Collaborations With Leonard

Collaborations With Leonard by Harold Branam My family and I were living near New Hope, Pennsylvania, in 1975 when I got a position as Associate Professor of English at Pikeville College, Pikeville, Kentucky. Since I had always wanted to return to Appalachia, where I had grown up as a coal miner's son, my wife and sons agreed to the move. For me, the homecoming was surrounded by all the appropriate symbols. Most of the college was located on a hill overlooking Pikeville, and from my office I could gaze directly across the town and the bend of the Big Sandy and see a little hilltop graveyard containing the remains of the patriarch Randolph McCoy, his beautiful daughter Roseanna, and other principals in the big feud. At the bottom of the hill a few doors from my home stood the old Training School, renamed the Center for Arts and History, which housed the office of Leonard Roberts, a pioneer of Appalachian folklore. Not too long before coming to Pikeville I had read an approving review of Leonard's best-known book, Sang Branch Settlers (1974), in Time magazine. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Leonard was at Pikeville, and I was even more pleasantly surprised by the friendly reception he gave me. He saw me as a "fellow sufferer," a son of Appalachia who, like him, had traveled far but returned out of homesickness and a sense of commitment, and he was happy to find such recruits. Before I left our first meeting he had asked me to help him edit Twigs, the literary magazine published by the Pikeville College Press which Leonard directed. Poet Lillie Chaffin, who had been helping him, wanted to hand over her duties to someone else. My responsibility would be to select and edit the magazine's poetry and criticism, while Leonard would handle the fiction and history. I suppose I was flattered by the offer and didn't think about the thousands of bad poems I would have to read, so I accepted. Thereby began my collaborations—and soon my wife, an artist, also became involved— with Leonard Roberts during his last years. At the time, of course, none of us realized that those were Leonard's last years. When I first met him, he was sixty-three, nearing retirement age though he would never fully retire. Despite his graying hair, he looked more like a man of fifty, healthy, strong, and vigorous, almost athletic in the way he attacked work. He was determined to record as much of Appalachia as possible. As little magazines go, Twigs was already well established—in its twelfth or thirteenth year—when I began working on it. Perhaps Twigs was started before a strong interest in Appalachian Studies developed, or perhaps its founders lacked such an interest. In any event, Twigs was not particularly identified with the Appalachian region, and its subscribers and contributors were scattered across the country . This wide circulation base had its advantages for outreach, but I was disappointed that Twigs was not doing more for Appalachia . It was not hard to convince Leonard to begin moving Twigs toward an Appalachian orientation while trying to keep the interest of our current subscribers and contributors, even though this move would put us into direct competition with our Eastern Kentucky neighbors , The Mountain Review in Whitesburg 18 and Appalachian Heritage in Pippa Passes. In retrospect, our move might not have been too wise, since the competition might have helped kill off two of these magazines eventually, although there were other more important contributing factors. At the time Leonard and I thought the move was safe because we felt that our wide circulation base enabled us to reach out with the Appalachian philosophy and make connection with people not reached by the other magazines. But the move had to be made gradually and carefully. Obviously the rest of the country— urbanized, alienated, and confused—was in dire need of Appalachian outreach, but we had to perform our missionary work with the greatest delicacy. After all, some of those poor people out there who had not been reading Wendell Berry still held to the outmoded assumption that we...