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It was not difficult to come to such a conclusion, as the "outside" world constantly stereotyped us West Virginians as illiterate, backwoods hillbillies worthy of imitation only in such works as "The Real McCoys," "The Beverly Hillbillies," and "Little Abner." During all of those years as a public school and college student and subsequently as a teacher, I do not recall reading or teaching any literary works by any authors identified as Appalachian writers. In fact, I don't think I ever even realized that many of these writers existed since their works were not included in the anthologies that were adopted for use in my classrooms from the 1950's until today. Oddly enough, I cannot recall any books by Appalachian authors even being in my school libraries, other than poetry, drama, and short story collections by Jesse Stuart.
It should not be surprising then that I had put aside my own poetry writing which I had begun rather joyously in early middle school. Instead I concentrated my time and energy on reading and understanding the works within the accepted English canon. Experiencing no selections written by Appalachians about places and people that I knew and understood, while also being taught that I should rid myself of my Appalachian dialect and accent in order "to succeed in the real world," I apparently lost a part of my own cultural identity—an identity that I am not certain, as a young Appalachian, I even knew I had.
I did not begin my journey of self-discovery until the summer and fall of 1993 when I enrolled in two different courses: one, the Clemson Summer Writing Institute which was affiliated with the National Writing Project; the other, "Composing Southern Stories in Southern Classrooms," a contract course offered by Clemson to the teachers of Greenville County the following fall. The professor for both courses was Dr. Bea Naff, who structured these classes as writing workshops much like the Nancie Atwell (1988) model. It seems strange now to realize that, although I had once attempted to use that same model in my own classroom, I had never been a participant in such a workshop with my own peers.
As the weeks progressed in her classes, I discovered that I was writing again and loving the experience. Using my freedom to select the materials that I could read, I began to discover Appalachian literature for the first time. The first selections that I read, "Amazing Grace," a short story by William Hoffman, and Fair and Tender Ladies, a novel by Lee Smith, were suggested to me by Dr. Naff. Within the pages of those works, I found my home among the mountains pictured there, I heard the voices of my ancestors speaking in the words of the characters, and I sensed an awakening of my own desire to compose similar stories. I first returned to my own writing by composing a short story about a young girl in Appalachia and sharing it with my writing group during the summer. By the fall, however, it was the poetry of the language that was drawing me home, leading me on a journey of the heart.
Though I enjoyed the Appalachian prose, it was the poetry written by various Appalachian authors that enabled me to fashion a new self. In a review of the poetry of Robert Morgan, a Professor of English at Cornell University who grew up on a small farm located in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Zirconia, North Carolina, P. H. Liotta points out that "much of his work lies in that strange territory we used to call the human heart: he never fails to confirm a common human frailty, a need for order in the chaos of memory." That concept of the need for order in the chaos of memory can definitely be seen throughout Morgan's work as he attempts to deal with and draw from the ideas of kinship between people, their land, and the natural world in which they find themselves engaged in a struggle for survival.
This struggle involves a breaking out, a springing forth of oppressed/repressed emotions. The reader often finds in Morgan's poetry this image of water struggling to burst into the light from the dark, bubbling to the surface from the place where it had been forced to run underground. When the conditions are right, it bubbles up, much like freshwater issued from a newly cleaned artesian spring.
That image of a water bubbling forth from one's own backyard is also present in the work of another Appalachian poet, Jeff Daniel Marion. In his poem "Ebbing and Flowing Spring," he describes an experience of coming back to an old home place where he "almost expects to find the dipper gourd hung there by the latch" where it was always kept hidden in "the white-washed shed, now a springhouse of the cool darkness." He recalls the stories, seeds, and seasons associated with this old spring that he clears out and then listens as the water rises from a trickle once called "the spring of many risings" many moons before by a Cherokee chief who once lived near its waters. Marion writes,
Having cleaned out a spring on my family's property for numerous years, I knew the imagery. Suddenly, I wanted to go home to drink anew from my own spring, now long since neglected, its cool, refreshing water replaced by the modern tap water, which often tasted artificial and chemically cleansed. Before I knew it, the water of creative emotion was bubbling through me.It's a quiet beginning
but before you know it
the water's up and around you
flowing by.
