Review: “Foraging Kentucky : An Introduction to the Edible Plants, Fungi, and Three Crops of the Southeast” by George Barnett→

Published on: southernlitreview.com

What does an ideal field guide look like? It has enough information to be useful in a variety of wild places, but not so much that the reader gets lost in thickets of unnecessary text. Forager George Barnett’s first book , Foraging Kentucky (University Press of Kentucky 2024), masterfully shepherds plant enthusiasts through the terrain of the edible outdoors. With its focus on plentiful, easy-to-identify plants and fungi in the southeast, the book is destined to find a place in the backpacks and on the kitchen counters of novice gatherers and experienced wildcrafters alike.

The introductory sections are concise, but are filled with useful information for beginning foragers especially. Barnett includes basics about safety considerations such as tick bite prevention, avoiding herbicide contamination, and so forth, as well as helpful advice about legal considerations of foraging on both public and private lands. Additionally, there is a short guide to preserving mushrooms.

The heart of the book, however, is divided into three parts focused respectively on herbaceous plants, mushrooms, and woody plants. Each entry typically includes sections on identification, season, habitat, and uses. In addition, most entries include 3-5 full color photographs of each plant or mushroom. Helpful safety considerations specific to particular plants and fungi are mentioned in these profiles as well.

Most valuable in Foraging Kentucky are the plants and mushrooms Barnett chose to profile. As the subtitle indicates, these wild edibles—from common violets and wild lettuce, to chicken-of-the-woods and woodears, to redbuds and black walnut—are prolific wild crops in the southeastern United States. As an example, I am able to identify many of the species featured in this book where I live, a one arce lot in a booming college town in Virginia. At least half the herbaceous plants, and several of the mushrooms, trees, and bushes grow in my immediate vicinity. Currently garlic mustard, a notorious aggressively invasive plant that displaces native species, is beginning to bloom. Many people in my community are rushing to pull it before it goes to seed, adding to the seemingly inexhaustible seedbank in the ground. Instead of only throwing it in the trash (which is the recommended way of dealing with tenacious garlic mustard), I’ve experimented with cooking it as a potherb and as the primary ingredient of a green gumbo with good results. But Barnett added to my knowledge by discussing the root’s use as a horseradish substitute. And so it goes with the other plants and fungi he covers.

Among its other virtues, this book is timely as foraging, herbalism, and sustainability movements are having a moment. Many of us from the Appalachian region, in particular, are looking for ways to connect with our heritage in progressive ways and are nurturing a 21st century folk revival focused on the green world. If I’m right about this, that there is a folk revival brewing in the southern Appalachian region, then contemporary foraging schools are our places of worship and George Barnett’s book, Foraging Kentucky, may well become one of our cherished sacred texts.

For more information about his educational classes and workshops or to order Foraging Kentucky, follow George Barnett @thehungryforager on social media or visit thehungryforager.com

Book Review: Even As We Breathe by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

I approached Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle’s debut novel Even As We Breathe (Fireside Industries, 2020) with trepidation. It looked like an Important Book, no doubt full of heartbreakingly beautiful prose. Well, it is those things, both lovely and literary reminiscent of Willa Cather’s My Antonia, but it is also well-paced New Adult fiction you won’t want to put down. 

The story is about a young man, Cowney Sequoyah, raised by his grandmother and uncle in Cherokee, North Carolina. Cowney’s foot has an old injury which limits his mobility and prevents him from going to war or doing the kind of rough work (e.g., logging) that his uncle has done to earn cash money. Knowing his options are limited, Cowney takes a groundskeeping job at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville in hopes to save enough to apply for college. Besides the opportunity to earn money, Cowney is excited about his job because he’ll be with Essie Stamper—a pretty young woman who will be working in housekeeping at the Inn.

Cowney and Essie’s relationship is the hook and heart of the novel, although it is clear from the beginning that there will be no romantic ending. The young friends share some common bonds, they’re both native American and experience prejudice, for example: yet Essie is attractive and assertive, winning the admiration of others; Cowney, on the other hand, is timid and avoids interactions with his co-workers. 

Besides the tension in Cowney’s relationship with Essie, other subplots create movement in the story and deepen our understanding of Cowney’s inner world.  For example, one of the most beautiful parts of the story is when Cowney finds a pool below a waterfall deep in the woods. He enjoys a reprieve from the heat of summer and the smoke of wildfires when an injured bear shows up to bath itself in the pool. The bear doesn’t seem to notice Cowney, who has made himself small. Cowney and the reader are both alarmed—no one wants to meet a grumpy, hurt bear alone far away from town. Cowney keeps himself still—a survival strategy he learned from dealing with his mean uncle—until the bear disappears into a cave behind the waterfall. The scene is emblematic of others, creating a balance between literary prose and a page-turning plot. 

