A 
Introduction to Tamara Baxter's Rock Big and Sing Loud
By Robert Morgan
It is a pleasure and an honor to welcome and celebrate Tamara Baxter's story collection Rock Big and Sing Loud, winner of the Jesse Stuart Foundation First Author's Prize in Fiction. The award recognizes significant work by a new writer in the Southern Appalachian region. Named for the outstanding Kentucky author of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, Jesse Stuart, the prize calls attention to the virtual renaissance of exciting writing now produced in the area. The timing of this publication could not be better.
Anyone who reads this book of stories will be impressed by the strong sense of place, the mountains of eastern Tennessee, and the authenticity of the voices in both the dialogue and the narration. It is clear Baxter has absorbed the long-standing tradition of narrative writing that includes Harriette Arnow, author of The Dollmaker, Mildred Haun, author of The Hawk's Done Gone, as well as more recent fiction writers such as Lee Smith.
Baxter demonstrates perfect ear in capturing and rendering the talk of the region, whether spoken by poor folk or more affluent individuals. She draws on the colorful tradition of storytelling, the oral history, the tall tale, the comic hyperbole of the culture, and tells stories of sly humor and wry drama, taking unexpected turns, making surprising connections.
According to the Irish writer and critic Frank O'Connor in his study The Lonely Voice, the short story almost always portrays the outsider to society, the person of marginal consequence and power. Baxter brings to life in these pages the voices and lives of those long forgotten or ignored. She is especially successful in writing about the struggles of women, the pains and satisfactions of marriage in a world of ignorant, often violent men.Baxter looks at the world of the rural past with her eyes wide open, offering no sentimental pieties or nostalgia. In "Dustbusters" she presents an angry widower who "hadn't got his mileage out of Peony." In "Killing Oranges" an abused wife imagines driving a nail through her husband's ear, and does. In "Me and My Mean Sister" wicked little girls wreak catastrophe on neighbors and pretend innocence. Many are stories of women talking to women, talking to the reader, opening windows on confused but compelling lives.
Baxter shows an exact and detailed knowledge of the rural world, describing how seed corn is selected, how potatoes are planted, young puppies are killed, and how onion poultices are used for treating the sick. She writes poor black voices as well as poor white voices. But many of her best stories take place in the contemporary world also, in suburbs, in towns, in trailer parks. She writes vividly about a world of television talk shows, shopping malls, Victoria's Secret catalogs, Star Trek, and the vicissitudes of old age. In one of the very best stories, "To Boldly Go," the drunken husband Eddy, obsessed with Star Trek when fired from his job in a chicken factory, hears voices in frying pans and light fixtures, and imagines he is beamed aboard The U.S.S. Enterprise by Scotty.
In the unforgettable story "Flashpoint," a dying woman fights mentally for her husband's love with "the blond vulture" nurse who has been hired to take care of her. Baxter's best subject is marriage, and nowhere does she dramatize the struggles and pleasures of married love more effectively than in this short narrative. "You think he will change. He never does. He thinks you will always stay the same. You never can." In the end, though the wife loses both her husband and her life, she experiences an ultimate elation of freedom.In "A Christmas Mourning" a young and foolish husband attempts to confront the death in childbirth of his very young wife. All he knows to do is mindlessly chop down chestnut tree after chestnut tree. The midwife, Granny Older, meditates on his confusion and rashness.
"A woman knew how to accept and go on better than a man. A woman knew to wait until the day closed, the children in bed asleep, the husband satisfied and snoring on his side, only the night sounds of crickets and creaking planks of the house to meditate on. This is the time of letting go of grief, sobbing so quietly and still no one hears her private sorrows spoken into her pillow, her hands clinching and un-clinching until she lets go of her heart and falls asleep."
Baxter knows how to reveal a character and a time and place through one detail, a single sentence. In "Some Living Room" the elderly black man, Silas Mosely, who lives next door in a shed on a neighbor's farm, "sometimes sat on the porch and watched the Amos and Andy show through the side window." The multiple ironies evoked by that one image are awesome.
In the final story of the collection, "Rock Big and Sing Loud," we follow the thoughts of a woman nearly 106 years old as she plans her own death. "Orey toured the palace of her mind with fingers reading the Braille of the fireplace." She chooses the rocking chair on the porch as the place of her departure. "Dying was just like rocking back in time."
The past decade has been an exciting time for American fiction in general and Southern Appalachian fiction in particular. Tamara Baxter's stories are a significant addition to this surge of new writing. Her narratives can make you laugh or break your heart, and sometimes they do both at once. It is an important paradox that the most regionally specific fiction is also the most universally accessible. Almost all literary fiction is regional, even local, in its setting and idiom. It is the exactness of detail and voice, and depth of characterization, that make a story alive for readers everywhere.Writing truly about the world of eastern Tennessee Baxter also writes about the world at large, about humanity. She has given us the stories of some of the most afflicted and addicted, the most failed and failing, individuals on the planet, and also some of the strongest and most enduring people we are ever likely to meet. These stories take us to places we did not expect to go, and just when we think we have seen what is strangest, most absurd, most alien and outrageous, we recognize something of ourselves.
