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A Rock inthe Stream:
An Interview with Jim Wayne Miller [1936-1996]

Thomas Rain Crowe

Jim Wayne Miller was one of the principal voices for Appalachian life and literature and for the values indigenous to the region’s culture. In fact, Fred Chappell has said of him that, “If it were not for Miller, the Appalachian literary movement might have foundered before it got started.” A kind of modern-day Johnny Appleseed, Miller planted the seeds of the collective memory of the Southern mountains in university classrooms, seminars, workshops, high schools, elementary schools, public presentations, and countless journals and periodicals.

His first book of poems, Copperhead Cane, was published in 1964; his most recent volume of poems, Brier, His Book, was published by Gnomon Press. In between, there have been five other books: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same; Dialogue with a Dead Man; The Figure of Fulfillment; The Mountains Have Come Closer; Vein of Words; a long list of essays and reviews, almost twenty short stories, the editing of major poetry collections by James Still and Jesse Stuart, and two book translations of the Austrian poet Emil Lerperger. All these literary activities led to numerous awards and honors.

Miller was a native of North Turkey Creek, Leicester, Buncombe County, North Carolina. He earned a degree in English at Berea College, and a PhD in German and American Literature from Vanderbilt University. He was Professor of German Language and Literature at Western Kentucky University at Bowling Green. His priorities as an educator were specified in his essay “A Note to the Teacher”: “We must be concerned with teaching the history and culture of our different regions not for the past’s sake but for the sake of the present and future.” On the American literary tradition in general, he added, “Good poetry will deal with ordinary things… and still manage to evoke a sense of wonder, of the miraculous.” His poetic stance mirrored his resolute commitment to what he called “an ongoing Appalachian experience worthy of wonder.”

In 1989, he and I stole a few hours from a conference to engage in the following conversation.

Thomas Rain Crowe

You have more often than not been referred to as an “Appalachian writer.” I’m wondering how you feel about that label, and whether you feel that kind of literary packaging has been a hindrance in any way? Or has it proven to be of some value in the long run?

When I was a teenager and still in high school out in Buncombe County, I checked out of the library Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders. I don’t remember why—probably because the title struck me. But I can remember being delighted with it and it being much more than I had anticipated it would be in that it gave me a sense of place, a sense of belonging to a group of people who had an identity, who had a particular kind of history. And above all, I was impressed with the sections in that book that dealt with the language of the Southern Appalachian region, with the speech of “southern highlanders.” I later came to see that Kephart is very selective in his presentation of the folk speech of southern highlanders. Nevertheless, when I first read him, I recognized the speech as my language, and the language of the people I most cared about—my kinfolk and my neighbors. So there’s no doubt that Kephart’s book was an early influence.

But to answer your question more directly: I’m sure that such labels have had some effect on my work. I may simply be unaware of ways in which the term “Appalachian writer” may have limited the reception of my work. I might have a larger or wider-reaching audience if my work were not identified with Appalachia. I don’t know. I do know that I never cultivated the Appalachian label myself. But my work became associated with the region from the very first time there was any critical comment about it. Maxine Kumin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who was conducting what amounted to a poetry workshop in a regular column in The Writer, first commented critically on my poems back in 1963. She commented on them in terms of the “feeling of place” they evoked. She thought that they might have come out of the backwoods of Missouri or Arkansas. She wasn’t far off. The place I was writing about was Western North Carolina. But what she couldn’t have known, and what no one would have suspected, was that one of the poems she commented on in particular I had worked up out of a combination of my own experiences and recollections of familiar things from Western North Carolina, such as springhouses and moss growing on springhouses, but also from a little passage in the Hawthorne sketch. And I think this fact needs to be considered. I borrowed details from a Hawthorne sketch in Mosses from an Old Manse, worked them into my poem, and readers and critics were convinced they were reading “pure Appalachia.” Well, you see what an inexact term Appalachia is, if smuggled materials from 19th- century New England can rest under it!



Since this label of “Appalachian poet/writer” does exist and since it has been projected onto your work in particular, I’d like to take this subject just a little bit further by asking you, as a writer, as a mirror for the Appalachian culture, at present, just how you respond to the challenge of being a modern-day mythmaker, of inhabiting the role of “Poet as mythmaker”?



I would consider myself not so much as “mythmaker” but as someone who uses those things that are already in the tradition in one way or another. I might recombine them, I might select something from this one and combine it with something from another one. I see tradition as something that comes down through time and is altered in the process, much the way a creek rock is altered by turning over and over and over in the stream. Two hundred miles downstream that rock isn’t going to be in exactly the same shape as it was when it started out. So all these things that are handed down from individual to individual, from group to group, they’re constantly butting up against the demands of the present. And it’s right at that juncture, where the handed-down material meets the present, that’s where the interesting action is! This is so because the demands of the present will require that we take certain things out of that tradition because they seem “relevant” or “apropos” and not select others. There’s a constant process of selection emphasizing one thing over another. On a personal level, I have to say that it’s not a conscious process when I do it. I can only look back on it and see what I have done, in hindsight.

