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8 Here, There, Where David Huddle’s Appalachian Virginia After all, the great majority of people are destined to be, in some sense, provincials—and so why not make them good provincials, not provincials by prejudice, but knowing something about their own province for good or for bad, and, therefore, better able to function also as citizens of the world? George Stewart, “The Regional Approach to Literature” Much as that mountain culture along the New River near a village called Ivanhoe in southwest Virginia has and does trouble(d) him, David Huddle can’t seem to help but return to it again and again in his work, repeatedly conjuring up that small portion of hilly rural Virginia in print using a number of fictionalized names, including, most recently, Glory River, the title of a 2008 volume of poems which very well may prove his best collection of verse—perhaps his best book altogether—through the first decade of the twenty-first century. “Professor Nelson can’t get free of Stevens Creek, Virginia,” (La 1) declares the narrator in the first line of Huddle’s second novel, La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl. This utterance ascribes yet another fictional name to the same region of Virginia explored in Huddle’s other works, while the phrase “can’t get free” suggests the protagonist’s binding fate—-a debilitating psychological prison sentence, at its worst, a muse’s blessing, at best—is true enough for Professor Nelson’s creator as well. And is this not as it should be, especially for writers? Much as we yearn to escape our formative places, occasionally fooling ourselves into believing we have succeeded , they surface from time to time, or, to regionalize a cliché, come back to haint us in ways so subtle we frequently fail to understand or even discern them. Fortunately, however, the relationships between formative places and artists remain a little easier to ponder and trace because of 156 · Part III. Looking Closer: A State of Place those created bodies of work that possess the capacity to serve as conduits or translators between the two. Paradoxically, then, many of the qualities David Huddle and writers of similar upbringings (self included) tend to shut out, lament with embarrassment, and/or outright despise about their parochial points of origin—qualities such as meanness, savagery, patriarchy , violence, countless manifestations of numbing small-mindedness, a smothering overriding xenophobia—often function as or among the most powerful catalytic variables in the workings of a writer’s craft. After all, our bodies have digested and continue to carry the trace elements of the soil, flora, air, animals—as well as the often-unconscious psychological impacts of sound, weather, topography, and human interaction—long after we have departed. A connection remains, some of the dimensions of which tend to make our places almost indistinguishable from ourselves, to the extent that we might even be known to others and ourselves by the same names as the land. It is no fiction at all, for instance, that about five miles northwest of Ivanhoe—in the shadow of Raven Cliff, just off State Route 619, along Cripple Creek—there is a place on the map consisting of little more than a scattering of homes called “Huddle.” There exists a fundamental tension, then, a mixing or confusion of formative being, location, and identity, which has the potential to prove most favorable for the concerns of artists but also destructive to human beings, including artists, in the contexts of their everyday lives. “I don’t!” Absalom, Absalom!’s Quentin Compson famously repeats in ascending manic manner as he attempts to ward off his friend’s question, “Do you hate the South?” Of course, it is himself as much as the South of his mind that Compson both loves and unconsciously hates. The two have become unceremoniously and awkwardly welded within him, and since, unlike his authorial creator, he is possessed of no satisfactory medium to reconcile or even investigate the crippling identity he has come to embody, it annihilates him—metaphorically and, later, literally. It might be remembered here, too, that despite possessing an artistic outlet—despite having written those astonishing books—Faulkner was himself a tortured, even agonized, unhappy drunk of a man much of the time. In 2007, while participating on a panel of writers entitled “The Perils of Regionalism: Labels and Their Limitations,” Huddle explicitly addressed how his ongoing uneasy relationship with his home region continues to benefit his art: “There’s...

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