Printer-Friendly Version | Font Size: M - L - XL | Email To A Friend | Report a Problem With This Page

Oh, the Stories They Would Tell
By Larry T. McGehee
7/9/2001 

Many years ago, just after I graduated from college in Kentucky, my wife-to-be (although neither of us then knew that--or at least I didn’t) directed a religious history production for a statewide denominational convention. She talked me into garbing as a frontier preacher from the early 18th century, and my only line, albeit a memorable one, was “Kentucky is a heaven of a place, and heaven is a Kentucky of a place.”

Kentucky and sense of place go hand in hand, especially when one reads the fiction of the pantheon of great writers who hail from Kentucky. Morris Allen Grubbs, who teaches English at Lindsey Wilson College, has compiled a sampler of short stories by many of the Kentucky greats. Home and Beyond: An Anthology of Kentucky Short Stories (University Press of Kentucky, 2001, 424 pp., $38.00 hardback) offers forty representative works from forty Kentucky writers with works published between 1945 and 2000.

Because 40 is a frequent biblical number, that long-ago line from the Kentucky preacher is fitting, but more so because each of these contemporary writers is immersed in a sense of Kentucky as a place, almost a sacred place. Even in the darker stories, Kentucky is still haven and heaven.

Many of the writers are names familiar to all literate Kentuckians-Robert Penn Warren, Caroline Gordon, James Still, Elizabeth Hardwick, Jesse Stuart, Janice Holt Giles, David Madden, Bobbie Ann Mason, Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, Chris Holbrook, and Chris Offutt.

Others, perhaps a bit less known but nonetheless good writers, include Jane Mayhall, Dean Cadle, Billy C. Clark, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., Hollis Summers. Ed McClanahan, Sallie Bingham, Robert Hazel, Jack Cady, Jim Wayne Miller, Gayl Jones, Jane Stuart, Gurney Norman, Walter Tevis, Joe Ashby Porter, Leon V. Driskell, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, Richard Cortez Day, Sena Jeter Naslund, Pat Carr, James Baker Hall, Lisa Koger, Normandi Ellis, Guy Davenport, Kim Edwards, Chris Holbrook, Paul Griner, Dwight Allen, and Crystal E. Wilkinson.

The only missing writer that comes immediately to mind is Harriet Arnow, who wrote The Dollmaker.

As I’ve aged, I have found more pleasure and good writing in short stories than in novels, and because Kentucky writers are masters and mistresses of telling stories, the short story form fits most of them very well indeed. I read these selections and felt like the Everly Brothers, “just lying on a bed in some old motel, and listening to the stories they told so well”.

These stories, from Warren’s famous “Blackberry Winter” in 1946 to Wilkinson’s “Humming Back Yesterday” in 1999, are teeming with sadness and laughter, with clear description of the geography of the land and of the mind, and with reverence for language, subtlety, irony, and eccentricity.

As the stories progress, presented in chronological order based on when they were first published or written, one catches shifts in landscape (fewer mountains and more cities and more contacts with the larger world), relationships (fewer families and more individualism), and station (increasing mobility, physical or social).

But always--whether the writer is a transplant into Kentucky from Carolina, Alabama, or Montana, as are Davenport, Still, or Guthrie, or a transplant from Kentucky to other venues, as are Mason, Madden, Summers, or Offutt, or stay-at-home writers such as Berry-always Kentucky dominates the stories.

And why shouldn’t it? It is the Eden of beautiful scenery, wonderful people, great food, historical sites, good roads, great basketball, and sensational storytelling.

After all, heaven would be lucky to be a Kentucky of a place. 

comments: mcgeheelt@wofford.edu
copyright Wofford College, SC