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.”

At a five-year anniversary meeting of Poezia, a poetry-writing group she helped start, on Feb. 9 at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, Katerina Stoykova-Klemer is greeted friends, including group co-founder Colin Watkins, right. Photos by Tom Eblen

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer already was a classic American success story.

Born in Bulgaria, she immigrated to the United States at age 24 with her young son and married her American pen pal, Daniel Klemer. She earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science, then a master’s in business administration. She became a software engineer for IBM, then a project manager for Lexmark International.

Increasingly, though, she felt something was missing in her life.

Then, on Dec. 20, 2006, while driving down a Lexington street, she realized what it was. A poem popped into her head. She pulled into a Kroger parking lot and wrote it down.

Stoykova-Klemer, 40, had begun writing poetry at age 8. She was published in Bulgaria, to some notice. But in her rush to build a new life in a new country, she had stopped writing. The poem that popped into her head was her first in 11 years and the first she had written in English.

“I suddenly had this feeling of joy and thought, ‘I can’t let go of this!’ ” she said. “The most important voices in our lives are often quiet ones.”

A year later, Stoykova- Klemer quit her job at Lexmark, where her husband works as an engineer.

“Before I started writing again, my job was the most important thing I did; then it was just something I did,” she said. “I realized that I didn’t want to spend so much time doing something I am not passionate about.”

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer talks with poet Jude Lally. Accents Publishing has published two of Lally's books, including his new collection, "I'm Fine, but Thanks for Asking."

Since her passion for poetry reignited, Stoykova-Klemer has been a ball of fire. She started a poetry group, earned a master’s in fine arts from Louisville’s Spalding University; taught classes at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning; and created Accents, a radio show about arts and culture that she hosts on WRFL-FM at 2 p.m. each Friday. She writes poetry and encourages dozens of other writers.

In 2010, she combined her business, technical and artistic skills to start Accents Publishing, which has produced 21 poetry books by 20 authors. Eight authors are Kentuckians, including well-known poets Richard Taylor and Frederick Smock.

“I think she is one of the most creative people in this town,” said Neil Chethik, director of the Carnegie Center. “She has a combination of business sense and creative juice, and she is such a compassionate person.

“Her poetry is fantastic. Plus, she’s trying to find a way to make literature and poetry marketable, to help other creative people make a living. She’s exactly what Lexington needs.”

Chethik watched Feb. 9 as more than 50 people came to the Carnegie Center to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Poezia. That is the writing group Stoykova-Klemer started with Colin Watkins, a poet and songwriter she met at a New Year’s Eve party 11 days after her epiphany in the Kroger parking lot.

The writing group meets at 7 p.m. Thursdays at Common Grounds coffeehouse. New members are always welcome. Poezia got its name when a member asked Stoykova-Klemer the Bulgarian word for poetry.

At the anniversary celebration, Stoykova-Klemer announced she was stepping down as a leader of the group, in part to focus more time on Accents Publishing.

The company’s most popular and profitable books are small “chapbooks.” Making them is a family affair: Stoykova-Klemer prints and cuts them, and her husband binds them. Her son, Simeon Kondev, a student at Rhode Island School of Design, creates cover art.

Stoykova-Klemer handles distribution to stores from Kentucky to New York and New Hampshire. “They all know me at the post office,” she said.

Chapbooks sell for $5. “What we found out is that people rarely buy just one,” she said. Profits from chapbooks help support larger, professionally printed paperbacks that sell for $10 to $15.

“Our idea of affordable books seems to be working,” she said. “They say poetry books don’t sell, but our books sell. We keep selling more and more of them.”

Accents Publishing sponsors an annual contest to find new authors. “We have had hundreds of people submit work,” she said. The company covers all publication costs and pays authors by giving them 10 percent of the press run. Accents broke even its first year, and she expects a profit this year.

Stoykova-Klemer wants to keep growing the company — adding prose books and widening distribution — as long as it doesn’t crowd out her writing time.

“I say the most important thing I can do for Accents Publishing is to keep writing,” she said. “That keeps me centered for everything else.”

Keeping up with Katerina Stoykova-Klemer

Personal Web site: Katerinaklemer.com.

Company site: Accents-publishing.com.

‘Accents’ radio show: 2-3 p.m. Fridays, WRFL-88.1 FM, or Katerinaklemer.com/radio.

Poezia writing group: 7 p.m. Thursdays, Common Grounds coffeehouse, 343 E. High St. Online at Meetup.com/poetry-439. A prose writing group meets at 7 p.m. Tuesdays. Meetup.com/writers-583.

Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning: Carnegieliteracy.org.

A selection of books published by Accents Publishing of Lexington. Poet Katerina Stoykova-Klemer started the publishing company to make inexpensive poetry books available to a wider audience.

Tens of thousands of Kentuckians were focused last Tuesday night on cheering for the Wildcats as they thrashed the Florida Gators.

Still, a few blocks away from a packed Rupp Arena, the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning also was filled to capacity. The standing-room-only crowd of more than 200 was there to cheer for local writers. Basketball isn’t the only pursuit where Kentuckians play at the top of the game.

Ed McClanahan read a hilarious tale of adolescent angst from his new retrospective collection, I Just Hitched in from the Coast. Bobbie Ann Mason read from her new novel,The Girl in the Blue Beret. Nikky Finney read from her new poetry collection, Head Off & Split, which recently won the National Book Award. Before the all-stars took the microphone, several aspiring writers read from their work.

Finney’s National Book Award — and the viral Internet video of her amazing acceptance speech — could not have come at a better time for a new Carnegie Center initiative. Neil Chethik, the center’s new director, has proclaimed Lexington as the Literary Capital of Mid-America and the Carnegie Center as its statehouse.

“It’s not as if we’re trying to be something we’re not,” Chethik said. “We are the literary capital and have been for many years. Half the job is marketing what we already have, and the other half is using that energy to create more.”

Many states have rich literary traditions. But few can top what writers who were born in or moved to Kentucky have produced — and are producing.

Robert Penn Warren was the nation’s first poet laureate, as well as the first writer to win Pulitzer Prizes in more than one literary genre. William Wells Brown was the first published black novelist. Hunter S. Thompson helped create a new genre of first-person narrative, “gonzo journalism.”

Wendell Berry, whose environmental writing has attracted an international following, was selected last week to give the 2012 Jefferson Lecture on April 23 at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. It is the federal government’s most prestigious honor for intellectual achievement in the humanities.

Eastern Kentucky’s mountains have produced, nurtured and inspired many outstanding writers, including James Still, Jesse Stuart, Harriette Simpson Arnow, Harry M. Caudill, Gurney Norman, Janice Holt Giles, Verna Mae Slone, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Silas House. Western Kentucky’s great voices have included Mason and Irvin S. Cobb.

Central Kentuckians James Lane Allen and John Fox Jr. were national best-sellers a century ago, just as Kim Edwards, Sue Grafton and Barbara Kingsolver are today.

Elizabeth Hardwick and Cleanth Brooks were two of the 20th century’s most influential literary critics. Other notable Kentucky writers from the recent past include Thomas Merton, Allen Tate, Gayle Jones and Guy Davenport.

Among today’s heavy hitters: Sena Jeter Naslund, Frank X Walker, Maurice Manning, Richard Taylor, Chris Offutt, C.E. Morgan, Crystal Wilkinson, Jane Gentry Vance and Erik Reece.

Despite a deep streak of anti-intellectualism, Kentucky has always nurtured great writing. But why? Some say it is the state’s location. Kentucky was the first Western frontier, a Civil War border state and a place always in the midst of transition, migration, clashing values and regional tensions.

“Conflict makes for great stories,” Chethik noted.

“I think it’s because we like to talk so much and tell stories on one another,” McClanahan said. “It’s so much a part of life. Maybe it’s in the water.”

It is not the water, but the land, said Finney, a South Carolina native who has lived in Kentucky for two decades. “Our greatness as writers has to do with the land. Our connection to it,” she said. “We don’t really own the land. The land owns us.”

More than anything, Finney said, it is Kentucky’s mountains: “We never credit the mountains enough for helping shape who we are, for giving us a specific lens through which to see the world, a lens to nurture what we have to say about our human presence in it.”

Writing is a solitary endeavor. But writers need a supportive community, and Kentucky has it. You see it in the attendance at huge annual book fairs in Frankfort and Bowling Green, at bookstores across the state and at events such as the monthly Holler Poets reading, which packs Al’s Bar on North Limestone Street.

You also see it in the attendance at classes and events at the non-profit Carnegie Center, housed in a beautiful old building in Gratz Park that used to be the Lexington Public Library.

“This is a sacred space; a nurturing space for writers,” said Finney, who wrote much of her book,Rice, in one of the center’s study carrels. Mason has taken French classes at the center since 2006, and they helped inspire her to turn her father-in-law’s experiences as a World War II bomber pilot into her latest novel.

