Cyber Newsletter March 99

Bloodroot:
Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers

Review by Belinda Anderson

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Edited by Joyce Dyer 1998, The University Press of Kentucky

Review by Belinda Anderson

Bloodroot is a gift not only to those interested in
writing and creativity, but to anyone trying to figure
out how place shapes his or her life. Editor Joyce Dyer posed a question to these authors: "What were the influences on your writing?" Often, Appalachia was the answer.

Several West Virginia writers contributed essays to this project. Some, like Mary Lee Settle, Jayne Ann Phillips and Meredith Sue Willis, now live in other places. Others, like Llewellyn McKernan and Barbara Smith, are transplanted Mountaineers. "From my own revelations and self-revelations have come all kinds of relationships with the people and places of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee—Appalachia," writes Barbara Smith, the author of the novel Six Miles Out and the teacher of many writers at Alderson-Broaddus College in Philippi. "And from these relationships come poems and stories and journal articles—and some inkling of who I think I am."

Poet Maggie Anderson moved to West Virginia when she was thirteen. "I know, of course, that the mountains can narrow our horizons, lower our ceilings, and hold us in, both literally and metaphorically," she writes. "But I must also admit that these hills comfort me. . . . The fact of their long past suggests the possibility of a long future . . ."

As a reader of fiction, sense of place is important to Lisa Koger, the author of Falanburg Stories. "I grew up in a family that valued place," recalls Koger of her childhood in Gilmer County. "We valued it so much that we could not bear to take vacations that would necessitate traveling more than fifteen miles from home. . . . I left that land a long time ago, I'm told, but I have no recollection of leaving . . . . Some part of me has been there all along, a disembodied spirit, invisible and content amongst them."

Denise Giardina, whose Storming Heaven and The Unquiet Earth told the history of the coalfields, claims two of the best lines in the book: "Learning to spell ended any illusions I may have had that we are totally free and independent creatures. No, there was a higher authority as inexorable in its own way as the booger man." Giardina, and the other voices in Bloodroot, speak to the loss of innocence that occurs to those who leave Appalachia. Many find that this other world doesn't fit them, and they return, only to find they no longer quite fit here either. But the hills hold them, offering some respite for a yearning spirit.

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A Place Called Home:
West Virginia and the Writing of Cynthia Rylant

An Interview with Cynthia Rylant by Michael Tierney

When I was young in the mountains," writes Cynthia Rylant in her Caldecott Honor Book of the same title, "I never wanted to go anywhere else in the world." But life intervered, as it has a way of doing, and like many others she left West Virginia for a home elsewhere. What didn't change was her love of the mountains, which furnish the setting for her most popular children's books. Cynthia Rylant, who lives on the West Coast now, has written more than forty books. In the following interview, she reflects on the value of a Raleigh County upbringing in helping to ground her writing in a solid, believable place.

What are your memories of hospitality in the mountains as a child?

I remember always feeling a part of a really large family of about 100 people in Cool Ridge, West Virginia. I regarded all the adults as parents and felt looked after by everybody, so I grew up feeling really safe and welcome, welcome into everybody's home, safe knowing I could go into anybody's home for help. That feeling of almost serenity is heard in my books. I owe a lot of the tone of my books to that peacefulness of my childhood in Raleigh County.

What do you carry with you from growing up in West Virginia?

I think compassion. I don't remember anybody in my immediate family, or in my immediate life, being terribly judgmental. We had some real characters in the little towns I lived in, some very eccentric people, but they were very much as loved and accepted as the principal or anybody with real standing in the community. As a result, I generally have offbeat characters whom I love in my children's books. I hope the love is conveyed so that when people read about them they say, "Isn't that a wonderful person? Aren't you glad he's there?"

Did you think of yourself as an Appalachian growing up?

When you're a kid you don't pay any attention to the culture in which you are growing up. You think everybody has fried chicken and okra for Sunday dinner. At the same time, in the sixties I was a Beatles fan and watched Shindig every day after school, and I wanted to be part of that world. I didn't realize I was part of a very distinct culture until I was going to Morris Harvey College, and then I felt inferior. At the time at least half the kids at that school were from Long Island. They were just more worldly. They were used to large cities and being connected with the larger world, and I had lived in southern Raleigh County my whole life.

