Sherry Chandler

from Crum (because it’s Sunday morning):

Herman Piney was self-ordained. He also was as tall as Tyler Wilson, twice as wide, fat as an autumn pig, and meaner than hell. And to top it all off, of course, he was Ethan Piney’s father. Herman conducted revival services only because he had learned the hard way what most Appalachian preachers were taught by the church — when your knowledge of religion runs out, start to shout. That gets home to them every time, and, besides that, no one can wonder what you’ve said if you never stop shouting long enough for them to ask questions. That was Herman Piney’s technique, just to shout the congregation into abject guilt, then line ‘em up at the dipping trough and run ‘em through the water. A year later he would do it all over again, for surely they had sinned again.

[Update: The photo of Lee Maynard was taken by Phyllis Wilson Moore. My apologies for not giving credit where credit is due.]

Another unexpected delight at the Appalachian Writers Workshop – Lee Maynard’s novels workshop.

At AWW, you submit a manuscript and are assigned to a specific workshop. My submission was in poetry and the poetry workshop with Leatha Kendrick and George Ella Lyon was my expected delight. Delightful it was and I came home much energized about my writing, spent all day yesterday revising an old poem that wasn’t even one I got critiqued, one I thought I’d finished years ago. That’s the way writing poetry goes.

But at AWW, you are also free to sit in on other ongoing workshops. Some people treat this like a Whitman’s sampler, dropping in here and there to get a taste of everything. I thought I’d like to be a little more focussed, and because my sidekick Georgia was in Silas House’s novels workshop, I thought I’d just sit in with Lee Maynard and report back to her and to my son, who is also an aspiring novelist. I didn’t expect to have such a big time. I even wrote an opening paragraph for my next novel, of which I am very proud, though I know I’ll never write another word of it. (I’ve done this before.)

Lee was friendly and accessible, willing to answer all kinds of questions, and a wonderful talker with a wicked booming laugh. He looks as huggable as Santa Claus. I ask you, can anybody with that face write a truly mean novel?

I wonder whether it’s possible to be a really good novelist and not p*ss off the folk back home. (I worry some about my own poetry collection. I thought I’d written some pretty daring stuff but my folks seem to love it.) Perhaps, to refer to Jack Higgs, the writer sees the archetypes while the boosters see only the stereotypes. And Lee himself told us that your characters have to be larger than life. Again, to quote Jack Higgs quoting somebody else, any story worth telling is worth exaggerating.

I’ve read that Lee’s great coming-of-age novel Crum is very controversial back in Crum, West Virginia where it is set, that his life may even have been threatened (nothing like living up to your stereotype). The novel does contain some frank material (Catullus is frank, says Poppysmatus, Martial is scatalogical) and some scathing portraits of small town life but often the episodes and characters are so over the top that the novel seems more American tall tale than satire. (Think Sut Lovingood, Brer Rabbit, Bret Harte.) It’s as episodic as Don Quixote with the swine swivers over the river in Kentucky taking the place of the windmills. As Meredith Sue Willis says in her introduction to the Vandalia Press reprint, it’s also packed full of loving portraits of people and landscapes.

Vindication for Lee, perhaps, in the fact that a first edition of Crum can sell for as much as $100. Perhaps not, though, since I doubt that any of that money goes to him. Anyway, read Crum. It deserves its comparisons to Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye.