What We’re Reading Now

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

In 1991, Kentucky poet Frank X. Walker looked up the word Appalachian in a dictionary, and he was dismayed to see it referring to white residents from the mountains of Appalachia.

Walker is African American, and he was, of course, so bothered by this erasure of his own identity and that of other African Americans in eastern Kentucky that he started using his own word to describe people of African descent who live in Appalachia, and that word is Afrolatchian.

He would eventually become Kentucky’s poet laureate, and he also started a group known as the Afrolatchian Poets, which includes such writers as Nicky Finney and Kelly Norman Ellis.

And the word Afrolatchia became used so much that it’s now in the New Oxford American Dictionary, where it’s defined as an African American who is native to or resides in Appalachia.

And one of those Afro-Latchian poets, Crystal Wilkinson, is the author of a lovely novel that I just finished.

It’s called The Birds of Opulence, which is a gorgeous title, opulence being the name of a fictional Kentucky township.

The book is about the lives of black residents in this township.

And this book is a quiet, lyrical novel about the relationships between family members and the relationship between people in the land and nature.

It’s about things said and unsaid in family and secrets and the way that friendships change over time, just the way that we’re all trying to get through life doing the best we can.

And you can tell that it’s written by a poet because there are all these poetic phrases, like she talks about the grand whisper of daffodils in the spring.

Or she starts out a chapter with, it is late October and the hills have colored up like beets and corn.

It’s a quiet novel. It sticks with you. I just keep going back there. It’s called The Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson.

Oh, that’s so lovely. And you’ve said something about that that reminds me of the book that I’m recommending.

And this is Joan Didion’s collection of stories Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Oh, yeah.

First published in 1968, and it still remains fresh.

It’s a snapshot of an era, but it’s precisely relevant nationally and personally to me now, and still vividly sharp.

For example, there’s an essay on John Wayne that is dated in a strange way.

I don’t think we revere our movie stars in the way that we once revered John Wayne.

Do we revere anybody that way anymore?

She has an affection for him that has not only part of her childhood awe of him as a movie star, but also has part of her acquaintanceship with him as an adult, where he was a man who could not escape his screen legend.

But for me, the part of the book that I like most is the parts where she talks about California and also her closing essay on leaving New York for California, because that’s a song that I know.

In the essay, Goodbye to All That, she writes, I was in a curious position in New York.

It never occurred to me that I was living a real life there.

And then later she realizes that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair.

And it really felt like that in New York.

It really felt like there was this carnival happening around you and that there was just another ride just on the next block or one more funnel cake to go get or, you know, one more house of mirrors to try out.

And at some point you just become exhausted and you’ve got to leave the fair.

And so if you’ve forgotten that Joan Didion is a precise, exquisite writer, her work is definitely worth picking up again.

And that’s Joan Didion’s collection of stories Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

I need to pull that down and read it again.

I remember the precision that you’re talking about.

And what’s remarkable, when you realize that some of her stories were laid down in her early 20s, so she mastered the craft very early, and there was no rust on her blade up to the very end.

We’d love to hear about what you’ve been reading.

Let us know, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.