J.B. Priestley, the English novelist and political writer, writes in his essay “Wrong Ism” that “the mass of people…are probably regionalists without knowing it. Because they have been brought up in a certain part of the world, they have formed perhaps quite unconsciously a deep attachment to its landscape and speech, its traditional customs, its food and drink, its songs and joke. . . . They are rooted in their region. Indeed, without this attachment a man can have no roots.”
It is only good and right, then, that a region with such a unique and colorful history as Appalachia be celebrated in fine publications like Appalachian Heritage: A Literary Quarterly of the Southern Appalachians, published out of Kentucky’s Berea College. Indeed, this journal celebrates landscape and speech and customs, food and drink and song and jokes. It is rooted din its region, in its very subject matter. A typical issue contains poetry, short stories, and a memoir, most often centered around recurring themes of Appalachian life like family, nature, farming and mining, poverty, land development and gentrification, and God and spirituality. That experience hinted at by Priestley, of coming to an understand with one’s region, coming to terms with one’s roots, is a regular subject treated here. Each issue dedicates several pages to a featured author, offering tidbits of work along with personal and critical essays about that author. Generous book reviews and write-ups track books fiction and non-, books either about the region and its people or written by Appalachian authors, and oftentimes both. A calendar of events follows the regions literary life. Recipes often accompany personally essays and remembrances. Each issue spotlights a featured photography, and within these pages are some of the most amazing photographs documenting rural life I’ve ever seen.
Let’s take a look at the most recent issue of Appalachian Heritage, Winter 2005, which features photographer Douglas Yarrow’s historical shots from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, taken mostly in and around West Virginia. His photograph “Sunset” graces the cover, a beautiful composition of purpling Appalachian dusk, faint stars and wintertime leafless trees. His back cover is equally striking: “Snow,” a study of tree shadows falling on untouched snow. Inside, the tenor of the photographs changes as Yarrow’s focus falls on people rather than landscape. Photographs like “Nimrod Workman Sings with his Daughter Phyllis, Mingo Co.,” “Trina,” “Levy Daniel,” and “Mrs. Bonifacio at the Mt. Hope Hardware Store”’ offer candid and powerful portraits. These take a political turn in “Underground Miner,” “Pickets in Virginia, “Miners Leaving Eccles Mine,” and “Checker Cab Protest.” Shots of strip mined land, “Stripping and Busses” and “Strip Mine,” provide ugly counterpoints to the covers and portraits, while “Hard Times brings the point home by combining all three: a man stooped over, underneath a marquee advertising the movie of the same name, pushing a shovel as snow falls.
The poems in this issue are pretty good, the best of them riding a fine balance between the beauty and tragedy of life in lower class, geographically distinctive Appalachia. Julie Dunlop’s poem “Mist” conjures the ghostly image of mountain mists, suggesting it may indeed be the spirits of “those / who lived here long ago.” The river can tell you their names, the speaker claims, although “it’s not their names that matter.” Rather, it’s
the fullness of their songs,
the strength and gentleness of their hands
if they were grateful for the very breath
in their lungs, the change to heal
the wild sweetness of a night sky full of stars.
Susan Shaw Sailer’s “Off I-68 Heading East” treats another ghostly image, that of Noah’s Ark, being rebuilt along the highway. It’s [f]our stories of rusty girders define / the frame,” but “[i]n fourteen years nothing / has been added, nothing changed.” Despite the lack of activity and cash flow,
[t]he edifice is staying put—
no floors, no decks, no sails,
no ballast, no stairs, no oars.
Money slow in coming in?
Builder suffering a crisis?
After sever years of drought
God knows we need the rain.
And, “Snowday Quartet” by Jeannette Canabis-Brewin perfects this theme of juxtapositions, of natural beauty (of landscape, of faces, of spirit and person) against toil and strife and the painful mortality of life. Stanza two reads:
wild carrots tatting
a winter crop of lace for their Queen
each brittle brown chalice fills with it
and with a peace
undisturbed by the commerce of bees.
