Is there a writer who best evokes the sense of being from the place that you call home? For Martha, Jesse Stuart’s writing about W-hollow in Kentucky perfectly captures that part of the Bluegrass State, while Grant notes that the 1982 book Blue Highways nails what it’s like to be a Missourian. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Writing that Evokes Home”
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.
Think of the place you grew up, or maybe the place you live now.
Who is the writer whose work best evokes the sense of being in that place?
When I was 14, my family moved from my native Kentucky to central Florida, and we lived there for just a year.
And my ninth grade English class was assigned to read a story by Kentucky writer Jesse Stewart.
And Grant, I can remember sitting there in the Sunshine State, reading his writing about the change of seasons back home in Kentucky, which I had missed.
And it absolutely gave me goosebumps.
I want to read a passage from that same piece that I just loved.
It has to do with a place called Dubya Hollow.
And he writes,
Dubya Hollow is a place in the sun, fenced in by the wind.
It’s just a place with four seasons, wind, sun, rain, snow, with scrub oaks and old log houses and new plank shacks, a place that’s somewhere for some and nowhere for most.
In the spring, you can hear the beetles and the whippoorwills.
You can hear the wind slushing around in the leaves.
In the summer, you can hear the wind and the corn blades parleying around.
You can hear the grasshoppers and the crickets.
You can hear the lazy wind.
The whole hollow looks lazy in the summer sun.
And the sun always shines on W. Hollow in Kentucky.
It never reaches some of it until noon.
But it gets there.
Nice.
I’ve been in hollows like that in Kentucky.
It’s not exactly where I grew up, but I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in those kinds of hollows.
And there was something about the writing of Jesse Stewart that always takes me to that state.
Because he was one of your people?
You felt like an insider, like you were part of the same group or same set?
Well, he just evoked, I think in a really physical, sensuous way, what I had experienced physically.
And I’m just wondering, do you have something like that for you?
Of course I do.
I have one to match you.
I left Missouri after about 22 years there, and I still basically think of myself as about a third Missourian and another third New Yorker.
And I guess the new third’s Californian.
We’ll see how that goes.
But at the bottom of that was always having to explain to the world around me what it meant to be from Missouri because there was a lot of misunderstanding.
And there’s a really nice passage in the 1982 book Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon, also known as Bill Trogdon.
It’s a book that he wrote after he divorced and then drove a truck around the country.
And he talks about what it means to be a Missourian, which he is and which I am.
He writes, a Missourian gets used to Southerners thinking him a Yankee, a Northerner considering him a cracker, a Westerner sneering at his effete Easterness, and the Easterner taking him for a cow hand.
And that is literally what it is.
You just can’t win.
And I once applied for a job in the Virgin Islands and the editor of the newspaper there thought for sure that I must be a racist because of the way that Missouri had fallen, you know, which politically during the Civil War.
She just assumed that everyone from Missouri must be, you know, a dyed in the wool racist who wanted to bring back the Confederacy.
And so as a Missourian, you frequently encounter that sometimes you’re lumped in with Ohio, which makes no sense to Missourians.
Some people think that it’s basically Montana.
You know, there must be giant cattle ranches.
They just have no idea, really.
Yeah, well, you’re right there in the middle, so you’re not really southern and you’re not really northern.
Yeah, exactly.
Missouri itself is—
Eastern or western.
I mean, I could write a whole treatise on this.
Missouri is divided many ways.
And if we were to redraw the map of the United States based upon people’s allegiances to ideas or language or point of origin, Missouri wouldn’t exist.
It’s just only lines on a map.
Well, I think it’s a really interesting question to ask what writer really sums up a state.
I know that’s hard to do, right?
But I wonder, I’d love to hear from our listeners.
Yeah, sure. If you have a book or a passage or a line or two that for you represents who you are and where you’re from, whether it’s your adopted home or your birth home, let us know.
