The Bluegrass and Beyond

Writer Joseph Anthony. Photo by Tom Eblen 

What, exactly, is a Kentucky writer? Is it a writer from Kentucky? One who lives or has lived in Kentucky? Writes about Kentucky?

That idea has been discussed a lot since the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning began a project last year to celebrate Kentucky writers of the past and present, and to promote Lexington as the “literary capital of mid-America.” On Thursday, the center will name the first six inductees into its Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.

With all of this in mind, I went to talk with a talented Kentucky writer who took a roundabout journey to get here.

Joseph G. Anthony was born in New Jersey and raised “on the wrong side of the tracks” in Camden, which seemed to him like a no-man’s land between New York and Philadelphia.

Anthony said he lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for a dozen years, managing an off-track betting parlor and teaching English part-time at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University.

Then, at age 33, he was offered a teaching job at Hazard Community College in 1980.

“I knew nothing about Kentucky, except the Derby happened here,” he said with a laugh. “I found it to be a great adventure.”

After five years in Hazard, Anthony moved to the humanities faculty of Bluegrass Community and Technical College in Lexington.

As he nears retirement, Anthony, 66, has had a burst of literary output in the past year: a novel,Pickering’s Mountain, set in Eastern Kentucky, and a short-story collection, Bluegrass Funeral, set in Central Kentucky.

With those two books and his first novel, Peril, Kentucky, published in 2005, Anthony considers himself a Kentucky writer. (He also published a short-story collection in 2009,Camden Blues, set in New Jersey and New York.)

“I’ve really bonded with Kentucky,” he said. “I get angry at it, like you only can at a relative. I really love so many things about it. We’re so lucky here in so many ways. Kentuckians understand their identity. I come from Jersey, where we didn’t.”

Anthony enjoys seeing Kentuckians meet for the first time and do what he calls “the county dance:” figuring out where each is from and what connections they might have. “We never did the county dance in New Jersey,” he said.

The states do have similarities, he said. People in both states tend to feel outside the American mainstream. And both are often stereotyped by outsiders.

Insiders and outsiders are a recurrent theme in Anthony’s fiction. He doesn’t avoid stereotypes, but he tries to play off them to show readers that things are always more complicated than they seem.

This is particularly true in Pickering’s Mountain, in which a young New Yorker comes to a small Eastern Kentucky town to take a job as a newspaper reporter.

Sam Weatherby and his family are thrown into complicated situations involving families, religion and coal mining. The outcomes are anything but predictable.

“Things get complicated, because there’s real people involved, real dilemmas,” he said. “Eastern Kentucky is a very complicated place. I wanted to write about the complexity of it.”

Anthony faced the same challenge for Bluegrass Funeral, whose stories are set in Lexington and a fictional Godard County. The stories include explorations of the region’s complicated history with race and class.

Anthony will be reading from and signing Bluegrass Funeral at 6 p.m. Friday at Wild Fig Bookstore, 1439 Leestown Road, and at noon Jan. 30 in the lobby of Bluegrass Community and Technical College, 470 Cooper Drive.

The Bluegrass Funeral stories led Anthony to his next project, which he says will be either a collection of short stories or a novel set in Lexington during the civil rights era, between the 1940s and the 1960s. He has been preparing to write by researching that era and listening to oral history interviews.

“I want it to be fiction,” he said. “I really feel fiction can tell a story in a way journalism can’t or essays can’t.”

After three Kentucky books, Anthony said, he sometimes feels as if he’s just getting started as a Kentucky writer. There is so much interesting material to explore.

“We’re called a border state,” he said. “I don’t think anybody else is like us. We’re not the border. We’re it.”

Brent Hutchinson is the new director of the 110-year-old Hindman Settlement School. Symbolizing the school’s past and present are the circa 1913 log cabin, right, that houses the school’s offices, and the Knott County Opportunity Center, left, on the school’s campus at the forks of Troublesome Creek. Photo by Tom Eblen

HINDMAN — Brent Hutchinson knew he had big shoes to fill. And if he had any doubt, more than 100 people have told him so since he arrived in October to become director of Hindman Settlement School.

Hutchinson succeeded Mike Mullins, 63, who died unexpectedly last February. During 34 years as director, Mullins transformed the 110-year-old school to keep its mission relevant to changing needs.

The institution now provides arts programming and dyslexia services to schools in Knott and some surrounding counties. It also runs two acclaimed summer programs: the Appalachian Writers Workshop and Appalachian Family Folk Week.

Mullins left things in good shape, financially and otherwise. How does Hutchinson plan to build on that success? He isn’t sure yet, but he plans to do a lot of listening to the scores of people throughout the region who will help him figure it out.

“We have a lot of flexibility,” Hutchinson said of the school. “I want to figure out what people here really need more than asserting areas of interest to me.”

