Henry Clay Moore’s daughter was named Susannah, or Susie, and she was from his first marriage, which I believe ended when her mother died in childbirth. Her father had lent all their guns out to other people who were being terrorized and was trying to hold off the band of twenty-five armed klansmen with an axe. And, he wasn’t a prosperous farmer, he was a carpenter who lived in town—thus the axe. Susie leapt from a second-story window, landed on a klansman, wrestled his gun away, and opened fire on the band of 25 men, who had broken into their house and were trying to burn it down. The commotion she created alerted the other townspeople, who then came to the family’s rescue; this all took place on Main Street in Hindman, Kentucky, in 1898. Henry had fought for the Confederacy, and he was a prisoner of war until 1865 (though the Yankees gave him at least one parole so he could go home and tend to his family), but he must have had some kind of a change of heart, because the Ku-Klux targeted him on this particular night for speaking out against their women-whipping raids. There were several other children in the house with Susie, who was clearly familiar with conflict and men and guns. I detest the way these stories are always framed as women defending the very important lives of the men they lived with, as if they weren’t fighting tooth and nail for their own freedom and survival.

I just finished Mazzaroth: On the Constellations by Frances Rolleston, and I’m obsessed. Considering its potential as underpinning for my novella, which is about the Women-Whippers of Eastern Kentucky, or rather, about a handful of the hundreds of women they whipped. I’m combining the Mazzaroth conceptually with the short-lived No-Hellers, or Primitive Baptist Universalists (another obsession of mine) to create a utopic secret religion for my characters. The term (Mazzaroth) is a hapax legomenon, a word appearing only once in a text, which means nobody knows exactly what it means, which makes it perfect for fiction.

Eating:

Our chickens are going crazy right now, so I’m eating so many eggs—jammy eggs on toast, egg salad with lots of dill, deviled eggs. I might pickle some eggs today. There’s still a nip in the air (so grateful we’re having a real bit of spring), so I’m making vegetable beef soup. We eat mostly vegetarian these days, but I found some ground beef on bigtime sale and put it in the freezer, and we’re having some in our soup today. I eat like a medieval peasant most days, and happily.

Playing:

Can’t get enough of Slayyyter’s WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, especially YES GODDD and $T. LOSER. Jesus. I made two playlists public on Tidal this month: Every Spring Is Sad and Go to a Quiet Place (neither of which contains any Slayyter). The playlists are still works in progress, but if you’re looking for newish music, you might enjoy. The Magnificent Moon by Mildlife is my current favorite song (released in 2018).

Obsessions:

May-kover, where I get my shit together at least briefly before summer travel/work runs away with me, which entails reading, writing, exercising, eating well, meditating, one house project, and one garden project every day-- and no spending. Cancelling subscriptions, eating from my pantry.

Jean Ritchie (always). Mazzaroth. Cataloguing forgotten Appalachian people. Contrary to popular belief (and to what I was taught in school) people lived in Letcher County, Kentucky, long before the mining companies appeared, long before it was Letcher County—and, of course, for thousands of years before the settler-colonizers (my ancestors) arrived. I’ve been working hard to track down which Native populations were actually living (for half the year, it seems, in summer and fall) on the Millstone, Boone’s Fork, and Rockhouse Creek sections of the Kentucky River which is much more difficult than one would think, but I believe I’ve identified them as the Fort Ancients (a separate but “sister” culture of the Mississippians). The Fort Ancients and my ancestors just missed each other, since my people arrived in the first decade of the 1800s and the Fort Ancients were gone by 1750, likely killed by the spread of disease from earlier settler-colonizers over the Pound Gap/border in Southwest Virginia (also my ancestors).

I also had no idea how many free Black people lived and owned property in Eastern Kentucky long before the Civil War, or how many were killed by the Klan in Letcher County around the turn of the century, or how few of those deaths were acknowledged and/or recorded as wrongful. James Baldwin said, “One of the things that most afflicts this country is that white people don’t know who they are or where they come from. And that’s why you think I’m a problem. I am not the problem. Your history is.” I take this admonition seriously. I want to know the truth about who I am and the people I come from.

Also, I’m obsessed with Heidegger’s poem-essays in Poetry, Language, Thought, especially this one:

When the mountain brook in night’s

stillness tells of its plunging

over the boulders…

The oldest of the old follows behind

us in our thinking and yet it

comes to meet us.

That is why thinking holds to the

coming of what has been, and

is remembrance.

Wouldn’t that make a beautiful epigraph?

Recommending:

Baskets is a perennial favorite (though it’s on Disney, but you can get it from the library, too). In the Company of Wolves and Kurosawa’s Dreams (both on Tubi). Anything with Shelly Duval—just rewatched The Shining. I rewatch so many movies and shows downright chronically. I have two beautiful writer friends with brand new books: Beth Howard’s Song for a Hard-Hit People is available now and Hugh Ryan’s My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond will be out at the end of this month.

Trying:

Not to be anxious every moment of every day, and that’s a full-time job.

One of Everything by Diane Gilliam Fisher (poems)

The Slicks by Maggie Nelson (essay)

A Fig and a Fither by D.F. Daves Smith (poems)

Words for Dr. Y by Anne Sexton (poems)

Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Marcia Marquez (stories)

In Search of Lost Time (Swann’s Way) by Marcel Proust (novel)

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (novel)

Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders (stories)

February:

Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch (micro-essays)

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (novella)

The Gold Cell by Sharon Olds (poems)

The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi (poems)

The Mountain Feuds of Eastern Kentucky by Noah M. Reynolds (short nonfiction)

Solidarity with Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy by Madeline Lane-McKinley

(plus two theses for Bennington)

March:

P.E.A.C.E. by Chariot Wish (poems)

August, September, October by Craig Morgan Teicher (poems)

The Owl Invites Your Silence by Richard Parisio (poems)

Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart (nonfiction, reread)

The Old Regular Baptists of Central Appalachia by Howard Dorgan (nonfiction, reread)

In the Hands of a Happy God: The No-Hellers of Central Appalachia by Howard Dorgan (nonfiction, reread)

April:

Moonshine: Its History and Folklore by Esther Kellner (nonfiction)

Poetry, Language, Thought by Martin Heidegger (philosophy)

The Mystery of Ghostly Vera and Other Haunting Tales of Southwest Virginia by Charles Edwin Price (stories)

Claire MacDonald’s Scotland: The Best of Scottish Food and Drink (cookbook/nonfiction)

Mazzaroth: On the Constellations by Frances Rolleston (philosophy, kind of)

I’m realizing only now that I chose both books for their geography. Diane Gilliam Fisher is native to and still lives in Ohio. I took a poetry class with her in 2011 in Hindman, Kentucky, at the Appalachian Writers Workshop, and spent a good portion of the class trying to think of something meaningful to say in her presence. I’d pored over her collection, Kettle Bottom, which was set in a West Virginia mining town during the 1920s, and I was floored by the way each poem seemed to fling itself from a treacherous precipice of personal and collective memory. Maurice Manning, one of the early champions of my own work, led the class.

How I Came to the Table

By Diane Gilliam Fisher

It could be any table: our round formica maple,

With its newborn calf legs spindly and splayed,

Maybe Aunt Mae’s pearly linoleum top, gray,

with little red waves marking each place,

or Grandma Novi’s oak table, leaves that dangle,

pedestal with mangled claws.

What matters is, there are always women

around it, and not enough chairs for girls.

Mama doesn’t want me there, perched

stiff-armed on the counter, heels knocking

at the cupboard doors, when the talk turns

to what matters: unexpected bleeding,

broken water, strange growth my aunts measure

by pinching their thumbnails down

from the tip of a finger.

The night no one sees me, I am fourteen,

Standing at the refrigerator door, listening

to Aunt Juanita tell how my cousin Debby

ran away with her skinny friend Lisa, something

about three men in a car. “Hopie,”

she says to Mama, “they molested those girls.”

I go blind there. I have no memory

of getting back to my room, or of everyone leaving.

Mama checks on me later, stands in my door

With the light behind her, asks if I’m alright.

I say yes.

We wait a week, then go see how they’re doing.

Back in her room, Debby tells me, “They made us

do everything.” I don’t even know what everything is.

But she has to talk, I have to let her:

They said they’d take us to McDonalds, then give us

a ride home, all the way to Bellefontaine.

They were nice. They had kid sisters themselves, they said,

they wouldn’t hurt us, it would be OK. But we stopped

at this empty trailer, one of them said they might

murder us, bury us under that old trailer

and our Mom and Dad would never know where we were.

I had two of them on my

and Lisa couldn’t stop screaming.

A month later, I’m trying to squeeze through

to Mama, through my aunts around the long,

narrow table in Grandma Novi’s lean-to kitchen.

I hear Debby has got her period. Good.

Grandma sees me, looks away, nudges Mama’s knee.

“She knows,” Mama tells her, slantways. I turn

Away, but Grandma leans forward across her table,

says, “Move over, Mae. The girl’s coming.”

As I remember, Manning urged us that day to collect old anthologies of poetry and to track down the lesser-known contributors of any poems that stayed with us. He’d brought a stack from his own collection to share, and he’s still one of the best readers I’ve encountered, even now, so I took his advice, compelled by the idea that there might be a whole world of brilliant writers out there who will never publish or will only publish a little, that their work might be especially revelatory, a good reminder that any audience is a luxury, that so much of publishing is luck (though, granted, it’s hard to get lucky if you’re not actually writing). He also demonstrated a technique that actors might use to make themselves weep, then connected it to the sonic properties of Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

A Woman Is the Heart of a Home

By Diane Gilliam Fisher

Some days, the heart wonders how

she ended up in such a responsible position,

moving the blood along and never

going anywhere herself,

never visiting the elbows or going

to see what the toes are doing.

The heart gets a hankering, some days,

for a new sentence to sing,

but an old rhythm thrums

and drums through her rooms,

a bass line, a syntax whose momentum

the heart is hard-pressed to overcome.

The hardest part is, the heart can’t stop

even for a minute, wait for a second wind—

Someone will come running, counting

the seconds, pound on her like a door.

And the heart almost always relents,

beats, believes she should, accepts

what she’s been told: That of all

the muscles, she is the strongest,

and most involuntary.

One of my students asked me this week what I liked most about being a writer, and I told her that it was an easy justification for and validation of obsession. I’ve been an obsessive for as long as I can remember, but it wasn’t until I began writing seriously that I could see the value of my obsessiveness, the way I become temporarily, ecstatically consumed by the flashes of the world around me.

And, one of my cyclical obsessions is genealogy, though oddly not just my own. I like researching other people’s families, too, and when I began reading A Fig and a Fither, I became obsessed with its author, D.F. Daves Smith, or Daisy Frances Daves Smith, who was born to a reverend father in Atlanta in 1902 and adopted by her uncle, a locally famous judge, when she was six years old, soon after her mother died. Smith attended Agnes Scott College, one of the Seven Sisters of the South, and while she was there, she campaigned for on-campus housing so that female day students could safely and conveniently attend events after dark. After she finished her graduate degree in history at UPenn, she returned to teach at Agnes Scott, and in 1932, when she was only thirty years old, Smith organized an all-girls’ high school in Decatur, Georgia, where she served as principal for eleven years, until WWII compelled her to join the Women’s Army Corps as a private.

Whosoever Will (an excerpt)

By D.F. Daves Smith

…The nineteenth century men’s hopes revive:

Inventions promise a world in unison.

This brilliant hundred years’ phenomenon

Brings changes more than all past years derive.

