Family Pieces: Interview with Silas House

INTERVIEW Family Pieces: Interview with Silas House Marianne Worthington With a great deal of pride and enthusiasm, Silas House will tell you that he was raised in southeastern Kentucky by a close-knit, hardworking, extended family who attended the Pentecostal church "every time the door was cracked." With equal pleasure he will tell you about his ancestral scoundrels and daredevils. He points to one of the scores of family pictures adorning the walls of his home and relates that the two couples in this picture are sitting on the courthouse steps awaiting a possible indictment for some wrongdoing one of them has committed. The alleged deed is forgotten, but what Silas House likes about the picture is the attitude. The two women in the 1940s pictureHouse face the camera dead on. They are wearing pants and smoking cigarettes. Their rebellion makes him grin, and it is suddenly obvious to anyone who has read House's debut novel, Clay's Quilt, that his characters are probably composites of his own large family, who have lived in Appalachia "for as long as anyone can remember." Clay's Quilt is about a close-knit, extended family living in contemporary eastern Kentucky. The characters are ordinary, yet extraordinary ; passionate, rebellious, hard workers, harder drinkers and true believer in their connections to each other and to their particular place. Published by Algonquin Books in March, 2001, Clay's Quilt has been successfully received by critics and readers. By June, the novel entered its third printing, and reviews have appeared in national publications, including the New York Times, Southern Living, and USA Today. As a new novelist, Silas House was chosen as one of the ten best emerging writers in the south by Vanderbilt University for the Millennial Gathering of Writers; he has been awarded two Kentucky Arts Council grants and the National Society ofArts and Letters grant; and he has received four Appalachian Heritage Denny C. Plattner awards for best writing from and about Appalachia. Silas House has 15 been on a book tour for most of the spring and summer, traveling to bookstores, book-fairs, and writing workshops from Mississippi to South Carolina. His part-time job as a rural route mail carrier for the London, Kentucky, post office allows him some flexibility for travel, but the upheaval of publishing and publicizing a novel has not visibly affected his grounding in family and place. As a young married man with two small daughters, he lives just over the hill from his parents' house on God's Creek, in Spook Holler, in the small community of Lily, in Laurel County, Kentucky. Nor have the promotion activities interfered with his writing. He is hard at work on his second novel, currently titled The Parchment ofLeaves, named after a line in a James Still poem. Also about a family and set in eastern Kentucky, this novel focuses on a Cherokee woman, loosely based on House's greatgrandmother , and is set in the early 1900s. A portion of the novel was recently published in the Lexington-based Ace Weekly magazine. The following interview was conducted during a series of meetings, emails and phone calls. Our conversation started on the long car trip from Whitley County, Kentucky, to Pocahontas County, West Virginia, en route to the 2001 Appalachian Studies Association meeting, and ended at Silas House's comfortable kitchen table in June, 2001. Interview I was born in Whitley County, Kentucky, in 1971 and raised on Robinson's Creek in Laurel County. My people have been in Appalachia for as long as anyone can remember. We don't really know how long. My father's people are German-Irish, but my mother's family always claimed to be Cherokee. While researching that, I've found that we are also Melungeon. I know that's the fashionable thing to say rightnow, but it's true. My daddy was a supervisor at a fiberglass plant and my mother worked in the school cafeteria. She took that job just to be close to me when I was in school. She was pretty protective. My paternal grandfather was a farmer and a real wild man - there are some stories to tell about him...