Mouth of the Holler

Hope in Belinda Anderson's Fiction

A review of The Bingo Cheaters

by Belinda Anderson. Mountain State Press, 2006, 189 pp. Cat Pleska, Ed.

 

           Consider: Experts on the public’s reading habits indicate that reading is a declining activity in this country. Reasons vary—the internet, lack of education in and promotion for reading, to name a few, but folks who respond to my occasional ponderings as to why they don’t read cite lack of time.

Consider: Publishers think the public won’t buy short stories because everyone prefers novels, so the trade publishers are traditionally hard to convince they should publish short story collections.

I think there’s an obvious answer here to ease the negatives of both considerations: no time to read long novels? Then read short stories. Do you have books tucked around the house partly read? What was the first part about anyway, you might ask when you stumble across a partially read book months after you began it? And how discouraging is that?

Short stories are perfect for today’s harried, word over-loaded society. What’s more satisfying than to begin and end an entertaining—and complete—short story between laundry loads, or for a few minutes to help you wind down after putting the kids to bed?

The finely crafted stories in The Bingo Cheaters, in a fortuitous event, carry another bonus: the stories share characters. It’s like wandering through a novel. Through each story, characters romp in the background, star as the main attraction, or hover in the middle ground. It’s like catching up with family members; you know who they are—you just don’t know what they’ve been up to lately.

Traditionally, short stories are between 5,000 and 8,000 words—another reason to pick up Anderson’s collection. One short story that shares the title of the book, “The Bingo Cheaters,” is a beautifully compact 1,384 words. Brevity is Anderson’s strength. Her crafting of succinct, but satisfyingly complete stories is so superb that none leaves you scratching your head at the conclusion. Yet, no resolution is handled gratuitously.

Perhaps it’s a reflection of Anderson’s journalism training that her style is informed by conciseness of language and crisp character development. Words do double, even triple duty; however, there is no feeling that anything needs to be “unpacked.” All her words are evocative, touching into many worlds of thoughts, ideas, beliefs. Take, for example, this final paragraph from “Twilight Dawn.” The character, Twilight Dawn, has passed on and finds herself in a garden. A little girl appears who turns out to be her mother, who died when Twilight was born.

I picked up her doll, the old-fashioned porcelain kind. The face was colored like mine, the bronze of gingerbread. . . . I felt those little arms wrap shyly around my neck and her warm cheek press against mine. “I been waiting so long to tell you I love you,” she whispered.

The Book of Revelations may say all tears shall be wiped away and there shall be no more crying, but something wet as rain was falling from my face. “I love you,” she whispered again, giving me what I’d wanted all my life, but had never known until she spoke.

And then she picked up her doll with one hand and took my hand by the other. “Let’s go to the fair.”

I stood and let her lead me from the garden. “I reckon I’m finally ready,” I said.

We must be in heaven: tears wiped away from deep grief; going to the fair, a place of fun, delights, and a gathering of people we know and love. Yes, it must be heaven. Twilight is ready, leaving us to believe that though we might stand in the garden there is yet a chance to find the answers to life mysteries.

  Compassion radiates through the stories. In “The Bingo Cheaters,” the Flat Brush Women’s Club is gathering for the monthly bingo game. Irene is vexed by what she thinks is the other women’s penchant for cheating. In this smartly written story, we see all the players through Irene’s eyes and sense her frustration but eventual understanding that the cheating might not be what it seems. The other women’s compassion for Irene’s foibles reminds us that none of us are perfect.

Humor is a hallmark of Anderson’s writing; her wit comes through with simple, seemingly off-hand remarks said about or by her characters. Again, in “The Bingo Cheaters”:  “A West Virginia University extension agent after World War II . . . had attempted to present homemaking as both a science and an art, but the members were suspicious of foreign spices such as ginger.”

Throughout the story, typical of all in her collection, Anderson’s descriptions of characters delight: “The Basham sisters, the club elders . . . thin and hunched by osteoporosis . . . reminded Irene of a pair of ragged old crows.” Later, the women, “crow through their loose dentures” and later still one Basham sister declares, “I have to check the obituaries every morning to see if I’m listed.”

The Bingo Cheaters is Anderson’s second short story collection. This collection, as the first collection, The Well Ain’t Dry Yet, was published by the small, independent Mountain State Press in Charleston, WV. Anderson currently has a third collection she’s polishing. Again, as in The Well and The Bingo Cheaters, the characters in this new collection, Buckle Up, Buttercup, wander in and out of each other’s stories.

