Bloodroot:
Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers
Edited by Joyce Dyer
University Press of Kentucky, 304 pages, $28
They remember honeysuckle vines and fiddle music, rhododendron and hog killings, cascading streams, magical nights of storytelling, a sky forever veiled in blue haze–and “through it all,” as Heather Ross Miller writes in her entry in “Bloodroot,” “the long backbone of the rising land, the high places, the mountains.”
The 35 women’s voices sounding through the pages of “Bloodroot” include those of such well-known writers as Gail Godwin, Nikki Giovanni and Mary Lee Settle, along with such lesser-knowns as Anne Shelby and Maggie Anderson. Though a few are transplants, most grew up in Appalachia–in the coal fields of West Virginia or the hollows of Tennessee, in towns like Sodom, N.C., and Viper, Ky. They write of the bonds they feel with the region, the artistic nourishment they take from it, the sparks it has ignited in their imaginations.
Wherever your own roots lie, you will find “Bloodroot” moving, inspiring–and a reminder that we are all shaped by the landscape we spring from, the place we call home.
Editor Joyce Dyer writes of “the literary renaissance that is taking place in the hills of Appalachia . . . sending light across the mountains, light so visible it fills the sky.” How can it be, she asks, that such radiance can emerge from a region so widely stereotyped as “the most dimly lit corner of America”?
Not all the writers answer that directly. But many take a stab at it.
Kathryn Stripling Byer of Cullowhee, N.C., notes that historically, women were trapped in the mountains while their men came and went, and “singing must have seemed the only way they could travel. They knew their place . . . and their place knew them. Out of that reciprocal knowing, they were able to sing their way through their solitude and into a larger web of voices, voices that I have come to see as connective tissue stretching across these hills.”
Sharyn McCrumb, with deep roots in North Carolina’s Smoky Mountains, credits the Appalachian love of oral history and ballads. She likens her novels to quilts: “I take brightly colored scraps of legends, ballads, fragments of rural life, and local tragedy, and I piece them together into a complex whole that tells not only a story but also a deeper truth about the culture of the mountain South.”
Many of the women note that they came late to an appreciation of the hills they once viewed as backward. Lee Smith, from Grundy, Va., recalls ignoring the maxim to “write what you know”–until she encountered Grundy in James Still’s novel “River of Earth,” and realized what a wealth of material her native Appalachia offered. Now, she writes, “the stories that present themselves to me as worth the telling are most often those somehow connected to that place and those people. The mountains that used to imprison me have become my chosen stalking ground.”
For that–and for all the voices in “Bloodroot,” ringing out from the hills in all their glory–we can be grateful.