Yet brawn of old and brains of new connive

To make the First World War a paragon

Of brute atrocity, a skeleton

Of the Second War; and then Appeasements thrive:

Grim tanks and planes and submarines, and gas

And mines and bombs keep Might, not Man, supreme;

Flamethrowers sear, and radar points war’s sting,

And atom bombs prevail; jet planes surpass,

Man’s value plummets down, brainwashers scheme;

Now guided missiles, H-bombs wait to spring…

When the war ended, she left the service as a second lieutenant, but by then the boys and girls high schools had been combined, and she was told no work was available for her, so she accepted a job as a mechanic at Esco’s Garage and began wearing men’s clothing and driving pick-up trucks. When the garage closed, she returned to teaching, but she never married, and census records from 1940 and 1950 list her as living in Atlanta with her lifelong partner, Willa Barrett, “the most treasured person in her life,” who was also a principal.

The Waiting Dancer

By D.F. Daves Smith

Slender and dainty and dressed exquisitely

In soft shades that fascinate the eye;

Waiting, poised, without hostility,

Indeed with gaiety and never a sigh:

How can it be that I should keep her standing,

Clearly a lady, that I should put her off?

It looks as if I myself a churl am branding,

An awkward lad that should country manners doff.

Well, it takes steady money to keep us two

And she must wait until my job is through.

Then I’ll hasten her needs and fears to rout,

Reach my hands to her, and turn her quick about,

Note her fractured arm, and deft and sure

Cement it at the break—figurine demure.

Sadly, Smith was also a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and her first collection of poems (which I have not read) was titled Half-Breed. And, isn’t that always the way? Our history is and has always been littered with dissonances and denials, with the same grotesque and unearned exceptionalism that might just be the end of us if we don’t figure our shit out.

I am currently writing a novella about the KKK in Eastern Kentucky, in Letcher County, who called themselves, among other things, the Women-Whippers. I’m mapping and cataloguing their victims, which included “lewd” white women, disabled people, and, of course, free Black landowners, all of whom were far more plentiful in antebellum Eastern Kentucky than one might think.

If I could go back and tell my young self that someday she’d be a writer, that she’d teach at beautiful colleges in Vermont and Indiana, that she’d have the cutest little office right across the hallway from her daughter, who would also be a writer, that they’d sit and talk about students and agents and book deals and poems, that another elegant writer friend who loves beauty as much as she does would send her a bouquet of ribbons from a shop in London, just because he heard her say she liked ribbons...she’d totally believe me. She’d say something like, “I knew it!” and she’d put her head down, and she’d work even harder, because she was always smart like that.

XOXO,

Shawna Kay

Subscribe now

This past weekend, I saw Willie Nelson, who is ninety-two years old (sixteen in the pic above), perform in St. Louis as part of his Outlaw Festival Tour. The show opened with his video for Living in the Promiseland, because Willie stays to the left of things and always has, even in 1986 when it seemed the whole of country music had gone Republican:

Give us your tired and weak
And we will make them strong
Bring us your foreign songs
And we will sing along
Leave us your broken dreams
We’ll give them time to mend
There’s still a lot of love
Living in the promiseland

Living in the promiseland
Our dreams are made of steel
The prayer of every man
Is to know how freedom feels
There is a winding road
‘Cross the shifting sands
And room for everyone
Living in the promiseland

So they came from a distant isle
Aimless woman, faithless child
Like a bad dream
Until there was no room at all
No place to run and no place to fall

Give us your daily bread
We have no shoes to wear
No place to call our own
Only this cross to bear
We are the multitudes
Lend us a helping hand
Is there no love anymore?
Living in the promiseland

Living in the promiseland
Our dreams are made of steel
The prayer of every man
Is to know how freedom feels
There is a winding road
‘Cross the shifting sands
And room for everyone
Living in the promiseland

And room for everyone
Living in the promiseland

Halfway through his performance, which was epic and barefaced and at times uncomfortably vulnerable, I turned to David and said, “It’s like watching a supernova happen in real time, the active death of a massive star.”

The first Willie Nelson song I ever loved was Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys, which I heard on the radio in 1980, when I was only seven, lying across the speakers beneath the rear windshield of my grandpa’s green-gold Chrysler as I waited for Lakeside Elementary School to open its doors. Kentucky was so far away, and we were still part of the Body, still living in community, but it was an urban community in Duluth, and for the first time I was in public school, and secular music and television and movies were everywhere, and when Mom dropped me off for school, sometimes she let me listen to the radio. (Thanks to Kin, some of you are already familiar with this recollection.) In my memory, Mammas is often conflated with Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors, which was much closer to a traditional ballad, but both songs were narrative, both had autobiographical bones, and both songs delighted me--Dolly’s because it centered the experiences of mothers with their children, and because it was a triumphant subversion of the tedious, pervasive hillbilly stereotypes that were already hurting my feelings on a regular basis. Willie’s because it was also about mother-love but it was ironic, right? After all, it’s confirmed cowboys who sing the warning, who ain’t easy to love and harder to hold, who never stay home and are always alone, even with someone they love. “He ain’t wrong, he’s just different/but his pride won’t let him/do things to make you think he’s right.” My Grandpa Roy was like that. Back then, I thought all men were either businessmen (doctors and lawyers and such) or cowboys, and I didn’t know any businessmen.

The second Willie Nelson song I loved was Pancho and Lefty (yet another ballad), which I listened to with my grandpa when we returned to Kentucky, and the third was Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain (remember Morgan Fairchild?), which I listened to dozens of times alone in my dorm room when I was a freshman at Berea College. I was dating a drug dealer named Jimmy, I think. I had worked for months and saved up enough money for a fancy stereo that had a remote control and a multi-disc changer and a double cassette deck, and my favorite tape was a collection of country favorites (I cannot for the life of me remember what it was called) that again reminded me of my grandpa. Willie and Merle singing Kern River and Dan Seals singing Everything That Glitters (Is Not Gold). I was so homesick for the mountains and for belonging, for the Appalachia that was disappearing right in front of my eyes. I knew somehow that my heart was about to be shattered. I think it already was. I was beginning to understand that an easy life/love/story was not in the cards, that I might be doomed to roam the earth like one of those men who were always alone, even with someone they love.

But, Willie’s very best song, I think, and perhaps the best country song ever written, is Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground, which is not about love, not really, or even about lost love, but about letting go when you’re not ready, because of course, nobody ever is. Of course, Angel is not the heart of the story, the narrator is with his labors of love which are completed with total devotion and without attachment, which are both conditions necessary to love-- or else it’s not really love, but control, right?

If you had not a-fallen, then I would not have found you
Angel flying too close to the ground
And I patched up your broken wing
And hung around a while
Trying to keep your spirits up
And your fever down

I knew someday that you would fly away
For love’s the greatest healer to be found

So leave me if you need to, I will still remember
Angel flying too close to the ground

Fly on, fly on past the speed of sound
I’d rather see you up than see you down

So leave me if you need to, I will still remember
Angel flying too close to the ground

Leave me if you need to, I will still remember
Angel flying too close to the ground

I love the place I’m from and the people who live here, even those who don’t love me back, and I’ll never give up on them or on us, not because I think America is the best country, or even that one country could be better than another country, but because it’s my country. This is the patch of earth I sprang from, that my babies sprang from, and their babies, too, the patch to which I’m tethered, the patch I’ve been tasked with tending. Don’t give up on it, y’all. Like every corner of the globe, it’s still beautiful and still worth your love and care, even in its doomedness--especially in its doomedness. If you had not a-fallen, then I would not have found you. Perfection is not part nor parcel of love, not real love anyway. It’s okay to love and celebrate our patch. It doesn’t belong to those businessmen anyway, no matter what they think.

Grandpa Roy at the beach, which he loved better than anything.

XOXO,

Shawna Kay

Hugh has written a couple (soon to be three!) deliciously brilliant books you should read. His first, When Brooklyn Was Queer won the 2019 New York City Book Award. His second, The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, won the 2023 Stonewall Book Award from the American Library Association. He read from his forthcoming book at Bennington in June (not sure if I can leak the title yet) and brought the house down.

He’s exactly the kind of friend I hoped to have since I was a girl, a writer obsessed with writing, eternally interested in the strangeness of humanity and all its gorgeously complicated variations, an eccentric, singular mind that could not be dull or stagnant if it tried. He’s a gentle, cerebral anarchist who practices what he preaches, and we have so much fun together! We’ve shared maple creamees at The Maple Reserve in Manchester, Vermont. He can keep a secret as well as I can, and we’ve gossiped everywhere--on porches and in courtyards and on walks in the woods and (by making eye contact) right in front of people. We’ve crashed so many dreamy (read occasionally nightmarish lol) parties filled with writers we loved and admired and chattered about them for days. He talked me down from a pretty gnarly panic attack last summer, and only a handful of folks have ever seen me like that. I tend to nurse my wounds in private. I don’t like to be too much trouble, and I can’t stand to feel like a burden. Like, REALLY can’t stand it. I mean to say that I feel safe with Hugh. I think the whole world is safe with him. I’ve only ever seen him hot-tempered when someone he loved was being treated poorly. We are both tragically loyal people.

Sometimes I convince myself that I’m nothing. Or rather, I go back to feeling that way, as if my brain periodically reverts to its original settings. I’m not blaming that feeling on anyone, because for all I know, it’s my natural default, or maybe it’s about my culture or geography or gender. Honestly, I don’t think why I feel it matters nearly as much as that I do, and it has taken me years to figure out that if I’m going to be happy at all during this life, I need to be around people who don’t have to work hard to enjoy or appreciate or celebrate who and what I am. I think we all deserve loved ones who find us easy to love. I think Hugh and I will be friends until we’re wizened, dessicated, stenchy old bog hags. I will relish our time in the bog. I find him so easy to love!

(The afghan below was made by Hugh’s partner and brilliant textile artist and fellow redneck, Jason A. Bishop, whom I’ve never met, though I feel like I’ve known him for years. He knew instinctively what colors and tones I would love. Can you imagine? I’ll treasure it always. I’m planning to repaint my living room in one of these colors..)

XOXO,

Shawna Kay

Did you know that spending two hours on your phone every day equals one full month every year? A full month. Nights and days.

I’ll be the first to admit that my attention span/capacity for sitting still has progressively disintegrated since November. My phone was always a hole into which I happily and unapologetically crawled. Curated nest. Stimulating womb. Long-lost library I had all to myself. A lot of my life is off-grid (or half-off lol) so it seemed relatively harmless to spend a couple hours reading stuff there, watching bazillions of people dance, watching babies and animals multiply joy. I never had to be bored on my phone, and boredom is maybe my least favorite thing in the world. So much to learn! Derrida on sexuality? Sontag on motherhood? Travel to Guatemala? Zoomer-speak? Millennial humor? The indomitable beauty of the human spirit? The whole world at my fingertips.

I felt the same way about Spotify-- like what do you mean I can listen to anything I like? I remember when I was a teenager and Walmart opened in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and there was a music department inside, how I walked in and eagerly humiliated myself by humming the beginning of Purple Haze to the guy behind the counter, because I didn’t know the title of the song (and there was no way to find it out in the Beforetimes), and I was amazed that he recognized the tune, and that I left that day with two cassette tapes, my own copy of Experience Hendrix: The Best of Jimi Hendrix and The Cure’s Disintegration, which was one of the first albums I ever listened to until I knew every word and riff and moan by heart. Before that I’d stealthily snagged a copy of The Cult’s Sonic Temple when we were in Cincinnati for a church convention and stopped at a shopping mall, and before that I had ordered my ten albums for a penny from Columbia Music House (which I’m pretty sure was my first experience having a bill of my own sent to collections). My grandma had a stack of records we listened to sometimes, mostly old country, and I was such an old person I ordered tapes off TV (like this one) whenever the opportunity arose, by which I mean to say that I would’ve listened to anything, that when my parents bought a Taurus and it came with a cassette tape meant to show off the stereo, I listened until I knew those songs by heart, too (Oh Sherrie by Steve Perry, I’m on Fire by Bruce Springsteen). The world was always so far away. I wanted it all around me. I’m just saying that I lovelovelove it all, that I want to know everything about everything and always have, that I have a hard time laying it down, slowing down, looking at or listening to or being absorbed by one beautiful experience at a time.

