Every River on Earth

I read many compilations by and about Appalachians. But seldom have I read a collection so rooted in place as Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio published earlier this year by Ohio University Press. Edited skillfully by poet Neil Carpathios, the coordinator of the creative writing program at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, this intriguing collection is divided into four parts that speak to the paradox of Appalachian experience as defined in southern Ohio.

Carpathios acknowledges his "transplant" status in the introduction to the book's themes,"…this anthology started with a personal, maybe even somewhat selfish desire to better grasp my new home," he says.  Winnowing the 400 plus submissions down by the primary criterion of "quality," Carpathios sought to include a variety of styles, subjects and voices that he says took on a life of their own, falling organically into four sections:  "Family and Folks," "The Land," "The Grind," and "Home and Away."

The book takes its title from David Lee Garrison's poem which includes this lyric tribute to the land:

"Wind pokes the land in winter,

trying to waken it,

and in the melting snow 

I see rainbows and in them

every river on earth."

Donald Ray Pollock provides the longtime resident's perspective in his foreword to the anthology when he says, "no, I can't think of anywhere I'd rather live."  Even though he admits  his life in Knockemstiff has included factory work, hard living and eventually an alcohol and drug rehab, he asserts that while there is "ugliness and despair and heartbreak in these hills, there is also much goodness and mystery and beauty."  Later in the anthology, the reader is treated to the beauty that Pollock makes of heartbreak in his story of forgiveness, "The Jesus Lights."

In the opening section, "Family and Folks," I was instantly charmed with the poetic voice employed by Roy Bentley, with Jeanne Bryner's stunning imagery when describing her farmer neighbor at work, and by the sense of magic in poet, Cathryn Essinger's "The Way Things Are." Ed Davis takes a surprising offer from a desperate widower to create "a boiling Appalachian stew" from his novel-in-progress. And I am still giggling from Janet Ladrach's "The Farmer's Wife's Vacation."

The second section includes homage to the landscape of southern Ohio including two of my new favorite tributes to sycamores by Cathryn Essinger and Richard Hague. Essinger entitles her poem "Someday the sycamores…" and in her playful lines, supposes that someday these trees are simply going to walk away in reaction to an ever-hovering danger from development.  She closes her poem with these  lines:

"And if you watch carefully, if you sit down in the dark

when the moon, that old tattletale, is out of sight,

you will see them stand

on gnarled knuckles and inch away, see them gather up 

their children, hand in hand, and even if you call,

they will not come back."

Richard Hague is a Cincinnatian who has published 14 books, many that are set in eastern and southern Ohio. In his nonfiction contribution, he describes how easy it is to forget that we live in a natural world when the city swallows so much of it. Hague relates the sycamore hunts he and his late friend, Joe Enzweiler used to plan together. He also crafts many indelible descriptions of the trees:

"The sycamores edged the stream like a procession of white-robed deacons."

The third section of the book is entitled "The Grind."  It is here that we read about the difficulties of living in Appalachian Ohio.  Those ugly, desperate heartbreaks that Donald Ray Pollock warns us about in his foreword.  Among my favorite reads from this section--which was heavier on prose than the other sections--are Michael Henson's "Coming Home," "Destroying New Boston" by Brooks Rexroat and of course, "The Jesus Lights" by Donald Ray Pollock. In these raw stories, a recovering addict gets thrown right back into the path of cronies who will surely drive her to drugs, a bunch of bored teenagers accidentally wreck part of a town's painful heritage, and a man's grief illuminates a path for forgiveness.  While the circumstances in many of these tales are bleak, the characters are not. Many of them discover "the goodness and the mystery and the beauty" in their plights.

