This Side of the Mountain

This Side of the Mountain James Gage In the maiden issue of Appalachian Heritage (Winter 1973), Albert Stewart recalled his first visit to James Still's home on Dead Mare Branch, in Knott County, Kentucky: About a year after James Still resigned as librarian at Hindman Settlement School and moved to Dead Mare on Burgey's Branch of Little Carr Creek to spend his time in writing and pastoral living, I made my first visit there, walking the fifteen or more miles across country from my home on Ball's Fork of Troublesome Creek. ... Although it was not uncustomary for one in the hills to decide on the whim of a moment to go take a night with a friend or kin, or ... to just "happen by," as Robert Frost's characters sometimes do, it was not customary to visit a stranger out of curiosity—although this, too, was often done. So, if some pattern of friendship based on common interests and sustained by intermittent correspondence and visits had not been established long before, I would never have made that journey to Dead Mare—and someone else would be writing this paper ("At Home with James Still on Dead Mare," 37). But there were the common interests of the hills and community and books and poetry. And there was correspondence. Albert Stewart and James Still first met during the summer of 1932, when Still came to the Hindman Settlement School as a volunteer recreation worker and Stewart was home for vacation following his first year of college. Subsequently, the two "kept running into each other as observers wherever the human comedy or tragedy gathered itself about its rituals and ceremonies—at funeral meetings on distant hilltops, at sorghum stir-offs, court days, elections and the like. ... I recall one autumn we met on Ball's Fork and simply walked along the fringes of the crowd and talked. And this became a kind of pattern, too. ... During the summers or while I was away in school again, there would be occasional letters or cards from such places as Breadloaf, Yaddo, Peterborough, or Florida." James Still often signed his letters to Al Stewart with the name "Godey Spurlock," after a character in his fiction, and Al Stewart developed his own persona, Guvas Coomer (Cover). Now, Guvas and Godey are gone. Albert Stewart died on April 1, in Hindman, Kentucky. He was eighty-six. James Still died in Hindman, Kentucky, on April 28. He was ninety-four. Much has been written about the poetry and fiction of James Still, and more scholarship is sure to come. When Stewart and Still first met, Still had already been published in the Atlantic Monthly. By the time Stewart trekked across the ridges to visit that first time on Dead Mare, Hounds on the Mountain had been published, and River of Earth was taking shape. But Stewart went on to become a significant poet himself and to have major influence in the Appalachian Region as a citizen, teacher, activist and editor. After Albert Stewart's mother died, when he was five, he was sent to live at the Hindman Settlement School, where teacher and novelist Lucy Furman came to have profound influence on his life. He was a 1936 graduate of Berea College in biology and English, both of which he taught for a number of years at high schools in Kentucky and Virginia, and he earned a master's degree in English from the University of Kentucky. Stewart served as a naval officer in the South Pacific during World War II, and he later taught writing and literature at the University of Kentucky, Morehead State University and Alice Lloyd College. Always humble about his own literary efforts, Al Stewart was a major encouragement to writers and other artists from the Appalachian Region. He founded a writers' workshop at Morehead State University and the Appalachian Writers' Workshop at Eastern Kentucky's Hindman Settlement School. In 1973, with a grant from the National Endowment to the Arts, he founded this magazine, Appalachian Heritage, at Alice Lloyd College in Pippa Passes, Kentucky. "So much has been written about Appalachia," he wrote in the first issue of Appalachian Heritage, "so...