The Rough South: Grit Lit Composition

Saludos to Professor Dean, et al.

Per your request via email:

Here’s the deal on Rash: His first book of poems? Eureka Mill? It’s partially about my mother’s family’s textile company.

I hope you don’t feel deceived, Dean; I preferred never to talk about mom’s kin because it was complicated and got me pegged in all kinds of ways that I would have resented in NC. But there it is. For the record, despite the acuity of Rash’s book and the historical record, my family was a lot “better” than its contemporaries….

Funny story: I was in Columbia, SC with my mother in 2003 after second
year at UNCW, just after Rash’s first novel came out. My aunt and my
grandmother and my mother and I took Ron Rash out to freaking lunch.
Seriously. It was funny because I think he was expecting a bunch of
white gloved debutantes sniffing at him petulantly over crab salad and
my grandmother was wearing her bandana from the barn that morning and
my aunt was driving a Dodge van with two huge, slobbery mongrels and we
all climbed in and I looked at him apologetically as my aunt said, “so,
Ron, you know this is the last car ride of your life, right?”

RR was very cool. We hit it off, especially being the only ones sucking down beer at an early lunch in Columbia, both trying to dull our respective discomfort. It worked and we talked at length about the south and writing and he was certainly a straight-forward dude who I’d have liked to spend more time with, especially away from the daunting presence of my grandmother.

His poems were not flattering of my family, but neither were they an attack. They were about the reality of life in a mill village and my great grandfather does appear in some of them. Not vicious at all, but not afraid to decry through imagery and narrative the horrendous crap poor people went through.

My mom bought like 40 copies.

(Bio, per the eminent professor Dean’s request: With a few strokes of absurd luck, I currently live in Barcelona with my wife, Lili. My work lives at: Rivendell, Third Coast, Cimarron Review, Pinyon, Whetstone, Alligator Juniper, Pedestal Magazine, the Seattle Review, Wandering Army (web), The Tulane Review, Blood Lotus (web), and Men Speak Out (Anthology, Routledge Press).  I was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won a nonfiction contest at Alligator Juniper. I have a story in pre-production at Westbound Films. A book of essays, Falling Room, is out from University of Nebraska Press, American Lives Series.  A memoir, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah, and a novel, Leaving Lara, are about to blow up according to secret agent man.)

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Dear Daren,

Thanks so much for writing to me, and for including me in your course!  Tell
your students hello for me — in many ways, that story (Speaking in Tongues)  is one of the most autobiographical I have attempted.  And Clyde (Edgerton) is a very good friend of ours; how nice that you were able to do your work with him!  There are several documentaries of speaking on tongues available, for anybody who’d like to see the real thing — maybe through the school library? Or the internet?

Very best wishes,

Lee Smith

It was very sweet of her to write to us. Thank you Lee Smith!–DD

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I hope everyone enjoyed Lee Smith’s short story, Tongues of Fire, from Susan Ketchin’s Christ-Haunted Landscape. In an interview Smith says she upset her family because she went around telling everyone that God spoke to her directly. Now, some of us were shocked about the idea of “speaking in tongues of fire” but does the notion that God might speak directly to us seem controversial? I know I’ve mentioned this in class before, but for several years I lived with my great uncle who was a preacher and speaking in tonuges, laying on of hands (miraculous healing), being filled with the Holy Ghost, praying in the name of Jesus, and God speaking to folks was a daily event. But pointing to the exception doesn’t prove the rule. The question I asked in class seems to be an obvious one for the story in my view: Did Karen have a genuine religious experience when she spoke in tongues at camp or was her sickness an excuse for her behavior? Considering the different social strata Karen (versus Tammy Lester) came from how does her telling affect the reader’s attitude toward this kind of charismatic religious experience–and speaking in tongues in general as a practice?

Think about the approach of some of the more radical evangelists at Speaker’s Circle on campus who held banners declaring the list of those God (supposedly) hates. How are the Speaker Circle evangelists approaching the Great Commission as compared to the exposure of this more holiness brand of religion in Smith’s work? Remember where Karen’s mother ranked the Maranatha Apostolic Church on her list? Flannery O’Connor wrote that the artist has a duty to her art that might lead her to Salvation while it may lead the reader into sin. She believed the Catholic church had a duty to tell Catholics what was appropriate for them to read. Interesting view but one I’m surprised O’Connor would espouse. What do you think?