The final section, entitled "Home and Away" is largely devoted to those looking back at southern Ohio from somewhere else.  Whether it be Los Angeles, New Orleans or a fourteenth floor apartment, the characters and speakers look back homeward over time and distance.  My favorites from this section include Ronald D.Giles' "The Friday Night Dance," and Hayley Hughes' "The Fair."  Both are personal stories, but from very different time periods. Giles writes of an eighth grade dance experience in the 1950s while Hughes shares her more recent adventures at the Ohio State Fair with her father-- from her earliest recollections to her twenty-sixth year.  While Giles' maintains a strict narrative timeline, Hughes bounces around her quirky personal essay revealing the tricky relationship she maintains with home and family.  I also enjoyed the found poem in this section entitled "Portrait of Southern Ohio in Five-Syllable Road Signs" by Adam Sol.

While Every River on Earth laments the ugliness, despair and heartbreak of Appalachian Ohio. its quality of writing is testament to the goodness, mystery and beauty rising from a deep sense of place. Several of the authors have a reading scheduled at Joseph-Beth Cincinnati on April 4th at 2 pm.  You just might want to be there if you enjoy masterful writing or a great yarn.

This review originally aired on WVXU.org's AROUND CINCINNATI on March 27, 2015.  You can listen to the review at this link:  Listen to this review.

Appalachian Toys and Games from A to Z

New in March from University Press of Kentucky comes Appalachian Toys and Games from A to Z , the second collaboration between children's literature educator Linda Hager Pack and master water colorist, Pat Banks.  While their first children's book, A is for Appalachia!  The Alphabet Book of Appalachian Heritage explored the culture of the mountains, this useful and appealing volume focuses on toys and games prevalent in the region during the mid to late 19th Century. While both books would be welcome resources for any library or museum program on Appalachian culture, Appalachian Toys and Games offers a hands-on component to any classroom exploration through detailed descriptions of how to actually play the various games and how to create simple toys.

Moving alphabetically, the book begins with the letter "A" for apple doll. Pack describes the process of preparing a Rome Beauty apple to become the craggy face of an apple doll, complete with directions on how to carve the face and preserve the apple. Banks illustrates a finished doll, it's wizened face framed in curls and juxtaposed against a backdrop of the juicy red Rome beauties from which it was sculpted..

The letter "C," stands for corn shuck doll. For this toy, Pack forgoes the how-to approach for a more historical perspective, highlighting instead the Native American origin of these dolls. She includes the Iroquois legend of the corn husk doll as an example of story related to the toy. Banks' illustration pictures a tiny doll clasped in someone's hands against a muted background of green and gold, suggesting the outdoor playground favored by Appalachian children during this time period.

There are many descriptions of group games included in the volume such as "D" is for drop the handkerchief, "F" is for fox and hound,  "G" is for game of graces, and "H" is for hoop and stick.  Each game includes rules for how to play along with a Banks watercolor illustrating the  activity in a beautiful, impressionistic outdoor setting.

While those of us born in the 20th Century might be familiar with some of the games and toys described like hopscotch, marbles, jump rope, pick up sticks, Red Rover, and Hide and Seek, some of the games and toys are not as well known to city dwellers or even to suburbanites. For example, "W" is for whammy diddle describes a hand-carved toy that will respond to the commands "gee" and "haw." Farm folk will recognize these commands for cattle, horses, and mules to turn right and left, respectively.

Three of my favorite sections of the book involve the letters, "E," "I," and "O." For most children, eerie stories hold a fascination. Recognizing the rich oral tradition of Appalachian storytelling, Pack includes a complete eerie tale in this collection entitled, "Never Mind Them Watermelons." Banks accompanies the eerie story with a colorful illustration depicting a story teller holding her young audience rapt while in the background, a full moon holds court over a woods filled with haints, boogers, and eyes that glow red in the hollow of a nearby tree.

Near and dear to my inner child's heart are the sections entitled "I" is for imagination and "O" is for outside. Who hasn't floated hickory nut shells down the creek as sailboats? Or created little villages in the tree roots where fairy princesses could sleep on beds of moss? Or cut little pieces from their mama's clothesline to make little people with long flowing hair?  Exactly. In these sections, Pack extols the childhood ability to turn moss, rocks, sticks, creeks, and flowers into playhouses, tables, forts, castles, seas, jewelry or any fantastic world of whimsy that might be conjured by a child's imagination in the natural world. 

