Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2004 by Wells, Sean

Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia. Edited by Sandra L. Ballard and Patricia L. Hudson. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2003. 712 pp.

By listing alphabetically from Sheila Kay Adams's Come Go Home with Me (1995) to Mary Elizabeth Witherspoon's The Morning Cool (1972) and chronologically from Anne Newport Royall's Sketches of History, Life, and Manners. . . (1826) to Karen Salyer McElmurray's Mother of the Disappeared: An Appalachian Birth Mother's Journey (2003), editors Sandra Ballard and Patricia Hudson represent selections from 105 women writers "who have lived in Appalachia for a significant period of time, who identify themselves with the region, whose lives have been influenced by the region, and/or whose writings concern Appalachian experiences" in Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia. Entries range from standards in Appalachian studies like Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), Lee Smith's SavingGrace (1995), and Sharon McCrumb's The Songcatcher (2001) to toolong-out-of-print Sight to the Blind (1914) by Lucy Furman and Poetics South ( 1974) by Ann Deagon. Ballard and Hudson emphasize contemporary writings; of the more than 150 works surveyed, two-thirds were written after 1980 and six are from the nineteenth century. Like Joyce Dyer's Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women (1998), Listen Here boldly recovers, reprints, and makes available Appalachian women's writing from both a "political" rationale of counteracting the "unmitigated patriarchy" of Appalachia by foregrounding women's work and a "practical" aspect by making a broad spectrum of writing available in a single volume.

These political and practical ends are well served by alphabetically arranged selections, each of which includes an introductory biography that often provides the only accessible material on the writer's life. Peppered with statements by the authors as well as by the authors' friends and family, the biographies succinctly detail the women's relationship to Appalachia. Readers will find useful paragraphs at the end of biographical entries that situate excerpted materials in the context of the texts from which they are taken. Ballard and Hudson's biographies also provide crucial tools for researchers, including the locations of selected manuscripts, literary personalities acquainted with authors, and lists of pertinent primary and secondary sources.

Listen Here highlights the fact that many of the women included in the anthology work in multiple genres by subdividing lists of primary texts into categories that include expected fields like poetry, short stories, fiction, nonfiction, and drama, as well as refreshing areas such as autobiographical essays, books for children, young adult fiction, sound recordings, and video recordings. For example, Candie Carawan, whose Sing for Freedom: The Story of the CivilRights Movement Through Its Songs (1990) is excerpted in Listen Here, has recorded numerous folksong albums. And while the excerpts from The Bean Trees (1988) and Prodigal Summer (2000) will be familiar to many readers, Barbara Kingsolver's role as a poet may surprise them. Moreover, the secondary materials sections provide illuminating contexts. The editors list book reviews, hard-to-find interviews in local newspapers, reference sources, and literary criticism that will aid the work of interested students and researchers.

The entries themselves offer readers a carefully selected sampling from the writers' works. At eleven pages apiece, the most extensive selections showcase the works of Harriette Simpson Arnow, Jo Carson, Lou V. P. Crabtree, Wilma Dykenian, and Meredith Sue Willis. The shortest entries-Frances Courtnay Baylor, Corra Harris, andjane Merchant-are only three pages in length. None of the entries pretends to be exhaustive, and, as the editors acknowledge in their introduction, this anthology could have been exponentially larger. Listen Here's, goal of a broad spectrum of diverse writers is supported by the inclusion of multicultural voices, including Affrilachian poet Nikki Finney and Cherokee writer Marilou Awiakta, that may surprise readers acquainted only with media stereotypes of Appalachian communities. If the entries' brevity frustrates at times, their breadth will prove to be a boon for educators attempting to survey a wide range of styles, subjects, and themes for courses on Appalachian literature, women's studies, or contemporary literature. The works selected for each entry initiate readers in many neglected writers' artwork that, as a collection, will undoubtedly inspire renewed interest and, one hopes, new editions of the literature presented in Listen Here.

After an impressive 627 pages of biographies, sources, and selections, Ballard and Hudson list the names and selected works of over 100 additional women writing in Appalachia and offer a five-page selected bibliography of other anthologies and source materials for the study of Appalachian literature. Together, the appendix and bibliography make Listen Here a potentially indispensable resource for further reading and research, and they should provide both students and teachers innumerable ideas for classroom and individual projects.