Wanda Fries's Blog

It’s fascinating to read that David Green, worth 4.5 billion dollars, is upset about the mandate to pay for birth control and believes that somehow an IUD covered with spermicide is against God’s will. Apparently, the company pays above minimum wage–and closes on Sundays (though the employees stock shelves on those days). As corporations go, Green seems to be about as concerned about the poor as anyone. And of course, he has the right to his beliefs. However, it’s always interesting to me how much pride we often take in our ability to follow Christ (Green believes his wealth is a sign of God’s favor and has said so) when Jesus himself put the bar for goodness at a height where the only reasonable response is humility. And it’s also interesting that we want to equate our own goodness to our ability to control what other people do.

In his response to the rich young ruler, Jesus couldn’t have been clearer in articulating the distance between wealth and virtue:

[18] A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

[19] “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good — except God alone. [20] You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’”

[21] “All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said.

[22] When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

[23] When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was a man of great wealth.

[24] Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! [25] Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

And then there is, of course, the story of the Good Samaritan, who asked no questions about the wounded stranger whose care he paid for: not, what was he doing on a road among robbers, not, what did he do to bring this upon himself.

Pretty radical. Impossible. But it’s what he said, and it’s in the Bible that Green quotes in his employee handbook and reads at staff meetings, the Bible he focuses on in a traveling display of which he is especially proud.

And it’s the kind of selflessness, alas, that most of us are incapable of. I know I am. The question becomes, can a corporation or even a nation be Christ-like? It can behave ethically, of course. But can it show the kind of radical generosity, the full measure of grace, the kind of humility that the man who healed the Roman soldier who came to arrest him, who did not fight back, who did not establish a kingdom and expressly refused an earthly kingdom as not being what he was about? After all, such a kingdom is based upon love, a love that is not puffed up, not insistent upon its way. And since we’re all like that to some extent, perhaps we should recognize it as part of our human condition, and try not to label it Christian?

I once made a student so angry with me it was a challenge to reach her the whole rest of the semester because, when we were discussing racism in the context of a Flannery O’Connor short story, she had said she was proud of being a Southerner. When I asked her why, she sputtered a bit as if I had put her on the spot (and perhaps I had) and rattled off every cliche about how Southerners all looked out for each other, put family first, and believed in God and country. Since I, too, am a Southerner who has lived in Kentucky my whole life, I felt comfortable in pressing her a bit: What about poverty? Racism? That we have higher levels of divorce than that vanguard of liberalism, Massachusetts? Don’t the statistics seem to suggest that perhaps their family values might be stronger than ours?

A thinking Southerner cannot help but feel some ambivalence about the place we love. Yes, the founders who wrote those stirring documents about equality were mostly slave owners. But only in the South did war erupt in an effort not only to sustain slavery, but to extend it, and despite all the attempts to explain affection for the Confederate flag as a desire to remember the nobler aspects of Southern culture, the truth is that even after the end of slavery, from condoning lynching to fighting the Civil Rights Movement and supporting candidates such as Strom Thurmond and George Wallace, Southerners have a sorry history of equal rights.

Opening the controversy wide again is Paula Deen. The whole Southern schtick Deen perfected, from the drawl to the platinum hair to the way she could whip up a key lime pie, made us feel as though we were in the world of Andy Griffith, with Aunt Bea in the kitchen and sweet tea on the front porch. I confess to being drawn to it, too: who wouldn’t want to have an Aunt Paula baking pies, picking out nail polish, and handing out homemade philosophy?

Unfortunately, that side of the South must also co-exist alongside the rest of its history, the history not only of slavery, but of decades of oppression and, even recently, a sense of guilty grievance among folks who, having never owned slaves (as Shelby Steele would have it) can’t quite figure out why they can’t have their Confederate flags and the Allman Brothers and Lynard Skynard or why, if all those black professionals look so lovely in their dress-up clothes, we white gals can’t throw on a hoop skirt and play Scarlet O’Hara for a wedding. But when Deen, who keeps drawling and bawling herself into a deeper hole, admitted to using a racial epithet–and more crucially, to me, said to Matt Lauer that she couldn’t be expected to know what offended people–we are once again reminded that Southerners long fought not only on the wrong side of history, but on the wrong side period.