Books help though, and they were always there as well in some form, in some number, and I’m finding my way back to them, to the relevance and durability and immortality of the alternate world they offer. Though, if I’m honest, because so much of my online reading has consisted of gritting my teeth through horrible news stories until I can’t bear it anymore, I feel these days when I’m reading for pleasure like a stroke patient in rehab, like I’m back to Square One, like I should start with something easy. I’m trying to strike a balance.

So, my booklist:

Build Yourself a Boat by Camonghne Felix

Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud

Worthy of the Event (from Hugh Ryan’s new book club--you should join!)

A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis

Smoky Mountain Voices edited by Harold F. Farwell, Jr., and J. Karl Nicholas

Folklore, Legends, & Spells by Selena Ibbott

Wild Child: Girlhoods inthe Counterculture edited by Chelsea Cain

My Friends’ Secrets: Conversations with My Friends About Beauty by Joan Collins (I collect old beauty books)

Wake and Sing: Music of Appalachian (vintage songbook from a friend fellow writer, Amy Lyles-Wilson)

not pictured:

Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins (which I’m reading on Libby)

I got lost in the sauce of bringing my three youngest home from college for the summer, and hosting my first full-length writers festival and retreat (more about that soon), and then traveling to beautifulperfectutopian Vermont for summer residency at the Bennington Writing Seminars (more about that soon, too!), but I’m finding my way back to a routine. Tell me what you’re reading and how you’re managing your phone time and retraining your brain and why it’s hard for you and why it’s worth it. I’d love to hear from you--about anything.

Subscribe now

Gonna be posting lots more. It’s also hard for me to write anything that’s not a full-length essay (as you may have gathered). But, I’m working on it. I’m working on it all.

Love you so,

XOXO

SK

We didn’t know yet what Asa’s name would be, but when Clara announced to Mom that he was coming, she explained that he was the size of a blueberry, so that was what Mom called him, The Blueberry, and she died a couple months before he was born, and there is a special sadness my family carries around Mother’s Day, because she was days away from being a great-grandmother, and her holding the baby had become a kind of finish line we were all collectively running toward, and then it never happened.

And the hardest part for me is not that she didn’t get to hold the baby, but that she didn’t get to see Clara hold the baby, because I do, every single day. Every day I get to watch my eldest parent both her children with the kind of grace and humor and tenderness and care that would have filled my mother’s heart to the top, that would have had her lavishing Clara with old-fashioned praise. Asa has a significant speech delay that complicates his life in sometimes devastating ways, and it would have worried my mother to death, and I have the privilege of watching my eldest mother him into a life and a self that is happy and serene, that is deeply connected to the world around him, despite the great barrier he lives with. Clara is his sanctuary, his advocate, his translator and guide—sometimes even his voice-- and what I wouldn’t give for one more hour with Mom, just so I could show her the legacy she left behind, how in the most literal way imaginable her gentleness and her softness and her joy live on in Clara’s mothering, how her grandchildren and great-grandchildren lavish me every Mother’s Day, knowing how broken my heart is, how much fun we’re having together in spite of the world raging around us. I wish I could walk with her up the hill to Clara’s house and that Asa and Alice could run into her arms like they do into mine. I wish she could hear how much and how often we still talk about her, how present she still is in our lives. The painting below is one of my Mother’s Day presents this year, from Stella. My mother in her nightgown, which is how we all remember her. A handful of blueberries. “I didn’t get the eyes right yet,” she told me when she gave it to me. Mama, she’s still working on the eyes.

XOXO,

Shawna Kay

“We know that through the patient aeons gone destruction has been followed by reconstruction, so that we have come to look on this wondrous universe of ours, of which our swinging orb is but, as it were, an atom and we microscopic creatures, as a restless laboratory wherein the alchemy of nature transforms through an endless cycle death into life and life into death, until the far-off dream and hope of those who strive after Nirvana seem the end most to be desired.

Ages ago flora of inconceivable vastness died, and we have it as coal. Geologists would have us listen to their marvelous story of upheavals and subsidences here on our earth, of erosions by water giving to us such phenomena as the gorge of New River, the schoolroom of geologists, of plains and pene-plains, of regions once fertile and arable, now gorges and mountains due to the force of falling waters. Besides this, the hidden recesses of our earth have from time to time upheaved the crust of our planet, giving to us for example the great “fault” that brought forth the Pine mountain, where the strata stands on edge. Eastward into Virginia along Crane’s Nest Creek, westward through the Elkhorn region, the strata lie again in uniform beds sloping gently downward to the Northwest…

The Chesapeake & Ohio Railway has grown to its present fine magnitude chiefly because of its New River coals. Forty years of digging has made us to see the probable end to these coals. The Norfolk & Western Railroad has been drawing heavily for years on its vast Pocahontas deposits. The cry is for more and more coking coals. The cry is answered by the Elkhorn coals of Eastern Kentucky. It is a virgin coal territory, to which are stretched the eager hands of many industries. This is indeed the heritage of Kentucky, but now owned in large part by aliens. Kentucky has slept on her rights.

…Look again at Pound Gap. Draining to the northeast is Shelby Creek and its tributaries. Flowing down the base of Pine Mountain also northeast is Elkhorn Creek. Breaking away to the west are the head waters of Kentucky River. Ride from Pikeville up Shelby Creek, spend the night with Bob Damron on Caney Fork, then go leisurely the next day up Long Fork, back to Beef Hide, see the Flat woods, then on through Shelby Gap, up Elkhorn Creek to the top of the gap, from which you look with wondering eyes away onto the head waters of the North Fork of Kentucky River. If you have been well guided you will have seen coal openings, whose magnitude surpassed your utmost expectations. You have ridden into them, put your hands with reverence on the face of coal veins seven, eight, nine feet thick, all clean, coking coal without a fault, the equal of the famous Connellsville coal. Yes, better than that. If you have time, trace the horizon of this great Elkhorn seam. Follow it down Elkhorn. Then trace it, if you are not surfeited with coal, down the Kentucky river to Whitesburg. Follow it north, if you please, across Rockhouse Creek, Caney Fork, Troublesome, back and forth, coal, coal, coal—can it ever be exhausted? I quote what has been said by Professor A. M. Miller:

If then, the Elkhorn coal district should be compelled to bear the entire brunt of the coal and coke mining industry, it would be able to bear the strain at the present rate of production for fifty years by the one method of estimating coal, and thirty-seven years by the other (the miner) method.

…First, as in New River, (the veins) offered themselves easy of attack. Now the drifts have gone back in the hills and a new era has come. Virgin coking coal fields are limited. We find one in West Virginia on Meadow River, a confluence of the beautiful Gauley. Then we return to our own Elkhorn region, and almost with a feeling of jealousy, see the hungry capitalists, men of commerce, dig into our precious reserves and carry it away to enrich other States. What does Kentucky get out of this? The stream of precious freight will soon begin to pour down Big Sandy and the Kentucky on through and beyond our own State, to leave us in the end barren hills. The stream must flow, our coal must burn, but the pity is that:

Sic vos von vobis nidificatis aves;

Sic vos von vobis vellera fertis oves;

Sic vos von vobis mellificatis apes;

Sic vos von vobis fertis aratra boves.

Doubtless I shall be pardoned if I express in our own vernacular this famous distich of Vergil found one morning on the walls of Rome:

Thus ye, O birds, build nests but not for yourselves;

Thus ye, O sheep, bear fleeces not your own;

Thus ye, O bees, fill hives, but not your own;

Thus ye, O oxen, the yoke for others must bear.”

--December 11, 1910, by Major James Poyntz Nelson, a realtor for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Company, in the Lexington Herald

I write often about my mother’s paternal grandmother, Rebecca Jane Potter (1887-1947). Her father, Abraham Potter (1837-1913), was an early settler/colonizer of Letcher County. Shooter Ike (1845-1925) was his brother and her uncle. I hadn’t realized until I read this article that the coal and railway companies were openly discussing the end of the coal boom in East Kentucky before it had even begun.

XOXO,

Shawna Kay

Carter asked me what I’ve been working on (lots of folks did!) so I figured it might be time for an update.

First, there’s my book, which is a sequel to Kin (the second of a trilogy, I think). For now, I’m calling it Mae, because my grandmother is the farthest my living memory goes back on my mother’s side, so I’m sort of positioning her as the queen buried deep at the center of my maternal family’s hive. Mae delivered babies and took care of old and disabled people in her home. Her mother, Bertha, did as well. When Bertha died, Mae inherited her patients. So, the book is about the complicated inheritance of caregiving, about the long lineage of midwives and nurses I come from, about nursing as both buoy and millstone, as passport and jail.

So far, the greatest challenge in writing the book has been decentering men from the narrative, by which I mean telling the story from inside the lives of these women I come from, even when the story is about violence they experienced at the hands of the men they lived with and loved. As hard as this work probably sounds, it’s even harder, because it requires a new kind of deconstruction, the deepest revision of an anciently held narrative. I want Mae to read like a family bible that’s been repurposed as a scrapbook to hold fading photos, newspaper clippings, letters, poems, and songs. The chapter I’m currently writing is in the voice and from the point of view of Bertha’s ghost, and it’s rendered in the dialect of her era, which I was born into the tail end of and remember well and feel entirely desperate to immortalize.

I realized recently how important sound is for this story (and all the stories I tell). If I had a nickel for every person who’s asked me since Kin came out why on earth I didn’t do the audiobook, I’d have a jarful of nickels to take to the Coinstar! I think when my first book was sold, I knew but also didn’t know how important sound is to my projects, and this will be a hill I die on in any future contract negotiations. Dave and I are also putting together a companion album for Mae of Jean Ritchie songs—he’s playing the guitar, I’m singing, and I think we may have a banjo player for the project, too. Here’s the song list so far:

The Bluebird Song

One I Love

Nottamun Town

Blue Diamond Mines

Wondrous Love

Keep Your Garden Clean

The Cuckoo

Skin and Bones

The Little Family

The May Day Carol

Brightest and Best

Green Gravels

I’m also writing a lecture to give during June Residency at Bennington, tentatively titled Writing Violence, and I’ve been reading and rereading Ritchie’s memoir, Singing Family of the Cumberlands, which is where I got the idea. Jean and Mae would have known each other from the annual camp meetings, baptisms, and foot-washings (another obsession) they attended, belonging to the Indian Bottom Association of Old Regular Baptists. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Ritchie family, about all the art and music they made together, and how confidently and authentically they’ve moved through the world, how they were able to follow their passions to distant cities and also to move freely in the mountains, to maintain their identities. I’ve been thinking about how my Mamaw Mae wrote poems for herself at her kitchen table, and the joy I feel when I think about publishing them in my own books, and how my own family (and others like it) might have been transformed by better access to art and music-- to any form of expression. When Alan Lomax visited the Thornton Old Regular Baptist Church in Mayking, Kentucky, in 1959, and made his seminal recordings there, my family was present—Bertha was sixty-four, Mae was forty-two, and Deborah, my mother, was six. Also, “twelvemonth” is a favorite new word of mine.

And, I’m writing an essay for The Believer, a profile of Sam Fife, the leader of the wilderness church my family joined in 1977. Ginger Greene found and enjoyed Kinand reached out to me about writing essays for the magazine, which I hope will mark the beginning of a long and meaningful relationship with a publication I’ve admired for years. I’m currently most interested (surprise, surprise) in examining Fife through the lens of his many adulterous marriages.

