Issue 3:2 | View | Mark Roberts

COMPLICATING PRECONCEPTIONS: APPALACHIAN LITERATURE TODAY, a Commentary on the Literature in NR 3:02

by Mark A. Roberts

I just finished reading Issue 3:02 of the Nantahala Review in all its grand diversity, and as the scorch of this early August burns into a balmy summer evening, I sit on my porch in a centuries old rocking chair thinking of you, readers. I think of you all— many thrust across the globe—and relish what you are about to experience, if you take a few hours of your busy day, to indulge in the wealth of writing and photography we've culled here for your edification and delight. Reflecting upon this issue—one of our largest yet— I am struck not only by the quality of the writing and image-making but also by the vast variations of Appalachian life wrought from the blood and bones of personal experiences. Seven years ago when the editors of Nantahala pooled their passion to produce this journal, our intent was to put on display, in a globally accessible format, seasoned and fresh artists whose literary and photographic representations of Appalachia complicate the preconceptions of our peoples and places. Without a doubt, this issue achieves that goal in full form.

FICTION

We have selected nine fiction writers, all of which show that our mountain writers are as interested in narrative experimentation as they are with producing traditional stories. Take for example Dale Neal's "Yonaguska," a story told entirely from the perspective of a captive bear, caged for the amusement of tourist. Telling a story from the point of view of a captured animal runs all kinds of narrative and stylistic risks (i.e. Disneyfication), but Neal's controlled tone and language propels us into the unknown regions of animalistic experience and yet makes us feel as if we have indeed known it. Certainly an admirable feat. Deborah Huso's "My Grandmother's Garden," on the other hand, takes a more traditional story-telling approach but in the capable hands of Huso, whose subtle use of imagery and compressed language, weaves dark meditations of death into fertile signs of life. Rummaging through the rubble of her grandmother's burned house, we follow the story's protagonist to her organic epiphany:

Doomed somehow like the stoic Scandinavians in the moss green album to have no name, no history but that of ancestor. Ancestor not known. Ancestor not understood. Ancestor not loved.

And then the flowers, rooted in the earth, replenished by death, born of bulbs my great-great-grandmother had buried in her own garden. Eternal as such innocent things will be.

In addition to stylistic diversity, this selection of fiction also peers into the multi-ethnic roots that run through the families of many Appalachians. Ed Davis's "Like a Brother" is told from the perspective of a West Virginian "who got out" to live in the north (Ohio) and hold a respectable job (engineer). This educated Appalachian escapee returns to face the father he hates and to meet his half-brother, Latham, who's part Cherokee. Davis's story is interesting in that his native Appalachian narrator holds many of the same pejorative stereotypes of southern mountain people as outsiders. But what's surprising about Davis's story is how he simultaneously confirms and denies the negative stereotypes of both Native American and Appalachian. This point is not a negative critique but instead a statement of the story's intriguing ambiguities.

Much of the fiction published in this issue has to do with home, and all the emotional and genealogical weight that comes with it. One of the most successful writers on this topic is Chrystal Wilkinson whose excerpt from her new novel Opulence dramatically depicts the birth of her protagonist in a "slave field" worked by her ancestors. In this poignant scene, she writes of how the land and all its history wells up into her body and through that experience her narrator is led to recall and proclaim her diverse ethnic make-up:

When she walked across this land she saw the faces of her kin. When chill bumps rose on her wrinkled forearms she rubbed the skin to warm the blood. The blood coursing through her veins rich with survival, all her bloods, the Indian, the Irish, the African all intersecting here underneath her skin, here on this piece of earth.

In Wilkinson's work, we see clearly how land is connected to ethnic identity.

POETRY

The poetry we've selected for this issue illustrates diversity as well but along the lines of how outsiders adjust to being insiders and how insiders adjust to being regional outsiders. Sebastian Matthews's poem "Here" effectively combines larger and more popular aspects of American culture with particular cultural characteristics of the Appalachian region. To begin, the poet proclaims: "What I know of this place / doesn't go far." And so as readers our curiosity is perked. What can a poet say about a place he doesn't really know? Well, as any good poet knows, you strike comparisons— you make knowledge out of metaphor.

