Attempting to write about West Virginia
Via excerpts about place, from Arundhati Roy, Jim Harrison, and Lauren Oyler; and my own poem about a place, called Southern Kitchen.
Writing about any place (meaning location) is difficult to do sincerely, convincingly. Travel writing, a genre of location, is often maligned by serious writers though it has potential to be illuminating; there is something to be found in the record of a novel encounter, a blind eye awakened—as long as the reader is aware a traveler will likely never touch a place’s core. But writing about a place you love, or hail from, or live within is far too mangled by identity and folklore to be presented as anything but history obscured. In the case of the childhood home, nostalgia can be tricky, cloaking memory like a shroud. It’s simply difficult to write about a place you are emotionally attached to without a proper distance that even physical separation can’t ensure.
A place is comprised of a physical nature and a collective history; but like reality itself, this whole is fragmented by an infinite number of subjective experiences. Of course, a writer should always strive for truth, which emotions can tend to skew. But the subjective remains most interesting.
I was born and raised in West Virginia but I’ve only been able to write about it poetically—meaning, literally, in poems. When I attempt to write about the state as a narrative, or even in an essay such as this, it feels a burdened initiative. West Virginia, like the rest of Appalachia, remains a trope in our nation’s consciousness. To represent it carries an inhibiting responsibility; the writer is expected to illuminate something within that outsiders won’t allow—something interesting, full, or even universal. That said, a trope is often grounded in reality, and it would be disingenuous to ignore the very real seeds of the West Virginia stereotype completely.
Charleston is West Virginia’s capital—a “city” of less than 50,000—and also where I grew up; an urban suburbia that isn’t only surrounded by the rural but infiltrated by it. You could drive a mile outside the city in any direction and touch seclusion. You could likewise remain within the city itself and generously touch grass, since a state park makes up more than a quarter of its substance. I am at least 5th generation West Virginian—a good portion of that being, unexpectedly to most, Middle Eastern—meaning I have strong rooting in the state even if most of my immediate family has now dispersed to other, more viable ones (myself included).
If we were to play an association game, my West Virginia is surely not yours. Mine would be very green, a vibrant green, a dark green, a swallowing green. It would be tiptoeing earth worms after rain. It would be falling into a river and trying not to inhale its dangerously chemical saturation. It would be very Lebanese, a little Syrian. It would be redneck, which I sometimes called my dad (his neck would get so red!). It would be Boone and Kanawha. It would be privilege. It would be friends who went to either Myrtle Beach or Paris for vacation (or both). It would be a churning regatta. Never missing a Sunday Catholic service for any reason. A Syrian priest. A hot dog with chili and onion. Cruel, nosy women. Women who mothered me. Professional women. Interesting women. Stupid women and provincial men who spoke down at me (still do). Deer, so many deer and also raccoons and squirrels and the occasional possum. Snakes and field mice and bats. It would be the day my best friend and I got lost in the woods searching for arrowheads and thought we’d never make it out. The day that same friend and I dug up a buried gun from her backyard in our quest for (fool’s) gold. It’s really all green, dense, wooded, and tree. So many tender and cruel people in equal measure, so many of them flooding my house after my dad’s death with casseroles and stuffed grape leaves; that not even death could deter them from gossip.
Can you name a town in New Jersey where life breathes similar? Maybe Connecticut, or Iowa? Perhaps. But most other places are allowed the allegory—they might be sad but they are part of a human experience. How many classic 20th century novels encompass the Midwest as some greater extrapolation of America? West Virginia is usually only allotted a sadness, some despair, that no one could possibly emerge from it unscathed, unless by fluke. (Jennifer Garner usually being an example.) The fact that 70% of its inhabitants voted for Trump in the most recent election has only solidified an alien perception—West Virginians are a people without sense nor purpose.
***
May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruit air. They they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.