During the pandemic most literary fiction has been too challenging for me to read. I want to escape from worries and stress, not be invited into a world without hope or beauty. Thankfully Even As We Breathe hit the perfect note as a pandemic read, building narrative tension with the trials and tribulations of a narrator we care about, but Clapsaddle relieves that tension with a fast-paced story full of wonder, romance, and mystery. 

You can find a great interview with Clapsaddle here.

Review of Dimestore: A Writer’s Life by Lee Smith

It’s been a long time since I read a piece of non-fiction that has thrilled me the way Lee Smith’s Dimestore has. Though I’ll probably never meet Lee Smith, much less be a writer of her caliber, she is my imaginary mentor and reading this book felt like a gift. If you fell in love with the voice of Ivy Row in Smith’s novel Fair and Tender Ladies, you must read Dimestore.

The central paradox of the memoir, and of Appalachia in general, is that of a rootedness in place; yet that very place has gone mainstream and the big box has commodified what was once a culture—or is that only our nostalgic reckonings. In the preface Smith describes herself as a mountain girl “through and through,” specifically from Grundy, Va., yet being raised to leave because she had a mother who was “not from around here.” She wrestles throughout the volume with being of the mountains, but not in them. Like the coal extraction from Central Appalachia, Smith realizes that her own stories have most value outside the region.

The first and longest essay of the collection, the eponymous Dimestore, is told in Smith’s Grundy voice, sounding very much like Ivy Rowe from Fair and Tender Ladies. This essay is a sweet, deep dive of Smith’s childhood growing up the only child of the owners of the local dimestore, tracing the history of her daddy’s business in Grundy when Grundy was on the other side of the river.

After reading Dimestore and Recipe Box I felt rather gut-punched reading Kindly Nervous—a phrase I know well—where Smith recalls her parents’ bouts with mental illness (at the age of nineteen, when I told my dad I had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder he said he didn’t think that, only that I was “kindly nervous”). Kindly nervous is short and set off from the long recollections that frame it, and must have been how Smith experienced her parents’ bouts of depression. She is the Dimestore daughter who watches parents dance in the kitchen, yet from time to time she is sent away while her parents recover from low periods. But she doesn’t know when she is young that these are things she can write about.

My favorite essay in the collection was the one that had me wiping tears off my cheeks on the bleachers while my boys were in their ninja class. Marble Cake and Moonshine takes us to Smith’s early adulthood where she recounts finding her writer’s voice. Here, after hearing a reading by Eudora Welty, she finally understood the meaning of “write what you know.” The essay was so moving for me because it wasn’t until I read Smith’s novel Fair and Tender Ladies, which ranks second only to Wuthering Heights in my personal literary cannon, that I understood what it means to write what you know. I burst into tears when I read: “Though I have spent most of my working life in universities, though I live in piedmont North Carolina now and eat pasta and drive a Subaru, the stories that present themselves to me as worth telling are often those somehow connected to that place and those people. The mountains that used to imprison me have become my chosen stalking ground” (p. 70-71). She had entered the part of her life where she can begin reconciling her past with her present.

The second half of the book turns, appropriately, to Smith’s mature adult life and we hear less Ivy Rowe and more Miss Daisy. In this section of the book, Lee gives much good writing advice wrapped up in interesting stories. For example, in Big River, the story of how she and her friends took a riverboat journey, which she later fictionalized, she says, “But a trip—or a plot, let us say—is merely a series of events, and even the most interesting events do not add up to a story.” Fiction, she says, must have conflict. Lightning Storm and On Lou’s Porch are about Smith’s teaching experience. She uses the essays to move her narrative along as well as write lovely tributes to her students, such as Virginia writer, Lou Crabtree.

My favorite piece in this section was Driving Miss Daisy Crazy. It is all about the so-called New South, and the challenges artists and writers from the region encounter. For example, she says: “For a writer cannot pick her material any more than she can pick her parents; her material is given to her by circumstances of her birth, by how she first hears language. And if she happens to be Southern, these factors may already be trite, even before she sits down at her computer to begin” (p. 118). I might be part of the last generation who lived out many Appalachian stereotypes and it is indeed a challenge to write about my experience in fresh ways.