We find that "here" for the speaker in this poem is "just a truck stop / & all music a song / on the jukebox." Thus, our poet is rootless, a traveler, a vagabond picking up culture as he goes along his unique way. His way, now, has led him here: to the southern mountains. And what does he find? That Appalachia is America and America is Appalachia:

& the music

I know is of this place

because I play it on my stereo.

old Dylan records

with Appalachian ballads

poking through their clothes

like ragged undershirts. Jazz

is my bluegrass. Coltrane

my moonshine. If I went

to church, I'd go to his

What Matthews's poem hits upon is this: that what is good in a particular place (mountain ballads) will make its way into the broader culture (mountain ballads in Dylan's songs). And that when one resides in a particular place yet doesn't indulge in the local cultural tradition (bluegrass, for instance), the spirit of bluegrass can be transmuted in the notes of different kind of music— Coltrane's jazz, for example (who happens, in fact, to have been a southerner from North Carolina's piedmont). With "Here," Matthews investigates the human desire to belong and the cultural methods we often use to solidify that feeling despite its inevitable evanescence.

Rachel Jennings, now a resident of Texas though native to East Tennessee, echoes what many educated mountain folk feel when faced with the startling realization that other educated people buy into and propagate negative hillbilly stereotypes. Here's the beginning of her poem "Chicano Studies":

Muy estimado

Don Profe Chicano,

I mean no disrespect,

but a kindly compa–era

once confided that she

overheard some jokes,

your door cracked open

but she unseen outside.

Some silly banter about

Kentucky trash, inbred

fools, possum folkways.

My whole past, that is.

In terms of rhythm, the poem sings even as it sows together the Spanish and English while at the same time calling out the high-minded professor (of another often demeaned group) to account for his prejudices against her people. The speaker of the poem then proclaims all those "possum folkways" as her own and boldly embraces that misunderstood history: "My whole past, that is." Jennings's speaker is conflicted, though, and that in part is what makes it so good. She wants desperately to sit at the table where her teacher teaches his followers, but she cannot indulge in that hypocrisy. And so, like Romeo, she is "banished"É "all history / straining in [her] eyes." The poem concludes with an imaginary but strained dŽtente between the Chicano studies professor and the student from Appalachia (and the cultural identity that these two ostensibly represent) as the poet casts their roles in comparison with the greats of Western literature— and all expressed with a smattering of folk language dashed on the first line:

Still, I reckon, in our storyline,

our names would be

linked forever

like Lear and Cordelia,

Oedipus and Antigone,

Sigmund and Anna.

Let no one stop us; no,

nor come between us.

Let's imagine it.

The evocation of strained human relationship—represented in the figures of Lear and Cordelia, et al— at the end counterbalances the poetic relationship forged from the languages of Spanish and English at the beginning. Of course, we all know that any organic unity, whether human or linguistic, is worked out of the sweat and tears of artifice. Perhaps that's the lesson Rachel Jennings's "Chicano Studies" teaches: We gotta work together imaginatively to get along— so, why not begin imagining it?

NONFICTION

Reading creative nonfiction entries is like digging through a bag of Halloween candy: you get all kinds of goodies. Our collection of essayists is eclectic, ranging from personal histories and reflections to terse, sage-like quips. Bill King's essay "Images of Relief" reflects upon his experience as a volunteer stuffing care packages for victims of the 2006 tsunami. At first glance, one might expect his story to describe in detail the benefits that the relief packages he helped stuff afforded for those need. But King's essay turns on a more critically reflective note: his sincere desire to help those in need is challenged by the mundane process of filling the bags with American consumer goods:

The chaplain begins to explain the process—we will pick up the bag, rotate from item to item, and sign a Ôpackaged with love' slip before beginning again—but I am drawn to the continuous stained glass, only interrupted by four doors—north, east, south, and west—that serves as the chapel's outer and inner wall.

This image of the outer and inner wall parallels King's own outer and inner struggle as he questions his own motives to aid the tsunami victims: "I can not say for sure why I am here," he laments. In the end, King does provide a moving answer to that solemn query, but only through delicately threading his own memories of need with the mechanical acts of stuffing "100 health kits" with consumer products whose brand names— like Safeguard and Dr. Du-more— eerily echo his own sentiments about how to bring light to a darkening world.