To give you a concrete example of the updating process you referred to in your question as it might relate to the idea of myth: I wanted to write something about how there is still the tendency to stereotype mountain people. But I wanted to say it in a way that would get people’s attention. I wanted to suggest, too, that a lot of mountain people are becoming aware of this tendency and, as a result, are kind of getting up on their hindlegs and resisting it. I wanted to take the notion that for so long, starting back there in the 1870s and 80s, mountain people as a group began being looked at as “some other kind of Southerner” or “someother kind of American.” I wanted to deal with the notion that too often these people have been written about by other folks and that they have not as frequently presented their own story. They have not written the script of the play that they’re in. They have simply been drafted as “actors” in this script, with someone else writing the lines.

Well, I took the Andy Griffith Show and its television continuation Mayberry RFD, where you have a mountain family, and another mountain character, Ernest T. Bass, who is always coming down into town and creating havoc by throwing rocks through windows and so forth, and I wrote a mock script of the Andy Griffith Show, a script in which the mountaineers capture the sit-com’s writers and put them in the Mayberry jail, hold them captive, and tell them what to write! So, by using the character of Ernest T. Bass, who tells the television writers what to write, I used something from the contemporary period. It suited my needs, so I used it, and I altered it in the process. I didn’t invent the Andy Griffith Show, certainly, only my particular spoof episode. The show came down time to me, tumbling like a creek rock. I picked it up and shaped it to my purposes. I don’t think myths are made consciously. But we may take something we recognize to be myth, or at least have mythical elements—a tale, a legend, or even a TV sitcom—and rework it. This is one way that what you call myths are made, the way most familiar to me. I’ve created a persona, the Brier, who is a representative Appalachian person. But he isn’t a myth; he’s a character, a kind of Appalachian Everyman.



I’d like to get back to the subject of language, more specifically, “dialect.” I am wondering about your experience with your native mountain speech, and if there is any sense of loss in not being able to speak that on a daily basis, to use that speech as a major part of what you speak and write; and if there is that sort of “grieving” process, how then do you go about recovering that “loss of language” or do you? As a person with direct ties to the mountain culture, most noticeably through language, and a teacher of languages, how do you deal with this unfortunate and residual aspect of acculturation, and how can the rest of us deal with it?



Well, the folk speech of southern Appalachia is in some ways distinctive. That is, we recognize it as being of that place and of no other place. Yet, if you really stop and examine it to see of what it really consists, you’ll see that there is really very little in it that is unique; rather, it’s the configuration of elements, the way that all these bits and pieces come together in a particular place [that makes] the configuration of Appalachian languages or “dialects” unique. But the “laws of language” that are operating in it operate in the language of folk speech everywhere: everywhere in this country and, in fact, everywhere on the globe. And it’s the spirit of it that is translatable. If we lose a particular word or phrase, we say “I don’t hear that much any more,” or “I don’t use that much myself anymore,” and “I have this feeling about it, it’s too bad.” That doesn’t mean, though, that the spirit, the technique, of that expression may not crop up somewhere else. Street language in Philadelphia or in New York City, street language is full of the same devices that we find in what we think of as quaint and colorful southern Appalachian speech.

The language of Appalachia, standard English, street talk, contemporary talk, what it was 500 years ago, what it will be 500 years from now-well, there’s a lot of commonality. It’s true that one generation, one set of circumstances, will cause a particular kind of language simply to pass away. And some of us who know it will regret it, and because of that we’ll preserve it to some extent; and yet, some of it will be lost forever. But the animating “spirit” of it won’t be necessarily lost forever if we have loved it and if it has become at some point an essential part of our language. In fact, I would be very uncomfortable with the notion that we had only one way of speaking. I would not want southern Appalachian folk speech to be my only form of utterance, simply because it would limit me. It would limit the people I could communicate with and, I think, it would limit the things I could think, feel, and express.

For instance, Icelandic has the landnam, which means the sanctification of new land by mythologizing it. It is a process the American landscape is still undergoing. The process involves something like what Frost had in mind when, in “The Gift Outright,” he declared, “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” He goes on to suggest that true possession of land involves being possessed by it. Poetry and fiction play a role in the process of landnam, and just knowing this word clarifies for me an activity I am caught up in and for which I had no single word. So I want to know as much as possible. This doesn’t mean, though, that I have to forget southern Appalachian folk speech. On the contrary, I don’t want to be deprived of it either! How people get by without the word swarp (as in “to swarp around”) is a mystery to me!

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