Listen Here Page 2
from Abiding Appalachia: Where Mountain and Atom Meet (1978)
BETSY SHOLL
from Appalachian Winter (1978)
BENNIE LEE SINCLAIR
from The Arrowhead Scholar (1978)
HILDA DOWNER
from Bandana Creek (1979)
VERNA MAE SLONE
from What My Heart Wants to Tell (1979)
LEE HOWARD
from The Last Unmined Vein (1980)
LILY MAY LEDFORD
from Coon Creek Girl (1980)
BETTIE SELLERS
from The Morning of the Red-Tailed Hawk (1981)
DORIS DAVENPORT
from eat thunder & drink rain (1982)
PAULETTA HANSEL
from Appalachian Journal (1982)
JANICE TOWNLEY MOORE
from Southern Humanities Review (1982)
MARY LEE SETTLE
from The Killing Ground (1982)
ANN DEAGON
Broadside (1983)
SIDNEY SAYLOR FARR
from More than Moonshine (1983)
LLEWELLYN MCKERNAN
from Short and Simple Annals (1983)
LEIGH ALLISON WILSON
from The Raising, From The Bottom Up (1983)
Lou V.P. CRABTREE
Homer-Snake, from Sweet Hollow (1984)
ELLESA CLAY HIGH
from Past Titan Rock (1984)
JANICE TOWNLEY MOORE
from Negative Capability (1984)
JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS
from Machine Dreams (1984)
SUE ELLEN BRIDGERS
from Sara Will (1985)
LOUISE MCNEILL
from Appalachian Heritage (1985)
JANICE TOWNLEY MOORE
from Southern Humanities Review (1985)
JANE STUART
from Transparencies (1985)
BETTIE SELLERS
from Liza's Monday and Other Poems (1986)
LILLIE D. CHAFFIN
from Appalachian Heritage (1987)
DENISE GIARDINA
from Storming Heaven (1987)
GAIL GODWIN
from A Southern Family (1987)
RITA SIMS QUILLEN
from October Dusk (1987)
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
from The Bean Trees (1988)
BELINDA ANN MASON
The Gifts of the Spirit (1988)
LOUISE MCNEILL
from The Milkweed Ladies (1988)
HARRIETTE SIMPSON ARNOW
The First Ride from Appalachian Heritage (1989)
JO CARSON
from Stories I Ain't Told Nobody Yet (1989)
CONNIE JORDAN GREEN
from The War at Home (1989)
IRENE MCKINNEY
from Six O'Clock Mine Report (1989)
CANDIE CARAWAN
from Sing for Freedom (1990)
LOLETTA CLOUSE
from Wilder (1990)
AMY TIPTON CORTNER
from The Hillbilly Vampire (1990)
LISA KOGER
from Extended Learning, Farlanburg Stories (1990)
HEATHER ROSS MILLER
from Hard Evidence (1990)
BENNIE LEE SINCLAIR
from Lord of Springs (1990)
ARTIE ANN BATES
Belinda, Our Tremendous Gift (1991)
JO CARSON
from Daytrips (1991)
DORIS DAVENPORT
from voodoo chile: slight return (1991)
ANGELYN DEBORD
from Praise House (1991)
LOUISE MCNEILL
from Hill Daughter (1991)
ELLEN HARVEY SHOWELL
from Our Mountain (1991)
EFFIE WALLER SMITH
from The Collected Works of Effie Waller Smith (1991)
DOROTHY ALLISON
from Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)
MAGGIE ANDERSON
from A Space Filled With Moving (1992)
FLORENCE COPE BUSH
from Dorie: Woman of the Mountains (1992)
KATHRYN STRIPLING BYER
from Wildwood Flower (1992)
DENISE GIARDINA
from The Unquiet Earth (1992)
GLORIA HOUSTON
from My Great-Aunt Arizona (1992)
JANE WILSON JOYCE
from Quilt Pieces (1992)
KATHY L. MAY
from Door to the River (1992)
CYNTHIA RYLANT
from Missing May (1992)
MARILOU AWIAKTA
from Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother's Wisdom (1993)
JO CARSON
from Maybe, The Last of the ‘Waltz Across Texas’ and Other Stories (1993)
HILDA DOWNER
from Appalachian Journal (1993)
HEATHER ROSS MILLER