Soon, I discovered another Appalachian poet, Judy Odom, whose works were published in 1990 and who also employs the image of water waiting to be discovered. In her poem "The Diviner Choosing a Well-Site," she creates the monologue of an old Tennessean describing how he always uses a new forked cherry limb to find the site to dig a well. The old man describes how the limb works:
She concludes the poem with the old man's words as he explains to those who suggest that his use of the divining rod categorizes him as a witch: "It's just a kind of listening with your fingers./I set the music free./I don't create the song." Suddenly, I realize that there was a music in my own language and that, as I ran my fingers across the pages of Appalachian poetry, I was "listening with my fingers" for the first time. Those fingers then desired to make music of their own; thus, I started writing poetry again for the first time in years. It was almost like awakening from a deep, deep sleep.It seeks
the water
for its own green pleasure.
I can feel
the hunger
singing
in my hands.
The rod
dips down
into a stillness.
Then the water
answers
true and cold
as children's
voices calling
on a winter's night.
This image of returning home to drink cool water from our own springs and to discover ourselves is also captured by Wendell Berry, who writes in his poem "Elegy,"
Since I first began to read poetry written by Appalachians, something began bubbling up from my heart into my mind much like the clear water that emerges deep from the underground in a mountain spring, awakening our senses as we "dip and drink" -- words suggested by Marion in "Ebbing and Flowing Spring." Likewise, suddenly the lines from Fred Chappell's poem "Dipperful" made sense to me:To be at home on its native ground
the mind must go down beyond its horizon,
descend below the lightfall
on ridge and steep and valley floor
to receive the lives of the dead. It must wake
in their sleep, who wake in its dreams.
Suddenly, I began to write the words that had once been "toted fresh" by the storytellers of my family when I had drunk in "the hill" during my childhood years while sitting on the steps of my grandparents' front porches in Appalachia just at the edge of dark and listening to their stories. Nightfall had always ended those marvelous moments, but now, I was awakening to the dawning of a new day—a day when I would begin, much as Georgia Heard has suggested, to find a way to "write" myself home."Help yourself to a drink, it's toted fresh."
My hand rose in the water to meet my hand
And in its shadow his sweet spring appeared.
Mice-grains swarmed out of the hill-womb,
A crawfish trailed a funnel of yellow sand.
I drank the hill. A scatter of sand-motes sparkled
When I launched the gourd's blind belly back in the bucket,
And on my tongue the green hill sprouted ferns.
Unfortunately, we do not have enough English teachers in our schools who will provide their students with the opportunity for such journeys of self-discovery as the one that began for me in Dr. Naff's classroom that summer in 1993. Perhaps, one of the most significant parts of this journey of self-discovery has been my own realization that I can and should provide such opportunities for my own students to discover and share their stories—to mine for the treasured stories that have been in their own backyards all along.
As Jerrie Scott (1988) suggests, "Schools must change or modify materials so that the content includes experiences and knowledge familiar both to non-mainstream groups and mainstream groups" (31). Appalachians have been a cultural group often ignored or ridiculed by the mainstream groups in our society, which in turn had caused me to move out of my primary discourse into a secondary discourse where I could survive. The concept that where I was living and the people with whom I was living were "culturally deprived" had greatly affected my own sense of identity and creativity. Kiah (1985) writes that within each group represented in our pluralistic society where racial, cultural and social diversities abound, there still exist mutually shared experiences which can "become crucial and salient to the members of the groups as they strive to maintain and preserve that which gives them a sense of worth and self-identification" (286). Using Nancie Atwell's (1987) suggested strategies for "borrowing mode, topic/theme, and technique," student writers can borrow from the poets they read by drawing upon their memories of the old traditions while combining them with the tensions of the present day to create their compositions. Linda Blair (1991) suggests structuring units that use multiethnic works as models whereby students can use these to discover "their own strong honest voices" through the integration of their writing with their reading of literature and the composing of narratives based on their own personal experiences (25). Christine Bennett (1986, 1990), writing in her work Comprehensive Multicultural Education: Theory and Practice, also suggests that the
Bennett's claims seem very similar to Miles Myer's argument that similar changes of status, authority, and self-identity accompany any changes in literacy. He views this form of literacy as "a form of self-fashioning," which he argues has been suggested by many other researchers as well (140-141). He suggests that a translation/critical literacy needs to be adopted by English teachers who would use this knowledge to "teach students to develop confident selves with the courage to engage with difficulty" (144). One such "self-fashioning" project for English classes is the creating of a personal life history that focuses on the beliefs and the experiences of the student and suggests that English classes may be the place "where students attempt to invent a coherent story for what is otherwise unclear and uncertain" (Faigley 1992 qtd. in Myers 1996, 155).Literature and artistic achievements by one's own people provide sources of identity and pride within the individual, and sources [of] respect from others. They can help expand students' readiness for