Hutchinson, 38, has the benefit of coming in as both an outsider and an insider.

His mother was born in Germany, but she moved here when her mother married an American soldier from Knott County. Displaced by the Carr Creek Lake project in the 1970s, the family moved to Whitesburg. He was raised in Louisa, graduating as valedictorian of Lawrence County High School in 1992.

“I grew up driving past the settlement school and never dreamed I would end up here at this point in my life,” said Hutchinson, whose twin brother, Brian, is athletic director at Morehead State University.

Hutchinson and his wife, Gwen, who is from Floyd County, graduated from Morehead State. They moved to Lexington in 1997. She earned a master’s in social work at the University of Kentucky and led an Alzheimer’s day care program. He earned a master’s in family studies at UK and worked in ministry and counseling.

They left in 2001 for Nashville, where she did social work and he was in ministry, most recently at Rolling Hills Community Church in Franklin. They have two sons: Adam, 9, and Miles, 5.

“I think it’s difficult for a lot of people who leave Eastern Kentucky to get it out of their blood,” said Hutchinson, who is finishing a doctorate in leadership studies from Dallas Baptist University in Texas. “We always thought we would come back. We didn’t expect it to be this soon.”

Hindman Settlement School was founded in 1902 along the banks of Troublesome Creek by two progressive women from Central Kentucky. Its original mission was to provide basic education and health services to people in this then-remote corner of the mountains, but its role has changed as the area has developed.

“Being a part of social change is something that’s always been important to me,” Hutchinson said. “I knew Hindman Settlement School was a place that did that.”

Glenn Leveridge, a Lexington banker and chairman of the school’s board, said Hutchinson stood out among 34 candidates as being well-suited to both carry out the school’s missions and figure out new ones in the future.

“Every spoke of the wheel was tight,” he said of Hutchinson’s background and qualifications. “But the thing that really sent me over the moon was when he called toward the end of the process and asked, ‘Am I going to be able to dream?’”

Hutchinson eventually wants the school to broaden its scope throughout Eastern Kentucky by partnering with other organizations to enhance education, arts and heritage programs. Rather than just try to help solve problems, he wants the school to be a positive force in shaping Appalachian culture.

More immediately, Hutchinson is looking forward this summer to Appalachian Family Folk Week and the Appalachian Writers Workshop. The workshop has become famous because of the participation of such literary icons as Harriette Arnow and James Still, who worked at the school for many years.

Kentucky-born author Barbara Kingsolver will be the featured lecturer at this year’s workshop. And, despite her recently announced move from UK to South Carolina to be closer to aging parents, award-winning poet Nikky Finney will be back at Hindman, Hutchinson said. This will be the third year she has led a special workshop for young Kentucky writers.

“I was told by people that there’s some magic that happens on the banks of Troublesome Creek,” Hutchinson said. “The more I’m here, the more I realize that people really do believe that.”

It is tempting to assume that great authors just sit down and write great books. The writing is so good, they make it look easy.

“Mrs. Arnow writes so well, with so little apparent effort, that critical examination seems almost irrelevant,” author Joyce Carol Oates once wrote about Harriette Simpson Arnow’s most famous novel, The Dollmaker. “It is a tribute to her talent that one is convinced, partway through the book, that it is a masterpiece.”

But nothing came easy to Arnow (1908-1986), a native of Appalachian Kentucky whose five novels, three non-fiction books and many short stories earned her acclaim as one of the 20th century’s great American writers.

Arnow was a tiny, tough woman whose prolific literary output was a testament to determination. She overcame many obstacles, from economic hardship and the sexism of her era to the everyday distractions of being a wife and mother.

Evidence of Arnow’s struggles will be on display soon at the University of Kentucky’s Margaret I. King Library. The exhibit marks the completion of a 20-year effort by UK’s Special Collections Division to sort, catalog and, in some cases, make sense of 145 boxes of Arnow’s personal papers.

The exhibit opens with a program that includes remarks by Appalachian Journal editor Sandy Ballard, who is writing a biography of Arnow, and Gurney Norman, a UK English professor and former Kentucky poet laureate.

Later in life, Arnow became an encouraging but demanding teacher at writing workshops in Murray and Hindman, where Norman became her friend. “She could be very intimidating,” he said. “She was not, shall we say, a warm and fuzzy personality, but she was very generous.”

Arnow’s books are not warm and fuzzy, either: most are gritty tragedies about mountain people struggling against their circumstances. Don’t expect happy endings. In The Dollmaker, Gertie Nevels leaves her beloved Kentucky farm to follow her husband to a factory job in Detroit. They find only hardship and despair.

Still, in a 1979 Kentucky Educational Television documentary, Arnow insisted to interviewer Al Smith that she was not a pessimist. “If I were a pessimist,” she said, “I would have never have tried to write, because writing is such a gamble.”