Next to Banks' serene rendering of a barefoot young girl crossing a creek over smooth stones, Pack summarizes "O" is for outside with a list poem filled with images of outdoor play.  Here is a brief excerpt from page 23:

"Outside is where toes were dipped,

Rocks were skipped,

And laughing children dropped from ropes

at favorite water holes."

"Childhood has always beckoned me," says Linda Hager Pack in her author's note to Appalachian Toys and Games from A to Z.  "I had no sooner stepped beyond its borders than it flirted with me to come back. 'Come play," it whispered."

In a skillful blend of how-to, history, story and verse, Pack beckons the reader to experience 19th Century playtime in Appalachia from A to Z.  It's a journey masterfully punctuated  by the illustrations of Pat Banks, who captures the visual essence of each toy and game, inviting us to play along.  Sharing this book with your favorite child, grandchild, niece, nephew, classroom teacher or librarian might just take you all on an imaginative journey outside where your inner child so longs to play.

(This review aired on WVXU's Around Cincinnati on May 12, 2013. Listen to the review at this link:  Listen!

Appalachian Elegy

"Poetry is a useful place for lamentation," says author, activist, teacher, and artist, bell hooks in the introduction to her latest work, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place. Published in late September of 2012 by University Press of Kentucky, this volume of meditative poetry is a departure for hooks who has written more than 30 books in her career, mostly provocative and political writings on gender, social justice, sustainability, and literary criticism. Why then these sixty-six poems of mourning and celebration for the land of her birth?

Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1952, hooks took her lower case pen name from her grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, a strong-willed African American woman who urged Gloria to take a stand against the repressive forces of the dominant society. After the adversities she faced transitioning to a predominately white high school during the turbulent 1960s, bell hooks pursued her degrees in English, education and literature at Stanford, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, writing her doctoral dissertation on author, Toni Morrison.

In 2004, hooks accepted a position in the department of Appalachian Studies at Berea College, bringing her back to her Kentucky roots. Since her return, the concept of community and its ability to overcome race, class, and gender inequalities has become more prevalent in her writings. As hooks says in the introduction to her poems, "living in the Kentucky hills was where I first learned the importance of being wild."  She goes on to say that this wildness led her to believe in the power of the individual to be self-determining. hooks sums up the influence of her Kentucky childhood on her radical critical consciousness in the following passage,  "Folks from the backwoods were certain about two things:  that every human soul needed to be free and that the responsibility for being free required one to be a person of integrity, a person who lived in such a way that there would always be congruency between what one thinks, says and does."

The poems of this collection are largely about reconnecting with place, sometimes causing the poet to alternately mourn and celebrate the beauty of the land, animals and people who have formed her. The lines are short, lyrical and unpunctuated, giving the reader a frozen snapshot of a natural world partially destroyed that will not be conquered. There are no titles, but numbers for each piece, and each poem seems to be organized around a single evocative image.  The second poem addresses the loss of a beautiful landscape in the following excerpt:

such then is beauty

surrendered

against all hope

you are here again

turning slowly

nature as chameleon

all life change

and changing again

awakening hearts

steady moving from

unnamed loss

into fierce deep grief…

And then poem 7 discusses hooks' ancestral ties to the land and her inner wildness  in these lines:

again and again

she calls me

this wilderness within

urging me onward

be here

make a path

where the sound

of ancestors speak

a language heard beyond the grave…

Poem 21 speaks of turtles and a land without environmental devastation:

turtle islands everywhere

heads poking out

bodies embraced in the world

before the coming of the white man…

hooks conjures a time before horse racing and farms in these final lines from poem 26

horses grazing quietly

four-legged Buddhas

standing in grace

forgiving

There are poems about drought, mudslides, fires, fallen trees, soaring birds, mammoth caves, native peoples, storms, a strutting turkey, and ravaged mountain landscapes--all infused with deep sadness and hope.

bell hooks had never really identified as an Appalachian, but acknowledges in this beautiful collection her claim of " a solidarity, a sense of belonging that makes me one with the Appalachian past of my ancestors: black, Native American, white, all 'people of one blood' who made homeplace in isolated landscapes where they could invent themselves, where they could savor a taste of freedom."