from Friends and Assassins (1993)
NIKKI GIOVANNI
Griots, from Racism 101 (1994)
JANE WILSON JOYCE
from Old Wounds, New Words (1994)
LLEWELLYN MCKERNAN
from Many Waters: Poems from West Virginia (1994)
BARBARA PRESNELL
from Snake Dreams (1994)
MEREDITH SUE WILLIS
My Boy Elroy, from In the Mountains of America (1994)
SHEILA KAY ADAMS
The Easter Frock from Come Go Home With Me (1995)
LISA ALTHER
from Five Minutes in Heaven (1995)
DORIS DAVENPORT
from Soque Street Poems (1995)
SIDNEY SAYLOR FARR
from Headwaters (1995)
NIKKY FINNEY
from Rice (1995)
LYNN POWELL
from Old & New Testaments (1995)
RITA SIMS QUILLEN
from Counting the Sums (1995)
LEE SMITH
from Saving Grace (1995)
DANA WILDSMITH
from Alchemy (1995)
LISA COFFMAN
from Likely (1996)
NIKKI GIOVANNI
from The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni (1996)
NIKKY FINNEY
from Queen Ida's Hair-Doing House of Waves, Heartwood (1997)
GEORGE ELLA LYON
from With A Hammer for My Heart (1997)
LINDA PARSONS MARION
from Home Fires (1997)
MARIJO MOORE
from Spirit Voices of Bones (1997)
RITA SIMS QUILLEN
from Appalachian Journal (1997)
ANNE SHELBY
from Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel (1997)
BARBARA SMITH
from New River Free Press (1997)
KATHRYN STRIPLING BYER
from Black Shawl (1998)
Lou V.P. CRABTREE
from The River Hills & Beyond (1998)
MARY LEE SETTLE
from Addie (1998)
ANNE SHELBY
from Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel (1998)
BARBARA SMITH
from Weeping With Those Weep: Poems of Bereavement (1998)
from Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel (1998)
MARY BOZEMAN HODGES
Ms. Ida Mae, from Tough Customers and Other Stories (1999)
LEATHA KENDRICK
from No Place Like Home, The American Voice (1999)
GEORGE ELLA LYON
from where i'm from: where poems come from (1999)
DANA WILDSMITH
from Our Bodies Remember (1999)
MAGGIE ANDERSON
from Windfall: New and Selected Poems (2000)
LISA COFFMAN
from Meridian (2000)
LEATHA KENDRICK
from Heart Cake (2000)
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
from Prodigal Summer (2000)
ELAINE FOWLER PALENCIA
Briers, from Brier Country: Stories from Blue Valley (2000)
JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS
from Motherkind (2000)
ADRIANA TRIGIANI
from Big Stone Gap (2000)
PAULETTA HANSEL
from Divining (2001)
SHARYN MCCRUMB
from The Songcatcher (2001)
JEANNE MCDONALD
from Up the Hill toward Home, Breathing the Same Air (2001)
MARIJO MOORE
Rumors, from Red Woman with Backward Eyes and Other Stories (2001)
CATHERINE LANDIS
from Some Days There's Pie (2002)
KAREN SALYER MCELMURRAY
from Mother of the Disappeared: An Appalachian Birth Mother's Journey (2003)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors want to thank the writers whose work is contained in this book. Their generosity and encouraging words have inspired us throughout this project.
We are grateful to editor Nancy Grayson, who encouraged us to submit our initial proposal to University Press of Kentucky, and to editors Jennifer Peckinpaugh and Nichole Lainhart, whose persistence and cheerful good work have seen the book through to completion. We appreciate the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend that helped to launch this anthology.
