Ethan Mannon

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Ethan Mannon lives in the mountains of Tennessee with his wife and children. He is an Associate Professor of English at Mars Hill University, where he teaches American and Appalachian Literature, as well as composition. He is the Director of the MHU Honors Program and one of the founders of the MHU Heritage Garden. His recent book, The Georgic Mode in Twentieth-Century American Literature: The Satisfactions of Soil and Sweat (Lexington Books, 2024), includes a chapter about honey bees.

Recent Essays

An Introductory Course in Apicultural Science: Tracy Farone’s Honey Bee Vet

Ethan Mannon - August 12, 2024

But even a novice like me—hobbled by an ignorance of veterinarian science and perennially pulled toward too many projects—found the book interesting and useful.

Cornmeal and Butter: On the Significance of Temperature

Ethan Mannon - March 9, 2023

At all hours of the day and night in the Mannon house, you’ll find butter in its designated dish on the dinner table and cornmeal in the fridge. I hold strong beliefs about these two points of culinary geography.

Heating with Wood as a Habit of Mind

Ethan Mannon - January 20, 2023

I enjoy certain utilitarian advantages by heating with wood, but I also prefer the habits of mind—attention, connection, succession, frugality—that my woodpile’s growth and contraction inspires.

More of the Familiar in Wendell Berry’s How It Went

Ethan Mannon - November 8, 2022

He has never chased the new or tried to be avant-garde. Even in the physical act of writing, he has famously resisted the “advantages” of a personal computer and has opted instead to continue using the older technologies of pencil and paper. Though How It Went is technically a new book from Berry, the stories are pleasingly familiar.

The Growing Pains of a Small Farm: Kristin Kimball’s Good Husbandry and “The Problem of Scale”

Ethan Mannon - August 19, 2020

In some ways Good Husbandry stands as a kind of bildungsroman for Essex Farm and, by extension, the support-your-local-farmer movement.

In Defense of Okra

Ethan Mannon - July 15, 2020

I doubt okra tops many people’s list of garden must-haves, which is a shame since it is such a determined grower. Gardens are only guaranteed to produce one thing year in and year out: humility.

Wholeness and Gratitude: Working through Scott H. Moore’s How to Burn a Goat

Ethan Mannon - March 23, 2020

Moore insists that his book about farming is not exclusively about rural places: “the point is not even about farming . . . most of what I’ve said in this book is equally applicable to work in the office, factory, classroom, or home." Moore argues that in each of these locations, the human experience begins and ends with gratitude.

Ethan Mannon

Recent Essays

An Introductory Course in Apicultural Science: Tracy Farone’s Honey Bee Vet

Cornmeal and Butter: On the Significance of Temperature

Heating with Wood as a Habit of Mind

More of the Familiar in Wendell Berry’s How It Went

The Growing Pains of a Small Farm: Kristin Kimball’s Good Husbandry and “The Problem of Scale”

In Defense of Okra

Wholeness and Gratitude: Working through Scott H. Moore’s How to Burn a Goat

The Dirt on Resilience

Resisting Romanticism and the Elision of Labor

Take a Hike? (I Would Prefer Not To)

Cultivating the Candy Roaster: An Extensive Pleasure

America’s Regional Fences