The UK exhibit, organized by graduate student Amber Surface, uses notebooks, drafts and letters related to Arnow’s novel Hunter’s Horn to show her creative process. Memorabilia from The Dollmaker will be used to show how that novel was prepared for publication and became a best seller.

Arnow’s papers include the dime-store composition books she used to write first drafts in barely legible pencil scrawl, and her intense correspondence with editors. She made notes on both sides of everything. Her manuscripts show exhaustive rewriting and rearranging — cut-and-pasted paragraphs with editing marks everywhere. Her children drew pictures on some manuscripts.

Norman said Arnow’s jumbled papers could never have been made useful to scholars without 20 years of hard work by Kate Black, curator of UK’s Appalachia collection, and a parade of graduate students.

“It was as if someone had taken all of these papers and thrown them up in the air,” Black said. “We did a lot of piecing together.”

Black also found a carefully arranged scrapbook of reviews, letters and memorabilia related to publication of The Dollmaker in 1954. She said a family member must have put it together; it was too organized to have been Arnow’s work.

The collection includes Arnow’s baby shoe, diplomas, fan mail and an odd assortment of news clippings, saved perhaps as inspiration for future stories. Arnow also kept her membership materials from the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Civil Liberties Union. “She was a complicated woman,” Black said.

The papers offer a glimpse into the intense ambition and conflicted emotions of this early feminist — who did not call herself a feminist. Writing masterpieces while caring for husband Harold, a newspaper reporter, daughter Marcella and son Thomas made for a demanding life.

“I may be more housewife than writer,” Arnow told Smith in their 1979 interview.

On the back of one page of manuscript, UK archivists found this scribbled note from her husband: Harriette — The burners on stove do not work. The oven does work: Can you cook a bite in it? H.

If you go

An exhibit and program marking the opening of the papers of Harriette Simpson Arnow

When: 4 p.m. Nov. 17

Where: The Great Hall, Margaret I. King Building, University of Kentucky

Click here for more information.

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A new think tank has been created to study Kentucky issues and analyze the public policies being developed to address them.

The Kentucky Center for Economic Policy is a project of the Berea-based Mountain Association for Community Economic Development, which has a long track record of producing quality research on issues affecting Eastern Kentucky and Central Appalachia. The center’s Web site is at: www.kypolicy.org.

The center’s first report looks at how $3.4 billion in federal stimulus money shored up Kentucky’s budget — and how the state will be affected now that stimulus spending is coming to an end.

“Kentucky relied heavily on Recovery Act dollars to plug holes in the 2009-2010 state budget and to craft a balanced budget in 2011-2012,” the center’s director, Jason Bailey, said in a news release about the report.  “Those funds dry up this year, however, at a time when the economy remains in a deep hole.”

Click here to download the report. You can sign up to receive future updates at the Center’s Web site.

Expect the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy to provide some progressive balance to the conservative Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, based in Bowling Green.

Apologists for mountaintop removal and other destructive forms of surface mining often rationalize it by saying that digging coal by any means is essential to Eastern Kentucky’s economy, even as the number of mining jobs steadily declines.

A new Web site hopes to foster more public discussion about creating a sustainable, healthy and environmentally friendly economy for Central Appalachia.

The Web site, www.appalachiantransition.net, was created by the Berea-based Mountain Association for Community Economic Development and the social-justice group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.

“We believe the old extraction-based mono-economy has produced poor results and offers a very limited future,” said Jason Bailey, MACED’s research and policy director. Besides, coal reserves are dwindling.

“We know that transitioning to a new economy in Central Appalachia will not be easy or quick,” Bailey said. “But we believe with a clear vision and a steady approach, together we can move to a new economy that sustains the people and the land.”

Bruce Burris is best known in Lexington for helping other people create art — and for pushing the boundaries of what art is and who artists are.

He directs (with Crystal Bader) the Latitude Artist Community on Saunier Street, which for nearly a decade has helped people with disabilities express themselves through visual art. Latitude artists’ work has been displayed at galleries in New York and Paris, France.

Burris started ELandF Gallery, a “small-projects accelerator” for art in public spaces. It has sent poets to read in nursing homes and on LexTran buses. And it has paid small honoraria to people who wrote winning essays about why they wanted to watch clouds or read a book while sitting in a streetside parking space.

At the height of the controversy over Dudley Webb’s now-stalled CentrePointe development, Burris paid performance artists to publicly “mourn” the demolition of the block’s old buildings and to walk Main Street as “town criers,” giving dramatic readings of a defensive speech that Webb made to the Urban County Council.

Away from Lexington, Burris has gained notoriety for his own art. He has had solo exhibitions in San Francisco, Philadelphia and cities in California and Michigan, but never in Lexington. Until now.