Anderson is a native of Appalachia, as I am, and her characters could well be too. They are familiar people, yet it won’t matter one whit where the reader is from when it comes to reading and enjoying these stories: the nature of these characters is everyone we know and some we have wanted to know. Not all stories, of course, are light in tone, nor should they be. Some, like “Solace,” is about young boys sent to a camp after trauma shatters their young lives. Likewise, the little boy in “Match” (who shows up at Camp Solace) is a worry because of his fascination with fire. Though they live in the County of Hope not everything is golden, just as in real life.

And how human and natural is the vanity in us all? Might you recognize yourself in the character of Margaret who, in “Foul the Guesser,” worries about aging? She compounds her problem by making a carnival worker guess her age. His guess is off by ten years—on the plus side. We can bemoan the fact, like the character Margaret, that our vanities sometimes make us gluttons for punishment. We can’t leave well enough alone.

Folks of all ages, women, men, and children, all live and breathe in Anderson’s stories. Their problems, foibles, and triumphs are ours, and we’re in fine company. Perhaps the stories can help us be more forgiving—to ourselves and to others. Each time you pick up The Bingo

Cheaters—to read one story or many at a sitting—Anderson’s universe is one we’ll be glad we visited. You’ll come away thinking that maybe life is nothing to cheat ourselves out of, but like Anderson’s characters, we should sashay right into it, embracing all its troubles and joys, and, if we’re lucky, discover that a little hope will get us through.

Cat

Interview with Belinda Anderson

Cat: Most fiction writers write from details of reality, yet they aren’t trying to duplicate reality as they know it. Imagination is paramount; however, do you, like many other fiction writers, encounter folks who are sure a certain character portrays them? What do you tell them, if that’s so?

Belinda: I haven’t experienced such an encounter, perhaps because my characters truly are creations of my imagination. However, I’ve had several readers think that my stories are simply magnifications of real events and now I’m beset with suggestions – “You could write about this!”

But anecdotes aren’t short stories. To have fiction, you’ve got to have friction, as author Lee Smith says. Like James Still, I draw inspiration from real life, but I don’t take dictation. Often, an amusing incident will start me thinking of what-if possibilities. Sometimes, I write to work my way through trouble. “Solace” in The Bingo Cheaters began with a news article I read about a bereavement camp for children that was filled with survivors of 9/11. That was around the time of the anniversary of my father’s death, and on a cold, snowy day, I found myself writing a summer camp story about two boys trying to deal with loss.

And sometimes a notion just lodges itself in my imagination. “Season’s Greetings” began with nothing more than driving by a Christmas light display and defending it to someone who declared it garish. My philosophy, as a viewer, is that you can’t have too many colored lights and decorative lawn ornaments at Christmas.

Cat: You invented Hope County, WV, for this second collection. In what ways does Hope County reflect your attitude about real life? Or does it?

Belinda: It does, indeed. In The Bingo Cheaters, I wanted to create a fictional landscape to give me more freedom to roam in my narrative. I almost called that creation Polk County. But one day I recalled how often I characterize my stories as ending at a place of hope. And so Hope County emerged.

             In most of my stories, characters discover and draw forth qualities that haven’t been apparent. I’d like to think there’s always the possibility of redemption. In “Solace,” a boy discovers he possesses the courage of the father he grieves. In “Second Sight,” a thief repents and befriends her victim. In “Gatekeeper,” Wanda discovers that she can walk away from the doughnuts.

            

Cat: The current postmodern style of writing fiction, especially short stories, often leaves readers scratching their heads at the conclusion, wondering what they were supposed to understand. Flash fiction, sudden fiction, as well as longer forms, all drive a particular style of writing. What style would your term your fiction?

Belinda: Readable. That postmodern style you mentioned denigrates the worthy form of the short story. “Literary” has become synonymous with “dreary.” A story ought to be about something. A story can entertain, challenge and heal. Think of masters like Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty and Ray Bradbury.

            Whenever I present a reading, audiences always respond enthusiastically. People like short stories – they just don’t like the turgid stuff that’s being mass marketed.

