Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers

Letter from a Poet in West Virginia

LLEWELLYN MCKERNAN A transplanted Appalachian from Arkansas, Llewellyn McKernan (b. 1941) lives on a rural route in West Virginia and teaches part-time at Marshall University. She received a B.A. in English from Hendrix College, an M.A. in English from the University of Arkansas, and an M.A. in creative writing from Brown University. She is a poet and children's book writer, author of Short and Simple Annals: Poems about Appalachia (1983), More Songs o/Gladness (1987), BirdAlphabet (1988), Many Wtzters: Poemsfrom west Virginia (1993), This Is the Day (1994), and This Is the Night (1994). McKernan has received numerous grants and awards from various West Virginia arts agencies, as well as from Artemis Magazine, Modus Operandi, Poets & Writers, and the Chester H . Jones Foundation. Her work has appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Appalachian Journal , Southern Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Laurel Review, Grab-A-Nickel, and Now and Then, as well as in many anthologies. * * * Letterfrom a Poet in Uiest Virginia Dear Reader, Caught off guard by the blues this afternoon, I recover by crooning a few notes on poetry in these words I write to you. Lonely, alone, I listen with an attentive ear to the sounds in the small mountain holler where I live. Will you listen, too-to the black walnuts that thud on my lawn, to the birdsong that threads the trees topping the hill behind my home (it slopes down to my sprawling brown house in a coat of many colors: green grass, white Queen Anne's lace, goldenrod, amethyst thistles-some of them in my herb garden). Except for my study, where an air conditioner hums and computer keys play my finger tunes, all the rooms are silent. My husband is gone, working in his office at Marshall University, where he doubles as English professor and professional poet. Our daughter, Katie, has been gone-at first for five years as a Marshall University student in Huntington, and now even farther away as a schoolteacher in Charlotte, North Carolina. But being alone is all right. I share my loneliness with you, the reader, as I've always shared my poetry. Even as a child, when I lived in the country in southern Arkansas-with no friends nearby and with family members that often seemed distant and reserved-thoughts and feelings bubbled inside me that I dared to put on paper by imagining a reader whose empathetic ear was eager to be filled with what I had to say. Faith in such a reader is what gave me the courage to start on my writing journey, and finding many such readers in West Virginia (and other Appalachian states) has kept me writing and publishing poetry for almost twenty-five years. It was like finding family members who finally listened to me. That's what every writer needs, and I found it by living and working in West Virginia. Sometimes these readers have provided financial support. For example, those at theWestVirginia Humanities Council in 1983 who funded the printing and distribution of Short and Simple Annals, my first book ofAppalachian poems (which made available to the region work I'd produced throughout the seventies). And those at the West Virginia Commission on the Arts who around the same time awarded me a literary fellowship whose monies meant a whole year spent just drafting poems and ideas for poems, ones that I worked on throughout the eight- Letterfrom a Poet 189 ies (many of which appeared in literary magazines and Many Wflters, my second book ofAppalachian poems, published in 1993). I am profoundly grateful for these two decades ofwork, whose cornerstone was reader support on the state level. Awards from other readers came at moments in my life when I was discouraged and needed hard evidence that my work had found an appreciative audience. Like those in the 1978 Tri-State Author's Council who named me one of their Regional Authors ofthe Year. Those at the Cabell County Library in Huntington who sponsored my successful 1984 application to Poets & Writers, a national organization that funds local readings. Those directing reading series who called to schedule my appearance throughout Appalachia-from Lexington, Kentucky, to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to Highlander, Tennessee, to Richmond, Virginia . At these places and others audiences quenched my writer's thirst with the cup ofkindness that took the small words ofmy poems and made them overflow with their kinship of...