empathy. Self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and security are necessary before people can understand and accept others with whom they may disagree. (197-98)
Maxine Greene (1993) suggests that classrooms need to be open spaces where students are allowed to tell their stories in order to construct bridges among the other students in the room. Jerome Bruner (1990, 1992) suggests that stories not only provide us with the ways to see ourselves, but also to re-create ourselves while we read and tell stories through the remembering and rewriting of our stories. The importance of the literature that we ask our students to read and analyze cannot be stressed enough. Judith Langer (1995) states in her text Envisioning Literature that
Perhaps this is exactly what happened to me as I began to discover Appalachian prose and poetry. Langer suggests that, as we build such visions from reading, we begin to "make sense of ourselves, of others, and of the world" (9). She concludes that classrooms should provide a pedagogical frame which encourage students and teachers to use "what they know better and more effectively—to voice their own ideas, to hear others in ways that push their own thinking, to be sensitive to viewpoints not necessarily their own, to think deeply and to communicate clearly" (144).Literature plays a critical role in our lives, often without our notice. It sets the scene for us to explore
both ourselves and others, to define and redefine who we are, who we might become, and how the
world might be. (5)
The Robert Morgan poem "Double Springs," written about an area in the Dark Corner, captures this same idea:
So why not allow our students to dig deep as they "mine for treasures" in our own backyards? We may just discover that beneath the surface, we are not so different after all.I used to wonder how
two springs could issue from the hill
a yard apart. Why not dig deeper
and unite their flow?
And later realized they
surfaced close from opposite
directions. . . .
Works Cited
Atwell, Nancie. In the Middle: Writing, Reading, and Learning with Adolescents. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1987.
Blair, Linda. "Developing Student Voices with Multicultural Literature." English Journal 80 (December 1991): 24-28.
Bennett, Christine I. Comprehensive Multicultural Education: Theory and Practice. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1986.
_____. Comprehensive Multicultural Education: Theory and Practice. 2d ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1990.
Berry, Wendell. The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry. Frankfort, KY: Gnomon Press, 1985.
Bruner, Jerome. The Culture of Education. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.
Faigley, Lester. Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1992. In Miles Myers Changing Our Minds: Negotiating English and Literacy. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1996.
Greene, Maxine. "The Passions of Pluralism: Multiculturalism and the Expanded Community. Educational Researcher, 22 (1) 13-18.
Heard, Georgia. Writing Toward Home: Tales and Lessons to Find Your Way. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994.
Hoffman, William. "Amazing Grace." (1978). In Growing Up in the South: An Anthology of Southern Literature. Edited by Suzanne Jones. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
Kiah, Rosalie Black. "The Black Teenager in Young Adult Novels by Award-Winning Authors." (1985). In Crossing the Mainstream: Multicultural Perspectives in Teaching Literature. Edited by Eileen I. Oliver. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1994.
Langer, Judith. Envisioning Literature: Literary Understanding and Literature Instruction. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1995.
Liotta, P.H. "Southern Literary Journal" in Robert Morgan Green River: New and Selected Poems. Hanover, NH: UP of New England and Wesleyan, 1991.
Marion, Jeff Daniel. Out in the Country, Back Home. Winston-Salem, NC: The Jackpine Press, 1976.
Morgan, Robert. Green River: New and Selected Poems. Hanover, NH: UP of New England and Wesleyan UP, 1991.
Odom, Judy. Blosom Stalk, and Vine. Bell Buckle, Tenn: Iris Press, 1990.
Oliver, Eileen Iscoff (Ed.). Crossing the Mainstream: Multicultural Perspectives inTeaching Literature. Urbana, IL: National Council of the Teachers of English, 1994.
Scott, Jerrie Cobb. "Nonmainstream Groups: Questions and Research Directions." In Counterpoint and Beyond: A Response to Becoming a Nation of Readers, edited by Jane L. Davidson, 27-32. Urbana, IL: National Council of the Teachers of English, 1988.
Smith, Lee. Fair and Tender Ladies. New York: Putnam's/Ballantine, 1990.
Catherine Cook Sepko was born and educated in the mountains of southern West Virginia where she developed her love of story and verse. After spending almost twenty years as a secondary English language arts educator, she is presently an Assistant Professor of English at North Greenville College in Tigerville, South Carolina, where she teaches composition, creative writing, world, Southern, and Appalachian literature courses. She is presently a doctoral candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at Clemson University where she is completing a dissertation entitled "Critical Literacy in an Appalachian Classroom."