But occasionally, we are reminded that Paula Deen’s story of the South is only one part of the story, and perhaps in obsessing over her, we are neglecting deeper, more nuanced stories that give a broader picture of the region. Last weekend at a music festival in Owensboro, I heard for the third or fourth time a group called the Carolina Chocolate Drops. In 2010, the group recorded their first CD, Genuine Negro Jig, as a trio. Drawing on traditional Piedmont string music, the band reminds lovers of bluegrass that while the fiddle may have come over with the Scotch Irish settlers, the banjo came out of Africa, and it is in blending these two instruments that we have a lovely intersection between two quintessentially American music genres: jazz and bluegrass.

Not everyone knows this story. A while back, when someone suggested the group be added to a music festival line-up, one objection was that the name of the group was racist, even though the band–all lovely young African Americans–had chosen the name itself. Others seem startled at the idea of black young people playing old-time string music, as if the only songs black musicians are permitted is what Hollywood or mainstream radio allows. Alice Walker, who admired Flannery O’Connor, wrote that one of the strengths of O’Connor’s stories is that O’Connor wrote about black characters, but not for her black characters. O’Connor wrote, Walker points out, only what she observed, and in that way, “left her characters free to inhabit another life” than the one the white writer established for them. In playing the music that they love, the Carolina Chocolate Drops are telling their own story, risking that in the process some foolish critics might accuse them of lacking authenticity, when it is the authenticity of their cultural memory that they preserve, the music of a region that has nurtured them, and which, through their own work, they are helping to shape.

And in our ambivalence about the South, white Southerners (and those who might look down on us) might do well to remember that the South has never been white, not from the beginning, and not now, and the stories of white Southerners, like Deen, are not the only stories that are being told and certainly not the only ones we should be interested in hearing. When Deen rose to celebrity and wealth, she was a caricature of the lovely, gracious Southern life that exists nowhere except in Mayberry or on vacation; now she has become a caricature of the ignorant Southerner who can’t quite get it, who still thinks the Civil War was fought over states’ rights, ignoring that the primary states’ right was the right to enslave other human beings, who can’t quite imagine any role for black Southerners but as adjuncts to her own world, who is so sure of her own purity of heart that she can’t even imagine why anyone would have a problem with her or Scarlet or having Mammy tighten up either one of their corsets for the big ball.

In hearing this wonderful band, who has grown and developed over the past three years as they have added members (on their last CD and at Owensboro, they featured a cellist), I am reminded of the cliches which permeate most of television news and most of our thinking about all kinds of issues such as race. People aren’t issues; they are people, and bless the singer/songwriters like Rhiannon Giddens who can sing June Carter’s part of “Jackson” and her own song about loving the place “where the skin I’m in/feels like it’s supposed to be.” Like the wonderful short story writer from Casey County, Kentucky, Crystal Wilkinson, Giddens has claimed her own roots: “I am a country girl/I’ve been around the world/And every place I’ve been, nothing quite like/Living in the south/Oh, honey, shut your mouth/I am a country girl.”

Maybe the last vestige of racism is paying too much attention to Paula Deen, as if she defines the South instead of (or at least more than) Crystal Wilkinson or Rhiannon Giddens. While it’s always best to know and own one’s history, history is both linear and a quilt where many patterns come together to create the whole. The best way to treat the Paula Deen story may be to ignore it in favor of other voices, and all those deeper, truer, more nuanced songs that challenge the cliches we carry around in our heads.

http://www.carolinachocolatedrops.com/band

I adored my fierce little mother, and in the days leading up to Mother’s Day I’ve been thinking about her a lot. She was a complicated person (I use fierce for a reason) and for much of my life, her advice was very fatalistic: if you don’t go near the water, you don’t need to learn to swim; if you don’t have children, you don’t have to worry about them, and they won’t disappoint you; if you don’t go to church, you don’t have to deal with hypocrites; if you don’t have friends, you can’t be betrayed by them. She also taught me that books were powerful, and even though as a child she had to sneak around to read (can you imagine?) she believed that there was nothing a person could ever want to learn that couldn’t be found in a book. She didn’t like to sign her name or give her word–and even casual gossip was beyond her, because she could never know for sure if it was true–because if she couldn’t hold up her end, she would be lying. She quit smoking in her sixties (alas, too late) because she wasn’t sure if she’d told the doctor she would or she’d try to.

She was right about so many things, and for much of her life she suffered because of it. We know looking at the news that the world can be a very painful and sad place. But she was a model of how, if we have to die, and we do, how to do it with grace and dignity. I remember that a former colleague used to think that the dying scene in Katherine Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” was contrived, but he wasn’t there at the end with my mother. Like Granny–fierce to the end–my mother “stretched herself (taut) and with all the fierceness that had carried her thus far “blew out the light.”

