Joy on February 24, 2015. Thanks Sheldon Lee Compton, David Joy, & Revolution John.
February 15, 2015: The Harlan Daily Enterprise, my local newspaper, did a story about Trampoline coming out. You can see it here.
July 2, 2015: Thanks to Jayne Moore Waldrop for mentioning Trampoline in her survey of recent books by Kentuckians. Also mentioned: Nickole Brown, Riley Hanick, Emily Bingham, Wendell Berry, and Amanda Driscoll.
July 6, 2015: Thanks, Sheldon Lee Compton, for the mention on the dang slick blog, Bent Country.
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Here is a biographical sketch Robert Gipe wrote for Still, the online journal that serialized the first six chapters of Trampoline: I was born in North Carolina in 1963 and was raised in Kingsport, Tennessee, a child of the Tennessee Eastman Company, Pals Sudden Service, and the voice of the Vols, John Ward. My dad was a warehouse supervisor and my mom a registered nurse. I went to college at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina where I was a DJ for a student radio station I helped start. I went to graduate school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and got a masters in American Studies. I worked as a pickle packer, a forklift driver, and eventually landed a job as marketing and educational services director for Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky in 1989. At Appalshop I worked with public schoolteachers on arts and education projects. Since 1997, I have been the director of the Appalachian Program at Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College in Cumberland, Kentucky. I am one of the producers of Higher Ground, a series of community musical dramas based on oral histories and grounded in discussion of local issues. I am also a faculty coordinator of the Crawdad student arts series. I have had fiction published in Appalachian Heritage and have attended the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman every year since 2006.
I have been working on the characters in Trampoline and Weedeater since 2006. The narrator is Dawn Jewell. She lives in a coalfield county in eastern Kentucky, and is in high school when Escape Velocity takes place. She's having a rough go of it. The sound of people telling one another stories is the most precious sound in the world. Trying to catch that sound on the page is my favorite part of writing. Most of my favorite writing—Flannery O'Connor's stories, the novels of Richard Price and Charles Portis—seems to me written by ear. When writing is going best for me, it's like taking dictation from voices I hear in my head. As far as the drawings go, I have drawn pictures all my life, much longer than I have written stories, and with more compulsion. Trampoline is the first time I have seriously tried to integrate fiction and drawing. I love episodic storytelling, especially the great HBO series--The Wire, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, etc.—and have enjoyed thinking about how to break a story into semi-coherent pieces.
July 3, 2015: American sweetheart Glenn Taylor has got a roundup of Appalachian books over on the snazzy literary blog Electric Literature that mentions Trampoline in the same digital breath as works by Ann Pancake, George Singleton, Frank X Walker, Crystal Wilkinson, and Dot Jackson. Flip em, trade em, collect em all. And read em. And read Glenn's new novel A Hanging at Cinder Bottom while you're at it.
May 7, 2015: Stephen M. Vest of Kentucky Monthly Magazine reviews Trampoline for The Washington Indpendent Review of Books calling it "jagged, dark, and honest." Which is much appreciated.
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