• News |  
• Articles |  
• Rubble Masonry by Rose McLarney explores lifes touchstones

English professor’s essay collection examines humanity shaped by life’s touchstones

“Rubble Masonry,” the first essay collection by Lanier Endowed Professor of Creative Writing Rose McLarney, explores the cultural touchstones of life in the American South and how they shape an individual.

McLarney’s collection will be published by Louisiana State University Press on March 27, 2026. The essays discuss topics as diverse as picking cotton and growing exotic lilies, closed adoption records and doors in various styles of architecture, grandmothers and tattoos, geological intersections and the collision of a circus train, and much more, united by themes of monuments, gravestones and eroded stones.

“The collection of lyric essays takes its title from stonemasons’ term for working not with stones cut to ideal shapes, but the natural shapes of found rocks,” McLarney said. “I take the place in which I find myself — in the American South, in history, in an ecosystem, in the form of this woman’s body — and build with the material.”

Her previous work, all poetry collections, includes “Colorfast,” “Forage,” “Its Day Being Gone” and “The Always Broken Plates of Mountains.” McLarney has been applauded for her honest, immersive portrayal of Appalachian culture and how it interacts with memory and womanhood.

Early reviews of “Rubble Masonry” call the work “impressively splendid,” “spellbinding” and “startling, deeply original.”

In her first full-length prose collection, McLarney uses essays to envelop readers in her research on Appalachia’s geology and heritage, illuminating the influence of environment and history on how we are shaped, for new audiences.

“Perhaps the biggest draw was to the challenge — trying a whole new genre and also aspiring to write the most lyrical essays I possibly could,” McLarney said. “When I turned to writing essays, it wasn’t a turning away from poetry. Rather, it was trying to come to prose with everything I’ve learned about musicality and image and metaphor and space and leaps and implication.”

On Thursday, April 2, McLarney will hold a public reading from 6-8 p.m. at the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts and Humanities (CMDCAH) alongside author Melissa Range.

Range will read from her upcoming book, “Printer’s Fist,” which explores the abolitionist movement in the 18^th and 19^th centuries through the lens of print culture. Range won the 2025 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize for “Printer’s Fist” and was chosen as the visiting scholar in residence at the CMDCAH.

McLarney will read essays from “Rubble Masonry” and hopes participants will enjoy reflecting on what shapes them.

“I hope readers and listeners will be rewarded for their attention to my work by the through stones and touch stones in the essays, at the same time that my writing encourages them to explore their own thoughts,” McLarney said. “I like to think what fellow Alabama poet Charlotte Pence said is true, that ‘Rubble Masonry’ ‘provides a meditation on the past in an attempt to understand the bewildering present.’”

For more information about the public reading, visit the CLA Events Calendar.

Tags: English Faculty Arts and Culture Research