            Flash fiction can contain the elements that make a story compelling, but it’s too short a form for me. Character development drives my writing more than plot. My 5-year-old great-nephew, however, is an expert in the form. I’d bought a game for him with a spinner that dictates whether the story you tell will be sad or happy. Then you draw a card with a word you have to incorporate in the story. I told Andrew I’d go first so I could show him how it worked. I spun a frownie face, and the word “wet.” So I started thinking of some misty moor and trying to come up with a narrative when Andrew piped up, “I know a story!” Go ahead, I said. “Once there was a little boy,” he said solemnly. “And he wet his pants.”

Cat: There are elements of magic realism in some of your stories. Why are you attracted to this style of writing?

Belinda: Perhaps it’s an extension of the appealing idea of synchronicity – that sometimes people enter your life or events occur just as you need them or are ready to receive them. I think life is more magical than we comprehend.

Cat: What authors that you have read do you feel have influenced you?

            

Belinda: The idea that writing could be a vocation probably was the result of reading Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, a gift from my older sister.

            Also in elementary school, memorizing Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” left me with a lasting impression of how lyrical language can create mood.

Reading Harriet Arnow’s The Dollmaker in college was a powerful awakening for me, helping me realize that I could write about my own people and about my own landscape.

Cat: Tell us about your next collection.

Belinda: I consider Buckle Up, Buttercup to be the final volume in a trilogy. Readers of the first two collections will once again encounter some familiar characters, but this time a young man named Paul Goshen is the uniting element in the book.

We first meet him as a criminal justice major at the local community college and follow him through romance, marriage, fatherhood and a career as a police officer. It’s probably both the most spiritual and the most humorous of the three collections.

Right now, it’s still in the oven. I thought I was finished, but then a certain editor, for whom I have the utmost respect, suggested that I wasn’t. . . .

Idle Minds

With spring finally here, I found myself sitting on the swing on my deck, my dog lolling beside me, both of us soaking up the strengthening sun. Work to do, much of it, as it is for everyone, awaited me. But I've learned that relaxing in the sun or in the shade away from the summer's heat, letting the mind wander over . . . no, just letting the mind wander and wonder is sometimes the smartest thing I can do.

Lexi, my dog, yawned, making a soft sound from the throat that's universal: ah, argh, ah, a little whine and she's done. She laid her head in my lap and dozed. I stroked her head and felt the boney point on the top and wondered: why does she have that pointy nodule there? Is that normal . . . no wait. That's thinking. Let that go. The dog has it right. Doze in the sun.

As a writer, I'm constantly watching, listening, thinking, evaluating, absorbing, judging, reacting, wondering: can I use this somehow in my writing? It's constant. I do it in my sleep. But once in a while I wake. Truly wake. And let everything go. That's when I find myself on my swing, my dog beside me, M & Ms melting in my hand and letting the mind go idle. It's a recharging, a rejuvenating, a releasing of tensions, worries, duties, worries.

I recommend it, especially now that spring is here. Just sit and listen to the bird song, turn your face to the sun, loll, if you can. Take a cue from your dog. Let no thought enter your mind that contraries you. After a while . . . well, you'll know when it's time to go in. You won't even have given it deep thought. You'll just know.

Cat

Appalachian Mountain Girl

By Rhoda Bailey Warren

Academy Chicago Publishers, ChicagoIL. 1998. Paper back edition 2005. 173 pp.

Rhoda Warren’s tales of Letcher County, Kentucky, is part autobiography and part memoir, with a good dose of storytelling. She begins her life story the day her mother stands up from the dinner table and screams at her husband that she can’t take it any longer. She can no longer tolerate living in Corbin Glow Coal camp housing. And no wonder: life in many coal camps in the earlier part of the last century was often grueling. “On one of the mountains was the black gaping maw of a coal mine, its dank cold breathing of the grave. . . . the miners with lowered heads and stooped shoulders, entered its darkness. A slate dump slid imperceptibly toward the creek in a gray scaly skin of thin slabs of rock. Smoldering fire and smoke seeped from its edges, a fire no rain would be able to put out (1).”

Rhoda’s father finds a home in Letcher County and moves his family to a better life. The new house perched precariously on the side of a hill, its backside planted into the hillside. The front cantilevered several feet off the ground. The kitchen was a separate building 20 feet up the hill, with the outhouse even further. But no matter. An aerie Letcher County home was better than a cold camp house. In roughly the first half of the book, Rhoda writes about her family and neighbors. She relates her experiences in a one-room school and going to church. The second half of the book is tales of people in her community. And these are definitely stories, as Rhoda reveals the interior thoughts and motivations of the characters. Here the book takes on a fairy-tale feeling. As a child growing up in Appalachia and in neighboring West Virginia a couple decades later than Rhoda, I had heard about people similar to what she describes. They are fascinating and complex. Rhoda’s language honors them and respects them, telling us their stories in a lyrical and sensual way.

