When you peel back the bark of a tree, the hardest wood, tucked deep inside, is called the heartwood. This wood is the heart of the tree itself, both its soul and its center. This story called Heartwood has some of the most plain-talking, stubborn, and outspoken people I’ve ever met. My hope is that they will remind you of someone you know or something you have witnessed in your own life. These people and their stories are the heartwood of their communities. They put a human face to the land they live on and the air they breathe.
This story takes place in Kentucky, the state that I have called home for the past six years. The ideas and sounds come from what I have seen and heard while I have lived here. The hope as well as the hurt found in these pages is important to the fabric of this book. My desire as storyteller is simple: that what these characters talk about and what they do to each other might move you to take on something controversial in your own life or choose not to remain silent about something that needs your goodness and input. Fiction should reflect life in all its majesty and madness.
I have never felt more honored to write a piece of work than Heartwood. I have never been more affected and changed as a human being than I was when I sat with my circle of critics and editors: Bessie Chestnut, Margaret Lane, Rosa Stonestreet, Alice Waite, and Alona Johnson, members of Lexington’s Operation Read, brilliant human beings new to the written word, and Sandra Parrish and Charlotte Pyles of Lexington/Fayette County Mayor’s Training Center Adult Education program. These are editors who cared enough to laugh, get angry, and share with me every human emotion about what I have to say. This is what writing and reading must, and should, be all about. I hope that what you find on these pages makes you talk and feel and act with your heart in mind.
Thank you Phyllis MacAdam, Anne Keenan, and Bertie J. Harris for your invaluable guidance. Thank you Humanities Council for continuing to care that the truth and magic of books be available to us all.