I’ve got two politically-leaning essays in the works as well. One is about JD Vance and his relationship with his mother and with women in general. Here’s a passage from a current draft:

“When Hillbilly Elegy was released, most of the Appalachian writers I knew, myself included, immediately questioned the book’s authenticity, by which I mean that we recognized the performance of it, Vance’s fabricated bootstrap claim to a certain kind of Appalachian identity. Yes, there are Appalachian cities and suburban Appalachians. Yes, parts of the Rust Belt overlap with parts of the Bible Belt, and a corner of the Appalachian foothills stretches into the part of Ohio he’s from, around Cincinnati.

But, this was not the identity to which Vance was laying claim. It was Eastern Kentucky clout that he was after, the history and lore and gravitas that comes with ties to the place I come from, the region Wikipedia refers to as “Extreme Appalachia.” This is why Vance penned the first few chapters of his book so vaguely, why he led his readers to believe that he’d been raised in Jackson, Kentucky, in Breathitt County, which was his grandmother’s, Bonnie’s, ancestral home. And yes, she was as legit an East Kentucky Coalfields hillbilly as ever there was. But her daughter, his mother, was born in Ohio and lived in Ohio for most of her life. His father was from Ohio, too.

The problem is that Vance used the aesthetic of Eastern Kentucky culture, the macabre mystique of it, the indomitable resilience and badassery of the people who still live there, who have survived so many personal and political apocalypses, who ran moonshine under the cover of night during Prohibition, who established their own forms of governance, their own economies, when they were abandoned by their country, who survived child marriages and gross poverty and extreme cruelty to raise increasingly stable families—he used the wildness of Eastern Kentucky and the history of its wildness, to sell a book about a suburbanite who grew up in a decent-sized town in Ohio.

You could say he built his political career on Kentucky’s coattails, because without the stories he mined from his Kentucky family—without his uncles’ forcing a dishonorable man to eat a woman’s dirty underwear, without his Grandma Bonnie setting his grandpa on fire, without his mother roller-blading high-as-a-kite through the emergency room where she worked as a nurse, it is nigh unto impossible to imagine Hillbilly Elegy as a success.

In truth, Vance’s misogyny, his centering of men and their business in the world while he benefits from the invisible work and loyalty and steadfastness of women, is probably the most Appalachian trait he has. “

The other essay is about the KKK in Letcher County, Kentucky, around the turn of the century, who called themselves “The Women Whippers.” I suppose because there weren’t many Black communities in the part of the world I come from, they flogged women instead. Women who had their own money. Women who took up with men they weren’t married to. Also, men who weren’t masculine enough—a blind mail carrier, another man with a learning disability. They pulled these people from their houses and flogged them with whips in their front yards. I have ancestors who did the whipping, and I have ancestors who were whipped, and politically this all seems relevant and timely to me.

On a more joyful note, Trace to Trail is three short weeks away! Our visiting writer lineup is fabulous, and we’ve got lots of folks coming from near and far. The studio is closed now, but the festival is still open for registration, and it includes readings by and classes with Yours Truly, Robert Gipe, and Michael Patrick Flanagan Smith, as well as all meals, two yoga classes a day, chatty walks in a pastoral setting, and plenty of time with other writers who are trying to do what you’re trying to do! The cost is only $300, and if you’d like to come and can’t afford it, please message me.

Clara (my eldest) and I are going to make a podcast soon. We’re calling it Tea & Scandal, I think. Our first convo will tackle Miranda July’s All Fours, which I love and have loads to say about.

I could keep going and going and going, but I’ll stop there. Write to me!

Subscribe now

XOXO

SK

Isn’t this the problem that lies at the center of most family estrangements? Why do you resent your siblings? Because they know how terribly uncool you really are, what a fool you’ve been, and how often, and exactly what your foolishness, your naivete, cost you. Many parents choose to abandon their children rather than copping to lapses of reason--the gross corruption of the churches they followed without question, the predatory adults they assumed or pretended were safe, the vaccinations their kids didn’t get because of some babbling, potion-peddling movie star, the imagined romance and farm-to-table aesthetic of a life somehow reclaimed from the structural and spiritual Brutalism of American healthcare. This is, incidentally, why RFK Jr. has ascended the the HHS throne as he has, because of businesswomen like Oprah Winfrey (democrat) and Gwyneth Paltrow (democrat) and Hannah Neeleman (republican), who have made their fortunes by selling half-truths to women, conditioning us to drink bottle after pretty bottle of certified snake oil.

How and when and where have you been a fool? I already know the why. You’ve been a fool because you’re human, because you’re a silly little creature with a flash-in-the-pan life span. None of us is exempt from foolishness, and Americans are robustly foolish, and though I’d like to say it’s because we’re relatively young, youth and foolishness are not synonymous. The teenagers I know are not necessarily any less wise than their aged counterparts. In fact, children often make their choices earnestly, instinctively, without giving a shit about how things look, how they look, and we could learn a thing or two from their example.

It’s really about controlling the narrative, isn’t it? Isn’t that why Trump supporters won’t back down? They don’t want to have been wrong. They’ve already been presented with years of evidence that they are, with dossiers and criminally-managed pandemic, with damning recordings and multiple convictions. It’s clearly not a lack of evidence that keeps them hanging on, but the unthinkable fallout of admitting that they fell for his lies, that he was a criminal from the beginning, that the man for whom they have given up so much actually despises them and views them as he does everything, as a natural resource begging to be exploited and used and discarded and deported.

I mean to say that Trump supporters bought the timeshare, the Gone with the Windcollectors’ plates, the fake Prada with the gaudy hardware. I mean to say that they have already committed to the bit, that they’ve gushed publicly about the unrivaled beauty of the phantom robes that he still insists cover his naked body. His supporters have given up loved ones for him. They’ve given up years of meaningful holiday meals and peaceful family vacations. They’ve given up money and autonomy and freedom and dignity.

So often, I hear liberals refer to MAGA as a cult, and then go no further. They’re so stupid. They’re so blind. They’re so evil. They don’t care. But, if you truly believe it’s a cult, wouldn’t you behave differently? Wouldn’t you ask yourself how humanity might have saved those 918 people at Jonestown? Those 28 children at Waco? What approach by Third Reich dissenters would actually have halted the growing snowball in its tracks?

We don’t do this, I think, because we want control of the narrative too. We want to believe that we’re somehow exempt from culpability for this political nightmare because we didn’t vote for him. It’s a comforting thought, an answer to the moral injury sustained daily by a barrage of horrific images and stories, the ticker-tape tally of babies blown apart by our bombs, the mice-maze lives of working class people who can get just about any purchase to our doorstep within 24 hours, just so we can feel richer than we really are, who are still digging coal in 2025 (and now without protection from silica) because coal still keeps the lights on. We burned 512 million short tons of coal in 2024, and unless your home is powered by solar, you’re every bit as complicit in climate change and environmental devastation as any Trump supporter. The same is true if you’ve flown in an airplane, if you drive a car, if you eat factory-farmed meat, if you buy your food from superstores, if you spend money on clothing (or anything) made of plastic.

I want to be clear that I’m talking about myself, too, that I’m trying to let this moment change me, because I think our survival depends on this, on our ability to admit we’ve all been fools. Despite my best intentions, I have not always lived a life in accordance with my own deeply-held beliefs, my personal ethics. I have not always let my feminism inform the parenting of my daughters--or my sons. I have not done what I could to divest entirely from fossil fuels. I have been too worried about how my life appears to other people. I have mismanaged my money, foolishly believing there was never enough of it to matter. I have avoided talking to people whose politics disappoint me and make me anxious and angry.

My point is that we actually do have control of the narrative, but only if our stories about ourselves match the lives we live. Our personal and collective legacies will not be judged by which side we say we’re on, but by our actions, by the lives we led, by the examples we set for our children of humility and the capacity for personal growth and actual positive change. If we are living right, the next generation will be wiser, kinder, and more intentional than we ever were, and the planet will be safer and healthier for all generations to come.

What change will you commit to today? Consider writing your own personal manifesto, and then take steps to live buy it. I will do the same. It’s time to stop obsessing about all the ways that our neighbors are fools and to correct our own folly, to stop blaming 23 percent of Americans (who did not, incidentally, educate themselves) for our situation. It’s time to meet people where they are with humility and care and conviction and courage, to look them in the eyes and say, “I don’t think any of that is true, and I’m worried about you because you do.” Until we can do this, then we are every bit as much of the problem as they are, and I don’t want to be part of the problem for one more goddamn day. Maybe you feel the same.

Subscribe now

XOXO,

Shawna Kay

The first newspaper mention of Crane’s Nest comes in 1853, with the headline “Twenty Thousand Acres of Valuable Land for Sale (lying in Russel County, Virginia).” This acreage would be divided into parcels of 500 to 1500 acres along the Clinch, tributaries with names like Guest’s River, Tom’s Creek, and Crane’s Nest-- though it was the rookeries of Great Blue Herons, not cranes, that early settlers/colonizers noted nesting in the treetops, in this place where Virginia rests her back against Kentucky like an elder sister worn out from the chores of the day.

“My favorite place on the porch was the swing,” Jean Ritchie writes in her memoir, Singing Family of the Cumberlands, “in between Mom and whatever sister got there after I did. I loved the lazy motion of the old swing and the way it creaked in time to the music, fast little squawks with the quick tunes, melancholy moans with the slow sad ones. What a safe, warm world it was for me then, leaning sleepily against a soft, round arm, watching the darkening air twinkly with lightning bugs.”

Pierre Francois du Tubeuf, a French Baron (and, strangely, coal baron in Ales, France), a man with many debts who skipped out on the French Revolution, bought the land that included Crane’s Nest in 1791 and tried to start a colony, which he named Saint-Marie-on-the-Clinch. Not only did Pierre fail as a colonizer, he was murdered by thieves, his entire household was, and his property, valuable grazing farms having extensive mountain range, was acquired by the state of Virginia in 1792.

“To stand in the bottom of any of the valleys,” Ritchie writes, “is to have the feeling of being down in the center of a great round cup. To stand on top of one of the narrow ridges is like balancing on one of the innermost petals of a gigantic rose, from which you can see all around you the other petals falling away in wide rings to the horizon.”

My four-greats-grandfather, a farmer named Richard Abednego Baker, “Meb” to his neighbors (and married to Abigail Beverly, an ancestor I share with Loretta Lynn), must have bought some of this land from Virginia, because his son, Richard Baker III, my three-greats, whom I like to call Richard the Third, was born at Crane’s Nest in 1846.

In 1880, Crane’s Nest is mentioned again, when the patriarchs of early Appalachia assemble Dickenson County from bits of Russell County, bits of Wise. Richard the Third had James Napoleon Baker had Merida Monroe Baker, my great-grandfather, who married Bertha Viola Rose, and her people were founders of Dickenson County. “The Oldest Rose in Dickenson County” reads the tombstone of my ancestor, Bertha’s two-greats. Merida and Bertha were the parents of my maternal grandmother, my Mamaw Mae, who is hearth and flame and cauldron at the center of the book I am writing.

When I was in Los Angeles last week for AWP, I found myself at a cocktail party in Pasadena, scanning bookshelves in the studio/office of the House Beautiful home of a writer well-connected to a delightfully cosmopolitan literary world. She and I were on a panel together, distinguished alums reading our work in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Bennington Writing Seminars.

I don’t have an office, or a literary community--or even a desk. I write smack-dab in the middle of a very bucolic, provincial life, tucked into a favorite chair or a corner of my living room sofa, which is an ancient Ethan Allen camelback with rolled arms in a colonial navy floral. It’s not particularly comfortable or stylish, but it’s fine. Honestly, I’m most comfortable when I’m a little uncomfortable—and a little unstylish.

