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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Issue 3
By KIM HOLLOWAY
By LEE SMITH
Frankly, I never gave much of a damn about the Civil War. We'd scarcely noticed it in the Appalachian mountains of far southwest Virginia where I grew up, where some men fought for the South and some men went with the Union but many didn't get involved at all, hiding out in the hollers until the rich man's war was over. What was there to fight for, anyway? We had no aristocracy, no landed gentry (no flat land, in fact), and certainly no plantations. The only columns in town supported the Baptist Church.
Growing up in the Appalachian mountains of southwestern Virginia, nine-year-old Lee Smith was already writing--and selling, for a nickel apiece--stories about her neighbors in the coal boomtown of Grundy and the nearby isolated "hollers." Since 1968, she has published eleven novels, as well as three collections of short stories, and has received many writing awards.
On Agate Hill. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006.
Widow of the South by Robert Hicks
Reviewed by GLORIA OSTER
On November 30, 1864, 9,200 men were killed or wounded during the Battle of Franklin, considered by some to be the Civil War's bloodiest five hours. Robert Hicks, author of The Widow of the South, in the Author's Notes at the back of the book tells us "there were more casualties these five hours at Franklin than in the nineteen hours of D-Day-and more than twice as many casualties as at Pearl Harbor." The Union loss was numbered at 2,500 and the Confederate loss at 6,700.
Back to Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani
Reviewed by KATHERINE VANDE BRAKE
Trigiani's latest offering in the Big Stone Gap series is a quick read that rounds out the saga of Ave Maria MacChesney and all the people in her world we have come to know and love. The powerful themes of illegitimacy and the pain it causes reappear in the person of Lovely Carter, a young woman who is determined to find the biological parents she never knew just as Ave Maria longed to meet her biological father in the first novel.
A Conversation with Lee Smith, Part I
By DALE BROWN
I met Lee Smith at the Hindman Settlement School on the banks of Troublesome Creek in Eastern Kentucky for our conversation. To get there, I had to pass near Rowdy, Fisty, Talcum, and Dwarf. The town names like the mountains and shaded valleys seemed especially right, because Lee Smith has given us the cadences and rhythms of southern speech along with the beauty and terror of southern places. And her chronicle, in such books as Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, Black Mountain Breakdown, The Devil's Dream, and Saving Grace, captures the courage and character along with the foible and fun of these mountain folk.
Short Fiction - The Legend of Frank Johnstone
By TED OLSON
"The Legend of Frank Johnstone" is an original tale concerning a Scottish immigrant who during the mid-nineteenth century settled on the western edge of the Virginia Blue Ridge region--today that particular area is part of the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. In 1979, when I was a counselor at a West Virginia summer camp, I created this tale for my own enjoyment and for the edification of a small group of urban children who like me were temporary residents in an alien but intriguing Appalachian environment of densely wooded hills and once-farmed, cleared hollows. "The Legend of Frank Johnstone" evolved that particular summer to satisfy the collective need of young urban people who had been thrust together into an unfamiliar rural environment and who were jointly craving to develop deeper identification with that environment by understanding its elusive "sense of place." Although essentially fiction, the tale's historical background is based on fact and its setting is authentic--it is set in Cooper's Cove, the Hampshire County, West Virginia mountain hollow in which I first told this tale. Cooper's Cove was the location of the summer camp where I worked during my years as an undergraduate college student. As a camp counselor, my main responsibility was to lead natural history workshops. Yet, because that camp had in its curriculum always accentuated the study of natural history over cultural history, I introduced into the camp's program a folklore unit loosely based on the popular Foxfire model. Just a year out of high school when I first told this tale, I was already fascinated by folklore, having read numerous books on the subject. And so, during overnight camping trips while we were sitting around the campfire, I would tell stories to the mostly urban campers. I wanted to impart to the campers some information about the human history of Cooper's Cove, but little was known about the place--apparently, no one affiliated with the camp before me had shown much interest in the Cove's cultural history. Furthermore, the camp was located in an isolated part of Hampshire County, and I had only recently arrived there from my childhood home in Washington, D.C. and had had little time to gather information about the County's local history. Thus, during my very first overnight camping trip as a counselor, I concocted my own story about the settlement of Cooper's Cove. That summer I told "The Legend of Frank Johnstone" to many groups of campers, and I often readjusted the tale in response to their reactions; so it evolved orally before it was ever written down. After I left West Virginia that summer I quickly wrote down the "summer's-end" version of the tale before I would forget it entirely. Re-reading "The Legend of Frank Johnstone" today, I think that it represents the earnest if naive attempt of one urban person to understand the complex cultural history of the misunderstood and under-appreciated Appalachian people and their rural way of life. The tale might also be seen as a documented example of the camp lore that emerges every summer at camps. Most camp lore, while enjoyable and meaningful to its creators at the time of inception, is ephemeral, quickly dying out at the end of the camp's session as the people who created that lore disperse to lead their "normal" lives. Whether or not the following tale--a sample of "camp lore"--holds meaning apart from the specific environment in which it was generated, "The Legend of Frank Johnstone" has survived, albeit in altered form, having been translated from a fluid and interactive oral text to a fixed, self-consciously literary written one.
Melungeons: The Ties That Bind - Part II in a series on Appalachia's Melungeons
By KATHERINE VANDE BRAKE
A recent article on the Southern Ledger site reported that woman in Eastern Kentucky had died after being snakebit in a church service. Never mind that snake handling is against the law in Kentucky.