The night are clear, but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.1
The opening lines of Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things have been recurring inspiration for my own writing. A location’s natural makeup is as important to any story as is its cultural and interpersonal parcels, and though contemporary literature would likely deem it bad taste, I enjoy when a novel spends a good portion of page describing natural scenes. Roy’s novel, though deeply poetic in style, is ultimately a political one, a story of family, trauma, and caste. Still, it has a strong natural essence, too, a sense of place. A contemporary writer might find this trite but I find it essential; there is a natural atmosphere to everything that occurs, one that should be aptly expressed.
Jim Harrison was as much a naturalist as he was novelist and poet, and it is apparent in the multitude of pages he gives over to pure descriptions of nature. His vast knowledge of foliage, trees, flowers, and fauna are impressive in their detail as they are persistent. It was Harrison who wrote one of my favorite lines, found in the novel Dalva, “How could all this happen when there was an ocean?” And from the same novel:
I made coffee and took it out to my small balcony. It was barely light and there was a warm stiff breeze mixed with the odor of salt water, juniper, eucalyptus, oleander, palm. The ocean was rumpled and gray. I think I stayed here this long because of the trees and the ocean. One year when I was having particularly intense problems I sat here for an hour at daylight and an hour at twilight. The landscape helped me to let the problems float out through the top of my head, through my skin, and into the air. I thought at the time of a college professor who told me that Santayana had said that we have religion so as to have another life to run concurrently with the actual world. It seemed my problem was refusing this dualism and trying to make my life my religion.2
***
Modern culture has bastardized the love of nature into a commodity to conquer—turning the outdoors into a personality type, its adherents clad in well-engineered armor, seeking to crush an earthly mile. In my youth I did get lost in the woods sometimes but I really just laid in the acre of suburban grass we possessed, watched the leaves rustle intently as the clouds shifted form above. Nature was life like anything else, entwined and significant, present and abundant; I didn’t seek it because it was already known, wasn’t there for the taking (though others certainly took), was just available to exist within.
In conversation with Steven Phillips-Horst for Interview magazine, writer and West Virginian Lauren Oyler said this:
I find people ask me about West Virginia very rarely, and when they do I’m like, “Oh, it sucks and it’s been ruined by corporate greed and politicians.” It’s not particularly beautiful where I live. You say that and people from West Virginia and rural America get mad at you because they’re like, “You don’t know what it’s like.” And I’m like, “I do know what it’s like, and that’s why I don’t live there.” They’ll never vote for better healthcare because they don’t want to admit that the healthcare they have is destroying their lives and terrible or anything like that. 3
Oyler is a critic and novelist who resists the more appetitive emotions in her writing. She rarely allows feeling to lead her astray from objective thought. She is rational and biting and funny and ironic but never sentimental. I imagine she would find nostalgia an abhorrent obfuscation of reality. The West Virginia she describes is not myth; much of it has been destroyed by corporate greed, an embarrassingly inane government.
I found only an essay in which Oyler discussed in detail any connection to the place she was raised. It is aptly titled “Tudor's Biscuit World Is the Best Thing About West Virginia”, published in Eater in 2016. The essay’s title is explicit, she is writing about the beloved local biscuit haven we call Tudor’s, which does have tasty biscuit sandwiches and is, as any West Virginian will tell you, an important cultural institution. In Tudor’s overwhelming sincerity (and the unnaturally orange American cheese it serves on all its sandwiches), she finds everything good about West Virginia. But she continues:
There are other traditions I might be proud of for being West Virginian that I don’t feel right laying claim to: bluegrass; quilting; college sports; flowery descriptions of honest landscapes; hiking, skiing, whitewater rafting. People sometimes ask me why I don’t write about West Virginia—the implication being that, just as I benefited from it on my college applications, I might benefit from it professionally. Any of these topics might make for a rich, descriptive essay, they say. Unfortunately, this would feel disingenuous, because I didn’t like living there, or any of these topics.4
In the essay, Oyler references writer Jedediah Purdy, writer of the book For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, a heartfelt response to very ironic times. As Purdy wrote in the introduction, “What has so exhausted the world for us? For one, we are all exquisitely self-aware.”5 Of course, Oyler is a writer known for an almost meta self-awareness and an adamant use of irony, one she claims allows for expressions of humor as well as ambiguity.