I began writing in earnest when my kids were little, when I was homeschooling them, after we’d puttered through the lessons and checklist of the morning, the part of their education that I thought at the time mattered most, the part that adhered to some kind of notion about “state standards” which I read and heard an awful lot about, being one of the first women in my community to homeschool for reasons of freedom, the timbre and quality of their education. I didn’t homeschool for Jesus, I often confess to people I don’t know, anticipating their judgment, which is, I have found, the most scathing when it comes from progressives who live in a very different America than I do. In fact, the better schools in all the places I have ever lived were private Christian schools, and homeschooling for me was a way to avoid indoctrination and conformity and all the culty ontologies.

Anyway, we’d get our boxes ticked for the day, then settle in front of the television, where we’d watch documentaries, adaptations of Shakespeare, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, British mysteries and Hitchcock and The Twilight Zone and YouTube videos of Rod Serling schooling young screenwriters and artists. Sometimes we’d listen to Rachmaninoff, or Molly Drake, or Sigur Rós. And, I’d open my laptop, and all my babies would have their own creative projects—writing, painting, clay, plays, fairy houses, novels and newspapers--and we’d spend the afternoon creating together while the television spun a yarn in the background. I’ve always been a TV girl.

It was like living in an art colony, and it felt like a miracle. Most days I woke up before the sun to write, too, because I found that I was easier to live with when I made sure I’d written for a few hours before anything else happened. But, the best writing I did usually happened in the afternoon, bolstered by creative conversations I was lucky enough to have with my kids. Isn’t that crazy? Isn’t it beautiful?

I was a writer before I knew anything about writing as profession or identity or dream or scene. I was a writer before I understood that the point of it was production. Last week, I found myself chattering away at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles with a new writer friend. I asked him, because he’s from Boston, if he grew up looking at art. His mother was a painter, he told me, so, yes, and I realized (for the first time?) that I was in my twenties before I stood in front of a painting, that it would likely have been some uninspired portrait in a hallway at Berea College, which I don’t remember at all. What I do remember are my first experiences of student work in a campus studio. In college, I was practically worshipful of people who wrote or painted or made any kind of art. Nearly every boyfriend I ever had was a painter, including the one I eventually married.

I did encounter art though, growing up in the mountains. My grandmother was a master quilter who worked architecturally, by which I mean that she drew up plans, gathered materials, and constructed the quilt in elaborate stages over the course of a year. I can sew anything, she’d say, as long as I have a pattern, then alter every pattern soon after she began, making improvements that inevitably increased the difficulty of the project. And, the music I encountered at the Edwin Holbrook Primitive Baptist Church at Craft’s Colley was already a rare anthropological phenomenon—even as a teenager, I understood the gift of witnessing those voices. My neighbors covered their hillsides in flowers, they made checkerboard afghans of creeping phlox, visible from the opposite mountain across the way. They sat quietly on porches and read the stars for hours. They wrote poems for themselves.

At the Broad, in a roomful of Basquiats, I got lost in Beef Ribs Longhorn (1982), which broke something open in me, and I cried in front of my new friend, but this is not unusual. For nearly as long as I’ve been around them, I’ve been letting paintings make me cry. I divorced my first husband in 1999 and in 2000 (twenty-five years ago last week!) I married the guitar-playing painter I’d loved in college and overnight, my life was transformed, and overnight it included books and music and museums. I was pregnant when we married, and I had two children by my first husband, and they were three and five, and the first museum we loved together as a new family was the Currier in Manchester, New Hampshire—Sargent’s pearls, Remington’s bronco, Wyeth’s lonely gray boat, Henri’s rosy-gold glow. I didn’t know how to talk about art then, I just knew I wanted to be around it, for my children to take the presence of it for granted.

I like to keep the windows open in my house when I write, the cheap machine lace curtains throwing shadow patterns on the red oak floor my husband laid soon after we bought the house we now live in, which was built by one of his ancestors, a strange patriarch who lived and died with two unmarried sisters. My husband’s father is a painter, too, and a potter. His mother makes collage. Our home is full of his parents’ work, urns and pots, coffee cups and platters, a watercolor I put over my kitchen sink, because there’s no window there.

I think Beef Ribs Longhorn broke my heart because it’s the closest, as far as I know, that Basquiat ever came to the Kentucky-Virginia border, to the place I come from. There’s a detail in the painting, graffiti that could be blackboard notes in a child’s classroom, the literal trappings of an American education. Of course, when my family moved to Crane’s Nest, indigenous peoples who had lived in the mountains for millennia, including the Cherokee and Shawnee, had only just been forcibly removed. Daniel Boone, who crossed paths with my earliest ancestors, was an essential part of that violent story, as were they.

In the third chapter of her book, Ritchie describes a beating she got from her father when she was eight years old:

“Dad got me to the end of the porch where the house was backed up against the mountain, and he stepped off this low place and went to where Mom had a little bed of white tearoses planted. The bushes were full of tender buds, and some had just begun to open. I remember it well. Since then the smell of roses has made me think of pain and smart, along with all the sweet things they remind me of. Dad held onto me so I wouldn’t run away and he bent over and plucked one of the rose briers up by the roots. Then he carried me back to the porch. I was heavy and he was puffing with the load of me, and every step he took he made the little white roses dance up and down in front of my face. Some of their thorns were new green and tender, but some were brown and hard and very sharp. When he began to beat me with this switch they cut like knives into my skin and laid my back open under the thin dress I wore.”

Her description of the beating lasts for several pages. In places, it is funny. In others, devastating. By the end of the ordeal, both she and her father are permanently changed.

Storytelling is an art I know fluently by way of early immersion, osmosis. Where I come from, It’s performance art, and sometimes it translates well to the page. I am thankful to all my ancestors for this gift.

Mae made art for herself and her family, too. She wrote poems that I understand now were antithetical to the reality of her life. In her poetry, she is like a painter in medieval Europe, constrained by the story of Christianity and Jesus, which was the only metaphor/medium she knew intimately. Mae’s dad, Merida, died when he was only twenty-seven and she was only two, and I still don’t know how he died. I think maybe it was tuberculosis, or heart trouble, or suicide. Weak breast, he wrote on his WWI draft card. I don’t know if it kept him from active duty.

Mae was delivered by a midwife named Rose Belle Slemp at Bold Camp, a short ride by horseback to Crane’s Nest. I have been visiting these places when I can, and they are swirling with the ghosts of my family.

XOXO,

Shawna Kay

“One incident almost put me out of the church when Jim was still in Indianapolis. It was after the Korean War and there was lots of orphans fathered by American soldiers over there…. That was in 1961…Jim was always saying people should adopt rather than have children of their own. Since I didn’t have any children, I thought I’d like to adopt. I don’t know if they’d let me, since I didn’t have a husband. But I had a good job. So I asked Jim about it. Right away he said, “You can’t get the white ones.” Then he realized that he spoke before he thought, and he tried to straighten it out. I told him I didn’t want white ones; I wanted blacks, those fathered by blacks. I knew there was plenty. You can tell a lot about a person by a slip of the tongue. I should have left the church right there.”

Within four years of meeting Jim Jones, perhaps even sooner, Hyacinth Thrash had doubts about him, and she still followed him for more than two decades, from Indiana to California and finally to Guyana. In the wake of the Jonestown Massacre, she was found walking among the dead, leaning heavily on her cane, the only living person in the camp. There were other survivors hiding in the jungle around her, but Thrash didn’t know they were there. For two full days, she was alone with more than 900 dead bodies, including her sister’s.

To entice Thrash and her sister, Zipporah, to Guyana, Jones had promised freedom and abundance, more tropical fruit than she could imagine, so many bananas he swore she’d grow tired of them. As it turned out, he sold nearly all the fruits and vegetables that were planted and tended, picked and processed by his followers, at least eighty percent of whom were Black, to people outside the camp for profit. Thrash joined the People’s Temple when it was still called Wings of Deliverance, in 1957, because Jim Jones was a civil rights activist in Indianapolis, because he integrated hospitals and churches and even the choir that sang behind him when he preached on television, because the same year that he accidentally let slip his thoughts about interracial adoption, the racist, impolitic assumption that Thrash would prefer a white child to a Black child, he brought her and her sister along with him to town halls and Human Rights Commission meetings. Jones began his pastoral career as an apparent civil rights activist, and by the end, he was the self-proclaimed master of his very own plantation, a plantation that operated entirely on the backbreaking labor of his followers, forced under threat of exile, estrangement from family, public humiliation that included beatings and sexual abuses, and death. He ate like a king while they starved. When the authorities found her, Thrash weighed eighty-nine pounds.

Her memoir, The Onliest One Alive: Surviving Jonestown, Guyana, was published the same year she died, in 1995, seventeen years after the massacre, and it is arguably the only document of its kind--a story of survival, yes, but not in the traditional sense. Thrash never left the People’s Temple or Jim Jones. She survived accidentally, and though at times she gives herself credit for hiding and resisting, for knowing, the truth is that she slipped through the cracks on the day of the massacre, which she knew full well was coming. Jones held rehearsals, testing the faith of his followers--their eagerness to defend him against police, to drink poison--which they passed with flying colors. He created a patrolling unit that included 76-year-old Thrash, had her brandishing a machete from the deck of his boat. The title of her memoir is a portion of the first words she spoke when she realized his plan had finally come to fruition: “Oh, my God, they came and killed them all, and I’s the onliest one alive! Why didn’t they take me too?’’

When I was in college, one of my nicknames was Jonestown. Growing up, I belonged to The Body, a church that was often compared by outsiders to the People’s Temple—even by some of my extended family members. Both churches were part of the Latter Rain movement of the 70s, communal in structure, Pentecostal in worship, and founded by charismatic leaders—ours was Sam Fife, a country-western singer turned preacher who built his following in Miami. Fife died less than six months after Jones did, though his death was accidental. In April of 1979, he crashed his private plane into a mountainside in Guatemala during a mission trip, though I’m not sure I ever believed that story, not really. The worried families of his followers had begun talking to newspapers. The authorities were closing in. The People’s Temple had an estimated 3000 followers at the time of the massacre. There were around 4000 members of the Body when Fife disappeared. Were he alive today, Fife would be one hundred years old. Jones would be ninety-five.

When did you know? a stranger asked me as recently as last month, by which I think she meant, When did you know better? When did you realize you’d been fooled? It is a question I’ve always hated, because I don’t have an answer. I was never, by anyone’s definition (including my own), a model Christian, and I was usually in trouble. Still, I don’t remember ever not believing, and when I was a child, not believing seemed far more preposterous to me than believing did. Everyone I knew believed. Everyone. I sometimes admitted to the doubt I felt, and I always regretted it, because it felt like a failure of my imagination, of my conscience, because it separated me from the people I loved. I knew from the beginning. I still don’t know. I still experience moments that feel very much like belief.

Thrash never had an epiphany or deconstructed her religion, and she never received any kind of mental health care for the ordeal she experienced. She returned to Indianapolis almost immediately, and within seven months of the massacre that nearly killed her, that did in fact kill her beloved sister and hundreds of her friends and loved ones, she had joined another Pentecostal Holiness church--the same church into which she’d been baptized by Jones. For this reason, her book is entirely unique, a firsthand account of a mind managing the unmanageable, of her persistent apparent belief in a monstrous man. As a narrator, Thrash is consistently inconsistent, not in the experiences she details, which are accurate and verifiable, but in her relationship to those experiences, in what she says she knew and didn’t know, in the complicity and apprehension and agency she ascribes to the narrator, to herself, in each retelling. In certain moments, she knew exactly what was happening, in others, she didn’t, and it is impossible to determine what she really believed at any point during the two decades she followed Jones, to pinpoint the moment she was in on his con. She certainly knew by the time she followed him to California.