“Nobody really knows about that aspect of his personality,” said Phillip March Jones, who organized Burris’ first solo show in a decade, which opened Thursday at Institute 193 and continues through Feb. 20 (Thursday through Saturday, 2 p.m. to 8 p.m.).

Jones opened Institute 193 last fall at 193 North Limestone. It is a little gallery with big ambitions: to showcase the work of this region’s unsung contemporary artists.

“Everything with Bruce is about Latitude or ELandF, but it’s never about him. … His own art never gets presented,” Jones said. “And, for me, it’s some of the most interesting stuff he does.”

The show is called We Will Someday, Someday We Will. The name was inspired by this season of New Year’s resolutions, when we all promise to become better people.

Burris’ sculptures, drawings, paintings and installation pieces use humor, irony and parody to comment on and raise questions about community dynamics and cultural stereotypes. He wants his art to promote activism and awareness of regional issues including poverty and mountaintop-removal coal mining. His art isn’t intended as decoration; he wants it to make viewers think.

One piece, Welcome to Lonely Mountain Community Center, is a bulletin board filled with fictional news and notices that speak to issues, concerns and cultural conflicts in contemporary small-town Appalachia.

Burris is as much a storyteller as an artist. He densely weaves words and messages into his paintings and drawings, some of which are reminiscent of funk-art album covers from the 1970s.

“What really carries the work is this text,” Jones said. “He’s dealing with the very problems we’re dealing with every day. These are serious issues, but he deals with them in a visually lighthearted way to get people into them.”

I met Burris for lunch at Third Street Stuff on a cold, snowy day. The first thing he wanted to do, before talking about himself, was to show off drawings and paintings by Latitude artists on the wall behind our table.

Burris, 54, grew up in Wilmington, Del., seeing art in everyday life. His mother was constantly taking him to museums and cultural events, “which, of course, I didn’t appreciate at the time,” he says.

He also was influenced by a boyhood neighbor, the famous artist and illustrator Frank Schoonover, who was well into his 80s but still painting and teaching. “He had an open studio where neighborhood kids could wander in,” Burris said.

“I grew up feeling like the visual arts were an approachable thing,” said Burris, who studied at San Francisco Art Institute. “But the better way for me to make art is not in an isolated environment. Collaboration and community and support; it’s a very natural thing for me.”

That belief, and a public service ethic picked up while attending Quaker schools, led him to a career that has combined art, community and social work — working with homeless and abused children in San Francisco and with disabled artists in Kentucky.

Burris moved to Lexington 16 years ago with his wife, Robynn Pease, who came to the University of Kentucky to earn a doctorate. She is now UK’s director of work life, teaches sociology and social work, and was elected last year as staff representative on the university board of trustees. They live near Southland Drive.

Originally, Burris thought he would be here three or four years then move back to San Francisco. “So I stored all my unimportant stuff in a friend’s garage,” he said. “I hope he’s had a big yard sale by now.”

After his last solo show a decade ago at a major San Francisco gallery, Burris said he ran out of steam and stopped creating work for several years. He resumed only recently, sparked by concern about mountaintop-removal mining and other issues.

Burris’ art, like the projects he sponsors through ELandF, are reactions to what he sees around him.

“I like all the projects I’ve done, but I know in my heart that they’re not innovative enough,” he said. “I don’t always feel like taking risks in this environment. You won’t see people taking these risks here; it’s a small town. But we should take risks.”

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This seems to be Kentucky month on the small screen. If you didn’t like Diane Sawyer’s view, KET has something completely different.

Our Kentucky, an hour-long video valentine to the state’s scenic beauty, debuts on KET1 Saturday at 8 p.m. as part of the network’s annual on-air fundraiser. In tone and content, it couldn’t be more different from Sawyer’s report on systemic poverty in Appalachia for ABC’s news magazine 20/20.

It’s coincidence that these TV programs came out within two weeks of each other. In many ways, they represent the two sides of Kentucky’s coin — both begging us to scratch below the surface.

In Our Kentucky, KET’s videographers visited Kentucky’s most beautiful places, bathed in golden sunlight and rendered in high-definition splendor. We see panorama after panorama, set to majestic music and evocative narration by Nick Clooney.

There are fawns grazing in mountain meadows at sunrise, geese flying in formation framed by the setting sun, egrets swimming in misty cypress swamps. The camera lingers on such places as Chained Rock in Bell County, Natural Bridge in Powell County and Pennyrile State Forest in Christian County.

We see historic homes, foals romping across manicured Bluegrass pastures and the awe-inspiring cathedrals of Covington. There’s the 21st century skyline of Louisville, the 19th century skyline of Augusta and distilleries as noted for their quaint charm as for their fine bourbon.

It’s an idyllic view of Kentucky — true, as far as it goes.

