Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers (review)

Figure 1.

A toymaker, Tryon, North Carolina, 1930s. Photo by Bayard Wootten. (North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill).

I don’t know how Joyce Dyer did it. How did she manage to convince 35 women authors to write brief reflections on the importance of Appalachia in their work? Whatever means she used to elicit these essays, the result is a marvel of a book, one whose significance far exceeds the boundaries of the mountains.

In her graceful introduction Dyer explains why she did it. Because there has been a veritable explosion of Appalachian women’s writing in the second half of the twentieth century, and because that writing has largely gone unnoticed in such important books as The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995) and The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985), her primary intentions are to identify the principal Appalachian women writers working today and to celebrate that writing. Establishing a fire image that becomes a motif in her essay, she calls the Southern Highlands “ablaze with talent.”

Dyer also explains how she compiled the volume. She sent a letter of invitation to a list (though she does not reveal how large the list) of women she wished to include, asking them to describe the influences on their writing and discuss whether or not the Appalachian place they inhabited, either in memory or actuality, was important to their work. At least 35 women accepted the invitation and sent in essays remarkable in both their uniformity and diversity. Other recent books address the questions posed here, usually in the form of interviews with a handful of writers; but I know of no other book that is both so narrow in focus and so broad in participation. Though the concept is new, the format is straightforward. Dyer marches her writers down the pages in alphabetical order, introducing each with a photograph and paragraph of biographic information. The essays that follow, averaging about 5000 words and usually written specifically for this volume, all have a basic autobiographic cast but with impressively individualistic approaches.

Dyer succeeds in getting responses from some of the most prominent contemporary novelists: Lee Smith, Mary Lee Settle, Gail Godwin, Lisa Alther, and Denise Giardina. She includes Wilma Dykeman, whose distinguished 40-year career of writing fiction and nonfiction has established her as the grande dame of Appalachian literature. She publishes the words of such poets as Kay Byer, Rita Sims Quillen, and Hilda Downer. She acknowledges the presence of cultural diversity among Appalachian writers by including the “Affrilachian” writers doris diosa davenport and Nikki Giovanni and some with Native American backgrounds, such as Ellesa Clay High and Marilou Awiakta. Representing pop culture are mystery writer Sharyn McCrumb and songwriter Jean Ritchie. George Ella Lyon and Anne Shelby write, among other forms, children’s books. It is a rich mix of genres, geography, and genealogy.

The glue that gives the anthology coherence is that each of these writers has been touched in some way by the Appalachian region, either by having been born there, moved there, or even dreamed of being there. As Henry Shapiro demonstrated in his 1978 book, Appalachia on Our Mind, the region became an entity not through fact, but through fiction. Curiously enough, Joyce Dyer has never lived in the mountains, but, as she says in the introduction, “somehow I’ve never left this place I never was.” Appalachia, whether literal or mythic or both, has exerted a powerful influence on this otherwise disparate group.

The twin stereotypes of Appalachian women—young, innocent, submissive, unlettered ingenue and old, feisty, crude, unlettered crone—were challenged long before Al Capp finished his cartoons of Daisy Mae and Mammy Yokum, but this volume gives lie to those notions that still breed condescension, discrimination, and neglect. It is full of bright promise. The apt title, Bloodroot, refers to a medicinal plant...