Brier Country: Stories from Blue Valley by Elaine Fowler Palencia (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS OPINIONS AND REVIEWS Elaine Fowler Palencia. Brier Country: Stories from Blue Valley. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. 165 pages, $17.95 paper. In 1993, during one of his many lectures on Appalachian literature, Jim Wayne Miller encouraged his audience to compare the new short stories collected in Chris Offutt's Kentucky Straight to those in Elaine Fowler Palencia's Small Caucasian Woman. Stories in both collections were located in similar Appalachian communities, based on the authors' hometowns near Morehead in Rowan County, Kentucky. Although characters in both collections used the term "Hidy" to greet one another, that is where their similarities ended. With his nucleus of menacing forces charging the dark and violent ways of the men who live on the ridgetops and in the hollers of his fictional community, Offutt created a wake of literary controversy among his Appalachian readers. Meanwhile, Palencia, like her stories, remained quietly committed to her fictional community of "Blue Valley, the county seat of Moore county in eastern Kentucky," where "[bjehind every story whispers another story." Picking up where Small Caucasian Woman left off, Palencia resumes her short story cycle in this new collection. As the epigraph explains, Brier Country takes its title from Jim Wayne Miller's persona, Brier, and Miller's poem "The Country of Conscience": "A land and people finds it has a voice, / discovers a tongue to say itself. ..." At the heart of these sixteen new stories are the carefully drawn characters who inhabit sleepy Blue Valley and the discoveries of their undeniable connections to their place and to one another. Brier Country is about what happens to people when they bump into one another in a small town. "The Shoe Woman: is an epistolary exchange between two aging southern belles. The transplanted Julia Bone teaches English at Blue Valley College and delights in "finding bits of local eastern Kentucky color" for her friend's amusement. Julia Bone abhors the local people but crashes head first into their lives through a series of encounters with an illiterate woman who is wearing Julia's cast off "blue and white spectator pumps, the ones [she] ruined at President Gray's lawn party." The encounters mark Julia irrevocably. These outsider/insider crashes provide the basis for much of the conflict in these stories. In "The Long-Haired Dictionary" a professor from the north (on a one66 year appointment in Blue Valley, having been denied tenure at U. Mass. because halfway "through the book he was writing on Virginia Woolf, he had discovered that he had nothing to say.,") is romantically involved with, according to him, the only intelligent, cultured local woman around. But their culture-clashes only reinforce the stereotypes held by the "long-haired" professor. He asks himself, "Did he want to spend another year in a place where he couldn't even listen to NPR? The hills blocked the reception." But the best example of culture clashes occurs in the story titled "Briers," told in the voice of the brambles, the briers, which encircle the old Forrester farm. This narration is both a tribute to and a twist on Miller's Brier that readers will find engaging. Mr. and Mrs. Forrester, recurring characters in both Small Caucasian Woman and this collection, had raised their family on the farm, but moved away in old age to live with their daughter Dreama. When a young couple comes "in a shiny new car " to rent the Forrester farm for a year, the briers quickly observe that the "new people were wrong for us. We could tell by their smell, a smell of flowers killed in moonshine. We could tell by their soft hands." The man intends to write his book "about getting away from it all in a forgotten corner of Appalachia," and to learn to play a dulcimer he orders from New York which arrives "bright and shiny like it had been dipped in honey." The woman is a mean-spirited version of Lisa Douglas in Green Acres, another twist on the Brier theme Miller would have appreciated. "God, " she wails, "where am I going to get arugula?" The briers watch and grow, creeping toward the couple. "We tolerated...