And at the end, I like to think I was her best friend. I didn’t always want to be. I wanted optimism and light and so many things she told me I didn’t want to know and so much–what had happened to her besides poverty and an alcoholic father–to make her bloody her palm prints with her fingernails before she would cry, to make her so fierce that I only suspected.

And I think she was glad I was different, at least most of the time. While she was right about all the if you don’ts, including if you don’t love, no one will break your heart, she knew in some part of herself, too, that if you don’t open yourself to life, there’s no joy in it either. When we are hurt, we shouldn’t become more rigidly defensive of the walls that keep us from others; we need to reach out and remember that there are probably lots of folks hurting even worse than we are. No, they aren’t all given us to love, and we don’t have to keep trying to love someone who obviously doesn’t value it, or keep shoveling dirt in the hole in the earth to China. But better to be hurt than to be dead, and not to love is to be dead in the only place it matters: in the spirit and in the heart.

A week before Easter and my baptism, Greg asked me to go swimming with him in the college’s indoor pool. I didn’t have to be baptized to join the Episcopal Church. I had already been baptized at Cherokee Valley First Baptist, when I was twelve, and while Baptists wouldn’t accept either infant baptism or anything less than total immersion under the water, the Episcopalians were happy to recognize mine.

But I wasn’t. I hadn’t really believed then. I had only gone up during a revival because it seemed to make my mother happy, and, practical girl that I was, I knew that was the only way to get both the preacher and the youth group leader to leave me alone. This time I was making a commitment for myself, of my own volition, and it seemed important to me to start from the beginning, to get it right.

It was a beautiful day outside, and the pool was deserted except for Greg and me. Greg sat on the edge near the center when I waded in, his feet dangling in the blue water. I was embarrassed at being in a swimsuit in front of him, and hurried to where the water would cover me up to my neck.

I swam laps, and then Greg joined me, and we stood resting at the center of the pool. My breasts—what there was of them, which wasn’t much—floated level with the water, but I made a conscious effort to keep from folding my arms across them. I didn’t want to be self-conscious. If Greg didn’t think of me as either girl or woman, I didn’t want to think of myself that way either.

Steam rose off the surface of the pool, and Greg trailed his fingers back and forth through the water. “Next week’s the big day. Did you tell Billy you’d already been baptized?”

I nodded.

“He didn’t try to talk you out of doing it again? He usually does. Especially since yours was a Baptist baptism. They claim to baptize just the way John did in the River of Jordan.”

I shrugged, aware of Greg’s body close to mine, the water as warm as my skin, and above the surface, my shivering shoulders. “He said it wasn’t necessary, but I told him I wanted to anyway. I want everything to be new.”

Greg smiled, looking down at me. “You’ve got goose bumps,” he said, glancing at my bare shoulders. “Are you cold?”

I shook my head, but he rubbed his palms briskly across my shoulders, anyway, then down across my upper arms and back again. “Yes, you are.” He turned me in the water until I was facing away from him. Then he pulled me into the deeper water so that my shoulders were covered. He leaned me back against him, wrapping his arms around me, resting his chin on the top of my head.

After a moment, he lifted his chin from my hair. He stepped back a little, and gave me a quarter-turn. I looked up, and he smiled at me. “Are you warmer now?

Yes.

“I’m glad you decided to be an Episcopalian. I don’t think I’d make a very good Baptist minister. All that responsibility. What if I dropped somebody into the water?” he teased. “A football player or some big rich woman with bad knees? Does that ever happen?”

I laughed. “Not that I ever heard of.”

“Hey. I know. Why don’t you show me?”

I tilted my chin up toward him, confused. “Show you what?”

“How to do a proper baptism. Let me practice on you. Who knows? Sooner or later, the Episcopalians may start dunking. I hear some charismatic Catholics already do.”

I might have thought this a strange request, had I been able to think at all, with Greg so close to me, and, of course, he was teasing me. “I can’t.” I flicked a bead of water with my index finger in the general direction of his chest. “You don’t have the proper equipment,” I said, picking up the word “proper,” which sounded bookish and vaguely British to my east Tennessee ears. How could I ever look at a boy my own age, after Greg?

His eyes widened and he grinned. “You mean I need equipment?”

I didn’t clap my hand over my mouth when it dawned on me what I had said, but I felt my face redden, hoping he wouldn’t notice. Surely I didn’t really say that? Equipment? The girls in my dorm were always giggling at my unintentional double entendres, and I was becoming aware that the only child of middle-aged parents—one a college professor—often said all sorts of things she didn’t mean to say.

But instead of teasing me again, Greg looked me straight in the eye as if this was the most serious discussion in the world. “Like what kind of equipment?” he asked. “You don’t have to do it in a creek or a river for it to count, do you?”

“No, of course not. We’re civilized Baptists. We have the baptistery built inside, on the opposite side from the choir. But you don’t even have a handkerchief.”

He just looked at me.

“To go over my mouth. To keep the water from going in my nose.”

“Oh. Well, that makes sense.” He pulled out the pockets of his swimsuit and grinned before he stuffed the nylon lining back in. “Nope. No handkerchief.” He looked around. Someone had left behind a hand towel from the work-out room at the edge of the pool. He stretched toward it. “Will this do?”

I nodded, trying not to think who had sweated on the towel, but maybe Greg had thought of that, too, because he soaked the towel in the chlorinated water and wrung it out. He was obviously still teasing me, but no one watching would know from the solemn look on our faces. The moment was strangely grave, as if we were really standing in a baptistery, a fake river bank behind us, complete with a mural painted the imagined blue of a Galilean sky, the light brown sand behind dotted here and there with palm trees.

He folded the towel, frowning in concentration, and then pulled me to the middle of the pool, where we would have more room. I followed without resisting, then took his left hand and put it on the small of my back to support me. I put the folded towel in his right, raising his arm until his hand was just over the lower half of my face.

“What do I say?” he asked, holding the towel in mid-air.

“I think you have to say, ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit’.”

When Brother Jenkins at Cherokee Valley had baptized me, at the last minute, under the blue water, I had opened my mouth to protest. Even with a handkerchief and Brother Jenkins’ big hand covering my face, I had come up water-logged and sputtering, not transported to another realm with Jesus, but humiliated, my body willful and stubborn, resisting even when I thought I had made up my mind.

But when Greg tipped me back, I cupped his hand in both of mine, helping him to hold the towel over my face. When my head disappeared under the warm water, my feet lifted, and I gave myself up to him, to the water and the spirit, eyes closed, floating motionless in his arms until he was ready to let me go.

He set me back upright. He looked at me for a long time without saying anything. He tucked my wet hair behind my ears and cradled my head for a moment between his hands. Thumbs under my chin, he lifted my face up. “It’s too bad you’re not a little older,” he said, so softly I almost didn’t hear him.

“Why?” I asked, and since I wasn’t breathing, couldn’t breathe, I thought it quite possible I hadn’t spoken at all.

He kissed me on the forehead and then pulled me to him, his arms around my waist, and I rested my cheek against his chest. “Because if you were,” he said, “I think I’d have to marry you.”

I take my place in line for communion, looking at the plain cross behind the altar. I watch Greg move behind the altar rail, placing the host in the hands of each member of his congregation, laying his own hand in blessing on Mary Thompson’s baby’s head. As Mary reaches up, one-handed, to receive, the baby snuggles deeper into her arms. Aching with loneliness, I watch my husband move down the line to each kneeling parishioner, until he all but disappears completely, hidden behind Aileen Harris’s big straw hat.

When Aileen rises to go out the side door and return to her pew, Greg makes his way again to his left, to the beginning of the line. The body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven. The body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven. The same words over and over, the same faces week after week. I never know, from one day to another, what I believe theologically—I’m enough my father’s daughter that I can never be totally free of skepticism—but I have never had one moment’s hesitation about the real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It’s as if my bent toward mysticism and my Dad’s science are for the moment in total harmony.

Even Dad, when I had tried to explain it, on one of those long Sunday afternoons before he went into the hospital for the last time, had shrugged and said, “Who’s to say if or how it works? We do know that matter is never created or destroyed. As long as people don’t use religion to beat other people into submission, I guess there’s no harm in it.”

And even if this is all that’s going on—that I long to feel connected to something larger than myself—receiving communion has always made church worth it for me. At the moment when the host is placed on my tongue, when the wine is warm in my throat, I don’t have any doubts about anything. I am part of the body of Christ, partaking of the bread of heaven, and I’m part of Greg, too.

But today, I am full of doubt, and suddenly, watching Greg make his way from one parishioner to the next, I realize that even after all these years, I still don’t have a clue what he’s thinking or who he is. There are weeks when he doesn’t touch me, and even when we do make love, he turns me around, embracing me from behind as if he’s afraid to let me see his face.

