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 Carl 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.

The majority of the writers included in this anthology are contemporary. We contacted the writers or the heirs of those writers who are deceased. Our correspondence with many of these writers began in the late 1990s; we introduced ourselves, explained the project, and invited them to complete a biographical form if they were interested in being included. As a result, much of the information in this book—birthdates, education, thoughts on the writing process, and ties to the region—has been provided by the authors.

The initial correspondence was followed by several years of research; there was always one more interview to do, one more article to track down, one more book to read. We never dreamed the project would span almost a decade. Fortunately, we had collaborated previously on a book, The Smithsonian Guide to Historic America: The Carolinas and the Appalachian States, so we knew we could work together.

What we did not know was that one of our family members would be seriously injured in a horseback riding accident; that there would be a series of surgeries and hospital stays spread between our families; that we would go through three computers apiece and our word processing program would become obsolete. In the midst of all this, one of us changed jobs and moved to a different state, which complicated the collaborative process considerably.

We are deeply indebted to the authors for their patience, as well as their many supportive letters and e-mails. They embraced this project and its two harried editors with tremendous generosity of spirit. We have been privileged to cross paths with these writers, and we continue to marvel at their creativity and their impressive ability to capture and interpret the endless variety of human experience.

In Joanna Russ's book, How to Suppress Women's Writing, she writes:

Of those [women] who are not ignored completely, dismissed as writing about the ‘wrong’ things, condemned for (whatever passes for) impropriety (that year),…condemned for writing in the wrong genre, or out of a genre…It is still possible to say, quite sincerely: She wrote it, but she doesn't fit in. Or, more generously: She's wonderful, but where on earth did she come from?

Sometimes she comes from Appalachia.

NOTES

1. Quoted by Maggie Anderson in “The Mountains Dark and Close Around Me,” Bloodroot, ed. Joyce Dyer (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 39.

2. “White Columns and Marble Generals,” www.leesmith.com/columns.html 13 Dec. 2002.

3. Contemporary Authors, Vol. 117, 487.

4. Quoted by Jim Wayne Miller in “A Note to the Student,” I Have A Place, ed. Jim Wayne Miller (Pippa Passes, KY: Alice Lloyd College, 1981), x.

5. “The Song about the Story—The Story behind the Song,” Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers, ed. Joyce Dyer (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 226.

6. Quoted by George Ella Lyon in “Voiceplace,” Bloodroot, ed. Joyce Dyer (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 169.

7. “Voiceplace,” Bloodroot, 169.

8. Koger, Lisa. Letter to editors.