Thanks also to the Carson-Newman College students who helped with the research, photocopying, and typing: Kara Roach Davis, Nicole Drewitz Crockett, Angela Ellis Roberts, Courtney Turnbow, Amy Hartman, Melanie Johnson Daugherty, and Joy Hayes. Special thanks to Nichole Stewart for typing much of the first draft. We thank the students at Appalachian State University who helped in the creation of the final manuscript of this book: Jenny Trest, Cassie Robinson, Ruthie Blakeney, Trish Kilby, Heather Robbins, Carl Larsen, Erin Casto, and Kathy Duffala. Your enthusiasm and energy for this project kept us going. Thanks as well to ASU colleagues Lynn Moss Sanders and Grace McEntee for being such a wonderful writing group.
We especially thank Toney Frazier, Sam Stapleton, and Elizabeth and Erin Stapleton for their loving support and patience.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Sandra L. Ballard and Patricia L. Hudson are co-authors of The Carolinas and Appalachian States in the Smithsonian Guides to Historic America series. Sandy Ballard is the editor of the Appalachian Journal and Professor of English at Appalachian State University. Formerly on the faculty at the University of Tennessee as a reference librarian, Pat Hudson is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in American Heritage, Appalachian Heritage, Americana and Southern Living.
INTRODUCTION
“I'm a hillbilly, a woman, and a poet, and I understood early on that nobody was going to listen to anything I had to say anyway, so I might as well just say what I want to.”1
—Irene McKinney, West Virginia Poet Laureate
The 105 writers in this collection are women who have spent their writing lives saying what they want to; the goal of this anthology is to ensure that more people have the opportunity to listen. As a group, these writers have been relegated to the fringes of the American literary community, largely because their “place”—Appalachia—continues to be viewed as outside the American mainstream.
Appalachian author Lee Smith has examined the general public's perception of the region and concluded that “Appalachia is to the South what the South is to the rest of the country. That is: lesser than, backward, marginal. Other. Look at the stereotypes: ‘Hee Haw,’ ‘Deliverance,’ ‘Dogpatch,’ and ‘The Dukes of Hazzard.’ A bunch of hillbillies sitting on a rickety old porch drinking moonshine and living on welfare, right? Wrong.”2
If the region itself can be dismissed as “other,” then it is hardly surprising that the region's literature has suffered the same fate. Indeed, the deprecating label of “regionalist” is often assigned to writers who set their fiction in Appalachia, as if any work depicting the land, people, and culture of a particular place must be provincial and limited in appeal.
New York writers are not labeled as “regional” writers, even when their locale—Manhattan and its environs—suffuses their work. “All American fiction, it seems to me,” says writer Leigh Allison Wilson, “is circumscribed by place; I have the feeling that my work ends up being labeled regional simply because fewer people come from my particular place.”3
As editors of this anthology, we set out to create a collection of creative writings by women whose identities have been marked by life in the Appalachian mountains, because we discovered that their voices are missing from our national literature. Their absence from most of the standard literary reference books was brought into focus in 1998 when the University Press of Kentucky published Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers, edited by Joyce Dyer. The collection of autobiographical essays written by some of the region's most prominent writers holds enough warmth and intimacy, hope and humor, to make readers feel they have received an unexpected inheritance. But when we searched for these writers in standard literary reference books, we found only an empty-room echo.
None of the thirty-five authors in Bloodroot appear in the 1996 Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. None of them.
We then searched The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995), a massive reference book of more than 1,000 pages, and discovered that only eight women from the Appalachian region were included: Olive Tilford Dargan (1869–1968), Mary Noailles Murfree (1850–1922), Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1881–1941), Harriette Simpson Arnow (1908–1986), Marilou Awiakta (1936–), Nikki Giovanni (1943–), Lee Smith (1944–), and Annie Dillard (1945–).