One of my favorite chapters is “That Man.” It’s the tale of a stranger who showed up one day and began living in an abandoned house. He looked like a cadaver, and his eerie appearance and silence scared people. The local men voted on whether or not to run him off. Fortunately, they didn’t. Soon it was clear the man was dying. With deep compassion, the men in the community began a waiting vigil until the man died.

Another favorite character that Warren renders vividly is Cindy, a local “Doctor Woman.” I couldn’t help but think that a couple hundred years earlier women like Cindy were burned at the stake for practicing their home remedies. But I swear by the remedies, because my grandmother saved my life in much the same way Cindy saves the author’s brother a croup death. I liked Cindy because she was an independent woman. A preacher tried to convince Widow Cindy to marry him, “A man around the place would be a great help.” Cindy remarked to Rhoda’s mother, “I told him I didn’t have time to wash and iron and cook for a man.” Rhoda’s mother couldn’t argue with that reasoning: “A man does take up a lot of a woman’s time waitin’ on him hand and foot” (120).

Eventually, the Depression takes its toll and coal mines close down. Rhoda’s family leaves Letcher County and heads for Wyoming, New York. They last a year and a half. A blizzard is the final straw, convincing her mother that they need to go back home. But Rhoda, almost eighteen, remains behind. She’d met and married Howard Warren. Finally she enjoyed money and material objects that she’d never envisioned. After a year or so, she decides—reluctantly—to return to Letcher County for a visit.

This is the only section where the rationale for action seemed lacking. In telling her life story and that of her family and neighbors, I’d not gotten the sense that she was particularly eager to leave Kentucky. Such sentiment is quite common, then as now, because economics drive people out of Appalachia. But unless she had laid a prior sense of anxiety to leave, her later resistance is not convincing.

In reading Appalachian Mountain Girl, you will have invested your time in the presence of a talented storyteller. Rhoda preserves a specific past, hers and a region’s, but she also provides us with a mirror reflecting universal desires of all people: to understand ourselves, our family, our neighbors, and to survive hardship enough to move forward into the future as happy individuals. Where better to study how to be a good world citizen than to have come from honorable people?

Oh My Eudora

“Writers and Travelers are mesmerized alike by their destinations.” EW, One Writer’s Beginnings

This past summer, I visited a friend I’d not seen in 25 years. She’d moved from West Virginia to Pennsylvania in 1968, and we corresponded with pen and paper for a long time. But life, as it is for most everyone, gets busy and our letter writing waned in the 80s. In the 90s, it became sporadic email. So our reunion this past June was joyous, but I had no idea my old friend would gift me with letters I had written to her between the years 1968 and 1978. I hadn’t known she’d kept them, but she told me as she handed me a burgeoning manila envelope of letters—written on the rice paper and pop mod greens of the 60s, “You told me you were writing your memoir. I thought you might like to have these.” Wow! What a gift!

Since then, I’ve read perhaps half of the approximately 132 letters she’d saved. One of the earliest of these, dated June 27, 1968 , when I was 15, I wrote that what I wanted to do with my life was write and travel. I’d forgotten that long ago wish, although it turned out to be prophetic, as both have become my primary activities.

But I had no idea how synchronistic the discovery of my youthful wishes of writing and traveling would be when I recently finished reading a new biography of Eudora Welty (by Suzanne Marrs). At the end of this long book—652 pages (counting notes and index)—I thought, I am in mourning. With all due respect to Eudora and her living heirs, I felt as if she was my grandmother. The book, comprehensive and illuminating, made me feel an intimacy toward this writer that I’d not encountered reading any other biography. In truth, 250 pages of the book, laden with minute details of her travels to accept awards from a total of 39 institutions of higher education, might daunt any reader. But I seemed to soak it all in as if she truly were a relative. I had become vested in this lady.

