University of Illinois Press Chapter Title: Writing Appalachia
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University of Illinois Press Chapter Title: Writing Appalachia: Intersections, Missed Connections, and Future Work Chapter Author(s): CHRIS GREEN and ERICA ABRAMS LOCKLEAR Book Title: Studying Appalachian Studies Book Subtitle: Making the Path by Walking Book Editor(s): CHAD BERRY, PHILLIP J. OBERMILLER, SHAUNNA L. SCOTT Published by: University of Illinois Press. (2015) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt1hd18n2.7 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Studying Appalachian Studies This content downloaded from 76.77.170.243 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 15:52:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 3 Writing Appalachia Intersections, Missed Connections, and Future Work CHRIS GREEN AND ERICA ABRAMS LOCKLEAR As with other ethnic and identity studies movements in the last forty years, Appalachian studies has increased in scope and popularity. In particular, Appalachian literature (novels, poems, stories, plays, memoirs, etc.) has generated a huge amount of attention. In pure volume, literature is the most cited, presented, and studied subject in all of Appalachian studies. Additionally, Appalachian writers such as Lee Smith, Robert Morgan, Ron Rash, and Sharyn McCrumb have enjoyed a wide readership throughout the mountains and the nation. Likewise, the last ten years have seen an out- pouring of encyclopedic work conducted on the state and regional levels in which scholars of Appalachian literature have begun to outline its history; these pieces, however, are necessarily overviews that generally catalog names of authors and their works. One of the difficulties in compiling a history of Appalachian literature has, paradoxically, been the tendency for those who study it to focus on texts and authors. In order to instead focus on how Appalachian literature and Appalachian studies intersect, this chapter relates how a set of evolving movements and institutions affiliated with Appalachian studies has affected the shape and direction of Appalachian literature and vice versa.1 Rather than writing a unitary history, we map the varied paths (and dead ends) that people with very different visions of Appalachia made based on their situations. Some- times such decisions were very much part of an ideological maneuvering to affect the direction of practice and understanding; other times, decisions were responses to opportunities for people to realize their visions. In other words, the history of the relationship of Appalachian studies to Appalachian This content downloaded from 76.77.170.243 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 15:52:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms chapter 3. writing appalachia · 63 literature is a set of movements and directions—at times complementary, at times not; at times interlocked, at times separate—with diverse goals and outcomes. Yet when these are considered together, important patterns and effects emerge. In 1990 Jim Wayne Miller spent five pages in “A People Waking Up” dis- cussing how Appalachian authors are pressured by national presses and au- diences to portray the region to suit their need to “visit” the mountains in order to witness the lives of people whom “they believe to be more stable and reliable; or, alternatively, to go slumming through the lives of people who remind them of what they are not” (1990, 61). At times Appalachian authors, readers, teachers, and presses engage in a type of defensive hagiography of said writing. Such uncritical praise has a role, but ultimately it blunts the edge of cultural study. Nevertheless, literature about one’s own cultural group is tremendously validating when it recognizes and describes experiences that prior representations have excluded or misrepresented and when it affirms one’s culture and sense of self on an immediate level, as well as inclusion in the larger tradition of American and Western literature and culture. When readers encounter words and images that reflect their own experiences, they are provided the means to dialogue with and about that experience and permission to undertake such projects themselves. In addition to scholars, Appalachian literature includes authors, presses, magazines, readings, audi- ences, and classrooms (Miller 1990, 72). As we relate this history, we touch on the consequences of directions taken and untaken and of places in need of investigation. In our conclusion we summarize Appalachian literary study’s major accomplishments and absences, hypothesizing about future paths for inquiry. The first major set of relations that came to shape Appalachian studies and Appalachian literature were non-Appalachian mountain workers who came into the mountains in the late 1800s. Publications associated with Berea College, Hindman Settlement School, and the Council of Southern Mountain Workers (CSM), as