CONVERSATION WITH SILAS HOUSE

By Dale Brown

I talked with Silas House on his back porch, which looks out on a yard where his children play surrounded by trees and elbow room. Confessing that he rambles, Silas spoke of his remarkable success with his first three novels: Clay's Quilt, A Parchment of Leaves, and A Coal Tattoo. We tackled those subjects that so often turn up in southern literature: place, family, history, and religion. But we paused repeatedly over Silas' thoughts on faith. He was "raised Pentecostal," he says, and he talks of a childhood faith that both haunts and freshens his fiction. An accomplished short-story writer, and a recent entrant in the battle to halt mountaintop mining, Silas' truck sports a bumper sticker that reads, "I've Been to the Mountaintop and it Wasn't There." He has also worked as a creative writing professor, a rural mail-truck driver, and a short-order cook in a fast food restaurant. "A series of bad jobs can really make a writer," he says. Silas House rides his success with humility and grace. Quietly dedicated to family and friends, he still drives the roads of Laurel County, still loves Loretta Lynn, according to his other bumper sticker, and still supposes there's meaning in the days flying by. Silas House believes that writers change people, and that we all have a responsibility to preserve those stories that matter. Thus he listens intently and writes of what he has heard.

DB: Let's start with the psychiatrist's couch. I say "Lee Smith" and you think?

SH: Mentor. I read Fair and Tender Ladies when I was in college, and right around that time I published my first short story. When I read that book, I was absolutely stunned by how amazing it was. I had read Black Mountain Breakdown in ninth grade, so I had a history with her work. But I was so amazed by Fair and Tender Ladies that I wrote the only fan letter I've ever written. I told Lee how much the book meant to me and included a copy of my short story that had just been published in a small journal, Appalachian Heritage. She wrote me back a postcard and said that she really enjoyed the story and wished me the best of luck. I figured that would be the last I ever heard from her. About a year later, my cousin and I went over in the mountains to Hazard to a book signing she was doing. As we stood in line to have our books signed, she asked me my name. She said "Your name sounds awful familiar; did you send me a story?" I couldn't believe she remembered. I was really embarrassed. Then we got to talking, and she said I had to come down to Hindman School to this workshop. She said it would change everything for me. I immediately started saving up money to go to Hindman. I was newly married, had a new baby, and no money. Lee wasn't there that year, because she only goes every other year. I worked with Sharyn McCrumb and Robert Morgan. Robert Morgan was a huge influence. The next year I went back and worked with Lee. But we were so broke that year that I didn't have enough for tuition and board. So I stayed in a tent. That's become sort of a legend. I was ashamed to tell them that I didn't have enough money, so I just told them I liked to camp. It rained the whole week.

DB: James Still?

SH: I only had a couple conversations with him, but his books, especially his poetry, have been hugely influential. He did say one thing to me that changed my whole life and changed my writing. It was there at Hindman and was the only major conversation we ever had. In a very na�ve way, I had asked for advice. He told me to "discover something new every day." That was all he said. He was like that, gruff and of very few words. But that really had a huge impact on me. From there on out I consciously tried to discover something new every day. That not only changed my writing, it changed the whole way I lived. I think that statement had more impact on me than anything else I've ever learned about writing. I did an MFA after my first two books were published, mainly to get my degree so I could teach, and because I felt I had more to learn. But I learned more in that statement than I did in the two years of my MFA.

DB: So the writer is somebody who's paying special attention?

SH: Yes. People always think that writers are smarter than other people. That's the biggest hoax in the world. I just think writers are the ones who are looking in different ways; they're observing what a lot of other people take for granted, and just writing it down.

DB: Widow Combs?

