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This Side of the Mountain George Brosi This issue of Appalachian Heritage celebrates four Kentucky writers who share an important distinction. Beginning in 1958 and continuing for the next five years, four graduates of the University of Kentucky received prestigious Stegner Fellowships to Stanford University in California. These fellowships were named for Wallace Stegner (19091993 ), one of his generation's greatest nature writers, a Pulitzer Prize winner who founded the Creative Writing Program at Stanford. All four Kentucky writers returned to the Commonwealth where they were raised. Although they live very different lives, each of them has found ways to incorporate the positive values of the sixties California counter-culture with traditional rural Kentucky culture. Wendell Berry farms with horses organically and writes essays and fiction challenging Americans to revere the land and the people. James Baker Hall also lives on a farm and is widely known as an inspirational teacher, poet and photographer. Ed McClanahan continues to write and promote the positive values of the sixties counter-culture. Gurney Norman, the featured author for this issue, has devoted his life to creating and encouraging Appalachian literature. These literary figures have influenced Kentucky and Appalachian literature in a tremendously positive way, and we celebrate them gratefully. Like these Stegner fellows, I moved from Southern Appalachia to California in the 1960s, and, like them, I was attracted to the youth counter-culture there. I obviously also returned to the region. At the time, and subsequently, much discussion has centered on the sixties, its youth counter-culture, and thevirtues andvices andvalues ofthat era. Stereotypes of the sixties abound, and the media often characterizes the youth of that decade as devoted to sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Of course youth of the sixties, just like any other group of people, varied tremendously. Most weren't that different from the youth of previous decades. Many were not particularly disciplined and fell, without thinking, into what they saw as the trends of the times. Some of us, however, led quite intentional lifestyles and angrily still resent being lumped together as hedonistic promiscuous drug abusers. For me, the sixties was not at all a time of self-indulgence. I worked tirelessly then to try to bring about social change in the society I loved. I view the sixties as the decade that expanded my horizons and those of the entire nation in terms of the issues of race, gender, class, ecology and militarism. Although I identified more with '60s activism than the '60s counter-culture, I was sympathetic to its rebellion against the uprightness of our parents' generation and to its celebration of peace, love and nature. I strongly object to the fact that negative sixties stereotypes are used to discredit the legitimate demands for change which came out of that decade. I am often struck by the parallels between my generation of Americans and the English of the early 1800s. In the year 1800 William Wordsworth published a volume of poetry with Samuel Taylor Coleridge entitled Literary Ballads. The preface to this book, written by Wordsworth, is widely considered the basic manifesto of literary romanticism. Strongly influenced by the great political revolutions in America and France, Wordsworth declared his generation's independence from the ecclesiastical, political and cultural mainstream and asserted instead values outside of the influence of the dominant civilization—values of nature and of children, the under classes, and those from other cultures. He declared that poetry should be written in the language of the common people, not the elites. Many American youth of the sixties, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, felt a similar distrust of the mainstream, especially as the Vietnam War made its worst aspects blatantly obvious. We, too, turned to nature and to different cultures and subcultures for inspiration. This is where Appalachia comes in. In contrast to the excessive materialism of the mainstream, some exemplary mountaineers lived in the tradition of make-do or do without. Subsistence farmers lived close to the land and to nature. Traditional mountaineer culture—music, crafts, and stories—provided an alternative to mainstream-packaged, factorybuilt culture. The youth counter-culture of the sixties was attracted to Appalachia at least partially because of...

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