Purdy’s is a perspective honed by a bucolic upbringing, a West Virginia, he argues, of sincerity, pleasantly free from the pervasive irony we all are currently stifling under. Oyler, on the other hand, finds her hometown less noteworthy; neither idyllic nor downtrodden, “It was—and is—extremely boring.” Though I am reminded of this line, by Sontag: “But the charge of boredom is really hypocritical. There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom. Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration.”6
Oyler writes, “I agree that West Virginia is the least ironic place I’ve ever been,” but, like Tudor’s, “…its bizarre purity also represents an isolation from the rest of the world.” Like Oyler, I, too, escaped West Virginia when old enough, for college. My hometown a fence that began to hem in, far too isolated both physically and existentially. I spent a good part of my early 20s lying about where I was from, trying on other, more interesting origins for fun. I moved to Connecticut and to New York, to San Francisco, and back to New York again, where I plan on staying for a while. (I also lived in Ohio, briefly, but that wasn’t by choice.) I gained a more circumferential perspective that I wouldn’t have developed otherwise; all these American cities were connected to a modern sense, all were full of irony, and challenge, and paradox. Yet after all that living elsewhere, I concluded it was my West Virginia upbringing, golden in its searing earnestness, more complex than most allow, that gave me grounding perspective as I roamed.
I respect Oyler’s quest to resist trope, to reject the benefaction that can rise—and that some shamelessly exploit—from espousing yet another sad Appalachian tale. But she might be severely underestimating the inherent value of her kind of West Virginia, too. The boring story that says we are like everyone else; that our lives, too, can be extrapolated, can contain the whole of America, perhaps even read universal.
Oyler’s West Virginian sentiments, which were written almost a decade ago and may have realistically changed, did strike me as cloying, a kind of self-conscious attempt to define oneself against a well-traveled grain. But I don’t blame her inclinations, or the preemptive rejection of a tedious identity that West Virginia can bring. It is a precarious endeavor to write about West Virginia sincerely—and its various, bland topics she describes—without relying on either nostalgia or self-indulgence. Still, I wish more people tried. It surely must inspire a more intriguing narrative than addiction or exploitation, a natural beauty marred by poverty and corruption, a dense, fluffy biscuit.
The fact remains I’d much rather read Harrison’s detailed description of Arizona fauna, or Roy’s vivid rendering of light after a monsoon breaks, than I would Lauren Oyler’s waxings on expat life in Berlin. This is disparate writing about place—Harrison and Roy write of life and location like religion. Oyler writes from the opposite: a trapped and turned-over mind, a dogged and reflexive self-consciousness, likely far too rational to believe a place could be holy.
I remain skeptical, though, Oyler doesn’t find West Virginia “particularly beautiful,” doesn’t feel a pang of yearning upon return, isn’t swallowed up by that particular shade of mountain green.
***
When John F. Kennedy traveled West Virginia during his 1960 campaign—a previously forgotten and politically begotten state at the time— he made sure to traipse the most derelict in a suit and tie; was famously photographed wandering through the hollers, shaking hands with the barefoot; and of course, and most importantly, he ate at Southern Kitchen.
“Southern Kitchen” is a place and also a poem I wrote many years ago, a West Virginia poem that has little to do with natural beauty and much to do with a dingy diner. Much unlike a franchised Tudor’s, Southern Kitchen was lone in its singularity. Though it sadly closed almost two decades ago, it remains a portal into a collective memory of those of us who remember when. Everything that happened there was a reflection or facet of something more encompassing, so it contained the multitudes of the state of being West Virginian that I find difficult to write about otherwise.
During his visit, Kennedy gave a speech in front of Charleston’s gold-domed capitol. It began:
It has been said in recent weeks that the State of West Virginia is not "typical" of the rest of America - that it is different and somehow inferior. But I have traveled across your great state and I know that West Virginia is typical of America - it is typical in the strength and courage and determination of its citizens - it is typical in its desire for a better life for all men - it is typical in its belief in the great American traditions of freedom and fair play and a brotherhood of men - of all faiths and races - under God.7
We were then, it seems, as blighted by our own inclinations as we are now, a “typical victim of the short-sightedness, the blindness, the indifference, and the lack of faith which have characterized the entire last eight Republican years in Washington.”