Sawyer’s documentary, A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains, follows the lives of several poor children and young people in Eastern Kentucky. They’re shown trying to survive in a seemingly hopeless environment of poverty, drug abuse and a lack of enough good food, healthcare, education and economic opportunity. The report is true, as far as it goes.

The documentary attracted 10.9 million viewers nationwide when it aired Feb. 13 — the biggest 20/20 audience in more than four years. As expected, it drew fire from some Kentuckians who saw it as nothing more than a rehash of old stereotypes. After all, Sawyer could have found plenty of poor people on the cab ride out of New York to catch her plane.

Some complained that the program and a brief ABC News followup didn’t do enough to highlight progress and the efforts Kentuckians have made to help their less-fortunate neighbors.

Others, however, have responded with introspection, asking what more Kentuckians could do. Some of the most thoughtful reaction I have seen has been on WYMT-TV in Hazard, which could teach many big-city stations a thing or two about public-service broadcasting.

Appalachian scholar Ron Eller of the University of Kentucky, who appeared briefly in the documentary, wishes Sawyer, a Kentucky native, had focused more on the root causes of Eastern Kentucky’s problems and why so many efforts to solve them have failed.

“On the other hand, I think the program was quite successful at drawing attention to the persistence of poverty and social inequity in the Commonwealth,” he said.

National attention is helpful, Eller said. Ultimately, though, Kentuckians must create the modern economy, honest government and adequate infrastructure needed to lift Appalachia.

I missed Sawyer’s documentary when it first aired, so I watched it online Monday evening, immediately after viewing a preview DVD of Our Kentucky. In an odd way, watching them together made both more thought-provoking.

You won’t see any strip mines in Our Kentucky, no scalped mountaintops, factory hog farms or polluted streams. The Bluegrass meadows aren’t bordered by strip malls, big-box stores, McMansion cul-de-sacs or sprawling developments of cookie-cutter homes.

“The aspects of pride we have in who we are and where we live are often at odds with the way of life we have chosen for ourselves,” Eller noted. “But out of that strong sense of place could come actions to protect that land and the quality of life.”

Neither Sawyer’s documentary nor Our Kentucky tell the whole story. It would be asking too much to expect them to. But they’re both worth watching, because together they show Kentuckians what needs fixing — and why it’s worth the effort.

As I drove to Frankfort early Tuesday, punching the buttons on my car radio, I came across one of those feel-good spots from the Kentucky coal industry. It ended with this line: “Never underestimate the power of coal.”

That’s been good advice in this state for more than a century. And never more true than inside the marble walls of the building where I was headed.

I came to the state Capitol on this sunny day to witness a different kind of power — the growing public sentiment against coal-mining methods that blast away mountains and fill headwater streams with the debris.

More than 500 Kentuckians — from toddlers on their parents’ shoulders to seniors in their 80s — marched up Capitol Avenue and gathered on the Capitol steps for the annual I Love Mountains Rally. The citizens group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth organized the rally to push for legislation that would ban the burying of headwater streams with mining waste.

The marchers carried signs proclaiming “topless mountains are obscene” and urging “not one more mile” of streams be destroyed. They lacked the coal industry’s economic or political power. Instead, they sought to harness moral power.

Ashley Judd added glamour to the event. The Kentucky actress, famous for reciting other people’s words in movies, gave a 20-minute speech of her own that was passionate and eloquent. It was no celebrity puff piece, but a sharp critique of mountaintop-removal mining, the coal industry and the endless cycle of poverty she said coal has brought to Appalachia.

“There is no doubt that there is a crisis in Eastern Kentucky,” Judd said. “The crises are systemic, and the system at the root of our 100-year-long crisis is the unchecked power of the coal companies.

“They assured us that each reform … would be the end, the death of the coal industry,” Judd said. “Well, by golly, what do you know. Here the coal companies still are — bigger, and badder and richer than ever. … Make no mistake about it: The coal companies are thriving. Even in this bleak economy, they are thriving. What is dying is our mountains. And they are dying so fast, my friends, so shockingly fast.”

U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth of Louisville pledged to fight mountaintop-removal mining through federal clean-water legislation. That may be necessary. The state “stream saver” bill, sponsored by Sen. Kathy Stein of Lexington and Rep. Don Pasley of Winchester, is getting the usual cold shoulder from legislative leaders with close ties to the coal industry.

Silas House, a best-selling author from Eastern Kentucky, said he was disappointed Gov. Steve Beshear declined to attend the rally, even though it was just a few steps from his office.

“I think Gov. Beshear is a good man and I don’t understand why he won’t come out and listen to us,” House said, noting that many of his neighbors also are afraid to cross King Coal. “We’ve had a hundred years of being told not to speak out against the coal industry. It’s hard to break out of that culture. We’ve been taught to feel powerless.”