In poem 55 hooks seems to embrace that sense of belonging:

take the

hand-me-downs

make do

no culture of poverty

claiming lives here

we a people of plenty

back then

work hard

know no hunger

grow food

sew clothing

build shelter

moonshine still

wine from grape

we a marooned

mountain people

backwoods souls

we know how to live on little

to make a simple life

away from manmade

laws and boundaries

spirit guides teach us

offer always 

the promise

of an eternal now

Contemplating the woodland palette of bell hooks' Appalachian Elegy,  with its short meditative lines, plain language, and stark imagery,  allows the reader to consider the grief and healing of these lamentations mindfully, in the "eternal now" of the heart.

This review aired on WVXU's Around Cincinnati program in December 2012.

Listen to the review here.

Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky

New this June from University Press of Kentucky's oral history series comes a compelling work from Nora Rose Moosnick entitled Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky: Stories of Accommodation and Audacity. Moosnick reveals in the preface that she came to this project as a way to honor two men she loved, her father, Monroe Moosnick and her adopted grandfather, Mousa Ackall, whose Palestinian family became melded with her own Jewish family through a mutual knowledge of fabrics.  The author speculates that the Moosnicks and the Ackalls might have been drawn together out of an appreciation of their likenesses and an understanding of the odd position they held as Jews and Arabs in Kentucky.

As Nora Rose Moosnick set out to honor these two important men in her life through chronicling the stories of other Arab and Jewish merchant families in Kentucky, she found that women's stories in particular offered an appreciation of Arabs' and Jews' lives in their new surroundings through the overlap between them.  As a sociologist, Moosnick acknowledges that Kentucky harbors a larger story about immigrants settling in places not usually associated with them.  And strangely enough, the author suggests that it may be in places like Kentucky where Arabs and Jews are most apt to discover their likenesses.

Grounded in oral history while informed in research practices, the book is not intended to be an academic work.  Moosnick tells the stories of ten Arab and Jewish women while aiming to confound simplistic notions that states--like Kentucky-- in the Appalachian region lack diversity. The author asserts that the stories of these women tend to speak to larger themes. They tell similar tales about public service to communities, mother-daughter relationships, the agility required to work, mother and be an active community member, and what it meant to be an Arab or Jewish mother nearly a century ago.

In the chapter entitled "Publicly Exceptional," Moosnick looks at the lives of Jewish fashion entrepreneurs Sarah and Frances Myers  who sold high-end women's clothing in Hopkinsville in their family shop, Arnold's. Although socially rebellious--the sisters were known for holding poolside cocktail parties on Sundays during the 1960s--their shop was a gathering place for many in Hopkinsville who described it as a "salon." Socially prominent women frequented both their parties and the shop.

This chapter also inspects the life of former Lexington mayor, Teresa Isaacs, whose political career is firmly rooted in her family, the family business, and her Arab American identity. Her family legend includes enterprising Lebanese ancestors who settled in coal country to work as shopkeepers and peddlers until Isaac's grandparents established a theatre business. Isaac's political bent was probably influenced by her father's term as mayor of Cumberland in the 1960s, but community service loomed large in her family's history in Appalachia.  As a Christian Arab, she has sometimes been accused by political opponents of being a terrorist.  Since Isaacs completely embraces her Arab heritage and her Christian roots, she finds easy allies in both the Muslim community(with whom she shares "blood ties") and the Jewish community(with whom she shares the Old Testament.) In fact, when her political enemies attacked, it was members of the Jewish community who came to her aid, distributing flyers that disputed any connection with extremists.