“He talked a lot about survival, said we might have to eat each other or dead mules. He tortured Tommy Moore, Vicky’s son, with his own vomit. He said we might have to survive on our own vomit. We stayed in San Francisco about a year before going to Guyana. We lived on Geary Street, in a nice apartment near the Peoples Temple. Buses picked us up to go to church on Sundays. In the service it was my job to sit with visitors and tell them what a nice place the church was, the wonderful things it did. We were supported by Jim. The church paid the rent. We bought our own groceries with money Jim gave us. The only dinner we ate at the church was Sunday dinner. He said we were to get a hundred dollars out of our Social Security checks, but we never did.”

For a long time I felt, and sometimes still do, as if my faith had been installed like an engine in my mind when I was too young to remember, like the installation was so thorough it even included an auxiliary generator, so that every time I doubted, every time the engine cut out and I began to spiral into a paralytic abyss of disbelief, the generator fired up, flooding my mind with reassurances, with reminders that my doubt was perfectly normal—unacceptable, but normal, that the world outside my church was ignorant and doomed, that people who argued against my faith would never understand it or me, that the mistakes of charismatic leaders had nothing at all to do with the validity of God and instead could serve as useful tests of personal faith, that the best way forward was simply to keep going, to keep believing, no matter what I felt. There was a script to follow, and it was unassailable, and I was raised on it. I knew the script better than I knew myself.

Every moment of doubt I experienced, both publicly and in the privacy of my own mind, had already been weaponized against me, had been anticipated and preemptively answered, and this is how I know that what charismatic leaders require of their followers is not necessarily belief, but the consistent, daily suspension of disbelief. Everyone doubts, even the most pious, devoted believers, but what matters is loyalty, and what that looks like is saying you believe even when you’re not sure, especially when you’re not sure. This is why cognitive dissonance is not an accurate description of the contradictory machinations of high-control belief, because it’s not cognitive—at least not for long. It’s conditioning.

“It leaked out about the chicken livers in San Francisco, just before we left for Guyana. Rose Shelton knew it, that Jim faked cancer healings, saying people had passed cancers when they were really chicken livers. But you couldn’t make me believe they weren’t cancers! I thought he was a godly man. But we were deceived! He was of the Devil! …(Rose) was keeper of the “cancers” too! How could she do that? Jim knew he could never get me to go along with something like that. I think Zip would’ve hit the ceiling too. She was that kind of person. She would have laid him out. I knew Jim when he could heal. He healed me of breast cancer in Indianapolis and of a burned leg in Redwood Valley when I got too close to the space heater. Another person in my family, my niece Mary Watkins, passed a uterus tumor after Jim’s healing service in Los Angeles.”

Thrash attributes a litany of miracles to Jim Jones. He healed her of many things, though never of her disability. He healed her niece and her friend of cancer. He stopped her nephew’s heart attack by having her place a certain kind of towel rung out in hot water on the nephew’s chest. He anticipated and interrupted car accidents. He read people’s minds, including hers. “Jim was in there!,” she writes, seventeen years after the massacre, “He did wonderful things, so we hung on to him. He knew everything about my past—my mother, the way she died, my brother Alvin. How could he know all that?”

This is why arguing with believers is not just ineffective, but counterproductive, and perhaps even cruel. It’s why pointing out inconsistencies and exposing the lies of leadership they live under, why ridiculing and belittling and gotcha moments only serve to strengthen a leader’s grip. Doubt is common and cyclical for all believers, for all suspenders of disbelief, and every time the generator kicks in, a small portion of the self, of autonomy and agency and dignity, is sacrificed, which raises the stakes for each subsequent doubt. I mean to say that, because the personal cost is so high, every moment of doubt makes the next a little more shameful, a little less bearable.

Thrash knew in 1961, and she knew in 1962, by which time Jones was bragging to his congregation about the con, because that’s another way doubt is managed by leaders of high-control groups, by assuring followers that yes, maybe their leader is a liar and a conman, but not with everybody. Jones only took advantage of wealthy, white people, he assured his followers, not them. Never them.

“But Jim was pretty shrewd, too, to get whatever he could. When he came back from Brazil, where he went for his health and to check if it would be safe from nuclear attack, Jim told how he lay with a rich white woman to get money to feed the street orphans. He told how he made her walk about the streets where the begging children were, made her walk wearing her fine white clothes. Oh, Jim had his ways!”

Thrash knew when Jones stopped taking her with him on trips, because her continued disability made him look bad. She knew when he became violent and drug-addled and began incorporating ritualistic sex into their church services. She knew when dissenting and defecting members turned up missing, and she knew when he predicted a nuclear holocaust that never came. The problem was never that she didn’t know. The problem was that she did, that she’d fallen for it in the first place. Leaving would have meant acknowledging what she’d lost, the sunk cost of it all, which from the first day was astronomical, was her heart and her dignity and her trust.

Perhaps my favorite moment in Thrash’s story, is a rare moment of dignity she shares with a friend, a friend who most certainly died a few days later.

“One sixty-year-old lady was accused of complaining about Jim. So his henchmen slapped her and Jim called her a B-I-T. (Jim never laid his hands on the people. He had his henchmen do the dirty work.) Then Jim made her take off all her clothes and walk up and down the aisles of the pavilion nude. And the pavilion was full of people—nine hundred of them! I couldn’t look. I just sat at the back and held my head down with my hand. The next day I met her on the path, and she turned her face from me. I said, “Don’t you turn your face!” We hugged and kissed right there on the path.”

Surely, in that moment they both knew what they were in for. Surely they prayed that God would interrupt the plan and hold Jones back somehow, as he had done with Abraham and Isaac, which was the scariest story in the bible, I always thought, because what if it wasn’t God’s will at all for Isaac to die, but Abraham’s? Isn’t that what every child who reads that story thinks? What Abraham simply wanted to kill his son there on that mountain in Moriah, but changed his mind at the last minute? “I wasn’t ashamed of what happened, ‘cause it wasn’t my fault,” Thrash writes. “God knows I never wanted to be there in the first place. I never wanted to go to Guyana to die. I couldn’t have prevented it. I wasn’t scared either. But I was sorry and hurt. I didn’t think Jim would do a thing like that. He let us down.”

All my love,

Shawna Kay

(Zipporah Edwards, also known as Zip, beloved sister of Hyacinth Thrash)

It leaked out about the chicken livers in San Francisco, just before we left for Guyana. Rose Shelton knew it, that Jim faked cancer healings, saying people had passed cancers when they were really chicken livers. But you couldn’t make me believe they weren’t cancers! I thought he was a godly man. But we were deceived! He was of the Devil! …(Rose) was keeper of the “cancers” too! How could she do that? Jim knew he could never get me to go along with something like that. I think Zip would’ve hit the ceiling too. She was that kind of person. She would have laid him out. I knew Jim when he could heal. He healed me of breast cancer in Indianapolis and of a burned leg in Redwood Valley when I got too close to the space heater. Another person in my family, my niece Mary Watkins, passed a uterus tumor after Jim’s healing service in Los Angeles.

My reading this month was bizarre and hyper-focused. I am working on a series (I think) of essays responding to the present political moment by way of Jonestown. I read all the newspaper articles I could find about Jim Jones and his followers (many of which I had read previously, because this is just what I do) and I stumbled onto a book that is available online, which is the memoir of Hyacinth Thrash, the only living person found in the camp when authorities discovered the massacre, a full two days after it happened.

Which meant that Thrash had been alone with more than 900 dead bodies, including her sister’s, for that long. (There were other survivors hiding in the jungle around the camp, but she did not know about them.) And, I think anyone raised in fundamental, apocalyptic Christianity will immediately recognize her experience as a kind of manifestation of the Rapture, of being left behind, of finding oneself all alone in the world, forced to bear witness to the horrifying power of a father-god bent on The End of Everything. “Oh, my God,” she writes, “they came and killed them all, and I’s the onliest one alive! Why didn’t they take me too?”

But, my real obsession with Thrash’s story, the reason I believe it is entirely unique, is because she didn’t leave Jones. He left her. The entire Peoples Temple did. Thrash never deconstructed or received any kind of therapy. Two weeks later she was back in Indianapolis. Seven months later, she had joined another Pentecostal Holiness church (the same denomination into which Jones had baptized her). In parts of her story, she calls Jones the Anti-Christ and says she believes he’s in eternal torment. In others, she sings his praises. She admits to recruiting people for him, and managing his money, and keeping the secrets of his clandestine trysts with both men and women. She wishes her first ex-husband had met him:

I wish we had got married again. John and I always did love each other. Then I’d at least have something, like a home, insurance, and pension from the Big Four. (It was over in Brightwood, where the freight trains came in. He cleaned engines. It was a good job for that time.) I’m sorry he died before I met Jim Jones. I know Jim would have remarried us. Maybe Jim could have healed him of cancer. I think he would’ve gone to Jim’s church too.

Most cult memoir (maybe all?) is written from the other side of belief, but in Thrash’s story, her persistent belief becomes apparent. Her memoir was self-published in 1995 (with the help of a local educator and pastor’s wife), seventeen years after Jones killed most of the people she knew, after he killed her sister, after he tried to kill her, and she still believed, at least sometimes, that he was exactly who he said he was. Throughout the telling of her story, Thrash wrestles visibly with her own doubt, with the undeniable reality of the monstrous man she followed for more than 21 years, and her belief in him as a healer, as a good man. She still believes in him, which I think might indicate that there is no deal breaking line that high-control charismatic leaders can cross, no transgression so bad that their followers will see the light, that belief has nothing to do with knowing, with a lack of information. This seems especially relevant right now.

I read Thrash’s book at least a dozen times this month. I made a list of every miracle/special power she still attributes to Jim—and to herself, because she also believed she had the powers of healing and discernment (which is not unusual even today in Christian churches and might be the subject of the second essay in the series). I also read every newspaper article I could find about her and researched and sketched out her family tree. She was born in 1905 and raised in Wilsonville, Alabama. She grew up under the brutal enforcement of Jim Crow laws and around people who had survived slavery, and her family moved to Indiana with the hopes they’d be treated better further north, that they’d have a chance to make a better life. Jones was a civil rights activist when Thrash met him—that was his initial pull. (Incidentally, Rosalyn Carter and Angela Davis were also hearty, public supporters of his work in desegregation.)

Thrash was not a fool. In fact, when she met Jones, she was in between churches, because she’d stepped away from a pastor she believed was taking financial advantage of his congregation. But, By the end of her time with Jones, he had taken everything she and her sister owned--all their property and money, every social security check—to the tune of $150K. When she returned to the States, she was given three as-yet-uncashed social security checks found by authorities, and those checks were the sum total of everything she owned. Even her family pictures were lost in Guyana. She was 76.

I’m committed to shifting the focus away from power mongering men and making people like Thrash the main characters of their own damn stories. I want to push perpetrators of pain and cruelty to the edge of the room. I believe this is work from which we would all benefit. (This is also what I’m trying to do in the memoir I’m writing—I’m five chapters in.)

In between the hours I spent in Jonestown, I also read Truman Capote’s Music for Chameleons (1980), which is a collection of short stories (kinda), and his final full-length publication. I loved every single word of it, even the intro, which contained this artful, bitchy takedown of Norman Mailer:

In a story by Henry James, I think The Middle Years, his character, a writer in the shadows of maturity, laments: “We live in the dark, we do what we can, the rest is madness of art.” Or words to that effect. Anyway, Mr. James is laying it on the line there: he’s telling us the truth. And the darkest part of the dark, the maddest part of the madness, is the relentless gambling involved. Writers, at least those who take genuine risks, who are willing to bite the bullet and walk the plank, have a lot in common with another breed of lonely men—the guys who make a living shooting pool and playing cards. Many people thought I was crazy to spend six years wandering around the plains of Kansas; others rejected my whole concept of the “nonfiction novel” and pronounced it unworthy of a “serious” writer; Norman Mailer described it as a “failure of imagination”—meaning, I assume, that a novel should be written about something imaginary rather than about something real.

