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In the wake of a mass shooting at his daughter’s university, gravedigger Joe Blankenship quits his job at Mountain View Cemetery in the fictional Appalachian town of Blackston, Virginia, cracks a beer between his knees, and drives to his home on the New River. There, with a summer storm rolling in, he collects his tools, feeds his donkey, and digs himself a grave.
From the dirt, Joe sits in the rain and relives his life in fragments: a lonely childhood, his aunt Carroll, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, blackberry cobbler, beers with his best friend, Ricky, summer jobs, fireflies, the birth of his daughter, the loss of his wife, Jennine, diapers, field trips, sleepovers, fights, marshmallows, and all the holes he's dug in between.
Dirt Pusher is both an elegy and a celebration, at its heart a reflection on a uniquely American tragedy through the eyes of a man who deals in the earthbound nature of death. In his debut novel, Daisy Cashin brings the hard-hitting lens of Brian Allen Carr’s Opioid, Indiana and the coming-of-age tenderness of Aftersun to the hollers of Southwest Virginia.
“Dirt Pusher is a novel of grit and grace, a story that stares head on at the things we aren’t supposed to say out loud and turns them into something beautiful, something like your favorite song. Something that will break your heart. Addictive as a bag of peach rings, boiled peanuts, tomato sandwiches, love, this story will take you apart and put you back together and yet still you'll wish for it never to end. God, I just love this book—a gulp of fresh, rain-drenched air. I can't wait to see what Daisy Cashin does next.” —Stuart Pennebaker, author of Ghost Fish
Daisy Cashin grew up in the hills of Southwest Virginia before spending a decade in Charleston, South Carolina. He now resides in a shoebox in New York City where he cooks to pay rent. His writing has appeared in HAD, Farewell Transmission, BRUISER, Expat Press, the Panacea Review, Maudlin House, F(r)iction, and the American Literary Review. Dirt Pusher is his first novel.