The uniqueness of my culture hit me, but it didn't hit me in a really good way until I was in my early twenties and discovered fine southern writers. And when I did I felt immense pride in being part of their culture. I heard the voices I had listened to growing up; I heard them in my books. Those books were works of art. Here you had Appalachian people holding positions in books that were as worthy as any book published out of New York or London or Paris. It was then that I found my voice as a writer—reading people like Lee Smith or Fred Chappel, who is so extraordinary that I can hardly bear to read his writing. Otherwise I would have spent my life trying to sound like everyone else.

Had my teachers all through my elementary school and high school years put before me southern and Appalachian literature, I would have understood it.

What images of people of West Virginia did you grow up with?

I lived out in the country out in Cool Ridge and Beaver. It was a different kind of Appalachia in the county seat in Beckley. They had sidewalks, a country club, a swimming pool . . . they were more cosmopolitan.

My image of West Virginia was always of modest country people, modest incomes, modest attitudes. What I loved about them was their quiet grace, a steady faith in life that I took with me when I left.

What have you tried to convey of the mountains in books like Silver Packages and Appalachia: The Voices of Sleeping Birds?

I don't really set out to speak for Appalachia or to change or affect anybody's opinions of it. Each book is a reflective almost reverent reminiscence even if it's fiction. It's purely personal.

One theme I find in books like Silver Packages, The Relatives Came, Missing May, and An Angel for Solomon Singer is that of belonging. Why is that theme important for you to convey? How do you think growing up in the mountains has influenced your awareness of that?

If I had stayed in Raleigh County maybe that sense of belonging would have continued, but I didn't ever have the chance to find that out.

I went through elementary and high school with all the same kids. We all learned the trumpet in fifth grade together; we all learned to drive together. There was not any sort of hateful competition among the kids. When I left and I went out to the wider world my innocence was shattered for sure, and I have never been able to find the same trust and sense of safety that I had when I was living in Raleigh County, nor have I been able to provide it for my son.

There is also a tension in some of your work between staying and going away. That's important to us in West Virginia today because of the challenges to create jobs and communities that would allow our children to stay. What do you remember of the messages you got growing up about West Virginia as a place to stay or leave?

I think anybody who left was considered glamorous, at least for me. They came back for Christmas or the homecoming game, and they said they'd been living in North Carolina, and they were cool. The ones who stayed in town were not.

That's not why I left. I was just looking for an education. I went to Morris Harvey and then Marshall, and I had no intention of leaving West Virginia. But I couldn't get a job with my masters degree in English, and I ended up going to Kent State for a library science degree. Like so many other people I left the state to go to a university. After I left I just didn't make my way back. I tried to get back to Huntington, but I just couldn't get a job.

That missing my culture has been a real plus because I speak of Appalachia with such a reverence in my books that might not have been there had I stayed. I might not have seen it at all for what it gave me.

The stereotype of West Virginia is that we are very closed and inward looking. Many of your characters are immensely curious, and that sometimes sets them apart from their families or communities. Do you see that curiosity setting them apart from the culture, or being of it, or both?

People who are artistic want something different. They cannot be content to live their parents' lives. I just couldn't be content to marry my high school boyfriend (which I was going to do) . . . get a house trailer and set it in the field next to his mother's house.

Looking over all the changes I've been through I probably should have done that. It would have been so much easier than having to adjust to new places. It would have been so safe for me to stay there and never have to be lost. But there are always kids born in these towns who are different . . . they're pulled towards something out there that they have to find. That doesn't mean you can't be in your home town and be a writer or a painter. But if you do then you always feel a sense of failure that you haven't done the usual things—like get married and have kids.

But I always think I'm pretty fatalistic. You live the life you are called to live.

Silver Packages draws on the recurring theme of dreams in your books. Were there dreamers who were important role models for you as a child?

I don't know that they were dreamers. The people that I knew were incredibly unique. Each and every one of them was extraordinary, and I loved their uniqueness and their colorfulness and that they seemed very happy with their lives. The thing that I regret about TV—and don't get me wrong; I enjoy watching—is that uniqueness and colorfulness are not promoted in sitcoms. Everyone has the same kind of accent, the same kinds of houses, and the kids are supposed to fit this particular mold. The one thing in my experience Raleigh County in the 60s and 70s was that everyone was their own person. They hadn't been molded out of themselves.