Yes, it was like playing high-stakes poker; for six nerve-shattering years I didn’t know whether I had a book or not. Those were long summers and freezing winters, but I just kept on dealing the cards, playing my hand as best I could. Then it turned out I did have a book. Several critics complained that “nonfiction novel” was a catch phrase, a hoax, and that there was nothing really original or new about what I had done. But there were those who felt differently, other writers who realized the value of my experiment and moved swiftly to put it to their own use—none more swiftly than Norman Mailer, who has made a lot of money and won a lot of prizes writing nonfiction novels (The Armies of the Night, Of a Fire on the Moon, The Executioner’s Song), although he has always been careful never to describe them as “nonfiction novels.” No matter; he is a good writer and a fine fellow and I am grateful to have been of some small service to him.

Is that not just perfectly delicious? I sort of think of Capote as the papaw of my literary (nonfiction novel) lineage—along with great-grandpappy Faulkner, of course. Try and guess my granny…

XOXO,

Shawna Kay

Since the publication of my memoir, I have been asked this question so many times by so many people, and it feels like I have given a different answer each time, so I’m going to try to consolidate them here.

I teach nonfiction at Bennington College, in the low-residency MFA program, and, even there, I often feel that we can hardly get to the craft of nonfiction because we spend so much time discussing the reactions of people we know to our work--whether they’re weeping or fuming or even giddy with relief. Time and time again, our conversations return to this question, this worry, and we commiserate and reassure and grant each other permission in myriad ways. We chant the words of Anne Lamott like a mantra in the hope of absolving ourselves: “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

But the truth is that the social cost of good writing and of all good art is astronomical, that using the medium available to you (language) as beautifully as you’re able (whatever beauty means to you) to discover some truth about what it means to be a human at this moment in time, what it means to be you at this moment in time (even if you’re not writing or painting or singing about yourself, your art is still answering this question), is so much bigger than individual relationships, and writing something true and something that adds to the conversation artists are always having with each other across time and space is going to cost you.

The question was one of the first I asked my mentor and friend, Mark Wunderlich, when I was a brand-new poetry student in the MFA where I now teach, when I hadn’t even considered writing memoir: What if it makes my family mad?

“You know,” he said, “men never ask me that question.”

It was probably the only answer he could have given that would effectively spur me forward, despite the fear I felt, but I have been thinking about his answer for fifteen years now. At first, I admit it embarrassed me. Are women artists weaker? Are we more vain and superficial? Do we care too much what people think? Did William Blake care? (He did.) Have women been excluded from the world of “serious” art for so long that we’re still learning how to be serious artists? (I’m thinking of Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa which everyone should read. )

I don’t think any of that is true, and I understand better than ever, I think, what he meant, which is that the social cost for women (or for any marginalized people) who make art is even higher, and that the way society exacts that cost is through our individual relationships.

I’m going to quote/plagiarize myself (a few times) from a class I taught a few years ago at Bennington:

“In memoir, it is your barefaced story, or some version or interpretation or moment or aspect of it, some aspect of you, that is being consumed by your reader—or at least that is the sell. Arguably this is true with all art, but in memoir this relationship is explicit, contractual, imbalanced, and nonnegotiable in a way that resembles a bad prenup. Memoir can feel very transactional--I’ll show you mine, because you’ve paid me to, but you don’t have to show me yours. As a form, it can be insolent, brassy, unseemly, and insubordinate (which are, incidentally, all the reasons it’s perfect for me). ‘Good for you, but I could never do it,’ I’ve had women tell me, ‘I care too much what other people think.’ As if the entire point of writing anything isn’t because we care so much what people think, about the value of thought itself. I find it odd when people don’t make that connection, that I leveraged parts of my story, scenes from my life, for the sole purpose of changing the way they think.”

This is still true. I’m currently working on a series of political essays that utilize the tragedy of Jonestown and my own experiences in the Body, the church in which I grew up, to talk about how doubt is managed and weaponized by charismatic leaders of high-control groups, and why arguing with people who are being manipulated in this way can be dangerous and counterproductive, why cognitive-dissonance is not the right term to describe the internal machinations of brainwashing. In writing the first essay of the series, I gave myself two constraints—to avoid mentioning our president by name, and to avoid using the term “cult,” which I think is terribly unhelpful, inadequate, othering language. Regardless, I’m pretty sure the first essay is going to make everyone I know (yes, even Democrats) angry. Why? they’ll ask me, like my mama used to do all the time. “Shawna Kay,” she’d say, “You’re always pushing. Why do you have to push?”

“I’ve come to see these interactions, the how-does-your father-feel question, and the I-could-never comment, as concerted efforts to de-center my experience in the telling of my own story, as social punishments. I understand them as such anthropologically, meaning, I don’t believe that any individual intends to punish me for speaking, only that they are unwitting mouthpieces for a patriarchal system bent on centering the experiences of the powerful, the abusive, the monied, and the masculine, and that this end is often achieved subtly, via lighthearted misogyny and respectability politics, via pointed questions for me and expressions of concern for my father. How can I be sure I’m being punished for telling my story? Because the moment I am asked how my dad feels about my book, I feel shame, shame in having a voice, in taking up space in the world, in telling my own version of my own story, in the centering of myself in my own life.”

I wish I could tell you it will all be alright. It will. It also won’t. If you’re asking this question (or thinking it) you probably already understand that the work you want to create is risky, and you’re not sure you have the courage that you anticipate will be required of you to say what you need to say. But, courage never feels like courage when you’re employing it, it feels like fear, and there are a few ways I’ve learned to understand and manage this fear.

First, of everything I write, absolutely everything, I ask two questions: 1. Is it boring? (because if nobody wants to read it-- if even I don’t want to read it--what’s the damn point?) and 2. Is it fair?

The truth-truth, the real Truth with a capital T, is rarely cruel, in my experience. It might be painful. It might disrupt. But, it won’t injure for injury’s sake. It won’t tally, and it won’t tattle. And, even though there will be people in your life who might feel you are telling too much of their business in the telling of your own, if you’ve really asked yourself this question about fairness, if you’ve truly interrogated the work, your fears about being a bad person, about acting unethically in the telling of your truth will be assuaged. It is essential that you stay in conversation with yourself in this way every time you put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, especially when you sense that the social cost of your words is going to be high, because if you know for sure that your motivations are pure, that you’re not being an asshole, then it will be harder for people to make you feel like one.

Next, people are angry. They’re angry all the time. What difference does it make what they’re angry about? This is a question my beloved husband has asked me when I was in moments of crisis about my work, and it has become a kind of asylum for me. (I’m using that loaded term on purpose, because writing about your own experiences will have you feeling like a madman.) Will your work actually make the people you care about angrier, or will it simply give them another container for their extant, lifelong, nothing-to-do-with-you anger? The latter is an entirely different animal.

Finally, self-care—and I’m not talking about bubble baths or massages (though I do love both).

“Foucault defined the care of the self as ‘those intentional and voluntary actions by which (people) not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre.’ In other words, care of the self can be understood as a lifelong practice of self-formation and ethical exercises as a means of creating what Foucault calls an ‘art of life’, a method of examining and freeing oneself not by socially-constructed norms and standards, but according to one’s own ethical code, which he believed was the only means of maintaining freedom from oppressive power dynamics. Using his weird little wire-rimmed glasses as a literary lens, it becomes clear that the real transgression of writing a memoir lies at least in part in its relationship to this idea of making, quite literally, an ‘art of life.’ The memoirist is always confronted by the revolutionary practice of understanding truth not as a fixed entity, but an ongoing, dynamic process, an extended act of interrogation, and the self as a creation of our own making.”

Assuming you are not a serial killer, you have a right to exist as who and what you are in your own body in your own lifetime. Even if it irks people. Even if it makes them tear their hair out. Even if you write something wrong. Even if you are wrong about everything. Regardless of your religious beliefs about an afterlife, I’m sure we can all agree that we only get one lifetime like the one we are living now. When you begin to doubt the value of what you’re doing, ask yourself how you will feel if you don’t make the art you want to make during your lifetime? If the answer is scarier to you than your imaginings of the worst possible outcome, keep going.

My agent, another mentor and brilliant writer in his own right, told me a story once about his mother and his memoir. He was so afraid she would be mad at him when it was published, and although she handled it well at first, when he was interviewed about it for a magazine, and he said something about her that she considered transgressive, she called him. (I’m paraphrasing…)

“I’ll never speak to you again!” she said.

It was the moment he had been dreading for years, but when it came, his response surprised him.

“You’ll never speak to me again?” he asked, incredulous, righteously angry, “I’ll never speak to you!”

Later, they reconciled, but on different terms, and that, he often reminded me, is not necessarily a bad thing, for your most fraught and problematic relationships to evolve into something different (dare I say better?). Mexican poet, Cesar A. Cruz, said that “art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable,” and I don’t think this is only true on a grand, political scale. Maybe your most difficult personal relationships contain toxic power dynamics, and that’s why they’re difficult, and maybe those power dynamics should be upended, shifted, recalibrated.

I recognize how difficult this is when you come from people who have already been beat down by the world, to feel like you’re jumping on the bullying bandwagon. As an Appalachian woman, I bear the added worry of becoming yet another source of shame for people I love with my whole heart, another source of misunderstanding and stereotyping and dismissal and gross underestimation.

But, what if that’s why real and true Appalachian stories are so hard to come by? (They’re also out there, if you look for them.) What if it’s why so few books have been written by women who are actively deconstructing our relationship to faith and spirituality as it has been defined by patriarchy? What if it’s why women are only beginning to admit the staggering personal cost of motherhood? What if our fear of hurting each other the way outsiders have hurt us only serves to silence us? Since the publication of Kin, I’ve received countless messages from women who feel seen and understood and finally represented when they read my story. Many say my book was, for them, a first in this way, and that reading it made them want to write their own story, made them aware of that possibility. What could be more important? Certainly not my feelings-- or anyone else’s.

Art matures human beings, both individually and collectively. It grows us up and raises our standards—aesthetically, intellectually, emotionally. This is true even of transgressive art, of art that is stylistically unrefined and combative, that spits in the face of beauty as it has been defined by the status quo. All art calls us to be something better than we are, to halt the business, if only temporarily, of survival, and to do something practically useless, to ponder and wonder and create something that serves no quantifiable purpose in the world except to be examined and scrutinized and, hopefully, enjoyed. In writing my own personal truth, I have disturbed the comfortable, and I have comforted the disturbed, and, ultimately, I am proud of both-- and I’m still scared to death.

XOXO,

Shawna Kay

So, my reading. Not included here are the couple hundred student pages I read in preparation for residency, or my own work, or the pages upon pages of old newspapers I’ve been reading from along the border of Eastern Kentucky and Southwest Virginia. Or, my recently rekindled obsession with Jonestown. Or, the vintage beauty books I collect and consume like potions against the loss of my own beauty and vitality. I’ll write about Candy Jones soon.

Earthly Paradise: Colette’s Autobiography, drawn from the writings of her lifetime by Robert Phelps, which was recommended to me by Stacey D’Erasmo, is the book I currently carry wherever I go, reading a passage here and there:

“…In those moments while it was still night my mother used to sing, falling silent as soon as anyone was able to hear. The lark also sings while it is mountain toward the palest, least inhabited part of the sky. My mother climbed too, mounting ceaselessly up the ladder of the hours, trying to possess the beginning. I know what that particular intoxication is like. But what she sought was a red, horizontal ray, and the pale sulphur that comes before the red ray; she wanted the damp wing that the first bee stretches out like an arm. The summer wind, which springs up at the approach of the sun, gave her its first fruits in scents of acacia and woodsmoke; when a horse pawed the ground and whinnied softly in the neighboring stable, she was the first to hear it. On an autumn morning she was the only one to see herself reflected in the first disk of ephemeral ice in the well bucket, before her nail cracked it.”