Casey Clabough's essay, "To Bristol: Along the Warrior's Path," is an excerpt from his forthcoming book from UT Press, The Warrior's Path: Reflections Along an Ancient Route (utpress.org). His book is more an album than a record of his journey along the Athowominee, the path his ancestors took from Maryland to their final settling place in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee in the late seventeen hundreds. Clabough's method of investigation is a fluid combination of historical research, wide-eyed observation, and philosophical reflection. In academia, we like to talk about interdisciplinary knowledge and writing, but seldom do we see solid evidence of it, as we do in this work. He adeptly parallels stories drawn from early (and too often unknown) settlers of the mountain region like Stephen Holston and Samuel Stalnaker with German philosophers, such as Johann Gottfried von Herder and Urnst Junger, who have more to do with our American commitment to individuality than Jim Morrison.

Readers will learn much about Central and Southern Appalachia from Clabough's nonfiction essay, but they will also get some joy out of the way his prose style utilizes a ballad-like tone so prevalent in the folk songs that were no doubt sung in the hill country during the time of its settlement. Traditional ballads in the southern mountains were sung with such sobriety, with a tone that was controlled and decidedly unemotional, and Clabough's prose aesthetic seems to draw on that trope. While walking through Smith County, Virginia, he comes upon a lone Appalachian Trail thru-hiker, who, after several drafts of Yuengling at the "aptly named Relax Inn," asks Clabough for some sage advice. Clabough, on his own quest to find who he "was and is," reports the following: "Only a couple of years older than him and fraught with many doubts, I have no opinions or suggestions I feel good about when he asks for some after crushing an empty beer can against his forehead." Clabough again resorts to this balladic temper, which becomes rather smartly humorous upon repetition, when he is nearly killed on a "shoulderless bridge" by two vehicles coming opposite directions. He relays the incident like this:

Trotting off the highway and onto the roadside grass where the bridge terminates, I turn to watch the large dingy red vehicle, which slows as it nears me, its driver, a bearded man in a yellow baseball cap, leaning toward the open passenger window, eyes hard. "Stay off the fucking road, dumb ass!" are the words hollered at me, before the truck engine revs and I am left alone, shaky but unharmed.

The clincher, though, is in the following paragraph when he writes:

Momentarily heeding the driver's advice, I move further from the highway and slip off my pack, removing my water bottle before unsteadily sitting down, adrenaline pumping, hands shaking slightly, forearm hair still at attention–my body's chemical responses to the imminence of death. Rather than replaying my obliviousness, the inattention to my surroundings that had nearly been my undoing, I do my best to breathe deep and focus on where I am, the grounding quality of my surroundings. In the process of clearing my mind, an enormous weeping willow on the other side of the road attracts my attention. Like many other people, I have always considered willows beautiful and mysterious, mostly on account of their long drooping branches which hide their trunks, the true centers of their beings, not unlike long-haired humans concealing their eyes and faces behind wavy locks.

Clabough's tone is even-tempered, strong, and stoic like a good mountain ballad. But his highly structured sentences, his precise diction, even his detailed and clear-headed self-reflections point toward the literary aesthetics of regional travel writings. These characteristics combined with the seemingly effortless transition from a near death experience to a meditation on willow trees and their connection to "long-haired humans" makes for a reading experience that teaches while it delights. All these aspects of Clabough's art culminate into not only a startling original style but also an authentic regional prose that's as homemade as our moonshine.

With Issue 3:02, Nantahala Review contributes, I think, significantly to the growing body of diverse voices in contemporary Appalachian literature. Ours is a literature that's as rich in experimentation as it is in historical remembrance. It's a literature invested in the exploration of self-identity in connection to family lines, ethnic backgrounds, native landscapes, regional history, and even American pop culture. As many of the writers in this issue illustrate, we need not separate our history from our future, for it is when our yesterday is linked to our tomorrow that we make an appropriately complex literature that accurately remarks upon the cultural identity of our Appalachia today.

11 August 2007

Bristol, Virginia