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Hindman Writers' Workshop: Confirming a Community
- Appalachian Heritage
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Volume 25, Number 4, Fall 1997
- pp. 18-23
- 10.1353/aph.1997.0004
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Hindman Writers' Workshop: Confirming a Community_____________ Leatha Kendrick I first heard Jim Wayne Miller lecture on Appalachian literature at Hindman in 1987. He spoke with zest and with a preacher's conviction, nailing you to the chair with the intensity ofhis gaze and the timbre ofhis voice. From time to time he adopted the persona ofthe Brier-a colloquially articulate spokesman for the changing cultural truths ofAppalachia. At the time I was needing to be led out ofthe brier patch ofmy own illusions about place and identity, about literature and poetry. I had come to the Appalachian Writers' Workshop at Hindman as I had come to Eastern Kentucky-an "outsider," a flatland, "brought-on bride," but I was never once made to feel a stranger by the people ofthe workshop. Part ofwhat Hindman did for me was to deconstruct an attitude. Nothing in my academic background or training for a master's degree in English had prepared me to find "important" writing (real literature) in the mountains. What I found at Hindman in the dizzying heat and thick mountain air was world-class scholarship and passionate teaching. Mike Mullins, director of the conference and of the Settlement School at Hindman, called it "that sweaty little workshop" (there was no air conditioning in the buildings back then), but the heat only intensified our focus as we listened hard above the drone of the fans and talked way into the night in the cooling air. The intellectual energy ofthe workshop leaders, Leatha Kendrick teaches school in Eastern Kentucky and is associated with theHindman SettlementSchool. She wason thestaffofthe Writers' Workshop at Hindman this summer. 18 their clarity ofcommitment to the life ofwords, their generous nurturing were beyond anything I had known atthe university-and JimWayne Miller exemplified all these. In lectures and readings, these teachers reveled in their brier patch, and with joyfully solemn self-irony and humor followed the lead ofthe Brier, celebrating the place they loved and its stories as their rightful heirship-finding in them metaphor, and not mere "material." Jim Wayne Miller's spellbinding, scholarly, witty, funny lectures on Appalachian literature-what I came to know as his "road show"-were a highlight of the workshop. They made all of us see what we had here. He introduced us to tales and novels and jokes, published and unpublished. He gave out bibliographies that detailed the range and breadth ofwritings from and about the Southern mountains. He showed us from whence these writings sprang, and what their tendencies were, placing them in the context ofthe whole ofAmerican literature (which is really the history of American life and thought). Suddenly the hillbilly stereotypes made sense. Seeing the function that these "stock characters" associated with the hills served for the American psyche as a whole helped us accept their existence and thus freed us as writers to see the positive qualities ofa literature rooted to place. Jim Wayne had an especially clear sense of the importance of James Still's poetry and fiction. He realized that the real achievement ofStill's work was the way it transmuted location with "a vision both local and universaP'-just as stories by Chekhov and all great writers transcend place and time. Still's work was the perfect illustration of one ofJim Wayne's favorite sayings: "All literature is local somewhere." Writing essays about Still and introductions to his poetry, Jim Wayne was instrumental in bringing James Still's literary achievement back into focus for the scholarlyworld. But Jim Wayne was not only literary critic and colleague to James Still, he also was Still's friend and traveling companion on Odysseys to Europe and Central America. Though his critical writing about Still and others was (and will remain) important, it was Jim Wayne's lectures that almost single-handedly spread the idea ofa body ofliterature that could be called "Appalachian" to audiences that might neverhave read anything by Cratis Williams or Jack Higgsor even by Jim Wayne himself. Jim Wayne went to schools, library meetings , writers' conferences, teachers' workshops-anywhere he was asked almost . He was unstintingly generous with his time. Meanwhile, he was (as Mike Mullins said, year in and year out) the "heart and...