Moosnick's book also examines Arab and Jewish mothers in the 21st Century and how they balance their working lives with child rearing. She dedicates much discussion to how some Jewish and Arab families established businesses to elevate their children to the professional class, only to dissolve those businesses when their children achieved the desired success. She concludes the book by comparing two family stories of archetypal women from the distant past named "Rose" one of whom is her own Jewish grandmother and another who is Rose Rowady, who left Lebanon in 1909.  Both stories were related to Moosnick by the women's elderly sons.

In the preface of Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky,  Nora Rose Moosnick has this comment about her work:  "in some sense, I am going through an attic. I  hope you find gifts, as I have in what I have uncovered."  The real, examined lives of Arab and Jewish women in Kentucky--who share more in common than we may have imagined--are gifts to the reader for understanding the complexities of our stories.

(This review aired on Around Cincinnati on October 14, 2012.  Here is an audio link for listening to the review:

Listen!)

Dear Appalachia

In Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction Since 1878,  Assistant Professor of Appalachian Studies, Emily Satterwhite, explores the responses of readers to best-selling fiction set in the region.  Published in November 2011 by University Press of Kentucky, Dear Appalachia uses an innovative research method--that of sifting through fan mail and reviews to better understand the relationship between reader and text. Satterwhite, also a teacher of American studies and popular culture at Virginia Tech, discovers how readers have imagined the region and what purposes these imagined geographies have served for them.

Satterwhite received the Weatherford Award March 23rd at the Appalachian Studies Conference hosted by Indiana University of Pennsylvania.  This award is given for the best nonfiction book in Appalachian studies published each year. Her colleague at Virginia Tech and department chair, Anita Puckett, congratulated her at the gathering of academics by explaining, "there is no higher award for scholarship in Appalachian Studies."

This scholarly work is organized into five chapters, each dealing with best sellers during a particular historic framework, a conclusion that sums up the author's assertions, and an impressive appendix which includes a methodological essay, notes, bibliography and index.

Chapter One, entitled "Charm and Virility," offers a fascinating discussion of fan reaction to a literary surprise in the late 1800s.  When popular local color author, Charles Egbert Craddock who readers and editors alike assumed was a "strapping six-foot Tennessean," turned out to be Mary N. Murfrees, "a genteel, delicate-looking lady." the editor of The Atlantic Monthly was astonished. Satterwhite examines reviews of Murfree's work and charts fan mail from her readers to show differences in how the author was perceived by her audience. Metropolitan readers tended to construct the author of In the Tennessee Mountains as a virile, self-taught adventurer who provided a masculizing frontier for "his" readers. Murfree's writing style--even after it was well-known that she was a woman--was praised by metropolitan reviewers for its "force" and "masculinity" of style.  City dwellers during the 1800s were worried that men were too coddled by cities and looked to local color writing for something not "namby pamby," as one reviewer classified Murfree.

Fan mail from small town readers often testified to the authenticity of Murfree's jargon and the distance these small town elites felt from the quaint character of her collection.. Many of these letters were written by aspiring local color writers who saw the author as a member of their own elite circle. Satterwhite concludes that both groups of readers seemed to be drawn to the local color genre because it provided a kind of vicarious tourism to the mountains.

Chapter Two looks at the popularity of John Fox, Jr.'s The Trail of the Lonesome Pine circa 1908. Satterwhite examines two prevalent views of this book through the filters of three categories of readers: nationally identified readers, locally identified readers, and transitional readers.  A prevailing view of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine is that it promotes imperialism by painting moonshiners as inferior but redeemable. Another view holds that the author possesses "an intimate knowledge of mountain people." While Satterwhite acknowledges that she tends to agree with Fox's detractors, she investigates why the book struck a chord with so many early 20th Century readers.

She finds that nationally identified readers turned to Fox's work as an anti-modernist tonic. The books seems to celebrate mountain quaintness for these readers while nationalizing industrial intervention.  Locally identified readers saw themselves fictionalized as stereotypical buffoons and were offended. Much of Chapter Two develops an interesting theory--based on the novel's fan mail--of why this book gained tremendous popularity among migratory readers who felt ambivalence about "home" vs. "the industrial world." Fox's authenticity and the book's wide appeal seem to come from middle class readers who had sought to better themselves by leaving home, and then felt homesickness, a conflict Fox understood well from his own displacement from small town Kentucky while searching for upward mobility.

