Renea Winchester, Author
For her latest novel, The Mountains Remember, Renea Winchester draws on actual accounts of what private landowners—including her great-great-grandmother, Docia Queen Styles—faced as the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP) came into existence. “The book is a love letter to the women of Appalachia,” says Winchester. “It is a testament to the strength and determination of the people who once resided on the land that is now the GSMNP, those whom time has forgotten. The invisible women of Appalachia who toiled just as hard as their male counterparts.”
In Winchester’s story, Sadie Bird is a widow who, in 1929, supports herself by harvesting medicinal plants and making tonics and salves from them. Her life is upended when a government employee shows up to acquire her land for the planned park.
The house that Docia Queen Styles lived in is the one that stands today at the Mountain Farm Museum at the Oconaluftee Visitors Center. Winchester says that, as a child, she knew the house had belonged to an ancestor, but didn’t think beyond that fact. “At the time, I didn’t understand the significance of the house, or how many visitors came to the land, and I didn’t understand how desperately folk wanted to stay on their land.”
Besides realizing the heartache Appalachian women historically have known, Winchester hopes readers connect with the setting. “I hope to immerse the reader into the magic of these mountains,” she says, “because I do believe the mountains remember us.”
The Mountains Remember, September 2026, historical fiction, paperback, $22, by Renea Winchester, and published by Mercer University Press, Macon, GA. Upcoming appearances include City Lights Books, Sylva, on Saturday, September 5, at 3 p.m. and Fryemont Inn, Bryson City, on Saturday, September 26, 4–6 p.m. Learn more at MUPress.org.