Also, how should we think about this story from the perspective of a non-believer? I think those of you who come from a different religious background certainly might have a more objective view since it isn’t an emotional or spiritual issue. Southern literature is rich in this type of dialogue with and about characters from a protestant background torn between an all or nothing philosophy toward God and spiritual life.  

Smith has a new book that is getting rave reviews set in nineteenth century North Carolina. The Charlotte Observer refers to the novel’s protagonist, Molly Petree, as a female Huck Finn. I’ve included a link to Smith’s official website if you want to learn more about her and her work. It may even be helpful with Essay 1 if you choose Tongues of Fire to write about. I’ve never met the author, but from all accounts she’s a wonderful person and has been very influential in developing young writers as a professor. If you found Tongues of Fire interesting you might checkout her novel Saving Grace which features Snake Handling in Appalachia. I understand she did a great deal of research to handle the subject accurately and respectfully.

http://www.leesmith.com/works/agatehill.php

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 Pancake. Does that name ring a bell? You may be thinking of the other West Virginia writer Breece D’J Pancake and his collection The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake (1983) published after the author’s death. Ann Pancake is a different pancake, but made from the same ingredients that exemplify grit lit writing. I’ve heard the two writers are related, but don’t quote me on that. Breece Pancake is from Milton, WV and Ann Pacake is from Romney, WV. Her story collection, Given Ground (2001), was the winner of the Katharine Bakeless Nasan Fiction Prize. As more than one critic has noted, Pancake writes about class conflict in the Appalachian mountains which fits in perfectly with our class discussion of alienation. Another Appalachian writer I talked to once at a reading, Silas House, told me that at his readings sometimes he was asked about when they finally got the internet there in the moutains. ‘The same time as everyone else,’ was his answer. Pancake writes compassionately about the people of the Appalachian mountain country and her work is the real deal.

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I first read Randall Kenan’s book of short stories Let The Dead Bury Their Dead (published in 1992) back in 1995 and thought then (and still do) that it was one of the best story collections I had ever read. Terry McMillan once described Kenan as “our black Marquez. He weaves myth, folktales, magic, and reality like no one else I know, and doesn’t miss a beat” and indeed his early fiction contains interesting expiremental elements like the use of footnotes in the title story which is several years before David Foster Wallace would famously use the same technique in his own iconoclastic writing. If you have ever read Kenan’s short story The Strange and Tragic Ballad of Mabel Pearsall you might be tempted to call him the black James Joyce for Mabel’s false epiphany toward the end of that brilliant and disturbing story. His fiction is simply vibrant, ferocious, and transcendent in ways that may remind you of Georgia writer Flannery O’Connor.

It’s a shame that a writer as talented as Kenan is so little known. Even in his home state of North Carolina I met many native tar heelers who hadn’t heard of him either. Other books you should know by Kenan: James Baldwin: American Writer; Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the 21st Century; A Visitation of Spirits, and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. He has received a Guggenheim, a Whiting Writers Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the John Dos Passos Award, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

About The Fire This Time

Kenan’s title is a take-off on James Baldwin’s, The Fire Next Time, and deals with the complex subject matter of racial division. But Kenan’s view is much more upbeat than what a reader might expect. I know once when I described my own work as southern lit that a (white) student looked at me with unmistakable disgust. I asked her why she didn’t like southern writing and she said, “I’m sick of reading stuff about race. Southern writing only seems to deal with racial issues.” That’s an unfair and inaccurate charge in my view, but race and religion in this country are difficult subjects to ignore. Kenan is upbeat about this subject of race and points out the accomplishments of astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Robin Givham (among others) and “little is made of their obvious, undeniable blackness.” He discusses other subjects of cultural importance such as AIDS, Hip Hop, and the role of the Church in the black community as well.

Feel free to write about Kenan’s work in the comment section. Or, consider the unavoidable subject of race whether it is in fiction, memoir, nonfiction, and our American culture at large. Is Southern writing only concerned with race?

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