Chapter 3 entitled "Country to City" discusses the work of Harriet Simpson Arnow, in particular her two novels, Hunter's Horn and The Dollmaker.  Even though both works are characterized by Satterwhite as unlikely best sellers since they are, in her words, "long and bleak," an analysis of fan mail reveals that readers' needs were met by Arnow's authenticity. Arnow was credited by scholars as capturing an accurate vision of mountain life while attracting readers who identified with her characters, particularly the large group of Appalachian migrants who moved to the cities for work in the 1940s and 50s. Her fiction also served conventional readerly desires for authentic places, belonging and a sense of power.

Chapter 4 entitled "City to Country" examines the turbulent period of 1967-1970 and the wildly popular best sellers, Christy and Deliverance.  These two pop culture touchstones, as different as two novels can be, still continue to shape national perceptions of the Appalachian region. Fan mail indicates that both books served white, high middlebrow readers in the same way that local color fiction worked for the Gilded Age and Neo-Gilded Age audiences. These readers wanted the production of region as authentic, the construction of identity and belonging by way of geographical affiliations, and the circulation of power.

Fan mail for both books confirms that readers saw Appalachia as a distinctive world apart.  The novels provide mountaineers who relate a supposed colorful collective past for white culture through preservation of folklore and music. While Christy's 1912 pastoral setting provides a quiet place of God-fearing self-reliance, Deliverance  readers sought titillation and reassurance that Appalachia permits  the primitive to endure in the modern world.

Chapter 5 looks at the resurgence of local color writing beginning with the 1985 publication of the best-selling Lake Wobegon Days by public radio icon, Garrison Keillor. Satterwhite points to a second Gilded Age from 1985-2008, called by some scholars the Neo-Gilded Age, which shares with the first Gilded Age certain historic qualities. Among these are large gaps between rich and poor, high levels of unregulated corporate power, conspicuous degrees of consumption, influxes of immigration, and expanded U.S. activities abroad. In both the Gilded and Neo-Gilded Ages, high middlebrow readers expressed concern for loss of local cultures.

In this chapter, Satterwhite uses online reader reviews to examine how four best-selling novels set in Appalachia touch a nerve with a wide swath of readers. In particular, she looks at how At Home in Mitford, Big Stone Gap, Clay's Quilt, and Cold Mountain meet reader needs for authentic place, community, belonging and identity.

Emily Satterwhite warns in her concluding chapter of some unintended consequences of the imaginary versions of Appalachia created by readers, such as the potential to reinforce white nationalism or endorse problematic images of so-called primitives around the world.  Moving beyond traditional examinations of regional fiction, Dear Appalachia is an innovative study that reveals how narratives function in the lives of readers.

***This review aired on "Around Cincinnati" on April 29, 2012, WVXU 91.7.  You can listen to the review here:

Audio link for this review.

Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia

While watching a U.S. military official apologize to Afghans on the news over the unfortunate burning of copies of the Koran, I was taken aback by the characterization of the Afghan protestors as "primitive." The official seemed to be attributing the protestors' reaction to the gaffe as illogical or intrinsic-- the kind of behavior one might expect from a people who are not totally civilized.

Yet, on our own soil, areas of the United States have been characterized over our history as innately more dangerous and primitive because of their supposed isolation or cultural proclivity toward violence. In Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia, Bruce E. Stewart, assistant professor of history at Appalachian State, collects essays from experts in the fields of political science, history, and literature to question the supposedly innate brutality of the Appalachian people. Published in January by University Press of Kentucky, this book examines cases of violence in the mountains from the late 18th Century through the early 20th Century, making the case that violence in the hills is not isolated or inbred, but reflective of deeper problems within the United States itself.

In his introduction to the essays, Stewart shares prevalent explanations offered by early scholars and writers about the causes of violent behavior in Appalachia. Among those discussed are rugged frontier individualism caused by living in the wilderness, Scotch-Irish descent, and geographic isolation.