It is our hope that this book will spread the word that Appalachia has many women writers who are worthy of recognition. Some have gone unnoticed, some have been discovered and then forgotten, and some have gained recognition, only to have their ties to the region ignored. As writer Wilma Dykeman said, Appalachian literature includes “experiences as unique as churning butter and as universal as getting born.”4
When writers such as Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, or Barbara Kingsolver receive national attention, reviewers rarely highlight their Appalachian roots or acknowledge the rich heritage that nurtured them. But the voices of all of the women in this book were developed within earshot of good storytellers. “Sooner or later,” says folksinger Jean Ritchie, “memories would call forth a story—a tale not to be sung but told, with much laughing, and joining in, maybe a tear or two—and life would stretch broader for a while as older generations lived again.”5
The absence of Appalachian women's voices in American literature, though lamentable, is understandable when we realize that much of the work by these writers has remained uncollected or is no longer in print. The inaccessibility of much of the best Appalachian literature means that students from Appalachia who study American literature rarely find their “place” depicted in textbooks. While they can see the relevance of literature set in other places, it is easy for them to come to the conclusion that writers come ONLY from other places.
It is important for both writers and readers not to cut themselves off from their roots. As Nobel Prize–winning poet Seamus Heaney said, “for words to have any kind of independent energy, in some way they have to be animated by the first place in ourselves.”6
Appalachian author George Ella Lyon reminds us that “where you're from is not who you are, but it's an important ingredient…you must trust your first voice—the one tuned by the people and place that made you—before you can speak your deepest truths.”7
“I suspect,” echoes author Lisa Koger, “that trying to separate a writer's work from his background is a little like trying to separate a turtle from its shell…. Remove home and its influence from my back, and I will have lost not just shelter but an essential part of me.”8
Despite numerous obstacles, a number of women writers from the region have found critical and commercial success. This collection includes the work of nominees and recipients of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and Newbery Award. Some lived nearly a century; others died young. Most live, or have lived, the life of a writer while also being mothers, parental caregivers, and workers of day jobs to support themselves and their families.
Unlike C
arl Sandburg and Ernest Hemingway whose wives brought them breakfast on a tray and set it outside the door so as not to disturb them, most of these writers have had no such emotional or physical “elbow room” in which to create. Yet this anthology makes it impossible to deny their creativity.
While working on this project, we occasionally were asked why we chose to focus exclusively on the region's women writers. Our answer is both political and practical. The late Appalachian scholar, Jim Wayne Miller, addressed the political reasons behind this collection when he wrote in support of our proposal: “The Appalachian region is still seen as the site of an unmitigated patriarchy, with the result that the region's women writers and the impressive body of work they have created is not sufficiently visible, recognized, or appreciated. This collection can make a significant contribution toward correcting this misperception.” The practical consideration is that Appalachia's wealth of literary talent has yet to be collected in a single volume. We leave it to others to expand the canon further.
Having convinced ourselves of the need for an anthology of this nature, we proceeded to hammer out the guidelines that would shape this book.
First, we decided the collection should include writings by women who have lived in Appalachia for a significant period of their lives, who identify themselves with the region, whose lives have been influenced by the region, and/or whose writings concern Appalachian experiences.
Second, we defined “Appalachia” as the southeastern mountains and foothills—from the mountainous parts of Pennsylvania and southwest Virginia to West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee, western North Carolina, upstate South Carolina, and northern Georgia and Alabama.
Third, we decided the anthology would include writers who have published at least one book-length work, who are widely published in the region, and/or who have contributed in a significant way to the writing of the region. (Because we found more writers than would fit in this anthology, we have included a list entitled “More Women Writing in Appalachia” to document the range and variety of voices who also deserve to be heard.)
And finally, we believed the collection should highlight the fact that many of the women writing in Appalachia work and publish in multiple genres. Fiction writers also write poetry; poets also write short fiction, etc. The willingness of individual writers to cross from one genre to another suggests that they are more concerned with exploring their creativity than with publication and recognition. This collection includes excerpts from novels, short stories, poetry, drama, creative nonfiction, and children's books.