In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

McCrumb, Sharyn, and Mona Walton Helper. Our Separate Days. Blacksburg , Virginia: Rowan Mountain Press, 1989. Ill pages. Paperback. $9.95. Pate, R. Franklin. The Boomerang Poems . Blacksburg, Virginia: Rowan Mountain Press, 1990. 54 pages. Paperback . $6.00. Two of the first people I met at the very first writers' conference I ever attended in 1982 were Sharyn McCrumb and Mona Helper. They were then, and are now, two of the liveliest, most interesting young authors in the region. Our Separate Days is a collection of both writers' short fiction and poetry, award-winning selections introduced by Jim Wayne Miller. All are good, but my favorites are McCrumb's "Telling the Bees" and Helper's "My Mother Wore Combat Boots/' "Telling the Bees," originally published in Appalachian Heritage, is the poignant story of Carl's misguided effort to bring his sophisticated new California bride home to the family's Tennessee cabin, to share with her his background, heritage, and love for the mountains. In the cold, stark cabin, Carl explains why he can't use four pieces of short black crepe paper to start the fire. "For mourning," he explains. "You have to tell the bees when there has been a death in the family, or else they'll leave the hive and start one somewhere else. When somebody's gone, you have to tell the bees they're not coming back." Elissa, the society girl, is horrified. "I married an engineer," she sobs. "Not a—a hillbilly." Carl agrees to leave, to shift the honeymoon to Aspen, to forever leave his land and his old life behind. And, as he goes, Carl hangs a strip of black crepe paper on the hives. Helper's poem, "My Mother Wore Combat Boots," is about the strong (and big-footed) woman ("a schoolhouse needs a bigger foundation than does an outhouse") who trudged Clay County woods with loaded four-ten hunting alongside Daddy pushed past clutching briers at blackberry picking time; She could plant a garden, identify regional trees, balance a checkbook, hold her own in an argument, occasionally beat Daddy at poker Daddy never told her even once she was beautiful, but each day returning from work He kissed her proper no matter who was looking. Since that Appalachian Writers Association meeting in 1982, Sharyn McCrumb has published an award-winning series of crime novels, won an "Edgar, ' and signed major book contracts. Mona and I are not so well-published and welltraveled , but about once a year we get together to share the close friendship we started long ago. And, now, whenever I want to visit with them, I can pull Our Separate Days down off the bookshelf and enjoy two good friends. By the time I opened Franklin Pate's book of poems about the Vietnam War, my own son had flown out to Saudi Arabia with the 101st Airborne. Circumstance made Pate's poems even more powerful, to me, but The Boomerang Poems don't need any help. These are real. Pate is a Purple Heart veteran; the "boomerang" to which he refers is the Vietnam Memorial in Wash70 ington, D.C. In his opening statement, Pate offers no dissertation on the hows or whys of Vietnam, though, and says: "I can only write about what I know, and that is a small snapshot, taken from one camera, mine." His snapshots are vivid. "On Losing the War" still sounds familiar to those of us familiar with the Vietnam era: Vietnam was a slang war. A joke of the day war. Get high before you die war; Only the dead took it seriously. CBS knew more than we did. Kent State knew more than we did And the boys from Canada are still laughing. The Kennedys are dead. Johnson is dead. Nixon does the college circuit and Reagan thinks through his wife. We were winning when I left. Pate and many others came home to "Instant Reality ;: By tour's end I was John Wayne, or Charles Manson, depending on what side you buttered your morality. I never grieved or felt sad, (the brainwashing was effective) until I was safe in San Francisco and saw what "some hippie prophet" had...

pdf