Arnold J. Toynbee, in his 1946 work, A Study of History, characterized the (quote) "barbarizing effect of the American frontier" (end quote) on Appalachian residents. Toynbee's explanation follows the late nineteenth century popularization by novelists, missionaries, and scholars of a violent and lawless Appalachia. Toynbee argued that mountain violence was a product of living on the frontier. Forced to live in "the wilderness" where they had to defend themselves against Native Americans, Appalachian whites were thought to have lapsed into savagery, a condition that future generations presumably failed to rise above, according to this theory.

Many early twentieth century writers, however, argued that the Appalachian mountains were peopled largely with descendants of Scotch-Irish settlers who carried with them a "border culture" that included clannish behavior, and a cultural propensity to break the law and fight to defend property. Horace Kephart wrote in 1921, "They--the Scotch-irish--are a fighting race."

Stewart cites the most popular explanation for mountain violence accepted among early scholars as geographic isolation . By the turn of the twentieth century, most writers, educators and missionaries asserted that the mountains served as physical barriers keeping civilization out. C.T. Revere wrote in 1907 that mountain people "had never come in contact with the outside world, and are amazingly ignorant of anything which happens outside their immediate neighborhood." Revere and other writers of the time supposed that this isolation resulted in a peculiar mountain culture where highlanders became "extreme individualists."

Stewart goes on to present more recent challenges to these early theories about mountain violence, including the 1978 work of Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind. In his book, Shapiro wrote that the notion of Appalachia as out of step with the rest of America was a post-Civil War construct to make Appalachia "the other," a fictional place filled with natural beauty and populated with backward people who did not embrace progress. This notion gave crusading Victorian Americans the incentive to intervene in the lives of the deprived other, uplifting them toward the civilized world of industrialization.

Shapiro's work inspired other scholars to take a closer look at the cultural explanations for violence in Appalachia. Studies found the region to be more culturally diverse than described earlier with inhabitants who had ancestors from not just Scotch-Irish descent, but also from Welsh, English, German, Italian, Native American, and African lineages, thus debunking the theory of a homogeneous Scotch-Irish "border culture" that espoused violence.

The thirteen essays in this collection serve to cast each instance of Appalachian violence under the prism of history, examining each for complex causes including racial tension, economic inequality, governmental instability, class struggles, politically-motivated infighting, and land disputes. In other words, the kinds of forces that have caused violence throughout our nation at large were also at work in the mountains.

There is an interesting discussion of feuding in T.R.C. Hutton's essay, "Assassins and Feudists: Politics and Death in the Bluegrass and Mountains of Kentucky" where politicians found it expedient to blame political violence on the reputation of "bloody Breathitt" in order to hide corruption. A very compelling account of the state of Franklin which was formed briefly in the 1780s from western North Carolina also makes for interesting analysis. On the surface, the secession of Franklin from North Carolina seemed to be over a federal law requiring states with substantial western lands to cede them to the federal government. But in a closer examination of the historic forces, Kevin T. Barksdale reveals clashes for land with the Overhill Cherokee and a "divide and conquer" policy by one of North Carolina's governors to be instrumental in the bloodshed that eventually ensued. Bruce Stewart's own contribution, to the collection involves the negative image of moonshiners painted by writers of the local color genre in the 1870s.

In fact, many of the contributors to Blood in the Hills credit national press and literary genres with perpetuating the stereotypes of mountain violence. By providing a more complete picture of one region where violence has been exaggerated and misunderstood, Stewart gives the reader a better understanding of violence throughout the entire United States.

This review originally aired on Around Cincinnati on March 11, 2012, WVXU 91.7. You may listen to the archived review at the audio link to the right of this blog.

A is for Appalachia and What Comes Down to Us

Two titles from University Press of Kentucky light the way toward better understanding of a culture and a craft. A is for Appalachia!,written by Linda Hager Pack and illustrated by Pat Banks, lifts a lamp to the history, geography, and culture of the collaborators’ beloved heritage. In What Comes Down to Us: 25 Contemporary Kentucky Poets, Jeff Worley spotlights the diversity and vitality of modern verse in the Commonwealth. Both books enlighten in their method of presentation and rich content.