SH: Learning her story made me an activist. It was a major moment in my life. I was doing research on The Coal Tattoo and learning about broad form deeds and the way that coal companies stole land. Of course, the government helped them to do that; the government had and equal role in the whole business. I happened upon the story of the Widow Combs. Later, I found a picture of her, a 64-year old woman, being carried away by two deputies. I don't see how anyone can see it and not be moved by it. It was part of a series of pictures that won the Pulitzer Prize. My family had always taught me to stand up for what I believe in, but to see the Widow Combs standing up against those bulldozers made me realize that I had to not only be a steward of the land but also be brave enough to make some people mad. In 1965 in Knott County, Kentucky, they literally carried her off her place. They were mining the mountain above her on a broad form deed. She owned the land, but they owned the mineral rights; someone had sold them 50 years before. The rocks and slate and the mining debris kept coming down on her home and destroying her land, so she just went down two days before Thanksgiving and lay down in front of the bulldozers. They had to carry her away. What was especially admirable about her was that she remained completely still. She didn't fight; she was just completely still. I put that in The Coal Tattoo in the scene where the women face the bulldozers. They're completely still. They're different, though, because eventually they do fight. They use the stillness as much as they can, and then they say, "If we don't fight we're going to lose our land." It was 30 years before broad form deeds were outlawed, but without the Widow Combs they never would've been.

DB: "Pantsie?"

SH: Oh, Lord. I have a first cousin that I was raised with that I call my brother. His name is Terry Dean. I never was able to pronounce pants. I was too country. I'd call them "paints." So he calls me Pantsie.

DB: What about Druthers?

SH: That was my first job. I actually started working there before it was legal for me to work. I was raised with a really strong work ethic. That was in London, Kentucky. Both of my parents has been raised incredibly poor, so even as a child I can remember feeling guilty for having so much more than they had when they were children. I guess we were lower middle class, and by the time I was a teenager we were middle class. I was very aware of that, very aware that I had more than them. And I wanted to make my own money. So about three or four weeks before I turned 16, I got a work permit and started at Druther's which originally was a Burger Queen. I was a fry cook there and later left for a better job at Western Steer Steakhouse. That was out on the interstate in Corbin. I was a plate loader, which was basically a cook's assistant. I did every job there. I was a bus boy, waiter, cashier, and an assistant manager eventually. But I met my wife, Theresa, there. The first time I saw her she was reading Black Mountain Breakdown by Lee Smith, and I thought "I gotta ask that girl out" because she was reading on her break. Then she insisted that she drive, and she pulled up in this little pickup. She was playing Allison Krauss and I knew that I would marry her. Lee Smith loves that story; we tell her that she's responsible for our union.

DB: Sandra Stidham?

SH: She was my seventh grade teacher, and I still keep in touch with her. When I was in school, the Kentucky education system was in ruins. We didn't have any kind of literature course, for example, until we were seniors in high school. Miss Stidham knew that wasn't right. She knew that we should have some literature, so she just took it upon herself to teach us. She brought in all of her own books, her own personal library. It was an amazing thing to do. She put them all in the back of the room. She had a little notebook, and we could borrow any book we wanted. These were books that our public schools didn't have. They hadn't bought any books since the 1960s. Those books became hugely important to me. I found Jubilee by Margaret Walker, The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, which is probably the most influential, integral novel of my generation. To Kill a Mockingbird was the major one for me. She made us do book reports. For a while there I bought my own books. The only place you could buy books in that town was at the flea market. So I was getting books that I probably shouldn't have been reading at that time. I read Mandingo and was completely shocked by everything in it. I read Peyton Place and did my book report on it. That book is pretty racy. After I did my book report, Miss Stidham pulled me aside and said, "I've noticed that you have a really strong understanding of literature for your age." She decided to steer me toward books that were more acceptable than Peyton Place and Mandingo. That's how I came to To Kill a Mockingbird. When I did my book report on it, she saw how affected I was by it. She gave me that book. You hear about teachers having a huge impact, but I don't think that I would've been a writer if she hadn't done that.

DB: She says you were "born to write."

SH: Well, I always wanted to be a writer. But not until I read To Kill a Mockingbird did I feel like it was something I could do with my life. My family always ingrained in me that I should do something. I shouldn't just try to make a living and raise my family. You should do that, but you should also try to make a positive impact on the world.

DB: That's probably related to your religious heritage?

SH: I think that's a big part of it.

DB: How do you explain your fascination with books? Where did that come from?

