Читать книгу The Green Rolling Hills - Craig Tucker S. - Страница 3

INTRODUCTION

Shortly after moving to Martinsburg, West Virginia, in late 2004, I joined a local writers’ group. I soon discovered that many of these writers shared a common style—not a common voice, exactly, since it was quickly apparent that each of them had his or her own writing “voice”—but, they all had something that I only gradually came to recognize as a West Virginia voice too.

Just as the locals speak with their own version of a Southern accent, a drawl that is clearly not Northern, but is less pronounced than what one finds in the deeper South—a soft, almost a musical way of speaking—I found too that West Virginia writers “speak” in a manner that is very much their own.

Which is not to say, however, that they don’t have individual voices as well. Christine Kaye’s haunting Harai and Bev Rees’s frightening The Reckoning share a sense of the horror wrought by man’s arrogant interference with nature, but they are miles apart stylistically.

Craig Tucker’s Dear Ann Landers, Wanda Riggle’s Precious Child, and Trish Rudder’s Azalea Quartet all deal with the tribulations of childhood, and all are touching, but beyond those essential facts, they are not at all alike.

Love is the common denominator in Leigh Horne’s Pappy’s Angels and Eve Birch’s AIDS Diaries—Francel, the sort of love that transcends pain and loss, but the stories otherwise have almost nothing in common.

The wry humor Calvert Estill displays in The Child Bride of Lester Cooley is light years away from the take-no-prisoners hilarity of Sally Brinkman’s Rosie and Mac, but both are funny indeed, and—here is my point—funny in a distinctly West Virginia way. It is difficult to think of either being written anywhere else.

Really, as I said at the beginning, all of these stories are utterly different from one another and, at the same time, uniquely alike in the West Virginia sensibility that they share. And all of them, let me say, eminently readable.

After a time, it occurred to me that it would be a pleasure to see some of these voices assembled where they could be enjoyed both singly and jointly—thus was born this anthology.

It has been a great pleasure for me to work on this and to savor the writings of these talented individuals, and to know that in some small way I was preserving them for generations of readers to come. I am confident that they, too, will savor them.

—Victor J. Banis

Martinsburg, West Virginia