Goodbye to the Sunset Man goes back to a more intimate recounting, this time with Smith writing about her son’s experience with mental illness and his eventual passing. Here Smith gives a hope-filled account and goes a long way to counter stereotypes of schizophrenia. Her love for her son, her perceptions of who he was, shines through in a way that does not diminish him or center herself. She says near the end of the essay: “Yet to have children—or simply to experience great love for any person at all—is throw yourself wide open to the possibility of pain at any moment. But I would not choose otherwise. Not now, not ever.”

In the final essays, Smith connects and makes sense of what has come before. In A Life In Books she says: “I refuse to live an unexamined life. No matter how painful it may be, I want to know what’s going on. So I write fiction the way other people write in their journals.” Smith goes on to discuss how her fiction had been reflective of conflicts she herself didn’t see at the time of writing. It is fitting then that Angel’s Passing is almost a goodbye to Smith’s past, to the nostalgia of the Dimestore. Likewise, The Little Locksmith, a final short essay set on the coast of Maine (it’s about Katharine Butler Hathaway), looks forward to new lands or maybe to an old world. Yet we feel confident that she knows how “to listen to whatever voice speaks within” (p. 200), and look forward to Smith’s next great novel.

Review: Crystal Wilkinson’s Blackberries, Blackberries

I saw Crystal E Wilkinson’s collection of short stories, Blackberries, Blackberries (2011), reviewed on With Love, From Kentucky and was intrigued. I love a good collection of short fiction. And moreover, some of my favorite pieces of literature—the stories that haunt me—are short stories written by women (The Yellow Wallpaper! Story of an Hour!). Once I got Wilkinson’s book I took my time with it, savoring each of the aptly named blackberries.

If you’re looking for stories that pass the DuVernay test, look no further. Creating compelling narratives, Wilkinson portrays the interior lives of a diverse group of African American women that captures the intersections of gender, race, and rurality, yet allows each character to shine in her own unique circumstances of family and personality. Each story focuses on African American women from Kentucky’s small cities to the rural “backwoods.”

Like a wild blackberry ripening in the summer sun, Wilkinson’s prose is sumptuous and poetic, such as this opening line: “Aberdeen Copeland was bringing back yesterday from twenty years of hiding. (Humming Back Yesterday, p40). Or when Bessie says, “I used to watch a stuck hog writhing on the ground at hog-killing time, wondering what he was thinking” (The Reaper, p107). Wilkinson’s language is ripe with the histories of the women, sweet and rich with only a hint of the bitters.

Worlds open in her sentences. When Bruce, a young boy, describes another boy’s relationship with his mother, saying, “He is always with her with the grown folk (p. 32), Wilkinson paints a picture of a world where it is unusual for a young boy to be in the presence of adults visiting with one another. The reader knows that his mother is different from the other mothers, yet achingly familiar like so many of the characters in the collection. I particularly loved the story Need, in which “the other woman” meets with “the wife.” Having been through my share of relationship drama, I felt intimately connected to both of these women.

Like other Kentucky writers, Wilkinson’s work invokes a strong sense of place; these stories feel like Kentucky. What is it about Kentucky writers? bell hooks, Wendell Berry, to name my two favorites, and now, Crystal E. Wilkinson. I don’t know what’s in the water, but I look forward to reading Wilkinson’s award-winning novel, Birds of Opulence. It is the September 2018 selection for Wiley Cash’s Open Cannon book club. Crystal E. Wilkinson is a member of The Affrilachian Poets.

Review of Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place by bell hooks

I was introduced to bell hooks‘ work more than a decade ago. I immediately found myself falling into conversation with her. Her writing is frank and accessible, yet intellectually rigorous—those kinds of writers are few and far between in literary theory classes. First I became interested in her older, overtly Black Feminist work. Then I learned about her book, Where We Stand: Class Matters, and really fell in love with hooks as a writer and thinker. Not only is she from Appalachian Kentucky, but what she said about class in America really spoke to me. First, hooks immediately discussed the existence of poor White people, which is exceedingly rare in academic writing. Then she talked about the intersections of class, race, gender, and place, often sharing her own story. In recent years, undoubtedly since she returned to Kentucky and made her home on reclaimed MTR land, hooks has been writing about place [I also highly recommend her books on love]. This was the first time I had encountered hooks’ poetry.

The title of this book, Appalachian Elegy (2012, University Press of Kentucky), of course, predates Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016, Harper Collins), and I think that it would be fruitful to read them in conversation with each other as both authors are from the region, but from different gender, racial, and generational social positions. hooks’ book comes from a more mature position as someone who has come full circle, embracing her roots. Her elegy does not signal a final ending, but is rather only one part of the process of renewal and rebirth.