SH: I was born that way. I wasn't raised in a house where people were reading a lot. They were obsessed with never falling back into poverty. I wouldn't say they were workaholics, because that has negative connotations, but they worked all the time. My mother worked in the cafeteria at the elementary school; my father was a supervisor at a fiberglass factory. Then they were always working at the house. My father poured concrete on his days off. But it wasn't like I was this child who was left alone, because his parents were working. They made work something that we all did together. I never felt left out or anything. When they read, they read the Bible. But my father had been a big reader as a child. He had been obsessed with James Fenimore Cooper. But nobody in my family sat around and read the way that I do. I think I was just born that way.

DB: But you did grow up going to church?

SH: Oh, yes.

DB: And, and so the Bible was the King James Version?

SH: Oh yeah.

DB: Does that have something to do with your preoccupation with language?

SH: I grew up hearing stories. My family was all storytellers. They knew how to tell a story; it was innate. They just knew how to do it without even knowing they did. They knew how to exaggerate. Every time they retold a story, they'd change something. They knew how to pick up small details. I don't think I would've been a writer without the church. You know, there are all these little factors that make you into a writer. One of them was Miss Stidham and To Kill a Mockingbird. Another was having a family of storytellers. And a major one was growing up in a family that went to church. People would stand up and give their testimonies. Poetry would just fall out of their mouths, pure poetry. They weren't saying anything for their own glory. They were just putting words together in a beautiful way to articulate what they felt. I can remember from a very young age these people standing up and giving testimonies. I was always struck by how everybody had a story; everybody in the church had their own particular story. There was this one woman whose husband wasn't saved. Her recurring theme was how hard it was to love this man completely while knowing that he wasn't of the same mind as her. And there was another woman, a widow woman, and a man who'd been healed from cancer. He would tell that story over and over, but you never got tired of it, because he always told it in a different way and there was always the perfect little details. Then there were the sermons, too. It always amazes me how these preachers, none of whom were educated, could tell these brilliant, amazing stories and make these analogies and have these metaphors and similes that were just, amazing. I don't know where they came from. They hadn't been to seminary. Some of them hadn't even been to high school. People always ask me if I work hard on my metaphors and similes. I don't. That comes very naturally to me and I think that's from hearing those sermons full of pictures all my life. We went to church three or four nights a week: Sunday school, Sunday night service, Thursday night Bible study, and Tuesday night prayer meeting. We would go to tent revivals, and camp meetings. My mother was a singer. She sang all over the place, and so I would go with her. When we went to Mammoth Cave, the whole church went. The whole way there, we were in a van with everybody's singing church songs. That's the thing about the Pentecostal faith. It's a culture; it's more than a church, and that's why it's so hard to leave it. I'm always quick to point out to people that, even though I am not a member of the Pentecostal church today, I still identify with the Pentecostals, and I never ever will say anything negative about the Pentecostals.

DB: You see the world through that lens? SH: Yes. When you're a writer, people assume you're agnostic. They all assume I'm an agnostic or an atheist. They also assume that I could never ever embrace Pentecostalism, that I would be completely against all that. They' wrong. I'm glad I was raised that way, very glad. In my writing, I try to portray Pentecostals as human beings as opposed to the snake-handlers, poison drinkers, and fanatics that the media projects. In Clay's Quilt, one of my Pentecostal characters is a fanatic, of course, but the main Pentecostal character, Easter, is a complex human being who thinks deeply about her faith.

DB: She even goes through considerable doubt.

SH: Definitely.

DB: Jack Hoskins?

