Reflections on Growing Up in an Appalachian Writing Family

About the time I started school, I became aware of the strangeness of my parents’ occupation, that of writers. I noticed that my mother Wilma Dykeman spent much of her day on our porch or in a chair upstairs absorbed in reading and writing while facing the mountains. The solitary nature of this preoccupation immediately struck me. But, as the months and years went by, I began to realize that it was also an occupation, that she was writing for a distant public. Much more gradually, I came to understand that her immediate family—her mother and husband in particular—were crucial in the formation of her work.

My father, with a personality which reached out to all persons and things, loved to form connections between the mountain region and the larger American society that must have influenced my mother’s ideas. He would read and write under a hanging lamp in a part of the library next to my mother’s room and often visited her to share his ideas. At lunch and dinner, on the other hand, he shared with the whole family excerpts from a motley assortment of newspaper articles and books covering every subject imaginable. He also occasionally and unexpectedly recited Shakespeare’s soliloquies and his own poetry to us in a dramatic manner. These presentations startled us and made us laugh but also, without our realizing it, aroused our curiosity and helped make the mysteries of reading and writing manifest to us.

In addition to his literary preoccupations, my father spent part of the year like a farmer, growing a variety of vegetables and fruits in his large garden. In this garden my brother and I could witness nature as it changed through the seasons. This experience was reinforced by family car trips to nearby towns but also to distant national parks and cities. On these trips we could observe an astonishing array of natural and manmade environments.

These trips tended to begin simply enough, on the interstate highways, but, especially on the return portions, included numerous side excursions on state and county roads that tried our patience since we were usually eager to return home. But our slow, all-inclusive travel enabled our mother to point out to us how man and nature could interact in the eyes of writers. She had us note and ponder, for instance, the sedge that Ellen Glasgow described in her South and the wind that permeated the West in Dorothy Scarborough’s fiction.

My brother and I also started to realize that other car trips, those that our parents took around the South without us, resulted in books and articles, although we did not read these works for some years. During the latter trips, we were left in the care of our grandmother, sometimes at her home in the woods near Asheville.

The trip of theirs I remember the best was one from which they returned late one Christmas Eve. We were worried that they would not get back before the holiday, and I had bought some greenery that boys were selling from door to door. When our parents finally arrived in the evening, we learned that they had been observing the bus boycott in Montgomery.

During the periods when our parents were away, our grandmother held our attention by reciting long narrative poems and tales and by remembering childhood friends and relatives. She and other mountain people, by providing each other with self-made entertainment such as storytelling, were able to enjoy living in the present moment and to connect themselves with larger communities of people and nature that surrounded them.

On the other hand, my grandmother’s husband, the grandfather we never knew, was described to us by my grandmother and mother as a farmer who came originally from the North and frequently read for hours in books about history. He would point out to my mother, when she was a girl, that the realms of history and geography reached even into the mountains around Asheville. Later, after our mother’s novels began to appear, my brother and I perhaps...