0. First of all, The First Book of Bad Poetry (TM) by Priscilla King doesn't count, although most of the poems are about my part of the world. It's available through this web site (and it is locally printed, so you may specify the type size you want). It's a chapbook containing the poems that used to be available, free of charge, on my Substack and have now been sent out into the real world to earn their living.
Mention should also be made of some books, usually coffee table books, found in local gift boutiques that market their merchandise to visitors. I'm looking at a beautiful black-and-white photo collection, with memoirs and recipes, called Grazing Along the Crooked Road, on my own shelf now. There's the bookstore memoir, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, and something with terribly trendy recipes by a chef who married into the Carter Family, and What Would Dolly Do, and so on. These books aren't meant to be Great Literature but they are primary sources for the history books of the future. If you visit, I recommend buying them. Local people have probably already bought a few copies.
1. Rita Sims Quillen, who has also written a few books of poems (The Mad Farmer's Wife, Some Notes You Hold), really hit the ball out of the park with the novels Hiding Ezra and Wayland. These stories come from old family diaries and describe an otherwise scantly documented period in local history. The facts are true and full of adventure, suspense, and surprises.
2. "Addington's History of Scott County, Virginia" most often refers to an old book by Robert Milford Addington, considered authoritative on our history from frontier days to the 1850s. There are newer books by that name, written by R.M. Addington's dscendants and some of their neighbors. If you're familiar with my home town, you may want to collect and compare other books with "History of Scott County" in their title as written by members of the Addington and Peters families. They agree on facts; each one just had more access to a different set of facts.
3. Mark Zwonitzer's Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone is an insightful, well told history of country music as it was shaped by the Carter Family. It forms a sound track in local readers' minds. That sound track really ought to be available as a set of CDs.
4. Joyce Dyer edited a collection of 35 "essays on place" by different Appalachian writers, including Jean Ritchie, Lisa Alther, Sharyn McCrumb, Rita Sims (not yet Quillen), and many more. It's called Bloodroot (not to be confused with a recent novel by that name) and was printed by the University of Kentucky.
5. None of Jean Ritchie's songbooks was really complete! She gave readers a few songs here and a few songs there! Very frustrating to song collectors. However, she sang a lot of old pre-copyright songs (and she wrote some good new ones) that some local people still sing and love. Any of her songbooks that you find is worth having.
6. Sharyn McCrumb's novels, like She Walks These Hills and Saint Dale, are always a mix of tradition and history and suspense and falsehood. They have to be. In order to put fiction into real places you have to change those places--no murder was committed in the real restaurant local readers will think of when they read the story, no time warp was reported at the real building,and so on. It's frivolous genre fiction and great fun to read.
7. Lisa Alther, who has lived in and written about other places, wrote a novel called Kinflicks that used to work well as a guide to walking tours of Kingsport, Tennessee (Hullsport in the book)...and it was banned in Kingsport. In defense of the story Alther said that, like Flannery O'Connor, she wrote about "freaks not folks" and tried to make it obvious that her outrageous fictional plots and characters were not to be confused with any real people's real stories. Hullsport is Kingsport but the things that happen in it may never have happened anywhere. Among other things, what some consider the funniest scene involves lesbians wasting garden produce. (Hillbillies of that era did not waste food. There were people who needed that food, we were told.) At least that scene was set in the North, but still, in the 1970s many Kingsporters took the book as a personal insult. By the 1980s, when I had a Kingsport library card, they had lightened up about this.
Alther later wrote a book about the Melungeon tribe who used to live in Hawkins County, the border of which is straddled on one side by Kingsport, and called that book Kinfolks. As she noted in the book, anything about the Melungeons is still likely to be controversial. Alther identifies with the group and wrote about them with due respect. I'm no expert and can't endorse or refute any statements of fact. In my town, in 1910, some people with known Melungeon ancestry were ruled legally White and intermarried with White families, including mine. I grew up knowing these people as individuals, not knowing that there was a special name for them beyond the family names, Gibson and Collins. Kinfolks seems an appropriate title for a book that takes an appropriate tone.
8. Harriette Simpson Arnow wrote about Kentucky a long time ago. Well, different lengths of time ago, from frontier days in The Kentucky Trace to the 1930s in The Dollmaker and even the 1960s in The Weedkiller's Daughter. Between the Flowers, a sensitive study of where a marriage went wrong, was suppressed because it was about real Kentucky people of the author's generation and it didn't fit the ugly old stereotype of poverty, filth, and violence in "Appalachia." Arnow also wrote two historical studies, Seedtime on the Cumberland and Flowering of the Cumberland, that among other things gave a name to a town festival that is still celebrated today.
9. I started to mention Adriana Trigiani's Big Stone Gap, which was loved by the town in which the story is set, and down-rated by critics partly for that reason. It's not a badly written novel, as novels-for-adults go. It just fails to insult the bourgeoisie. But although I think his best books are nonfiction with a more general appeal, in which he refers to Kentucky mostly for anecdotes, I had to include Wendell Berry, one of the clearest-thinking men of our era. Berry's philosophy is based in love for The Gift of Good Land, and although flatter land seems easier to farm, mountain people have always been the ones who loved their land most.
10. Barbara Kingsolver's books are all well written, mostly set in my part of the world. I find some of them annoying and some delicious. Animal Mineral Vegetable is probably the most uncontroversially delightful book she's written. As documented at this web site, I liked Flight Behavior too; the science on which the fiction is based turned out to be wrong--sea level isn't rising fast, if at all, and butterfly populations have been decimated in the Blue Ridge Mountains--but the story's still well told.