I don’t want a priest; I want a husband, and I want to believe, despite his own certainty that life begins at birth and ends at the grave, that my father is still alive, even if in some altered state. But maybe Dad was right all along—faith is all just wishful thinking, hope born of the fear of letting go. We invent it all. We can’t even understand each other, let alone God. We make God in our own image, he said, and then try to convince ourselves it’s the other way around.

And suddenly, I am afraid, so afraid, that he’s right. This is all I can be sure of—my mother is at Good Shepherd, her brain shutting down like a series of programs closing prior to turning off a computer, and my father is in his grave.

Once inside the fallen angel sweeps death into the hall—

This broken-winged creature that wants to take it all—

He feeds on fear and trembling, thinks their weakness makes him strong—

But at the end there’s only silence and he stands alone—

Did he imagine retribution, want the favor of the Lord?

What shame or dream of evil moved the hand that bore the sword?

The rough beast taken root inside him, what constellation could reveal

The dark intransigence of purpose that wants nothing but to kill?

Like the horseman he came riding, an apocalypse of rage—

This fallen, wounded creature beyond tears and beyond faith

To rob the thing most precious, to leave the world in flames—

But once the bullet leaves the gun, no recalling it again—

And at the gates of hell, Rachel weeping for her children—

Will he find Rachel, weeping for her children?

The fix is not in—

The tongue not neutered

reproduces it all: the ego

leaks, gaseous need hissing

past the patch, the synapses

gape wide, the dim spark, the

dizzy whoosh of cars on

the highway, am I flying

too fast, or am I standing still?

Affix the stamp anyway, you

don’t even have to lick them

anymore, and if the address smears,

doesn’t it count, the good intention?

Who can pay it anyway, all the debts

you owe?

I do. I confess it. I borrow your stories. (Okay, maybe I steal them, I’m a thief of stories.) Sometimes I ask first (if I remember who told a story first). But when I take bits of dialogue and plot, if I’m doing my job, I transform them, the way quilt makers used to take old clothes and make a new quilt: a patch of this, a patch of that, around the theme of homecoming or nature, or a wedding. If you were to see the quilt–say, a print with blue cornflowers or worn corduroy–the cloth might seem familiar. Or you might even remember, yes, I remember that blouse and a kiss and a long ago summer day. If I do it right, you might remember it even if you never owned such a garment and the long ago kiss happened in autumn. It’s all just a story anyway, a life lived, all the same wonderful and terrifying story, world without end, amen.

Be gentle with your writer friends. We only have the material of our lives and the books and dreams and bits of dialogue that intersect it. And if a bit of the plot line happened to you, maybe it really did happen to someone else–even if in a dream–in just that very same way.

Bone Fire

The line drawn in ashes. In water.

In sand. Thinner than a filament

forked like a tongue of flame—

Love is warm. Hate

is warmer. Take the poker.

Stir up the fire. Feed it

with fuel, the flesh of

the forsaken, the bellows

the exhalation of your breath

in prayer— Sing.

Feed the fire whatever

it demands. Saints in their

white robes, alight with

their longing. Heretics broken

and lunatic, unearthly and calm.

Your children past swaddling,

laid on the altar, for what

can Abraham deny His God?

Take census of the living, collect

the tithes. The dead are numberless.

When they are at rest, dig them

to make room, more room for

more dead. The god at the bone

fire has a name, but we

do not dare speak it.

From his loins, demons

burst forth, dancing

like mummers, children

in a circle swirling like ashes

fluttering down and down.

In the old earth, the dead lie

barren and bleached, and wrapped

in their shrouds wait the new dead—

There was Adam and Cain

at the beginning. Now? Too many

to count, too many to name—

The Story Behind Ash Grove by Wanda Fries

My family left Harlan County, Kentucky, when I was very young.  Both my grandfathers were miners, and my father had no intention of following them into the drudgery of 36-to-48-inch seams of coal.  Instead, as part of what I now realize was a massive out-migration of families from the region in the fifties, my father moved us north.  He went from one factory job to another, struggling to make a living, while the hills and hollows of his childhood both repelled and beckoned him.

When I was in the third grade, he moved us back to Kentucky for good.  In the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, he supported a wife and six children with construction and factory work, and, part-time, as a Baptist minister.  One of my first writing experiences was in high school, as typist and editor for my father’s book about the last days that he self-published and gave away as a radio evangelist.