SH: That's my uncle. He was murdered when I was 11 years old and that's another thing that made me a writer. Maybe the major thing. After he was killed the family stopped telling stories about him for a long time. Because they knew that stories about him would always end with everybody breaking down and crying, they stopped. The way he died was so unjust. His murderer went free. It took us years to get over it. I don't mean this in an arrogant way, but I think Clay's Quilt enabled them to get over it in a way that they hadn't before. This death was only time in my childhood that I can remember when my parents didn't pay attention to me. The whole world was revolving around that instead of me. I think that's when my observation skills became the best. I remember the murder, the funeral, and the whole mourning period. My parents thought that I didn't understand, but, of course, I did. I even went to the trial. I heard all the testimony and heard the way that people told the same story from so many different points of view. It really helped me as a writer to understand point of view, the way that people see things differently. But the main thing I learned is that, if stories are not written down, eventually they die. I didn't want that to happen with my uncle. That's when I really started keeping track in a serious way. It also changed our whole family dynamic. It hurt our family in so many many ways. This is really hard to talk about, but my uncle was actually killed by my fourth cousin. When you're an Appalachian family, you know who your fifth and sixth cousins are. It's like this is part of your immediate family. So it caused a division in the family that has never been healed. I think that's one reason all my books are about families. No matter how mad you get at each other, there's still an unconditional love, this thread of unconditional love that holds you together as an Appalachian family. Family is the only thing that matters, you know. I just saw the movie, "Hotel Rwanda," about the genocide there. I remember a scene where folks are being dragged away, and this man, who has a little bit of a pull with the government, watches. His wife begs him to help their neighbors, but he says, "I am saving up all my favors for when it comes to our family. We have to watch out for our family; that's the only thing we can worry about right now." It's a universal thing. I think the reason it's lasted so much longer in Appalachian families is because they've suffered hardship, real hardship, more recently than most other Americans. And also, being an Appalachian is being a perpetual immigrant in this country. We'll always be treated as immigrants. We have an ethnicity that hasn't become mainstream. Lots of immigrants came here and became American in the way they spoke and ate and the rest. Appalachia is one of the few places in American that has held to a unique ethnicity.

DB: Why is that?

SH: It's in our blood not to let go of things easily. We're Scotch Irish, Cherokee, African-American and more.

DB: You are also interested in those people who fled the mountains for Detroit, Toledo, Dayton and other factory cities, only to feel displacement and homesickness.

SH: I'm writing a play right now, commissioned by the University of Kentucky, called "The Hurting Part." It's all about a family who moved to Dayton. It is about homesickness.

DB: You deal with that in "The Unsent Letter."

SH: Yes, the play is based on that story.

DB: Who has written about the poor white migrations from the South?

SH: Harriet Arnell's, The Doll Maker, would be the major one, I guess.

DB: Joyce Carol Oates has a piece about moving to Detroit.

SH: The Doll Maker is one of Oates's favorite books.

DB: We haven't talked about Aunt Sis yet.

SH: Well, I've said I was raised in a Pentecostal home. But my parents were pretty laid back.

DB: Liberal Pentecostals?

SH Yes, as crazy as that sounds. They gave me the sacred upbringing, and Aunt Sis gave me the profane upbringing. I'm exaggerating only a bit. After going to church three or four times a week, I would stay with Sis for a while. She would sneak me out to a Bob Seger Concert. She snuck me into my first bar when I was 15. The first cigarette I ever smoked came from her pack. I smoked it in her bathroom. I would sneak over to her house when she got home from work at eleven o'clock on a school night, and she would let me stay up and watch the late show. She let me read her "True Story" magazines. I read one recently that I found in her closet; I couldn't believe how dirty it was. This was in the late 1970's. So she evened out things for me. She took me to see "The Exorcist" when I was four years old. She didn't have very good judgment at all, but she was the quintessential cool aunt. Aunt Sis and my mother were so different, but they had that unconditional love for one another. They had sort of a mother and daughter relationship. It was never a problem for them that Sis was out partying every night, and my mother was at church every night. I think that's amazing that they were able to avoid falling out over that. They accepted each other the way they were.

DB: That must inform your portrait of Easter and Anneth.

SH: Absolutely. The whole book grew out of this huge fight they had one night when Aunt Sis threw a kettle at my mother's head. I thought they'd never speak again. But the next day, it was over. They made up so easily. My mother said, "Sisters don't really make up; they just go back to the way things were." The whole book, The Coal Tatoo, came out of that line.