I chose to pick up the children’s book first, of course. Drawn in by the marvelous cover art by master water colorist and Kentucky Arts Council Roster Artist, Pat Banks, I couldn’t wait to see why novelist Silas House declared this book “the perfect read.” Could it be because in his recent blog, A Country Boy Can Surmise, he had declared “Appalachia” to be the perfect word in that the letters seem to depict the rising and falling mountainscape with a little moon dotting the “i”?

Or could it be the perfect read because it is organized like an old-time children’s reader for teaching the alphabet by presenting a word and a picture for each new letter to aid the pupil’s comprehension?

My reading lesson on Appalachia began with the letter “A” which is for “Appalachia,” a region and culture defined by Pack in her text along side a breathtaking mountain vista created by Banks. The effect is stunning: here’s what the place encompasses, now witness it’s beauty and essence.

My lesson continued with some predictable forays into the letters “B” and “C” for “baskets” and “coal.” Since I was already well-schooled in some aspects of Appalachia, I expected these lessons. But I was completely surprised and delighted by the honest dichotomy between churchgoing ways and joy of living presented in the letter “D.” Pack handles that divide in her wry commentary on the dulcimer and fiddle as she advises the “youngin’s” not to view “the devil’s box” boldly explained and illustrated on the page before them.

Another interesting lesson is “J” is for “Jack Tale” which includes a text version of the tale superimposed on a beanstalk illustration that rivals the beauty of any fairy tale book I knew as a child. Well-presented also are “N” is for “Native Appalachians” supported by the clever inclusion of the Cherokee alphabet and “Y” is for “Yarb doctor” emphasizing the healing role herbs and plants play in the remote mountain regions.

Pack teaches children’s literature at Eastern Kentucky University, so it is easy to see how this book could be used by teachers to springboard a unit on Appalachia. But more importantly, Silas House was right. This is the perfect read to share with those you love.

Presenting poets chronologically is common in anthologies; however, Jeff Worley, a poet and professor himself, sheds light on the poetic process by following each set of poems in What Comes Down to Us with a brief biography and the poet’s commentary on the sometimes mystical matter of craft. The effect on me as a reader was surprising. Normally I would want to skim through a book like this reading the people I know about, saving the new folks for later. Instead, I found the format of first, writer’s face and birth date,then, selected poems, then, biography,and finally,reflections on craft and influences tantalizing enough not to “jump the order.” It was almost as if the title and format enforced a cosmic flow leading “down to us,” as the title suggests. By the end, I felt I had witnessed a stellar poetry reading with mini-workshop, all under my humble living room lamp.

The subjects for this over 100-poem collection include joy, death, family relations, and Kentucky history. It would be hard to pick favorites amid the exquisite verse, but I will share a few hard-to-shake glimpses.

I was smacked in the face by the imagery in Wendell Berry’s “The Man Born to Farming.”

Instructed in the mystery of all craft by Richard Taylor’s “Notes for a Manual on Form.”

Appreciated the importance of who’s telling the tale in Frank X Walker’s “Revisionist History.”

Experienced the power of a “made thing” -- like a poem that can distill emotions from disparate experiences-- with Leatha Kendrick in “Refusing a Spinal.”

Wondered with Frederick Smock about Cassius Clay’s gold medal at the bottom of the Ohio River.

Read the skies and predicted a moon landing with Nikky Finney’s “Black Orion.”

Laughed uneasily and inevitably at an outdoor wedding gone wrong with Kathleen Driskell.

This collection is a must-read for anyone interested in the scope and craft of contemporary poetry. What Comes Down to Us affirms Kentucky’s place in the literary landscape while shining a light on the poetic process itself.

This review first aired on WVXU's Around Cincinnati with award-winning host, Lee Hay. An audio link is included at the bottom of this blog.