The Book by Mary Ruefle. These are prose poems, I suppose, heady and wonderous and resolute. I’ve been treating myself to one volume of Ruefle every month or so. I read Madness, Rack, and Honey a couple years ago, and I’ve been teaching from it ever since (the same is true of Carole Maso’s Break Every Rule: Essays on Language, Longing, and Moments of Desire). I’m smitten with everything about Ruefle—the intensity of her renderings, the lore and eccentricity and fullness of human expression that seem to be her default setting, the way she holds a room in thrall whatever she’s reading. Her timing. “The Color” is my favorite from The Book:

“I was at my desk pretending to be writing. Actually I really was writing, but while writing I was really thinking about things that had nothing to do with what I was writing—and there were quite a few of them—and even now I must stop and think about that strange phrase quite a few, for how can there be quite a few, if there are few there are few, but wouldn’t quite a few be a lot, quite a lot as a matter of fact? Now I am done thinking about that, but this morning, while pretending to write, I was thinking that I had made a terrible mistake in choosing the fabric of my new curtains, no not the fabric but the color of the fabric (to be exact)(and one must strive for something), the color was too light, it needed to be ten shades darker, not a light wheat-colored straw but a dark golden straw, clearly I had made a terrible mistake and was now deeply in debt to my better judgment, such as it is (there are days my better judgment and I are not even on speaking terms), and there I sat, on and on I sat, pretending to write but secretly obsessed with what I had done, what I had done of my own free will, such as it is. I had irreversibly chosen, out of all the colors in the world, the wrong one. A titanic mistake! And as I sat there, many past instances of identical horror came back to me, like ghosts who were hungry and came home to eat everything they could lay their hands on, which was quite a lot. How could I pretend to be writing when the room was full of ghosts, when all my mistakes were hovering over me, demanding my attention, gobbling, always gobbling something? I could pretend to pretend—the thought occurred to me—it had worked in the past—but the ghosts wouldn’t fall for it, I knew that, they would be thinking there she is, pretending to be writing, her old ploy, what a scam. And so I tricked them, I no longer pretended to be writing, I just stopped, I stopped suddenly and cleanly, throwing them a loop I hoped would take them out the window.”

Disordered Minds: The First Century of Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, Virginia, 1766-1866, by Norman Dain (1971). An ancestor of mine, William Addington, died at the hospital in 1805, of melancholia, when it was called the Eastern State Lunatic Asylum. William left London when he was a young man and by 1774 was living in Culpeper County, Virginia, where he married Margaret Ann Cromwell (descendant of “The Great Protector”). Sometime around 1783, he and several other patriarchs moved to an area that would become Scott County, Virginia, where William founded and began construction on a church called the Addington Frame (later the Copper Creek Primitive Baptist Church). For some time the church remained unfinished, I’m not entirely sure why, which meant that, weather permitting, meetings were held in the exposed skeletal frame of the church, first without a roof, and later without walls. William’s son, William Robert, a blacksmith and shepherd and my four-greats grandfather completed the church, and he lost not only his father but also at least two children to mental illness—a daughter who “hanged herself in the loom room” and a son who, believing his wife meant to kill him, hid for three days in a fodder shock and died from hunger and exposure. It could also be said that my mother died of melancholia, or of the complications caused by it, and both her parents did, too.

Mom’s dad, Joel Martin Addington, would have known his grandfather James Taylor Addington, for the first six years of his life, and James Taylor would have known his grandfather, William Robert, for the first seven of his. I like thinking about memory in this way, as a traceable inheritance that whispers at the edges of our own stories in ways we barely notice. I mean to say that my maternal grandfather remembered his grandfather who remembered his grandfather who kept sheep on those gentle, brutal, historically-fraught hills, and who finished the church his own father began, the church in which he would mourn so many loved ones who could not survive the natural disasters of their own minds.

Where Time Stood Still: A Portrait of Appalachia by Bruce and Nancy Roberts. My friend and the brilliant writer and bookshop owner Rena Mosteirin sent this one to me just because she’s wonderful like that. (She also sent a book of nurse poems, but I haven’t yet read those.) This one is a collection published in 1970 of black and white photographs interwoven with interviews and character studies and thoughtful if dated social commentary. I’m so very happy to add it to my collection.

The Babies by Sabrina Orah Mark. Holy moly. These are also prose poems, which I’m only just realizing is all I want to read here at the end of all things:

Box Three, Spool Five

I have a little accordian. I wrap it in brown paper. Tonight I take it out to the porch and miss you, one word at a time. Lustspiel, I slowly mouth into the dark blue night. Behind me I can hear me shuffling closer and closer: Be again. Be. Again. I try very hard to pray with all these hands against my back. I miss the keeper of this accordion. I miss the fairgrounds. But most of all I miss you playing in the five-cent booth. And I in my wire gown. And you in your wire gown. Tonight I unwrap the accordion and your white hair spills out. Tonight even you cannot take the place of you. I peel your birthmark from my cheek and toss it to the yard crows. For you to feel their beak marks would be everything.

(end poem--still trying to figure out how to format excerpts here...)

Tonight even you cannot take the place of you.

Can you imagine writing that line?

Sometimes I think everything I write is for my mother. Anyone else? Just me? Cool.

Love you so,

Shawna Kay

My family left Letcher County when I was a toddler and didn’t return until I was in 4th grade. So, even though I was born there, and even though my family on both sides were founders of the county, I started with only a few hazy memories of the place. I was an awkward little girl with a Minnesota accent and no idea how to answer the questions I was always being asked about where we’d been. I was sure I didn’t belong, and most of the kids I went to school with agreed.

My parents were too busy working long hours and too traumatized by their own lives to connect with their family histories, and nobody wanted to be a hillbilly back then, and what this all means is that I moved through the mountains of Eastern Kentucky like a stranger when I lived there as a child, that I was around people all the time, like Leona Addington, who were my kin and, and did not know it. I was drawn to certain hollers and scenic gaps and river bends and wouldn’t find out until years later that some key event in my family’s collective story had usually happenened in the places that enchanted me. I spent a lot of time searching my grandmother’s closets and dressers for clues about who I was—and who she was, too.

Even in high school, my family still belonged to the Body, the church we’d moved away for, so our churchgoing routine was unique, contemporary, untraditional. We went to conventions once or twice a year, usually in Bowens Mill, Georgia, but mostly we had home church, which meant that I and my sister and my parents and two other women, one of them my aunt, and their children, met for a service in our living room. My father was our preacher.

On weekends when I spent the night with my Grandma Betty, I walked with her (she never learned to drive) to the Seco Methodist Church, which was perched at the edge of the creek (the Kentucky River) and on the outside it was snow-white against a bright blue sky, and on the inside it was dark wood and Murphy’s soap and bear hugs and hard candy from more relatives I did not know. I sang in that church. I sang in all of them.

Often, I was allowed to go to church with my boyfriend, a bodybuilding JROTC West Point-obsessed boy from Crafts Colley. He was a change-of-life baby, so his parents were much older than mine, nearly as old as my grandparents, and his mother, Pearl, was a devoted member of the Primitive Baptist Church, which is a branch of the Old Regulars, which is what my mother’s people were. Pearl’s husband was not a churchgoer, but she expected her son to go, and she expected me to go with him.

The preaching at the little church at Colley (also white, but high on a hillside) wasn’t hellfire and brimstone, at least not by my standards, and there was a big potluck meal after, a table spread with the signature dishes of every single woman who’d come to church that week. Pearl usually brought her Icebox Cake because it was my favorite, graham crackers and applesauce she tinted with strawberry, orange, lemon, and lime Jello, then layered in a baking dish and spread with Cool Whip. The “cake” had to set in the refrigerator for at least two days, and the texture was somewhere between a fig newton and tiramisu. She served it on the church’s Corelle dishes, and every slice was a perfect rainbow.

By that time, I’d logged so many hours in so many dancing-in-the-aisles, spirit-filled services that church hardly registered--there was no separation or distinction between it and everything else I did. I was so preoccupied with trying to behave at all times as if I were in church, and with my failure when I didn’t, that it felt to me like church was unavoidable and happening all the time, was the air that I breathed.

And, Pearl’s church was sweeter than most with its matriarchal atmosphere and potlucks and especially its music, which was the music I remembered, just barely, from my Mamaw Mae’s funeral, from before we left the mountains. It was church, but it was church from a different time, ancient and cultural and somehow relevant to my own life, even when I was sixteen. The old people called out to the preacher during his sermon, and he answered them. Sometimes they rose from their pews, weeping, and asked for a laying on of hands, and the sight of their heads bowed humbly over one another often brought me to tears.

They sang mournful, ancient, lined-out hymns, and sometimes there was what we called “special singing,” which was when a small group of ordinary people with extraordinary voices stood at the front of the church and sang their hearts out. Beulah Webb (the one in pink) was my favorite, and she was known throughout the county for the way she sang “How Great Thou Art.” I got to hear her sing it solo once with no accompaniment, just her clear, highland voice piercing the shadowy air of the church, and I can still feel it now, even as I write this, like a small sun rising in my chest. I’m so thankful for these recordings. I watch them often and catch myself searching the congregation for the back of my head.

Leona (Webb) Addington was born in 1918 in Letcher County, Kentucky, to Isom and Martha (Haynes) Webb. She was the granddaughter of Benjamin P. Webb and Lettie Adams, and the great-granddaughter of Jason Lewis Webb (pictured, far left). She married Lundy James Addington, son of Elihu Benjamin, grandson of James Taylor and Cecilia, who are my great-great grandparents on my mother’s (father’s) side. (I am also related to Leona’s grandmother, Lettie Adams, and, if you read the caption of the photo above, to the Webbs, too-- a few times over.)

The first time I had Apple Stack Cake was there at Pearl’s church, so I probably had Leona’s version, since it was popular enough to be included in the Golden Anniversary Cookbook of the Letcher County Extension Homemakers, which was printed in 1992, two years after she died and one year before I left the mountains.

I mentioned in my last post that my family celebrates Old Christmas. We eat soup beans and cornbread and biscuits and gravy. I still have green tomatoes from the garden, so I’ll fry those up, too. We play Kentucky Rook, and when the sun goes down, we set the Christmas tree on fire in the yard.

Leona’s cake opens the celebration, and I start making it a couple days ahead of time, because it is not a cake you can make the day of, not a cake to be rushed through. Apple stack cakes were the traditional wedding cakes of the mountains, and women in the community used to contribute layers as gifts to a marrying couple—a higher cake indicated a special promise of love and support. The bride’s family prepared the apple butter filling and assembled the layers as they arrived.

Apples are still everywhere in Letcher County, ugly and wild and full of flavor, old varieties carried across the pond and planted by our ancestors, and when I was a girl, old women still gathered those apples into their aprons and skirts. They peeled them with a knife somebody’s husband had sharpened, and sliced them thin, and dried them in a warm oven. Throughout the winter and the coming year, they reconstituted the dried apples in a little water and sugar and cooked them down with spices into a thick and flavorful butter, which is what this cake calls for, though it’s not even mentioned here. That piece of the recipe would be assumed.

The deeper and richer the apple butter, the better, but you can use fresh apples, too, to make your own butter, or make some butter from storebought applesauce by cooking it down further, or just buy apple butter—as long as you understand it won’t be as rich as the dried apple variety. The cake also cuts expensive sugar with molasses—use the darkest you can find. Dust the top with a little powdered sugar if you have it. Take the parts of your story that serve you well and hold them close. Make life delicious for yourself and the people you love all winter long.

Merriest Christmas to you all, and all my love,

Shawna Kay

Subscribe now