A 
SOUTHERN WRITERS
ISSUE 2
Table of Contents
By KIM HOLLOWAY
Most, if not all, southern writers have a keen sense of history and a drive to make sense of their personal and regional histories through their writing. Maybe this is the quality of their writing that draws us to their work-many readers of southern literature, too, are both haunted by the past of their region and drawn to examine their own personal past. In her introduction to Growing up in the South: An Anthology of Modern Southern Literature, Suzanne W. Jones reminds us of what critic Louis D. Rubin, Jr., observed about southern literature:
...to consider writers and their writings as Southern still involves considerably more than merely a geographical grouping. History, as a mode of viewing one's experience and one's identity, remains a striking characteristic of the Southern literary imagination...
By LISA ALTHER
It was sweltering that night as I sat in the stairwell in my pajamas, watching smoke drift from the living room on a ray of lamplight. The tabby cat slinked out of the shadows and paused to stare at me, green eyes flashing, and then narrowing in recognition. She leapt up the steps. I scratched her ears until she turned her head to lick my hand with a sandpaper tongue. The newspaper rustling in the living room punctuated the pulse of the locusts outside. My father's large frame would be filling the brown leather armchair, and his fingers would be flicking a cigarette. My mother would be curled up on the couch with a library book. My father's voice rumbled like flexed tin roofing. Hearing my name, I scooted down the steps, purring cat still draped across my lap. "I don't think he's too young," my father was saying. "I could ride a horse to hell and back when I was his age. But too squeamish � maybe." "He's just sensitive," said my mother. I frowned. "It's not like I'd just toss him in the saddle and turn him loose. I'll teach him first." "I tried to ride for years but never had any control over a horse."
Lisa Alther was born in 1944 in Kingsport, Tennessee, where she went to public schools. She was graduated from Wellesley College with a BA in English literature in 1966. After attending the Publishing Procedures Course at Radcliffe College and working for Atheneum Publishers in New York, she moved to Hinesburg, Vermont, where she has lived for thirty years, raising her daughter. She taught Southern Fiction at St. Michael's College in Winooski, Vermont. Having lived in London and Paris, she currently divides her time between Vermont and New York City.
NOVELS AND EXCERPTS
Kinflicks
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1976.
Excerpts published in:
Vogue, v.166, #2 (Feb., 1976).
Cosmopolitan, v.181, #2 (Aug., 1976).
New Dawn, v.2, #2 (July, 1977).
Pulling Your Own Strings, ed. Gloria Kaufman and Mary Blakely, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.
The Best of Modern Humor, ed. Mordecai Richler, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.
A Southern Appalachian Reader, ed. Nellie McNeil and Joyce Squibb, Boone, N.C.: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1989
Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor, New York: W.W. Norton, 1994.
My Old True Love by Sheila Kay Adams
Reviewed by Kate Vande Brake
Three things strike the reader immediately about My Old True Love by Sheila Kay Adams. The first is the distinctively arresting voice of the narrator, Arty Norton Wallin. She starts off with this: "Some people is born at the start of a long hard row to hoe. Well, I am older than God's dog and been in this world a long time and it seems to me that right from the git-go, Larkin Stanton had the longest and hardest row I've ever seen" (1). These words open this first person narrative and let me know immediately that Arty Norton is somebody I want to know better. The author herself recognizes that Arty is not just any narrator and in the book's acknowledgements thanks her editor "for helping me to turn Arty loose to tell this tale" (287). Arty's telling is as important as the story itself.
The second is the character of Larkin Stanton, orphaned when his mother dies in childbirth, raised by his "Amma," Arty herself, done out of the girl he loves by his cousin and best friend Hackley Norton, and scarred by horrific events during the War between the States. The book begins with Larkin's birth in a mountain cabin and ends when he finally finds the redemption he seeks. Descended from an Indian, with a voice that "was a wonderment, pure and clear, hitting them high notes and holding them, holding them" (26), Larkin graces the narrative with both goodness and mystery.
The World Made Straight by Ron Rash
Reviewed by GLORIA OSTER
Asheville, Marshall, Mars Hill - these neighboring towns provide the backdrop for Ron Rash's new novel The World Made Straight. Rash's setting, however, does not relegate this novel to that category of literature interesting only because it highlights the idiosyncratic nature of "Appalachian culture."
To be sure, we have the stock characters of Appalachian literature � the tobacco farmer, the high school drop-out, the disenfranchised, and the victimizers, reminiscent of backwoods characters in James Dickey's Deliverance. We also have the present's inextricable connection to the past, yet another characteristic of Southern and Appalachian fiction. In this work, the present is scarred by a massacre that took place during the Civil War. Rash's novel, however, like Dickey's, rises above the merely regional to present a worldview explored in many modern American classics. Western North Carolina, Rash has shown, is a place where the "verities" of human life appear as readily as in William Faulkner's corner of Mississippi.
A 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?
By JANE HICKS
The aim of the poet and the poetry is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual work in to the larger work of the community as a whole." Seamus Heaney
For Jeremy Davidson* 2001-2004
Spare me the post-modern pout about dog piss in the gray snow near the subway entrance,
Or the academic angst over a shaft of light like the one in a scriptorium of an obscure Tuscan monastery.
Witness meth labs that spring up in our rural gardens, a quick pay out or fuel for three piddly jobs, two to live, one to pay daycare.
Recount farm foreclosure, our food modified, altered atrocities, the domain of agribusiness conglomerates, the family farm a curiosity......
By KATIE VANDE BRAKE
The Melungeons, a minority recognized in Southern Appalachia where they settled in the early 1800s, have mixed heritage that is Native American, Sub-Saharan African, European, and Mediterranean. Their dark skin and distinctive features-long thin noses, remarkable blue eyes, black hair, volatile dispositions, and reckless manners-have marked them and been the cause of racial, social, and cultural persecution both by custom and by law in Appalachia for two centuries. An outsider might think that they, having suffered at the hands of those more privileged, might be understanding of others in a one-down position, but their marginalization has led to an insider mentality. Tolerance is not their mode. They are fiercely protective of the position that recent genealogical and biological studies have afforded them and police the borders of the Melungeon community with determination and energy.
The consummate mystery of the Melungeons is the question of origin. The native American strain is not disputed by anyone. The African connection is resented and denied by some, acknowledged by others. The real conundrum is nature of the European/Mediterranean element. Are the Melungeons Spanish, descendants of explorers, soldiers, and clerics who came to North America in the century between Columbus and Jamestown? Are the Melungeons the lost tribe of Israel or crypto-Jews who left the Iberian peninsula to escape the violence of the Inquisition? Are they descendants of Turks captured by Sir Francis Drake and dropped off at the site of the Roanoke colony right before the upheaval caused by the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588? Are they descended from Moors or Berbers? Are they Arabic? Are they Portuguese? They have said for more than a century that they are "Porty-ghee." Because there are no written records to prove any of these claims and the DNA tesing undertaken in the last five years confirms none of the theories incontrovertibly, the discussion about origins rages on.
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