Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jessica Cory teaches in the English department at Western Carolina University. She grew up in southeastern Ohio, and her work has been published in ellipsis…, A Poetry Congeries, and other journals.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction

Let’s be clear: Appalachian nature writing is nothing new. Recently a colleague, the wonderful Dr. Mae Miller Claxton, declared that “every Appalachian writer is an environmentalist”—and she’s right. With roots in the oral histories of the indigenous peoples who resided in these mountains and continuing on with the explorers and naturalists who found themselves in the region, nature writing has a rich and developed history in Appalachia. William Bartram’s Travels is often credited as the seminal work of Appalachian nature writing, and Horace Kephart notes in Our Southern Highlanders that “William Bartram of Philadelphia came plant-hunting into the mountains of western Carolina and spread their fame to the world”; he goes on to refer to Bartram as “the botanist who discovered this Eden.” Kephart’s admiration of Bartram struck a chord, too, with Edward Abbey, who is best known for his musings on desert life. In one of Abbey’s lesser-known works, his “Natural and Human History” essay in Eliot Porter’s Appalachian Wilderness: The Great Smoky Mountains, Abbey quotes Kephart’s praises and expands on the ideas first put forth by these pioneers of the genre. Mountains Piled upon Mountains continues to develop this understanding of the importance of Appalachian nature and human engagement with it, as well as further examines the definition of “the nature focused text” as “a cultural-literary text.”1 The popularization of the term Anthropocene over the last decade to describe our new epoch as one marked by human influence only serves to further these connections between nature and culture and, as such, the texts that spring from this relationship.2 By bringing together both well-known and emerging Appalachian writers to explore Appalachian nature in the Anthropocene, this collection shows that nature writing in and of the region continues to flourish and evolve centuries after Bartram’s legacy and the continuation of human involvement in the natural world.
Certainly, collections of nature writing that focus on particular areas of Appalachia exist. Excellent examples include George Ellison’s two-volume High Vistas, which examines western North Carolina and the Great Smokies; The Height of Our Mountains by Michael Branch and Daniel Philippon, covering the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley of Virginia; and Neil Carpathios’s Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio. However, as Heike Shaefer notes, nature writing is often a regionalist endeavor.3 Consequently, these collections, while helpful in understanding and appreciating the human engagement with Appalachian nature, offer a limited scope that diminishes the similarities of Appalachian areas and reduces the broader voice that the region as a whole can uplift, adding to the larger conversation of Appalachia and its natural (and, in some cases, man-made) environments. Regional place-based writing certainly provides those familiar and unfamiliar with the area with an “ecologically informed [redefinition] of human identity and cultural practices.”4 However, it’s my hope that a compilation of nature writing representative of the entire Appalachian region provides readers with a more comprehensive scope and understanding of Appalachian nature, culture, and people.
When selecting the works to be included in this collection, I considered the public perception of Appalachia, particularly by those who may live and work outside of the region. Often there is the misconception that Appalachian authors (and, indeed, Appalachia itself) are simply rural, white, and male. Though the latter part of that assumption has begun to fade with the fame of Kathryn Stripling Byer, Ann Pancake, and others, the perception—and to an extent, the reality of Appalachian literature being largely white—still persists. As Althea Webb reveals, “Appalachia has always had a racially and ethnically diverse population that has been significant and influential. Migration and mobility has shifted patterns of diversity within sub-regions and particular counties, but many areas recall traditions of inclusive collaboration unlikely to have taken hold outside the mountains.”5 Fortunately, there has been a recent effort to include and incorporate Affrilachian and Native American authors in the study of Appalachian literature. As these authors help to create the ecological history of the region, it’s important that we consider their works with the same, if not more, appreciation with which we approach more demographically homogenous Appalachian texts.

By having a better understanding of the history of nature writing in Appalachia and by gaining insight into the motives of writers who engage with nature, we’re encouraged to analyze our own ways of interacting with the natural world, especially as human engagement has become the marker for our current epoch. Are we activists fighting in the war against mountaintop removal? Do we shop at our local farmer’s market? Perhaps some of us garden or raise animals for meat. Or maybe we enjoy sipping our coffee on the front porch and watching the hummingbirds flit in and out, sipping their sugar water from the red glass ornament hanging from the hook beside the butterfly bush. All of these methods of interaction are important, as they shape our worldview and impact our human experience.
As evidenced in the works of Kephart, Bartram, Abbey, and many others, nature writing is almost always created with one or more of a few select purposes. These objectives include to recount an event tied inextricably to the natural world, to contemplate or appreciate a facet of one’s natural environment, to express outrage and raise awareness of environmental destruction, to encourage others to preserve or protect part of the natural world, to explore potential benefits and drawbacks as humans continue to evolve within and beside nature, and, finally, to celebrate the wonders and bounty that nature provides.
Meditation on aspects of the natural world, as the section on contemplation evidences, whether in simply appreciating nature’s beauty or being enthralled by its capabilities, can have an amazingly therapeutic effect on both the meditator and the reader. Many Appalachian writers throughout the ages have contemplated either the infinitesimal or the overwhelming. From Annie Dillard who in A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek describes the minute evolution of caterpillar eggs to Barbara Kingsolver who rhapsodizes on the positive effects of local food production on the region’s landscape and economy in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Appalachian writers are hoping to create in their readers a similar contemplation or at least to help readers see nature’s relevance. Perhaps changing the mind of a single reader is all it will take to change the larger man-versus-nature narrative.

In Taylor Brown’s “Harper,” we see a young man’s contemplation and engagement with nature play a pivotal role in his coming of age and understanding. A similar importance of contemplation as part of one’s journey can be found in Jeanne Larsen’s “At Goshen Pass, the Search” wherein entering nature without the extraneous “necessities” of modern life is “like . . . going into rehab.” Echoing the role of nature on one’s journey, David Young and Lisa Ezzard ponder in their works how nature and their experiences within it affect their thoughts and thought patterns, and how nature shapes the people we become. Continuing the inward focus that contemplation often takes, Scott Honeycutt and Felicia Mitchell use nature as a touchstone to contemplate human impermanence,...