What were the barriers to dreams or being your own person when you were growing up?

I think it's always too much of a burden to tell kids that they need to go out there and accomplish great things. I am glad that nobody where I was growing up made me feel that where I was living and what I was doing was not good enough.

I personally think that art is the best way to create dreamers whether or not people make their own kinds of art. But if they appreciate the beauty of life then that spiritual part of them will grow, and it doesn't really matter where they are living or what they're doing. I mean reading to them breathtaking literature—reading aloud. Giving them an opportunity to paint, and I don't mean realistic painting, but an opportunity to really love color. I didn't even have an art class in high school, and in elementary school it was just crayons, if that. I never viewed myself as someone who could make some kind of art, paint a chair decoratively or making a landscape painting, or modeling a pot, none of that was ever a possibility. It makes me really sad that kids don't have that kind of opportunity to develop their spirits through art.

How did you take the leap into illustrating your own work?

It was a totally unexpected thing. I never intended to do it. I was always intimidated by painting in the same way I felt inferior to rich city kids when I was in Beaver Creek. I wrote the book Dog Heaven in response to my friend's dog passing away. I had that story, and I looked at it and said maybe I could paint this. I couldn't wait for an illustrator to do it. I knew I would have to wait two or three years for an artist to fit it in her schedule. My boyfriend told me to go out and get books of Grandma Moses. I quilt and do other things. He felt there was a folk artist in me. I went out and got acrylic paint, brushes and paper. And I didn't ask for help from anyone. I went into a spare bedroom and painted my image of God or of what a dog should look like. I was like a primitive cave painter: "If I want to tell you this story, how do I show it?" It was the purest form of primitive art. I bet I could have done that thirty years ago. I could have done some form of that in fifth grade if I'd been encouraged, and I may have spent the last thirty years painting as a result.

One of your autobio-graphies was called But I'll Be Back Again, and the theme of returning to the mountains is important in Silver Packages. What is important about giving back?

I guess I was Frank [a character in Silver Packages] a little bit when I was growing up. For a few years I actually went to a place in Beckley that gave a toy to a poor child every Christmas. We were desperate enough at that time. It wasn't a Christmas train, but I waited in line for hours—hours— to be able to choose one toy to take home to be wrapped up for Christmas, and in fact the toy that I wanted was a nurse's kit. I understand so well that longing, and like Frank, it never came to me. It was gone. By the time I got up it was chosen.

When I grew up, I used to go to the discount store, buy a gazillion toys and take them to this charity place and drop them off every Christmas. It was my small way of giving back. I think that's very common—people who grow up in the same church their whole lives start taking some responsibility for making that church work. You'll see it in people who grow up in the same school. For me it's buying presents for kids who have to wait in line.

Cheryl Harshman, librarian, writer, and wife of children's author and Council board member Marc Harshman, compiled this partial list of West Virginians writing books for children and young people:

Sandra Belton

Adjoa Burrowes

Betsy Byars

Nancy Evans Cooney

Robin Eversole

Marc Harshman

Elizabeth F. Howard

Gerald Milnes

Walter Dean Myers

Isaac Olaleye

Cheryl Ryan

Cynthia Rylant

Brenda Seabrook

Joseph Slate

Anna Egan Smucker

Cheryl Ware

Meredith Sue Willis

Laurence Yep

Check with your local librarian or book store for these and other West Virginia writers!

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From the Director
Leaving West Virginia

When Jane Siers decided on a literary theme for this issue of People & Mountains, I thought it was both a good idea and a timely one.

A good idea, because West Virginia has a rich literary heritage. (My own list of favorite writers goes back to before there was a West Virginia, and includes David Hunter Strother, Melville Davisson Post, Julia Davis, the great Davis Grubb, and Louise McNeill.) And a timely one, because some remarkable West Virginia books have been published lately.

Two of the best have to do with growing up and going away, something plenty of West Virginians have had to wrestle with. The books are Colored People by Henry Lewis Gates, Jr. and Rocket Boys by Homer H. Hickam, Jr. They are set across the state from each other, the first on the banks of the Potomac North Branch and the other to the far south, below Welch in McDowell County.

Colored People is the more conventionally literary of the two, a classic memoir of an accomplished person coming to terms with humble roots. Gates, who heads African-American studies at Harvard, is one of America's most prolific intellectuals. His book gives a vivid portrait of Piedmont, the Mineral County town whose close-knit black community set him on the road to success.

