Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers

An Inquiry into Who My Grandmother Really Was

MEREDITH SUE WILLIS Born in 1946 in Clarksburg, the county seat of Harrison County, West Virginia, and now living in Sourh Orange, New Jersey, Meredith Sue Willis was recently honored for her significant contribution to letters at the Fourteenth Annual Literary Festival sponsored by Emory & Henry College. Her maternal grandfather, Carl Meredith, a coal miner, was an eyewitness to the great Monongah mine disaster of 1907, and her maternal grandmother, Pearl Barnhardt Meredith, was a sometime midwife in the mining camps ofMarion and Harrison Counties.The Willis grandparents were storekeepers who followed store managerial positions with Consolidation Coal all over the Appalachian mountains. She grew up in an atmosphere ofstorytelling, preaching, and radio melodramas and published her first story at fifteen. She has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, among other awards.Willis has several works offiction includingA SpaceApart (1979), Higher Ground (1981), Only Great Changes (1985), Quilt Pieces (with Jane Wilson Joyce, 1991), In the Mountains ofAmerica (1994), The Secret Super Powers ofMarco (1994), and Marco's Monster (1996). She is also an acknowledged authority on the teaching ofwriting, having published books withTeachers & Writers Collaborative in New York, including PersonalFiction Writing(1984), Blazing Pencils (1990), and Deep Revision (1993). Her books are used in writing classrooms throughout the nation. * * * An Inquiry into Who My Grandmother Really was Soon after I moved into his apartment on the Lower East Side ofManhattan, my boyfriend, Andy-now my husband-started a grueling medical internship. He was on at the hospital every third night, and when he came home, he slept. I was working on a master offine arts degree and trying to write a novel. At the end of that same summer of 1970, a friend ofAndy's came to stay with us. This friend had dropped out of medical school and was trying to get himself back on track. Once he arrived, though, he sat around our apartment oozing depression, obviously lonely, clearly in trouble-suicidal, although we didn't realize it yet-and without any compunction about interrupting my writing. Nothing in my life has ever made me angrier than the particular lack of respect I perceived at that period when people didn't take my writing seriously. I was largely unpublished, and my ego was so fragile that the slightest rejection sent me sheering into a tailspin. When our houseguest walked into the room where I was trying to write, sat on the extra chair, and said he was looking forward to the day my book got published so he could buy it for his wife, I practically screamed: "For your wife! For your wife! Do you think I write JUST for women?" He was no fool. He said, "Oh, of course I want to read it too, I was just thinking, that way, I'd buy the book-it would be a gift for her-but I could read it too-" I don't know if he was just talking his way out of trouble, or maybe actually fantasizing that somehow my book would help him reconnect with his wife, who was living in another state. Most likely he was merely making conversation to hear another human voice. He was a very damaged young man. Within a few months, he moved back into the medical school dorms, collected a supply of sleeping pills, and took his own life. I felt guilty, as did Andy and all his other friends. Could we have done more? Had my pushing him away been the straw that broke the camel's back? I had been raised to be good in the First Baptist Church ofShinnston, WestVirginia. I wanted to be loving to people around me-but I also wanted to write.There seemed to be a great abyss between Good Woman and Great Writer. I thought there might be a contradiction between being a woman and being a writer at all. Part of my plan was to live in New York City. Part of my plan was to be Who My Grandmother Really mts 291 nonnurturing, even ruthless and hard. Hadn't I refused to cook for our unhappy guest? Hadn't I willed myselfto be notjust a woman writer and certainly notjust a regional writer? Nor was it a fantasy to think that regional, racial, and genderidentified artists are devalued in our culture. All the jokes and attacks...