Hiya -- I grew up in Kentucky, too. That makes living in the United Kingdom, as I do now, kind of strange, because the abbreviation for that is UK, which any Kentuckian knows means the University of Kentucky in general, if not the University of Kentucky Wildcats in particular.
I can't say I've read many Kentucky books, though. My mother had everything Jessie Stuart ever wrote. I liked the Wilgus Stories by Gurney Norman -- *very* Kentucky, very Appalachian, and very satisfying. Some relatives who are archaeologists gave me Creekside, by Kelli Carmean, about an archaeologist digging a homestead site, along with the parallel story of the people who had lived there in pioneer days -- I felt it read too much like an archaeologist writing about a dig rather than like a novel, but I've lent to some other people who really liked it, so maybe it just wasn't my cup of tea.
I parted company with Wendell Berry long ago, and it probably just shows an unflattering inflexibility on my part, but when he published an essay about how writers were harming the environment by using word processors, and somebody said "what are we supposed to do, then?" and he said "Do what I do: write by hand and have your wife type it", he went down a notch or several in my estimation. There are many things I'd like to say to him about that, starting with breaking the news that, wonder of wonders, some writers out here are actually women, and there might be more of them if they weren't using their time on this earth as typists for Great Men...
Oh! Come to think of it, Ann Patchett's Patron Saint of Liars starts in KY and has big sections set in Kentucky, but I don't remember whether it was Appalachian KY.
posted 1 year ago. ( permalink )