But Rocket Boys seems to me the warmer book, possibly because Hickam (as he readily admits) exercises the writer's prerogative to improve a good story here and there. It is impossible to know just when this fictionalization happens, though the prostitute with a heart of gold is a pretty good bet and—maybe—the moonshine rocket fuel. But we are given to understand that the story holds to the facts in all the important ways, and always to the larger truths.

And what a story it is, a tale of miners' sons growing up in the late 1950s, reaching for a space-age future while the industrial past crumbled around them. Their "Big Creek Missile Agency" launched rockets miles high, everything fabricated by friendly coal mine machinists. Hickam went on to his dream career at NASA, and now writes about science and technology. Rocket Boys will have appeared as a movie by the time you read this, under the title October Sky.

Both these authors are what the late Jim Comstock called "chickened-out West Virginians," a big club whose members include Chuck Yeager, Kathy Mattea, and plenty more. Jim used the term lovingly, knowing that the best of them eventually bring something back to us. Gates and Hickam have brought something very good indeed, their thoughtful reflections on the value of a solid Mountain State upbringing.

Occasionally, they bring themselves as well, something your Humanities Council tries to encourage. Gates delivered our McCreight Lecture a few years ago, and we are working on Homer Hickam right now. We know he is a busy man, what with this book and movie and another book in the works. But we'll keep after him.

After all, persistence pays off and the sky's the limit, as a certain old rocket boy surely will agree.

Ken Sullivan

Executive Director

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Scribbling Women...

Diaries and essays, poetry and plays, novels, short stories, and dissertations . . . Since Sappho in the ancient world, women have written. The compulsion to create, the urge to express themselves, the need to earn a living are among the many reasons women—and men—write.

Yet women’s experiences as writers have often differed drastically from those of men, and the reception of their work, as Hawthorne’s outrage so dramatically points out, has frequently been less than enthusiastic. They were, after all, the weaker sex. Physicians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries often warned that too much study and attention to reading, writing, and scholarship could break down the female constitution!

Early twentieth-century novelist Frank Norris expanded on Hawthorne’s misogyny and stated that while women were writing more fiction than men at that time, they were not writing better fiction. This Norris attributed to mental and physical weakness. Women were too easily prey to "fatigue, harassing doubts, more nerves, a touch of hysteria occasionally, exhaustion, and in the end complete discouragement and a final abandonment of the enterprise."

In recent years women’s literary achievements have gained more acceptance, and the study of women writers has become more common. To encourage such scholarship the Public Media Foundation, with the support of a number of state humanities councils, has established Scribbling Women, a multi-media program to showcase American women writers and to provide teachers with the tools to teach the literature in their classrooms.

The Scribbling Women series includes audiocassettes, print materials, and a website— (www.scribblingwomen.org)— incorporating dramatizations of the literary works as found on the cassettes. Works include Louisa May Alcott’s A Whisper in the Dark (1863), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Willa Cather’s A Wagner Matinee (1904), Susan Glaspell’s A Jury of Her Peers (1917), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Caroline Kirkland’s The Schoolmaster’s Progress (1844), Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Louisa (1891), Marita Bonner’s Hate is Nothing (1938), Ann Petry’s The Bones of Louella Brown (1947), and West Virginian Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills (1861).

The multi-media education kit includes five double-sided cassettes with an illustrated guide containing a wealth of information on the authors and stories, literary interpretation, historical and literary contexts, biography, and further reading. Working with classroom teachers, scholars Lucinda H. MacKethan, Alumni Distinguished Professor of English at North Carolina State University, and James A. Miller, Director of African-American Studies and Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, authored the special section of the kit, Suggestions for Teachers.

The West Virginia Humanities Council’s History Alive! program has long recognized the contribution of women to the literary canon. The program currently showcases the lives and work of seven women writers from American literature—Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Pearl S. Buck, Anne Spencer, Anne Royall, and Ida B. Wells.

Author Denise Giardina and four of these famous women will attend a "literary salon" hosted by the Council in April at the University of Charleston. (See sidebar on page 14) They will discuss their work and their experiences as women in the literary world with each other and with the audience. A reception with the writers will follow.