Mickey McCoy, a high school teacher from Inez in coal-rich Martin County, agreed: “It’s a terrible thing when you can’t get a single senator or representative from the coalfield counties to represent anything but the coal industry.”

Beshear’s spokesman, Jay Blanton, said the governor was in an important economic development meeting that had been scheduled weeks earlier, but left it to meet with Judd and a small group of KFTC members after the rally. Blanton said Judd spent Monday night at the governor’s mansion where she and Beshear “talked at some length about these issues.”

KFTC said nearly 500 Kentucky mountains have been destroyed by mountaintop-removal mining. It cited figures from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that more than 1,400 miles of headwater streams in the state have been buried or damaged by mining since 1981.

The coal industry, which says it provides 17,000 jobs in Kentucky, argues that the “stream saver” legislation would virtually halt surface mining in Eastern Kentucky. And it notes that coal provides more than 90 percent of Kentucky’s electricity at some of the nation’s cheapest prices.

There’s no doubt Kentucky needs coal — at least until we can develop alternative energy sources, hopefully before all of the coal runs out. But that doesn’t mean coal must be mined by the most environmentally destructive methods. Electricity is cheap only if you don’t include all of the hidden costs to Kentucky’s land, water and people.

In the short run, economic arguments always seem to trump moral arguments, even when people know in their hearts what is right. In the long run, though, moral arguments usually prevail.

A few decades ago, it was blasphemy to speak out against the health dangers of smoking, because tobacco was so important to Kentucky’s economy. A century and a half ago, many people argued that the economy couldn’t survive without slavery.

“The environment is not a place where we go hiking; it’s a place where we live,” said Sam Avery, who came to the rally from Hart County, where he lives in a solar-powered home.

“When you grind up a mountain just for the coal, you destroy the trees, the animals, the insects, the water supply. The living world is that much smaller,” Avery said. “From a Biblical perspective, it’s an abomination to the creator.”

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A public memorial service is planned at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Hindman Funeral Home for Verna Mae Slone, the well-known Knott County author, quilter and dollmaker who died Monday at age 94.

Mike Mullins, director of the Hindman Settlement School and a close friend of Mrs. Slone, said the program will include music, remembrances and time for people in the community to share their memories of her. The service also will include a message from her longtime pastor and friend, Lawrence Baldridge. Visitation begins at 5 p.m.

The funeral is planned Thursday at 11 a.m. at the funeral home chapel, with Old Regular Baptist ministers officiating, Mullins said. Burial will take place in the Slone Cemetery at Garner. Following the burial, a meal will be provided for the family and friends at the Hindman Settlement School’s May Stone Building.

Despite steady rain, more than 200 people attended a family service for Mrs. Slone on Tuesday night, Mullins said. She is survived by five sons, 17 grandchildren, 40 great-grandchildren and 9 great-great grandchildren.  Slone was photographed (above) in 1993 by Barbara Beirne.

At a point in life when most people slow down, Verna Mae Slone found her voice.

She was a quilter, a dollmaker and the mother of five sons. But after Slone found her voice, she also became the author of six books, the best known of which was her first, What My Heart Wants to Tell.

In simple language, Slone wrote about life and the importance of family, community and the fast-disappearing culture of her beloved Eastern Kentucky mountains.

On Monday, her voice fell silent. She was 94 and had lived almost all of her life in the Knott County community of Pippa Passes.

“I often referred to her as the Grandma Moses of the mountains,” said Mike Mullins, longtime director of the Hindman Settlement School. “She loved to expound on the virtues and values of people from the hills in a very positive light.”

“She had a great sense of tradition and family … and a natural, wonderful way of expressing herself,” said Loyal Jones, retired director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College.

“Verna Mae Slone was a gracious, dignified, intelligent woman,” said New Jersey photographer Barbara Beirne, whose 1993 portrait of Slone became the centerpiece of her exhibit Women of Appalachia at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

“What I especially remember about Verna Mae is her pride in being Appalachian,” Beirne said Monday. “Everyone who views her photograph seems aware that they have been introduced to a very special person.”

Slone was born Oct. 9, 1914, in Knott County. Her mother died when she was 6 weeks old and she was raised by her father, Isom “Kitten Eye” Slone.

She married Willie Slone and had five sons, whom she cared for alone during the week while her husband was off supporting the family. He drove a bulldozer all over Appalachia, carving roads through the mountains to lay natural gas pipelines. He died in 1989.

Their oldest son, Milburn, said his mother completed eighth grade but didn’t move on to high school until he was old enough to go. They were in the same class until she became pregnant with his youngest brother, who was 13 years behind the other four.

Slone, 71, said his mother had a photographic memory and a lifelong love of reading she passed on to her children. Her hands were always busy, making thousands of cloth dolls she gave away and more than 1,800 quilts, many of her own design. Fifteen of those quilts decorate the walls of the main hall at Hindman Settlement School.