DB: What about your friends from literary climes, people like Michael Chitwood and Ron Rash. Have you found a community there?

SH: It was hard for me initially when I started going to conferences and the like. A lot of readers believe that writers are smarter than other people. They've completely bought into that. There are academics, so many of them, who forget that literature should be about people and not about stylistics. I realized that so many writers and academics were prejudiced toward me just because of the way I spoke. They thought I was ignorant, because of the way I talked, until I'd talked long enough to convince them otherwise. Therefore, you tend to form really strong relationships with those people who don't treat you that way. The first people who really embraced me who were established writers were Michael Chitwood and Ron Rash, who has become known recently as a novelist, but has been known in different circles for a long time as a poet, a great poet. Another was Larry Brown, a major friendship for me. I just worshipped his writing. We were doing a book signing together in Jackson, Mississippi when I first met him, and I was completely in awe. Afterwards, our publicist took us out to eat. This restaurant had a smoking room, and Larry and I both ended up there. It was the first time I ever met a writer where in the first ten minutes we weren't talking about books. We were talking about fishing and squirrel hunting and knives. He said, "You know it's so good to meet a writer who knows how to smoke a Marlboro, how to fish bluegill, and how to hunt squirrels." Our whole relationship was built on that. My closest friends tend to be like that; they tend to come from backgrounds similar to mine. Pam Duncan is my best friend in the writing world. She's a writer from North Carolina. But at the same time, one of my best friends is also very different from me. She's a writer, Neela Vaswani, raised in New York City. Her father is South Asian Indian, and her mother's Irish. On the surface, people would think, "Why are they such close friends?" But we both relate to being ethnic. People see her face and reach a particular assumption about her, just as people hear my voice and reach a particular assumption about me. So we relate. She's a huge part of my writer's community.

DB: What about Algonquin Books?

SH: I always dreamed about being with Algonquin. Most of my favorite writers were there: Larry Brown, Kaye Gibbons, Clyde Edgerton. A lot of people will buy an Algonquin book just because it's an Algonquin book. I don't think any other press can say that. They have an history of publishing really great southern literature. I was really honored when they called and thankful to them for giving me a chance.

DB: You've had considerable freedom there?

SH: Yes. If I'd been with another publishing house, for example, I think there would have been more pressure with my second book, A Parchment of Leaves. Clay's Quilt did really well for a first novel, to my surprise, and I think to Algonquin's surprise. The smart commercial thing would've been to write another contemporary book. But I went the opposite way with Parchment. I can see all these little things that have fallen into place for me. I feel really blessed. I thought what happens will happen; things will happen when they're supposed to. There for a while I didn't think I would get published. I worked on Clay's Quilt, worked on the book and worked on getting it published for almost eight years. I never gave up. I thought it would happen when it was meant to happen.

DB: But you've known you were a writer for a long time?

SH: Yes, but it's built in intensity.

DB: How is it that you came to transfer the power of To Kill A Mockingbird into your own life? Why is it that some readers are able to claim a book that way?

SH: By the time I read To Kill a Mockingbird, it didn't have the impact that it had when it was published. The world had changed. As child in the late 1970's, I witnessed racism. When I was very small they still had water fountains in Corbin, at the Newberry Department Store, labeled "whites" and "colored." So I was completely aware of racism but on a different level than something that was written in 1963 would've been. The huge impact for me with that book was in the family dynamic. The story features these these incredible characters. Reading that book and reading Black Mountain Breakdown, convinced me that books didn't have to be set in Hollywood or New York. They could be set in small towns and be about rural, working class people, and still matter. To Kill a Mockingbird was about social change, not only in race relations, but in everything. One of my favorite lines in To Kill a Mockingbird is, "You never really know a man until you put on his shoes and walk around in them." And my favorite line in that book is "There's only one kind of folks. Folks." Period. "Folks." That's one thing I'm trying to show in my work. My characters come from a unique place. Someone might be reading about them in Idaho or Oregon or California or India or Australia or wherever. But at the heart of it, we're just people, we're all just people. We all have the same struggles and desires. People tend to think that Appalachians are cartoon characters-the "Dukes of Hazard" or whatever.

