an excerpt from

         Reimagining Appalachia*

Appalachia has long captured the imaginations of outsiders. Some writers and filmmakers have portrayed it as a backward region populated by feuding hillbillies and fanatical snake handlers. Others have glorified its folklore, handcrafts, and bluegrass music. But, as writer and West Virginia native Meredith Sue Willis points out in the afterword to Out of the Mountains: Appalachian Stories, “For better or worse, the ballads and ghost stories and material culture have become a subject of festivals, celebration, study, and collection rather than the daily life of the majority of the people.” Willis’ book joins Cathryn Hankla’s Fortune Teller Miracle Fish, another new story collection, in providing vivid and stirring portraits of contemporary Appalachian life. Although the communities in these books retain unique customs and beliefs, their inhabitants’ searches for love, meaning, escape, and identity will resonate with a broad spectrum of readers. Both authors unearth universal themes by delving into the particulars of place.
Predominantly set in fictional locales throughout West Virginia, the twelve stories in Willis’ Out of the Mountains introduce a diverse cast of characters. They include a runaway who desperately attempts to find a new home after escaping the sex trade; a Jew from Queens, New York, who drives deep into Appalachia to attend the funeral of a college friend; and a PhD-wielding brother-sister pair who struggle with their hometown’s homophobia and small-mindedness. The most memorable characters show up in multiple stories, providing us with not only a sense of their own evolution but also insights into the communities they inhabit.

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Virginia native Cathryn Hankla sets the majority of Fortune Teller Miracle Fish in or near an unnamed town that closely resembles Roanoke, Virginia, where she teaches creative writing at Hollins College. Mountain trails, winding roads, sagging houses, a secluded cabin, and a family-owned pharmacy serve as backdrops for sixteen stories that render the interior lives of their characters in stunning detail. Often shown in periods of transition—in the final year of college, after a divorce, nearing middle age—these characters face recognizable human problems not exclusive to Appalachia.
Numerous stories in the collection delve into ailing relationships—often romantic attachments in which one partner’s desire and longing for commitment remain unrequited. . . .

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*An essay-review of

Out of the Mountains: Appalachian Stories. By Meredith Sue Willis. Athens: Ohio University
Press, 2010. 180 pp. $24.95, paper.

Fortune Teller Miracle Fish. By Cathryn Hankla. East Lansing: Michigan State University
Press, 2011. 192 pp. $24.95, paper.