“Making a quilt is a lot like living,” Slone once wrote. “When we are born we are given a bundle of scraps; the way we put them together is left up to us.”

Mullins said he met Slone in 1972 when he was directing an oral history project at Alice Lloyd College in Pippa Passes. “It seemed like every time we had a topic, she would give us an unbelievable interview,” he said.

As the interviews were transcribed, Mullins gave Slone copies. Those interviews sparked her interest in writing, and she wove them into a book about her father and the joys and hardships of old-time mountain life. She had 100 copies printed to give away to family members.

Somehow, Mullins said, a copy of the book found its way to a writer, who read excerpts on National Public Radio. New Republic Books published the book in 1979 under the title What My Heart Wants to Tell, and it has sold widely ever since.

Milburn Slone said his mother received fan letters from around the world about that book, but the one that meant the most to her came from a leper colony on an island off the coast of Africa. A copy of the book had made it there. “They said that book, second to the Bible, gave them a reason to live,” he said. “It told how you could survive under any circumstances.”

Slone went on to write five other books, including the novel Rennie’s Way and a book about Appalachian language called How We Talked. For many years, she wrote a column called Now and Then for a local newspaper, the Troublesome Creek Times.

Mullins said Slone’s home was a regular stop for visitors seeking to learn about mountain culture: “There were literally thousands of people who sat at the feet of Verna Mae and listened to her talk about life in these hills.”

Slone’s health began declining after a fall six months ago, but she was alert until 15 minutes before she died, her son said.

Mullins last visited Slone on Dec. 23. She was in bed, breathing with the help of an oxygen tank, but she recited a long poem she had written.

“She encompassed love of family, love of the hills, love of the values and traditions, and she had the ability to translate that through her crafts and her writing,” Mullins said. “Just to look into her eyes and have her look at you with that smile on her face was one of the most inspiring things.”

I had eight vacation days to use or lose, so I was off for the past two weeks.  I had great Christmas and New Year’s celebrations with my family, ate too much, took a cold bike ride, hiked at Raven Run nature preserve and made a start on the big stack of books I bought at the Kentucky Book Fair in November.

The best thing I read during my break was Uneven Ground, by Ron Eller, a University of Kentucky history professor.

Eller has been researching and writing about his native Appalachia for three decades, and Uneven Ground is an outstanding analysis of the region’s history since 1945.  Eller covers a lot in 260 pages of well-chosen words. It is highly readable and often profound.

Appalachia’s lack of progress has sometimes been blamed on its inhabitants’ cultural differences or fear of change. But Eller thinks it has a lot more to do with money and power. For most of the past century, Appalachia has been run like a colony, with outside interests owning most of the wealth, reaping most of the profits and leaving behind an impoverished population and a wasted landscape.

This paragraph on page 223 offers a concise summary of why a half-century of focus on improving Appalachia has made limited progress:

The Appalachian economy, for example, had always been tied to national markets, despite popular images of the region as isolated and underdeveloped. The postwar effort to modernize the mountains came at a time of rapid transition in the national economy, but politics and misperceptions of the region’s history limited the actions of planners and policy makers to playing games of economic catch-up rather than to designing a sustainable, place-based economy for a changing world. During the 1970s and 1980s, as promoters of Appalachian development were building industrial parks, supporting the expansion of coal mining and chasing runaway branch plants, the United States was undergoing a fundamental change from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. At a time when Appalachian leaders were struggling to recruit labor-intensive, low-wage manufacturing plants to an underdeveloped region, technology and globalization were moving these older forms of industrial growth abroad. Traditional industrial recruitment strategies not only perpetuated the long pattern of wealth flowing out of the mountains, but failed to provide a sustainable economic foundation or to protect the region’s sensitive environmental resources. Branch plant economies provided jobs but created little permanent wealth in the communities where they operated. As the rest of the nation invested in expanding higher education, improving environmental quality, and ecouraging creativity for a higher-tech and more service-based world, the core communities of Appalachia remained tied to the old, extractive economy.

Uneven Ground should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the region that includes so much of Kentucky. 

LONDON — Rex McDonald was born and raised in Corbin, went to Eastern Kentucky University and the University of Tennessee, worked for the U.S. State Department and lived for a time in the former Soviet Union.

But when it was time to settle down, McDonald wanted to come home. He started a company that provided a comfortable living for his family. But Bob Wilson, an entrepreneurship coach for Kentucky Highlands Investment Corp., thought the company could be more than it was.

McDonald and his partner, Hank Gevedon, moved their operation into Kentucky Highlands’ business incubator, took business-development classes and got hands-on coaching from Wilson and others. Kentucky Highlands also provided equity and debt financing to the company, PD3 Inc., which helps inventors bring their products to market.