Even then, we were so sad! So misunderstood, mismanaged, exploited and left out to dry of any latent potential. Kennedy spoke explicitly to a state of being unseen; he knew the greatest compliment delivered was to bestow us “typical,” meaning connected to the greater world, meaning just like everyone else. He won West Virginia, which remained a democratic stronghold for decades (save Reagan, once) until the turn of the millennia, when tides shifted Republican for good on account of George W. The state since in steady decline, in both population density and economy, with no one like Kennedy speaking to the idea of a more appealing future. How could anyone but us love a place so inert?
I am entangled with West Virginia by more than its nature, though its nature is often recalled more than anything else. Like Oyler, I see flashes of brilliance in the most Platonic of its ideals, in places like Tudor’s Biscuit World, or Southern Kitchen.
This is a poem is about living entities—a people deserved of a glance, if not the written word. And about a city I am endlessly nostalgic for, yet rarely ever return to. How sad.
***
Southern Kitchen Every week six women and one little me would congregate around the corner booth of an establishment called Southern Kitchen. Located on MacCorkle Avenue, Southern Kitchen was beloved. It lay deep within a neighborhood called Kanawha City; one may ask how to pronounce such a place, but I don’t have time to explain— Ancient Native American syllables flow from hillbilly tongues as natural as words like “git” and “y’all,” and I think that amounts to something greater but I can’t be sure. Southern Kitchen was alive, indefinitely. It was decorated mostly brown, flooded in warm fluorescent light. It was known for the miniature ceramic chickens lining its walls. I loved the crinkle chips and fried eggs with unnatural, sunflower-yellow yolk. In the late evening, or early morn, one could find the entire world: paper-white cops inhaling eggs and toast with grape jam next to gruff rednecks fading into camouflage, drag queens sipping coffee, the young and the old, Middle Eastern to Eastern Panhandle. Later in life it was where us Catholic school kids convened at unspeakable hours, for a necessary meal of sponge to soak up the evening’s debacles. It was a certain era: “my mother, a stylish ’90s blonde, Princess Di haircut, designer suede boots and sparkling blue eyes. And friends: A bobbed dark-blonde of dry wit and class; A plump, nurturing Italian of sharp mind, who hugged deep; A warm, diminutive Colombian who spoke furiously, comedic timing supreme; A trim, tanned intellectual of cropped black hair and biting tongue; A beautiful Cubana in bedazzled shoulder pads, booming voice and wild ringlets touching high and wide. I want to paint a picture for you. These six women held court each week to speak a state of affairs. To discuss a possible future. To laugh and insult and validate. Those early days, my mother would invite six-year-old me to sit amongst these women representing God’s creative will. I filled my seat at the table, though I was too small to see above the table’s edge. Sometimes I’d bring crayons to color, a toy to occupy time. Mostly, I watched and I listened. These six women hardly ever ordered food (perhaps an omelet, some toast.) But they always ordered coffee. Six cups of coffee would arrive on a dirty black tray, dense white mugs filled of liquid, lukewarm. The women would begin to color their coffee: one Sweet’N Low, I prefer the blue packet, two creamers, one creamer, she likes it black. They held the cups intimately, like a child, hands enveloping mug so one couldn’t separate body from ceramic. I noticed as each woman took a first sip of a fresh pour, it was like deep breathing, a moment of ecstasy and serenity, an elixir that gave birth. They’d drink in between laughs and stories, cups filled over and over until minutes collapsed. The laughter got louder, the stories more wrong. Half-moons of red and pink lips stained cup edges like pointillist paintings. I’d beg my mother for a sip. She’d acquiesce. I found the taste bitter but the warmth comforting. I wondered how they all grew to love something like that. They’d laugh as I scrunched my face. I asked for the bitter drink each time. I’d force it down, bear it with grace, until I learned to crave it. I guess they really taught me how to be a woman.
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things.
Jim Harrison, Dalva.
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, “Our Culture and the New Sensibility.”