well as the journal Mountain Life and Work, became integral in estab- lishing the first connections between Appalachian literature and Appalachian studies. Many of the publications from these venues were nonfiction, but there were notable exceptions, including but not limited to William Eleazar Barton’s Life in the Hills of Kentucky (1890); Lucy Furman’s Mothering the Perilous (1913) and The Quare Women (1923); poems by Ann Cobb, Amy May Rogers, Don L. West, Jesse Stuart, and James Still in Mountain Life and Work in the 1920s and 1930s; and reviews of Olive Tilford Dargan’s (pseudonym Fielding Burke) radical novels in the same publication. This content downloaded from 76.77.170.243 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 15:52:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 64 . green and abrams locklear A second influence involves the interconnected development of the study of ballads, folklore, and literature. While the role of ballads and ballad col- lecting has been much studied as it relates to the discursive history of Appa- lachia, scholars have not examined how the academic study of such ballads set forth core patterns that affected the shape of Appalachian studies (Krim 2006; McCarthy 1999; Shapiro 1978; Whisnant 1983; Worthington [2009]). Many English professors helped found folklore societies and also played an important role in the emergence of Appalachian studies, including Frank C. Brown, Reed Smith, John Harrington Cox, and C. Alphonso Smith (Cuth- bert 2006; Wilgus 1959). Familiarity with these roots allows us to come into critical relationship with the practices that inform the current orientation, allowing for renewal or intervention. Considering the role that university presses have played in the connec- tions between Appalachian literature and Appalachian studies is also essen- tial in expanding an understanding of past, current, and potential trends in the field. Heralding the coming War on Poverty in 1965, two academic publishers—West Virginia University Library and the University Press of Kentucky—released foundational materials for Appalachian studies and literature. Perhaps reflecting the energy created on campus by the folklore classes, the West Virginia University Library press brought out twenty-six books in the 1960s. In 1966 Lloyd Davis and other faculty at West Virginia University started the Appalachian Review, a magazine along the lines of Mountain Life and Work, and the first issue united essays about Appalachia by the likes of Harry Caudill and Robert Coles with poetry by Louise McNeill and fiction by Jesse Stuart. Likewise, in 1962 Kentucky published The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey, edited by Thomas R. Ford and Rupert Vance, which provided the first global update about Appalachia since the 1930s. In 1959 Willis D. Weatherford, Sr., and Wilma Dykeman coauthored an essay for The Southern Appalachian Region that became the landmark midcentury study of the state of Appalachian literature. That same year, Dykeman’s The Tall Woman came out, announcing her move from a nonfiction author who championed civil rights and social justice to a novelist who transferred those values into her literary writing about Appalachia. In coming years the University Press of Kentucky published key texts in the field, including but not limited to Jack Weller’s Yesterday’s People (1965), John B. Stephenson’s Shiloh: A Mountain Community (1968), and a reprint of John C. Campbell’s seminal 1921 text, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1969). These publications and more announced not only the inter- est of the press but also the new status of Appalachia on university campuses, This content downloaded from 76.77.170.243 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 15:52:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms chapter 3. writing appalachia · 65 thereby opening space for the study, writing, and publishing of Appalachian literature as part of Appalachian studies. Other than the Appalachian Review, the most important venue for combin- ing Appalachian studies and literature continued to be the CSM’s Mountain Life and Work. From 1949 to 1961 it published more folksongs and folktales than fiction or poetry; an even heavier ratio, almost two to one, occurred in reviews. While literary works in the 1950s were coupled with folktales and songs, after 1961 publication of folktales and folksongs stopped: from 1962 to 1969 Mountain Life and Work doubled the number of poems per year and increased the number of stories by 80 percent. And in 1968 and 1969 Gurney Norman and Jim Wayne Miller—names essential to post-1970 Appalachian studies—published more stories and poems, respectively, than any other contributors. In Mountain Life and Work and the Appalachian Review a cer- tain type of Appalachian literature became integral to Appalachian studies, performing an important (if different) type of cultural work as scholarship, essays, and images.