But now, let us look at us, in stanza four:
see us…fading back to no-color
to sepiatone, to black
and white images,
a wonderful life.
we do less
and what we do—chop wood, light
fire, heat water—is briefly
enough.
Jeff Mann’s “Hemlocks” (I love the almost haiku-like first stanzas: “without boughs / to sow, the wind / has less and less to say) and Richard Hague’s “Manure” (like Plath’s “Mushrooms”) (“We will rise and reign—I love Yarrow’s bovine photo accompaniment too) are also winners. I also recommend James B. Goode’s “No Breast Augers in Heaven,” told from the point of view of a speaker whose Daddy has died, a result of a mining accident in which “[a] big slate rock / Fell on Daddy’s leg— / Pinned it to the muddy bottom / Like a bug on a board. . . .” Just as he dies, the bosses come to “claim the company’s tool . . ./ Said Daddy wouldn’t have no use / For a breast auger in heaven. / ‘Thank God! By God,” I said.”
Despite the strength of these, other poems in the issue rely too much on a forced sentimentalism, treating God and death of fathers and spouses in straightforward yet somehow unchallenging ways. True, these works fit in well thematically with the whole, but remain unsatisfying. The same can be said of the fiction. Featured author Gretchen Moran Laskas’ story “Almost Persuaded” features a young woman’s experience at a revival. What the audience doesn’t know (until Laskas drops the pivotal information in short bursts and too late) is that she’s pregnant by a one-night stand and not ready for a baby. The cop-out ending does not do the earlier revival scenery and protagonist’s inner-life lines justice. Laskas, who won the 2003 Appalachian Writers Association’s Fiction Book of the Year for The Midwife’s Tale, is well defended in for and aft essays and apparently has the goods. But this story disappointed. Perhaps it is an excerpt from a larger work?
Like wise, “God’s Garden,” by Floyd D. Davis, begins well but ends badly. The garden of he title is one kept by the protagonist, Asa, his wife, Melissa, and son, Adam. It consists of “plants that people upstream had dumped in the creek as waste or that had washed out of creek bank yards during spring floods to take root where they might in marshes, fields, and waste places downstream” that he family has liberated and replanted. Against this intriguing image we learn that Asa has quit his white-collar job to work in the mines for better pay and that his second child was not in fact fathered by him. Both scenarios are full of potential, but any interesting character development is squelched in a contrived and forced attempt to make the original garden image a sentimental metaphor. The story screeches to a halt in a could of frustration. Another example, I contend, of a story ended before it got a change to get going, killed in its prime by cliché.
Cathryn Hankla’s “Outlaws” has the most promise, I think, but suffers a similar fate of forced, awkward closure. Originally from Maine, Snakeman is a “gender outlaw,” having been born with half sets of both kinds of equipment, living as a man in rural Virginia. He’s befriended by young Mitch from up the road and has even struck up a friendship with Caroline, a student whom he has helped after an unfortunate car accident involving a cow. Unfortunately, Snakeman’s past and identity don’t sit well with the neighbors, and Mitch’s dad gets a word in edgewise. All of this is great stuff, a fascination point of entry into seldom-seen cultural territory. But Hankla ends the story too soon, as if she were running out of available space. I simply don’t buy Caroline’s sudden interest in Snakeman, even after learning the truth about him.
But that’s ok—I’ll make myself some of these sour cream and ginger cream cookies, recipes courtesy of Sydney Saylor Farr (a former editor of the review), and all will be forgotten.
Don’t be fooled into thinking I’m down on these stories, the first two anyway, because they deal with God, faith, and religion. It’s often assumed that these topics, treated from the point of view of the believer, have little place in literary discourse and will be given the cold shoulder in academic circlings—this, even as we see a resurgence of spirituality in our poetry. The truth is, in an era of warring fundamentalist ideologies, “intelligent design,” gay bishops and the like, it’s more important than ever to talk about these subjects. However, does that mean standards fall by the wayside? Should not such poets and writers be held to the same requirements of character and story development, of worsmithery (and by this I do not mean that term oft hurled critically against contemporary literary PoMo writers—I’m not looking for language masturbation, just a better understanding of the economy of language), as anyone else? Shouldn’t cliché and glossed over, assumptive narrative style be left to those not of Appalachia who would yet embarrass themselves by writing as if they knew what they were talking about?