History Alive! characters, including these and other famous figures from the past, are available for programming free of charge to schools and nonprofit organizations. For more information contact Robert Herrick, West Virginia Humanities Council, 723 Kanawha Blvd., E., Suite 800, Charleston, WV 25301; phone–(304) 346-8500; e-mail—wvhuman@wvhc.com.

More information on the Scribbling Women series can be obtained from the Public Media Foundation, 100 Boylston Street, Suite 230, Boston, MA 02116; phone—(617) 357-5834; e-mail—PMF@MA.UULTRANET.COM Information on the series will be available at the salon in April.

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On Writing Rocket Boys

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In December, 1994, the editor of Smithsonian's Air & Space magazine called me with an urgent request. The "Above and Beyond" section of the magazine needed an article for the next issue. I had the reputation of being a fast writer with aerospace lore at my fingertips. Could I, would I, please provide something? I like a challenge so I replied affirmatively. I glanced at a small cylindrical object I was using as a paperweight. I picked it up. It was a sophisticated but tiny rocket nozzle. Its story was only a hazy memory. As I talked to the editor, pieces of it started to come back.

"You know," I told her, "when I was a kid—growing up in a place called Coalwood, West Virginia—would you believe it? We—some boys and I—we were miner's kids—we built rockets. We won a medal—a science fair . . . no, the National Science Fair medal." I wrote the article in three hours, the memories tumbling out of places I had not looked for decades. I didn't remember everything but enough for the 2,000 words required. I sent in the fax and forgot about it. The next day the editor called. She loved it. Would I send pictures? The medal? Anything I had? The magazine was going with the story as a major feature.

I was surprised at her reaction but I was to be absolutely astonished when the article came out. Letters and phone calls from parents all over the country, even in England, came in a rush. They were inspired, touched in a manner most unexpected. They called me just to hear my voice and tell me how proud my little story made them and, in a couple of instances, begged me to speak to their children. It was suggested that I should write a book on our adventures as rocket-builders. I agreed, thinking it would be simple. We were kids of the late 1950s. We were stuck in a coal camp and we were enthralled by the space race. Of course we built rockets. Of course, we kept building them even when they blew up. Of course, we kept working and learning until we had designed sophisticated rocket engines, capable of flying for miles into the sky. Of course, we had won the Gold and Silver Award at the National Science Fair, 1960. And then there was also something about John Kennedy being there with us . . . Didn't we, I realized, tell him while he was still a Senator that if he ever got to be President he should take the country to the Moon?

Maybe the story wasn't so simple, after all.

Something had happened once in my life, something so very special that thirty-five years after it had been done, and I had nearly forgotten it, it had been brought back to me to relive. I sat down and began to write. I wrote of the boys. I wrote of our rockets. I remembered the first one, and the next, and the next. And as I wrote, it was as if there were others there whispering to me, just shushes of conversation coming as if behind a thick curtain. Don't forget us, they said. And there was one. He wasn't whispering but he was there. Every time I tried to turn away from him in the book, he moved like a phantom to stay in my view.

My dad.
I wrote, and as I wrote, the little town of Coalwood came alive again. The miners trudged up the old path to the mine, their lunch pails clunking against their legs, their helmets perched on their heads. Dad was there amongst them, wearing his old snap-brim hat, his cow-hide coat, encouraging them in the day, gathering his foremen to him for their instruction. The people of the town bustled in and out of the company store and gathered on the church steps after Sunday services to gossip. My mother was in her kitchen, in her refuge in front of the big painted picture of the beach and the ocean. Her pet squirrel was there, giggling because he'd just eaten the family Bible. My dog waited in my basement laboratory, his stubby tail wagging at the sight of me as I picked up and inspected the implements of my chosen trade, the high school rocket builder—the potassium nitrate and sugar, the zinc dust and sulfur, the moonshine we used as a propellant binder. In my room, there was my old desk and the book our Miss Riley had given us, the one with all the answers written in a mathematical script no one believed we could learn but we had, against all odds. I looked and my wonderful little cat still slept on my pillow on the bed beneath the window from which I could see the mine and the tiny machine shop where the kindly machinist had built our first rocket. The church bell was ringing as once more we boys stood on the roof of the old Club House and peered through the telescope a junior engineer had loaned us, to see once more the bands of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, the craters of the Moon. The old high school was there, the halls ringing with the excitement of youth, the classrooms echoing with our lessons, the awareness slowly dawning on us that we were the designated refugees of our town and our school—that we were being prepared to leave and never return. Everything and everyone was still there, all in their places, defining the path, urging me along it, to where my dad waited.

