Outskirts Press, INC.

The calm lives of rural America collide with systemic forces: economic, political, cultural.

For Abel and Janine Bellamy, their parcel of dirt holds everything of value: home, family, history, life itself. So, when they are approached with a lucrative offer to sell the farm that’s been in his family for three generations, their refusal is predictable, and irrevocable. With support from family, and a cadre of close personal friends, including Harlan, a Native American school chum, they face the social abrasions and overt violence of a community that wants them gone. A story of intrigue and political maneuvering clashing with lives of common folk, their visions of the world, and the needs of a sustainable environment, Dirt probes the human psyche as it wrestles with basic moral obligations, its central conflict coming to a head when a newly elected county sheriff takes it upon himself to terminate the Bellamys’ reticence, if not the Bellamys themselves, as the whole community spirals into a civil war, from which no one will emerge unscathed.