Georgiana Kotarski

 

 

Georgiana Kotarski

 

          Georgiana Kotarski lives in Dunlap, Tennessee in an 1880 house bought eleven years ago as a shack so tipsy the bank refused to lend money on it. She and her late husband Dan spent six years renovating the hovel and the surrounding sixty-five acres of bramble and groundhog holes. Advocates of sustainable agriculture, they were "contrary farmers" in the Gene Logsdon tradition.

     Kotarski regularly dirties her hands with an assortment of chores: bush hogging pastures, canning food, tilling the garden, pruning fruit trees, and hauling hay. She has been shocked by electric fences, thrown from horses, stung by a hornet, yellow jackets, wasps, and ants, bitten by horses, a pony, a dog, a bat, a mouse, ticks, chiggers, and the love bug. She has stood her ground against rooster floggings and turkey threats, sucking leeches, and cow slobber.

     She shares her farm with about thirty head of grass-finished beef cattle, an exponentially increasing duck flock, several hens, two turkeys, three stray dogs (subject to increase at any moment), a cat, and a donkey, and, previously, horses and goats. Avid nature watchers, the Kotarskis preserved the hedgerows, bogs, and ridge side for birds and other creatures.

     Kotarski is the author of Ghosts of the Southern Tennessee Valley, (John F. Blair, 2006), a collection of regional ghost lore honored by Storytelling World in the anthology category for 2007. She has published more than forty articles in local and national magazines including two humorous pieces involving animals. "The Signal Mountain Kudzu-Goat War" appeared as the cover story in Chattanooga Life & Leisure. Reiman Publications' County EXTRA featured "You Can Learn a Lot from a Cow Named Bossy."

    

The author holds a BS in forestry from the University of the South, a BBA in accounting from Kennesaw State, and an MPA in policy from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She is the director of Chattanooga State Technical Community College's Sequatchie Valley site, a rural outreach campus. Previously, she was executive director of the Chattanooga Area Food Bank and, before its loss to fire, she owned and managed a mail-order herb nursery.

    

www.georgianakotarski.com

 

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