The introduction is written in hooks’ characteristic style, and gives some background on her roots in the region. Interestingly hooks doesn’t claim an Appalachian identity, but refers to herself and her ancestors as “backwoods” people. I, too, remember coming to learn that I was an Appalachian person. My family always taught me that I was a country person, for example. I’ve embraced the term, Appalachian, but hooks refusal of it places her in solidarity with others in the region who do not have academic backgrounds. Not using “Appalachian” goes beyond identity politics debates about who counts as Appalachian—which is largely a construction of outsiders. Instead, like her choice of penname, hooks looks to her African American, backwoods ancestors for how to think about her identity.

The koan-like rhythm of hooks’ elegy tells us that even in loss there is hope and evidence of rebirth. She comes home, finding death and destruction, yet there is evidence of a cyclical process in the wildness of nature. The first poem is a call to her muses, “the long dead/ the long gone/ speak to us.” This poem sets the tone of the collection and ends with a bloom of native wildflowers and a “promise of rebirth.”

In poem 10, I can imagine hooks tending her reclaimed MTR land and finding “treasure uncovered/remnants of ancient ways/not buried deep enough/excavated they surface” in the ground, but also in her psyche. Her own memories of the past, both concrete and intuited, finding connection with “reincarnated ancestors,” those mountain people who lived in relative harmony with one another as “backwoods” folk and intermarried regardless of skin color.

hooks’ homeland, Central Appalachia, was and is not immune to racial injustice, however. In poem 15 hooks uses the “pink and white oleander,” a toxic, ornamental shrub commonly grown in southern coastal areas, as a metaphor for White supremacy in general and slavery in particular. It is the same as “rebel flags/heritage and hate.” But true to all hooks’ writing she doesn’t stop with the condemnation of White supremacist patriarchy, but says in the war on poverty “there are no sides,” only ongoing suffering. In poem 51 her “remembered confederates” are “beyond country flag nation.” She finds solidarity in people who are close to the land, who work for the common good, those “yearning for atonement.” Continuing to use nature images as a metaphor for the people of the mountains, she calls for “blackbirds/ come rest home” (poem 53). The mountains don’t belong to one people, contrary to the White, Appalachian hillbilly stereotype; rather the hills and hollows are “an enchanted place” to “claim sanctuary” for all people.

Poem 55 speaks of a sort of Everyman’s Appalachia. Here there is no “culture of poverty,” but rather people making do and being happy with what they have, even though they “live on little.” In my interviews with people of the same generation of hooks’ (roughly baby boomer), people who grew up in the mountains, these sentiments are echoed. There is a real pride of having experienced a simpler time in terms of material possessions. I have heard so many times versions of, “Looking back on it, we were poor, but we didn’t know we were poor.” hooks and her contemporaries witnessed the last days of Appalachia’s subsistence culture and nostalgia for those times runs deep.

The last poem in the collection (no. 66) at first glance doesn’t seem to hold the promise of redemption that is present in so many of the other poems, but only death by fire, of “flames/climbing hills and mountains.” But read in context, this short apocalyptic farewell forces to reader to imagine what may come next. What kind of almost heaven might we all build after the fire? It is a destruction that calls “all hearts/ to burn and break.” But fire also purifies and I’m left to imagine a smoldering world where people are forced to come together to share in a common purpose—to love and care for the land.

bell hooks is the Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center at Berea College.

Review: Looking for Ireland by Laura Treacy Bentley

Looking for Ireland: An Irish-Appalachian Pilgrimage by Laura Treacy Bentley (Mountain State Press, 2017) is a beautiful collection of poetry inspired by travels to Ireland. The short poems are coupled with photographs the author took while visiting Ireland, or while in West Virginia and Maryland.

At a recent family gathering we passed the book around, picking out favorites. One we all enjoyed was “Signs,” a poem that chronicles the changes marking the transition from the end of autumn to the beginning of winter. In West Virginia we all know that moment “when Chicory blossoms/ fade in the ditch line.” Winter is coming, indeed, and the world will be laid bare.

The naturalist poems are short but satisfying. The shortest poem is The Poet Takes A Walk at five lines. The longest, Dissonance, measures thirty lines and takes the reader on a stroll through Dublin. The images range from architectural to sacred spots in the natural world.

This book would be a great addition to a collection of Appalachian poetry or literature.  As a book club selection, it would work well paired with a novel that explored Appalachia’s natural beauty, such as Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver. Finally with the holidays coming up, it makes a lovely and budget-friendly gift for those who appreciate the beauty of Appalachia and Ireland.