My father was not able to go to high school, but it was his influence, most of all, that made me a writer.  He loved to read, and though we could not afford to buy books, he flagged the bookmobile down, and later, took me regularly to the public library.  He was also a gifted orator, whose preaching filled my childhood with the rich cadences of the King James Bible.  My father taught me that language had rhythms just as beautiful as the music he played on his Gibson guitar.  When he spoke of the sufferings of Jesus, it was in the voice of someone who had seen suffering himself.  The preacher in my novel has my father’s talents, but not his restless questioning or his eventual crisis of faith.

While none of my grandparents had much of a formal education, my father’s mother, though she only went to the third grade, had the makings of a memoirist; she kept a journal in wide-lined, newsprint tablets like the ones children used to use in the first grade when they were learning to write.  When I was little, she told me ghost stories for the truth. Years later she scolded me when I suggested she had only made them up; she considered this tantamount to an accusation of lying.

My mother’s parents lived in a dark hollow in Harlan, in what was left of a string of coal camp houses stitched precariously into the hillside.  I remember trips to visit them as depressing and claustrophobic.  My grandmother walked with crutches—she had lost a leg in a logging accident before my mother was even born.  My grandfather, a still, shadowy figure, was tall and dark like his Cherokee mother.  He was fiercely loyal to the union. Once I remember a man coming by their home during supper with campaign literature, urging my grandfather to vote to re-elect Tony Boyle as president of the United Mine Workers of America.  My grandfather never had the chance; in January of 1970, when I was fifteen, Boyle’s challenger Joseph Yablonski was murdered, along with his wife and daughter.  Five years later, Tony Boyle was convicted of ordering Yablonski’s death.

I knew my grandfather had been an alcoholic, but had stopped drinking because of diabetes (he called it “bad sugar”).  He had not been a gentle drunk. Once, when my mother was a child and my grandfather’s temper flared into physical violence, my grandmother had him arrested.  Over the years, when my mother told this story, usually through tears, it was clear her allegiance lay firmly with her father, who, she said, had gone to work in the mines at the age of ten and couldn’t help drinking.  She resented my grandmother for calling the sheriff, for the betrayal, not only of my grandfather, but an unspoken family code.

I suppose I began Ash Grove as a way of puzzling out the mystery of what I considered my mother’s misplaced compassion and loyalty.  It was from a photograph of my mother as a child, her face turned slightly aside, as though she is afraid of what the camera might see if she looks directly into the lens, that I discovered the character of Deana, another dark-haired girl with brown eyes full of heartbreak and hope.

But I was also interested in other issues—miners preyed upon by corrupt union officials in bed with the companies, the gulf between the wealthy and the poor, the difficulty of maintaining faith in a ruthless world, the ways that other people disappoint us, and the ways we disappoint ourselves.

As a writer, I have found that I am not so much a memoirist as a scavenger of stories. When I found a husband, as fate would have it, I married a geologist who moved me straight back to Eastern Kentucky, where he did prospecting and reclamation for a coal company.  Most of what I know about men like Cleave comes from bits and pieces of stories my husband brought home, especially the graft and corruption between mine owners, union officials, and politicians.  Ironically, after being released from prison, the union accountant convicted of complicity in the Yablonski murders moved into a house across the road from our first home.  I still remember the white glare of his tee shirt as he sat on his front porch in the moonlight, blowing cigarette smoke into the dark.

It was also from my husband that I heard the story of a coal operator who, to avoid divorce and possible bankruptcy, had supposedly blown up his wife in car.  Like Cleave in Ash Grove, he was never formally charged, and, for all I know, was an innocent victim of circumstance and rumors fed by jealousy and boredom. Cleave, on the other hand, inhabits the fictional world of the imagination.

Later, from my students—first as a high school teacher in Eastern Kentucky and then at a community college—I heard other heart-breaking stories of family violence and despair.

Ash Grove is not autobiographical, though it is based on my own experiences and the experiences I have been able to piece together from the stories I have observed and heard.  My mother’s unwavering resolve to defend and love a father who damaged her in ways she has never admitted or understood may have led me to write Ash Grove. But in trying to weave together a story about the filaments of fear and resentment, mercy and love that bind us one to another, I chose fiction, not biography or history, because, for me, the literal truth is never as interesting as the bewildering truth of the heart.

Thanks to my friend Eugenia Johnson, I now know that my friend Shirley Anders died in 1994. What a brilliant writer.

http://www.uwfox.uwc.edu/aluminations/archives/Spring1997.pdf