Rivendell
A Brier Revisiting His Roots
I find myself returning. Like countless others, my story of Appalachia is defined by migration, by not-being in the mountains, by elsewhere. I grew up in the zinc-factory town of Spelter, West Virginia. When it came time for college, the mountains of western North Carolina and the pastoral campus of Warren Wilson College felt like home. I’ve since moved north, first to Vermont and now to Michigan, where I am teaching writing and literature at a small liberal arts college. For the first time in my life, I inhabit a landscape without the blue distance of ridges. To be among mountains, I must drive eight hours south, which is precisely where I find myself now, bound for Asheville on a muggy afternoon along I-26. When I reach Sam’s Gap, the air turns fragrant, and I roll down the windows. At that elevation, pockets of cooler air hang rags of mist like wash on the line over the valleys to either side. My car, a four-cylinder diesel, lags up the grades of this new and contentious stretch of interstate, affording me time to scan the mountains and remember myself back into the landscape.
Occupied with what it means to come home as a visitor, I recall some seemingly contradictory lines, written by two fellow West Virginians, that have found their way into this issue of Rivendell. In his poem, “Mountaintop Removal, Wallace Stevens, My Son Walt, West Virginia,” James Harms gives voice to what might be a certain motivation for migration:
[…] in mountainsides sealed from without, roots of hardwood twined with miners, their ghosts, even the darkness gone, for kin, for cousins, for carrying on. It’s never enough. Just being here. While in her poem, “Caving,” Maggie Anderson identifies a different rationale in those instincts that draw us away: Some journeys have as their reason: coming back.
Between these lines lay the topography and culture of the southern highlands, the physical and figurative landscapes that still call me home. Leaving Appalachia and the ineluctable returning (through imaginative and physical travel) has been a shaping influence in my own life; it has also, in powerful ways, formed the literature of the region and this particular issue of Rivendell.
As with earlier issues of the journal, this one is informed by literary geography. Many fine anthologies of “Appalachian literature” already exist, so for this fourth issue we’ve turned our primary focus towards writers and artists in Asheville’s immediate vicinity. At the center spread, you’ll find a sort of urban map: photos and a dispatch by Scott Latimore, who zeroes in on one particular block in Asheville. Placed around this is our feature on Asheville and its poets. The issue is loosely framed by Buncombe County landmarks; an interview with and poems by Jim Wayne Miller appear early in the journal, followed by a critical essay about Miller’s collection, The Brier Poems. Photographs of Black Mountain College by Jonathan Williams, his own poems, and a nod to the now-defunct Black Mountain Review appear towards the back.
The journal covers a broader territory, as well. From the corner of Merrimon and Orange, the works collected here broadcast outward in concentric circles to include writers whose lives and work range beyond the particular confines of Asheville and the Great Smokies but whose voices are crucial to the literature of southern Appalachia: Maggie Anderson, Jonathan Greene, Irene McKinney, Robert Morgan, Betsy Sholl, R.T. Smith, Jackson Wheeler, and Charles Wright among them.
At the end of his new book, Circling Home, John Lane writes that “environmental historians and the eco-critics often talk about the layered history of a particular place. Recently, GIS technology has taken this idea even further, producing actual layered models of space and time in which you can add or subtract any information set you choose—topography, population, geology, plant life, industry, school districts, voting records, etc.” It’s our hope that this issue of Rivendell serves as a layered map of the region, a place where the rivers of tradition are well-stocked and where emerging voices take hold in good soil. Where cities thrive, where the highways yield to dirt roads, and where the complicated nature of what it means to live in and love this place reveals itself.
Ryan Walsh« Back to Excerpts