Eudora, born 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, has West Virginia ties. Her mother, Chestina Andrews, was born in Ivydale, Clay County. As a child, Eudora traveled to her mother’s family home in Ivydale and also to her father’s family home in Ohio. She writes eloquently of West Virginia in this passage from her autobiography, One Writer’s Beginnings:

It took the mountain top, it seems to me now, to give me the sensation of independence. It was as if I’d discovered something I’d never tasted before in my short life. Or rediscovered it—for I associated it with the taste of water that came out of the well, accompanied with the ring of that long metal sleeve against the sides of the living mountain, as from deep down it was wound up to view brimming and streaming long drops behind it like bright stars on a ribbon. It thrilled me to drink from the common dipper. The coldness, the far, unseen, unheard springs of what was in my mouth now, the iron strength of its flavor that drew my cheeks in, its fern-laced smell, all said mountain, mountain, mountain as I swallowed. Every swallow was making me a part of being here, sealing me in place, with my bare feet planed on the mountain and sprinkled with my rapturous spills. . . . (57)

Although she wasn’t born in our state, those of us who were, and who’ve stood on a mountainside and watched bats fly at insects in the humid, blue heat of a summer dusk, or drank well water so cold that you ached for a moment between the eyes, or who stepped silently around fern fronds in our dense, primeval woods, knows what Eudora felt that day on a West Virginia mountaintop, that sense of independence and freedom. We relish that feeling she describes like being in a cathedral. There is a sacredness and we understand how blessed we are to have been born on this land.

I fancied in an email to Eudora’s biographer that perhaps Eudora channeled some of that West Virginia sacredness from her mother. Maybe that is what I sensed as I read about her life, that she was kin somehow. Of course, we West Virginians recognize one another no matter where or how we meet in the world. Our ears are attuned to our dialects, and we note a special passion and warmth that few societies can claim. We are not an arrogant people, and Eudora was a gracious equalitarian. I’m sure I recognized these traits from her biography and her literature.

For me, personally, I found out something I did not know about Eudora the person: she loved to travel. Here, I found my kindred spirit in life endeavors both in writing and travel. She spent at least as much time on the road as she did at home at 1119 Pinehurst in Jackson. Traveling throughout much of her life was a challenge, as well. Trains, mostly, long car trips often, in times when two-lane roads were the best the country had to offer, to the expense of huge blundering cars that gobbled gasoline. Later, she did fly, something she didn’t care for, and neither do I, but sometimes that’s the only way you can get there. She must have found traveling more compelling than her discomfort or fear, that the urge to roam is overwhelming. Me too. 

Like her, although I’ve traveled a good deal, I write mostly about home. Much of her fiction was set in Mississippi , a state she loved for its warm people and cultural heritage, and hated during its segregated decades. Mississippi and West Virginia often seem to vie for the bottom of the list in quality of life surveys, and I can relate to her frustration of living in such a vast, rich culture that is at the same time homogenous and suspicious. As she did, I rail at my friends about the state’s politics. Yet, West Virginia and Appalachia are tunes I keep humming and plucking, finding as she apparently did about Mississippi that one needn’t travel far to find plenty to write about that’s universal and interesting.

I suppose this new biography fascinates me, too, because of what it reveals about her writerly life, and the universal conundrums she dealt with through her literature. What concerned her in her real life, she evoked in scene, detail and dialogue in her plots and characters. I think that at the end of my life if that intertwining was spoken about me and what I write, I could consider it a life well examined. And this is where I truly find a connection and a bond with Eudora. I never met Eudora, except through her writing, but she has become, if not a role model or guide, certainly an inspiration that such as life is possible. I don’t have her fame or her talent, but I continue to practice and concentrate on my craft and my art. And I travel every chance I get.

I once met one of Eudora’s colleagues who’d published the text of a documentary filmed about Eudora. I told her I was writing about Eudora’s work in a graduate class. She kindly gave me insider information, which I pounced on and added to my paper, whether it made any academic points or not. Before she left the dinner we were both attending, she pronounced me a Weltian Sister, an unofficial colloquium of women who admire and study Eudora’s literature. Although there was nothing real about this sisterhood—there’s no charter or meetings—I admit I’ve bragged about my “membership” on a few occasions.

Probably the most revealing documents about this lady came through her letters, included in this new biography by the dozens. I’m astounded that so many of her family and friends retained her correspondence, and it’s through these epistolary efforts that she lets her hair down and talks just as if she were there in front of you. They are conversation. And to think we share that in common, if only with one friend in my case. But as two ladies who believe in the written word to the level that she did and I do, those saved letters are as important as any work published. It’s there on the private page the real Eudora and the real me is revealed.

Eudora: Greek for “generous gift.”

Cat—

1/19/06