DB: You speak often of feeling incredibly blessed by your writing life. You even talk about your books as "gifts." Gifts to you. You that writing A Parchment of Leaves sometimes felt like taking dictation, recording the words of a ghost. In one speech you referred to it as "a supernatural experience." Can you explain that?

SH: Well all my books are supernatural to some degree. But A Parchment of Leaves was that way to an eerie degree. I just wanted to write the book, because I knew that my great grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee and was taught to hide that. So I thought the whole book would be about being Cherokee. But, though that's part of the book, it turned out not to be the major part. There was this woman's voice pushing me. She did a lot of things I didn't want her to do. She ends up killing a man, and she ends up getting raped. I didn't know any of that was going to happen when I started writing the book. The character informed me of all that. The character took control of my life for awhile. I write a book in a very methodical way. I believe in method writing. In A Parchment of Leaves, Vine is a great gardener. She has a natural ability to make things live. I'd always raised a garden, but when I was writing that book, I raised a huge garden. It took up so much time. That whole book was written in the garden. I don't really know how to articulate it, but it was all completely given to me. There are whole passages in that book, pages and pages, that I read and have absolutely no memory of writing. I'll think, "Man that's good writing." But I don't feel responsible for it, because I don't remember writing it. It was just given to me. A lot of people will laugh at me for saying this, but I do believe that writers are just mediums in a way. The act of imagination is supernatural.

DB: So you really think of the characters as taking over?

SH: I don't think that I have a book until I feel like my characters are living people, that they exist, and that I carry them with me everywhere I go.

DB: You say that "if there's not joy in the writing there won't be joy in the reading."

SH: I believe that. I've never forced myself to write. I never sit there and stare at a blank page. Writing is always hard. But when it becomes miserable, I just don't do it. If I'm not enjoying the whole act of writing, I scrap it. I don't use it. There's a really thin line between the writer and the reader, and whatever I'm feeling when I'm writing, the reader will be feeling. That's another level of the supernatural act of wiring.

DB: No outlines or note cards?

SH: No, no. With Clay's Quilt I knew I wanted to write a book about a family whose whole dynamic had been changed by murder. With A Parchment of Leaves I knew that I wanted to write about a Cherokee woman who marries an Irishman. And with The Coal Tattoo I knew I wanted to write about two sisters who are incredibly different yet love yet love each other unconditionally. And that's all I knew. With the new book I'm writing now, I know I want it to be set in the summer of 1976. I want it to be from the point of view of a ten year old whose father is a Vietnam vet. Every writer works in the way that works best for them. When Lee Smith does a book, she has a whole notebook for each character. She knows what their favorite color is and what they eat for breakfast. She has it all written down. I discover these things as I'm writing the book.

DB: Does this new book have a title yet?

SH: Their Secret Trees, but I don't know if that's going to work or not.

DB: You not only want to tell a good story, something that taps into the universal hunger for good stories, but you also want those stories to be "shot through with hope." In one speech you change "hope" to "light." How does that work?

SH: Serious literary writers, these days, the ones who win all the big awards, tend to be writing doom and gloom. They are so cynical, so devoid of hope, that, reading them, I feel like slitting my wrists. I don't think readers really want that. People want hope. That's really the fundamental thing that we share. It just makes sense to me that every story should get to that. Lots of people think that if you have too much hope, especially at the end of the book, then you come off as sentimental. My reply to that is, "What's wrong with being sentimental?" We're sentimental by nature. We're human beings, and we are sentimental. There's a difference between being sappy and being sentimental. There's a movement in contemporary literature to strip everything of sentimentality or hope or love. When The Coal Tattoo came out, I was absolutely ravaged in the Memphis paper. The reviewer just tore me down, because my characters said, "I love you" several times in the book. I'd respond by noting that people actually say those words to each other. That's real life, and that's what I'm supposed to be writing about. If you take the love and the hope out of the book, then you don't have real people-you don't have real characters anymore. And it just becomes this doom and gloom stuff that, frankly, I thin