Letter to Our Readers

Christmas 1988 Dear Reader: A story about flatboating on the Tennessee River in the early 19th century suggests something about the relationship between Southern Appalachian writers and readers. Flatboatmen taking a valuable cargo down the river by night watched lights along the riverbank to determine their progress downstream. They passed a house where a great fire burned; they could see people dancing, and hear fiddle music. Soon they passed another house, again with a great fire burning, people dancing, and fiddles playing. After they had passed seven or eight houses, all with fires burning, people dancing, always to the same fiddle tune, the boatmen realized: they were caught in the notorious Boiling Pot, a swift eddy on the river near Chattanooga. Instead of going steadily downriver, they were going around and around in the dark, swinging always past the same house on the bank, where a fire burned and people danced to fiddle music! Much of the writing about Appalachia circulates like the flatboat and its cargo: it goes around in academic circles, repeatedly passing people but never touching their shores. The bibliography on the region is enormous, yet for the most part general readers are unacquainted with this writing and their understanding of the area is still clouded with myth, stereotype, and misinformation. As a rule, Appalachian history and heritage, problems and potential, are known to only a few academic specialists. Writing about southern Appalachia is not readily available to Appalachian people who happen not to be scholars. Over the years I have given my parents in Leicester, North Carolina, copies of magazines and journals in which my poems, stories, and essays have appeared. Appalachian Heritage is the only publication they read regularly, and the only one my mother asks for when her subscription expires! There are millions of people, like my parents, in Southern Appalachia as well as in other parts of the country, who would enjoy Appalachian Heritage, if they should become acquainted with it. But, like the cargo-laden flatboat, the magazine never reaches them. You can help Appalachian Heritage break out of this figurative Boiling Pot by (1) subscribing to the magazine yourself, (2) giving a gift subscription to a relative, friend, or acquaintance, (3) suggesting that your local library subscribe and (4) calling it to the attention of secondary school superintendents, principals, school board members, teachers and librarians. Appalachian Heritage has the potential for beginning a new era of awareness in the lives of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people throughout the region and the country-by bringing them, with each issue, a cargo of information about Appalachia's history and culture, about current issues and challenges. Won't you help broaden Appalachian Heritage's circulation by making the magazine available to at least one person who doesn't read it now but who would enjoy and profit from it? Sincerely, JiIp Wayne Miller Board of Advisory and Contributing Editors 3 ...