The Carnegie Center will have a public forum Thursday at 6 p.m. to gather ideas for this initiative. But Chethik already has some: a marketing campaign, literary conferences and more events that combine literature, music and visual art. Kingsolver is the keynote speaker for the center’s first Books in Progress Conference for authors and aspiring authors, June 8-9.

“There is something going on here,” Finney said. “There is a community hungry for good books and good words. And it has been for a long, long time.”

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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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I have a column in Sunday’s Herald-Leader about Bobbie Ann Mason‘s fascinating new novel, The Girl in the Blue Beret. It is a story about World War II and self-discovery, based on the experiences of her late father-in-law, Barney Rawlings, who was a B-17 pilot shot down by the Germans and rescued by civilians in the French Resistance.

As we had lunch last Tuesday at Stella’s Deli on Jefferson Street, after her regular French class at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, Mason told me something about her writing technique.

“Writing is so complicated,” she said. “What I tend to do is just to go over and over it. I read it again and again, and each time I change a few things. I have trouble with radical revisions. I think in reading it over and over like that you get too close to it. I just write it and polish it until I can’t think of a single other thing to do to it. I write it until it sounds right.”

Mason, a native of Graves County who now lives in Anderson County, is the author many books, including: In Country, Shiloh and Other Stories, Clear Springs and Feather Crowns. She is the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, two Southern Book Awards and other prizes, including the O. Henry and the Pushcart.

Tuesday is the National Day on Writing. Do you have a sentence or two to contribute?

If so, the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning wants to hear from you. To celebrate this day, the center is putting together what it calls the “longest short story ever written.”

The center is seeking contributions from average folks and from established local authors, including Ed McClanahan and Bobbie Ann Mason. First lady Jane Beshear plans to finish the story during an event at 5:30 p.m. at the Carnegie Center in Gratz Park.

The idea is to put together a snapshot of Lexington and what’s going on in people’s lives this day, said Neil Chethik, the Carnegie Center’s writer-in-residence.

People can add their contributions by stopping by the Carnegie Center from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. or at the following places and times: Starbucks in Chevy Chase, 7-9 a.m.; Starbucks downtown, Third Street Stuff or the Eagle Creek Library, 9-11 a.m.; Joseph Beth Booksellers or Barnes & Noble, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.; The Morris Book Shop, Waldenbooks or Northside Library, 1-3 p.m.; or the Village Branch and Central libraries or Common Grounds Coffee, 3-5 p.m.

Ed McClanahan

McClanahan has started the story with these two sentences: “I found her sitting on a bench in Woodland Park. She looked up when my shadow fell on the letter she was writing.”

McClanahan, whose books include The Natural Man, said he doesn’t know what will come from this community story.

“It will generate some interest among people (in writing), I’m sure,” said McClanahan.

He said writing is a useful exercise for anyone. “It is an opportunity to examine one’s life and experiences and thinking processes. It’s a way of looking at yourself and what’s going on in the world.”

This community story will be written on butcher paper, the pieces of which will be taped together into a big scroll. Excerpts will be published online, including on www.galleryofwriting.org, the Web site of the National Council of Teachers of English, which sponsors the National Day on Writing.

It sounds like a fun project. I’m just glad I don’t have to edit it.

“I’m glad I don’t have to, either,” McClanahan said.

Journalists love anniversaries; they provide a flimsy but convenient excuse for writing about things we find interesting.

This week marks two important anniversaries for people who love good writing.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Elements of Style, my favorite guide to good writing.

E.B. White, best known for his children’s book Charlotte’s Web, updated a writing manual used by his Cornell University professor, William Strunk. With simple commandments — Be clear. Omit needless words. — the book is a beacon in a world of blather.  National Public Radio has a piece about the book that’s worth hearing.

Reviewing The Elements of Style for Esquire magazine in 1959, Dorothy Parker wrote this piece of classic Dorothy Parker wit:  “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

White’s essays for The New Yorker remain classics. Two of my favorites are Here is New York, which captures the energy of the 1940s city, and The World of Tomorrow, which describes the New York World’s Fair of 1939 and man’s hubris.

Monday marked the 100th birthday of the late Eudora Welty, the Mississippi author and photographer.

Her novel The Optimist’s Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize. Her many stories, such as The Petrified Man and Why I live at the P.O., are great studies in human nature and Southern culture.

White and Welty were great literary stylists. Strunk would have been proud of them both.