When I was ten I wrote my first short story. When I was seventeen I wrote my first novel. When I was eighteen I wrote a second. When I was twenty-one I wrote a third, my first serious attempt at serious literary fiction. They were all pretty bad, of course. They were all training grounds. But they were all, also, the things that built in me a love of writing: they were the beginnings of a dream that has steered my life for the past twenty years. And this month it became real. That's the kind of thing I want to share with my family and friends. And since, over the past five or six years, Daily Kos has become both for me (you can see my diaries going back at least to 2004), I wanted to share it with you. And to start an uncommon conversation here. Please join me.
Let me be clear (yep, I've picked up that verbal tick from our President; I could stand to pick up a lot of other things through which he inspires me): I'm not gonna try to sell you my book, here. I'm not going to link to Amazon or some crap like that. I'm also not going to pretend this is a purely policy-oriented political email. This is personal. But it's personal because I care deeply about the people about whom I write. And I've been around these parts long enough to know that so do many of you: because I write about the disadvantaged, the poor, the voiceless of Appalachia. It was a large part of why I was behind Edwards in the primary. And it's why I want to write a diary, here.
I was born in rural Virginia, but I didn't really know Appalachia, didn't fall in love with it, until I was in college. I went to school in the poorest county in Ohio, right on the border with West Virginia, in the foothills of the Appalachians. There, I spent two years shooting a photo documentary project on the rural poor. I drove dirt backroads and knocked on the doors of crumbling houses and people took me in and sat me down and talked with me. We ate dinners. One family took me out back to feed peanut butter and jelly sandwhiches and cans of Coke to the black bear they kept (illegally, of course) in a cage in the back yard. Another old man gave me a bucket of cornmeal and led me out to the barn to help him feed his hogs. I grew to love these people, and the scrubby, craggy landscape that surrounded them.
So, when I was 19 and my father and brother and I spent a sumer clearing some land in Western Virginia in the Blue Hills and, with a farmer's help, built a cabin there, I already knew it would one day become my home. It has. In more ways than just a bed and a writing desk. It's where I feel most at peace, most right. And its where I've seen the poverty - in money - and wealth - in spirit and kindess - of the people who inhabit the hollows and swales of the Appalachian Mountains.
Before I left the cabin to go on book tour, I went down to talk with Russell Lugar. He's 86 years old. He hasn't seen his wife in 20 years. He sleeps in the same room in which he was born. He drinks moonshine each night. Once every couple weeks I walk down the mountain and knock on his door and sit by his wood stove and drink it with him. He has become my friend. My book, The New Valley, is fiction. It's three novellas about men making their way through the heartbreak that comes with losing a loved one, and coming out the other side. They're all set in the rural Southwestern mountains of Virginia, and they're all about completely made up characters, but they're also, in very real ways, about people like Russell. Like his son. Like my neighbors down there.
And, in that, I hope I'm continuing an important tradition of fiction that, while not dominated by political concerns, is shot through with them simply because it tries to bring to readers the lives of the poor, of the forgotten, in ways that only fiction can. I can think of a number of books like that that were hugely influential for me:
John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, of course. But also The Orchard Keeper and Child of God by Cormac McCarthy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Some of Bobby Ann Mason's books; Plainsong by Ken Haruf; Bastard Out of Carolina.
Heartsongs by Annie Proulx:
http://books.google.com/...
Even some of Faulkner's work; definitely some of Russell Banks' books.
http://books.google.com/...
And now, there's mine:
http://www.joshweil.com/...
I don't claim to be in the same league with all these guys. But I do write out of some of the same impulses, and about some of the same people, and I hope I bring to life a few of the same concerns and ideas and elements of the world.
So, I want to open this up to a conversation that's unusual here on Daily Kos: recommendations for books, especially fiction, about the poor -- not just rural, but urban too. What have you read that's moved you, that's brought you an understanding of these cultures that you might not have had otherwise? It doesn't have to be just American...I'm interested in all of it, from all over the world. And would love to hear your thoughts. Ideas anyone?
UPDATE:
So, here's what the DKos community of lit lovers has come up with so far:
- AndiePandie: Dandelion Wine & Huck Finn
- Frederick Clarkson: Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War, by Joe Bageant.
- Angry Liberaltarian: The Illuminatus Trilogy and Gravity's Rainbow.
- borkitekt: 1914 by Eyvind Johnson. The Emigrant series by Vilhelm Moberg.
- Mother Mags: Fool's Crow by James Welch.
- ornerydad: Storming Heaven, by Denise Giardina.
- rdestrada: Tim McLaurin
- mofembot: Jeanette Walls' The Glass Castle.
- danceattackjg: Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolpho Anay.
- JFinNe: The Doll Maker by Harriette Arnow.
- dewtx: "Littlejohn" by Howard Owen.
- jonimbluefaninWV: At Home in The Heart of Appalachia by John O'Brie.
- slowbutsure: The Primal Teen, by Barbara Strauch; Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun by Geoffrey Canada; True Notebooks by Mark Salzman.
- politichic: Pearl Buck's The Good Earth; Barbara Kingsolver's Pigs in Heaven; Upton Sinclair's The Jungle; Ole Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth; Mari Sandoz's Old Jules; Willa Cather's My Antonia: politichic
Thanks, y'all! Keep 'em coming!