Rex McDonald of PD3 Inc. shows U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Somerset, this company's emergency underground mine rescue chamber. At right is his entrepreneur coach, Bob Wilson. Photo by Tom Eblen

Now, 14 months later, PD3 has its own plant in nearby Rockcastle County. It has grown from six employees to 26. Thanks in part to a new product the company has designed and will soon manufacture — a portable emergency shelter for underground miners — McDonald expects to hire an additional 29 workers early next year.

PD3 is performing at a level McDonald never thought possible. It pays employees better-than-average wages and provides insurance benefits and a retirement plan. “We’ve built the foundation for a sustainable company that will survive beyond the founders,” he said.

PD3 is the latest success story to come out of Kentucky Highlands, a non-profit agency set up in 1968 to create badly needed jobs in southern and Eastern Kentucky by training and investing in local entrepreneurs. Over the past 40 years, Kentucky Highlands says it has created more than 10,000 jobs in its 22-county service area.

Business incubation is one of Kentucky Highlands’ many ventures, and the agency announced plans last week to expand that role by building a 9,600-square-foot center next to its London headquarters to mentor start-up companies.

Kentucky Highlands has created for-profit subsidiaries to supplement the private and government grants it receives. It has started two venture capital funds, a tax-credit program, and an agriculture loan fund. It has formed partnerships with a variety of schools and other organizations. It also has worked with local companies to build affordable housing in the region.

“We’re a catalyst,” said Jerry Rickett, a Corbin native who has been president of Kentucky Highlands since 1989. “We’re trying to find ways to facilitate the creation and retention of jobs.”

Economic development has always been a challenge in Appalachia. The region has a history of failed efforts and squandered resources, from empty industrial parks to millions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives given to companies that came to the region for a few years, then left when cheaper labor could be found elsewhere.

Kentucky Highlands has succeeded by doing things differently and by playing to its region’s strengths. The agency invests relatively small amounts of money in local people and businesses that can gradually create sustainable jobs.

Rickett points to census data that show there are 40,000 “micro-enterprises” in the 22-county region, which has a population of about 550,000. Nearly 87 percent of those enterprises have no employees except the owner.

“If over the next few years we could get 10 percent of them to hire only one employee — through training or micro-lending — that would be 4,000 additional jobs,” Rickett said. “And if one of those companies goes out of business, a community loses a job or two, not 200 jobs.”

Kentucky Highlands focuses on home-grown companies that can bring new revenue into the region. One example, Rickett said, is an electrical engineer in Harlan who likes to fly airplanes. His small business installs runway lights at airports around the country.

“His pickup truck is a twin-engine aircraft, and each week he loads up a bunch of Harlan County electricians and they go wherever it is in the United States they’re putting in runway lights,” Rickett said. “Then, on Friday night, they come back to Harlan. It’s not a big employer; maybe 12 people. But that money comes back to Harlan.”

For generations, Appalachia’s best and brightest have often had to leave to find work and opportunity. A theme of Harriette Arnow’s classic novel The Dollmaker was the anguish people felt when they had to leave the mountains after World War II to find work in Northern factories.

Thanks to digital technology and high-speed communication, a lot of work can now come to the workers, wherever they are. Rickett knows a mechanical engineer who designs heating and cooling systems for big retail developments. He lives in Eastern Kentucky, but does work all over the country via the Internet.

“He’s getting to raise his children in a rural community that has the values he wants his family to have,” he said.

“The best thing we have to market here is the creativity of our people,” Rickett said. “Appalachian people have always been resourceful.”

It’s a strength Kentucky could exploit in the 21st-century economy, along with a low cost of living, improving schools and strong vocational training programs.

“If we could just add a little bit of entrepreneurship to that curriculum,” Rickett said. “If you’re going to be an electrician, why not start your own business and hire the three best guys in your class to work for you?”

But success will require some culture change. Generations of Appalachians have grown up with a mind-set that work means working for someone else. “There is a lot of latent entrepreneurial capacity in Eastern Kentucky, but there are not many role models,” Rickett said. “We need to get kids in grade school thinking about being an employer rather than an employee.”

Bill Bishop of The Daily Yonder has an excellent piece on the discussion about Barrack Obama’s “Appalachian problem.” It offers statistics showing that race is no more an issue in Appalachia than many other parts of the country, including New York. Bishop argues that Obama would get a lot more support in the mountains if he would simply show up and try. It worked for Jesse Jackson two decades ago.

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In the last Kentucky Notebook, I mentioned “retiree” blogs. Another interesting idea comes from Marty Solomon, a retired University of Kentucky education professor. Like many people, Solomon says he is frustrated that some stories he thinks are important don’t get much coverage by major new organizations. So he has created The Watchdog Post blog to draw attention to them.