It was on a hot, black slack dump we called Cape Coalwood, our firing range, a place my dad had been forced by the people of Coalwood to give to us. All the rockets, the ones that blew up and the ones that flew were launched again. All the failures, all the successes, all had to be experienced. When I at last reached our final rocket, he was standing there, looking up at it as it flew out of sight. But the boy that was once me wasn't looking at the rocket. He was looking at his father. The father was saying something and I strained to hear what it was, difficult because of the cheering of the town in the background, and the muffling of the decades that had passed.

Glorious! Glorious! Oh, has there ever been such a glorious day!

I watched the boy and I knew he was waiting hopefully for the father to turn to him and put his arm around him. But it didn't happen. Instead, the father began to cough the wracking cough of the miner and it was the son—me—who reached out.

And he had let me.

Oh, has there ever been such a glorious day!

Just that one time, that one time . . . but all that was needed.

To recreate the days of the Rocket Boys turned out to be one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do. I reached as deeply as ever I could into my soul to bring them all back, all the miners and miner's wives and teachers and preachers and each of the boys, because it took them all, urging me, compelling me, to get me back to the place on that slack dump.

It was worth the journey, at least to me. When my father died, I was neither needed or wanted. But I know now, and will forever know because I wrote this book, that it was all right.

Oh, has there ever been such a glorious day!

I think, for a reason that may never become evident, someone needed to remind me of that.

Homer H. Hickam, Jr., was born and raised in Coalwood. The author of Torpedo Junction, a Military History Book of the Month Club selection, as well as numerous articles, he is a NASA payload training manager for the International Space Program and lives in Huntsville, Alabama. His book Rocket Boys has been made into the movie October Sky.

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Book Notes
For a Good Read
books recommended by Council board, staff, & members

Council member Arla Ralston and staffers Ken Sullivan and Jane Siers have been pondering the intricacies of Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost. A murder mystery set amidst the intrigue of post-Proctectorate Britain, the book explores more than just "whodunit."

The book recounts the death of an Oxford fellow from the point of view of four characters, each representative of an aspect of the period. One is an Italian medical student investigating family holdings in England, another a budding scientist coping in an age when science and religion are vying for supremacy. Yet another is a zealous son trying to avenge his father's honor, and another is a lowly Oxford librarian caught up in a dangerous liaison with a religious dissenter.

Set in a time when the difference between dissent and orthodoxy depended on what ruler and what religion was currently in the ascendancy, no one is who he seems, and the book's ending is as enigmatic as its cast of characters.

Homer Hickam's Rocket Boys is a resounding favorite with executive director Ken Sullivan and Council staff. This memoir by Hickam details his coming of age in a Southern West Virginia community and his rise from an inquisitive youth experimenting with miniature rockets to a distinguished career with NASA. Ken contends that this book is not only a good one but "much better than it had to be." Hickam could easily have written a simple coming of age story and left it at that. Instead, he went a step further to infuse the work with a real sense of time, place, and culture, says Sullivan. Ken recommended Rocket Boys to local businessman Dick Gould who called us to say he just loved it. It brought back many memories of his own childhood in the southern coalfields. The book has recently been made into a movie entitled October Sky.

Not being a parent, it is unusual for staffer Jane Siers to browse the shelves for children's literature. But while searching for a book for a new cousin she discovered the work of Cynthia Rylant. When I Was Young in the Mountains and Appalachia: Voices of Sleeping Birds were her choices. She hopes having these books read to him will remind the little boy of his West Virginia roots.

Another West Virginia-born writer, Mary Lee Settle, has a new book out entitled Addie. Like Hickam's, hers is called a memoir— this one beginning with her grandmother's life. Council staff hasn't finished this one at press time, but Ms. Settle must be doing something right because copies are hard to come by in Charleston book stores. The Council hopes to have both Mr. Hickam and Ms. Settle as speakers in 1999.

Still deep in twentieth-century poetry, grants administrator Pam LeRose recommends The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston from Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath. This book by Peter Davison combines poetry with biography and historical explication.

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