No, the problem isn’t that subjects like religion and God are give page space here. I believe that problem may rest in the fact that this journal’s strength is tightly woven with its weakness. The Winter issue seems fairly representative of Appalachian Heritage, if the four issues I’ve read are a good sampling, and there is approximately the same balance of good stuff and not so good (the most consistently excellent work, I think, is the photography). The admirable dedication to strictly regional writing is at least much appreciated by the non-Appalachian reader, at most downright indispensable to American letters. But it also results in a sameness of themes, and even of authors, as if the journal were relying on a relatively small stable of writers (if you’re ever wondering what Silas House of Kentucky, author of The Coal Tattoo and Clay’s Quilt, is up to, check in with the latest issue of AH—he’s the featured author in the Spring 2004 issue).
This makes sense, though. The themes of Appalachian culture are themes without enough national and international voice. And, for every Silas House and Robert Morgan and R.T. Smith and Sydney Saylor Farr and Kathryn Stripling Byer (the Summer and Spring 2004 issue, featuring these authors, contain the best writing of the four I reviewed), there are a hundred other writing equally themed, equally impassioned missives out of the region whose virtuosity is simply not as polished. There is space to fill, variety to seek out, and the journal could simply not live up to its name if it didn’t publish more folk and genre writing, which are typical of any region’s character. But the result again seems to be a literary magazine of variable quality, with too many unrefined, sentimentalized and clichéd stories and poems, hopeful works too rushed to achieve their promise.
Maybe I believe that. That word I used, “folk” was used wit editor George Brosi’s biographical essay on featured author, North Carolinian Sharyn McCrumb (Fall 2004) in mind. It holds a key to understanding what’s going on in Appalachian Heritage. In the essay, “Sharyn McCrumb: A Contemporary Bard,” Brosi writes of McCrumb’s prodigious, genre-hopping writing (great quote from McCrumb: “Finally I realized that Appalachia itself is a liminal state: it is a border land [with] all the magic that has been civilized away from most of the world . . . no place is really very far from civilization anymore”). After explaining how McCrumb started writing more “literary” regional novels after a string of successful mystery novels, he summarizes McCrumb’s outlook on the region’s literature scene. She sees the geographical and cultural split between “mountain South and flatland South” as extending into literature, with the Deep South’s “fine” and “mannered” minimalist literary tradition outflanking Appalachia’s more maximalist “popular” folk traditions in the fight for national consciousness (these “bardic” traditions can be connected with the region’s Celtic ancestry, McCrumb claims). McCrumb and, I wager, Brosi and the journal under his guidance see themselves as trying to bridge the divide.
I think this is an interesting and useful way of seeing things and a most worthy goal on her part (I haven’t read her novels, but I can’t say I enjoyed her offering “Abide With Me,” despite its mystical treatment of NASCAR, for many of the same reasons discussed above). For I am on the side of Priestly, who argued for a beneficial internationalism in which “sovereign” (my term) regions shared and understood each other’s cultures without “national man, drunk with power, demand[ing] our loyalty, money and applause, and poison[ing] the very air with his dangerous nonsense.” The language of the region, its storytelling modes and tropes, its themes and voices must thrive and survive, and even if it were to never achieve the same critical prominence as its Deeper Southern neighbors’ literary traditions, it should at least be understood on its own terms. Appalachian Heritage’s ideal reader may ultimately be him or herself of and from Appalachia (what an excellent way to keep a finger on the pulse of, or use a passport back into,” the form and colour, the very taste and smell of dear familiar things”?), but it behooves us all to achieve a greater understanding of our fellow regional men and women.