An Appalachian Heritage Interview with Crystal Wilkinson

Abstract

An Appalachian Heritage Interview with Crystal Wilkinson Silas House (bio) and Crystal Wilkinson In the introduction to her debut short story collection Blackberries, Blackberries, celebrated fiction writer Crystal Wilkinson drew a strong connection between two parts of her identity. “Being country,” she wrote, “is as much a part of me as my full lips, wide hips, dreadlocks and high cheekbones. There are many black country folks who have lived and are living in small towns, up hollers [End Page 57] and across knobs. They are all over the South—scattered like milk-thistle seeds in the wind.” It’s been sixteen years since those powerful words first appeared in print, and in that time Wilkinson has crafted an influential, genre-spanning body of work that further reinforces her observation. Water Street, her second collection, was a 2003 Long-List Finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction—one of the United Kingdom’s most prominent book awards—and a Short-List Finalist for The Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. Her work has been widely anthologized and published in respected literary magazines including the Indiana Review, Slice, and Pluck!. In March, her highly anticipated novel The Birds of Opulence—a lyrical exploration of how several generations of small-town black women deal with mental illness—was published by the University of Kentucky and excerpted in the Oxford American. Wilkinson recently sat down with her longtime friend and colleague Silas House and discussed her new novel, craft techniques, talking country, and how owning an independent bookshop has influenced her literary life. SILAS HOUSE What do you want readers to know about The Birds of Opulence? CRYSTAL WILKINSON I see this book as a sort of a meditation. It’s not written linearly. A lot of people would describe it as a story written in vignettes, and I did that intentionally to replicate memory. It’s about the things that we carry forward. On the cover of the book Ron [Davis, Wilkinson’s partner, who is a poet and visual artist] did this wonderful design of the Sankofa bird, which comes from [End Page 58] Africa. And it’s about what we carry forward and what we pick up from our past, like remembering where you come from. So I think that the book is about those things, sometimes hurtful things, that are passed down from generation to generation—some of them things that we can do something about, like abuse in families, and some of it you can’t do anything about, like what’s inherited, like mental illness. SH That’s one thing I definitely wanted to talk about—the theme of mental illness that runs throughout. Was that difficult for you to tackle, or was it cathartic to write about that? CW I think it’s always been something difficult for me to write about. And I write about it from a personal standpoint because it’s something that has been prevalent in my family, and something that is prevalent I think throughout Appalachia and up hollers and across knobs that people just don’t talk about directly. And I think that’s why I wrote it in the vignettes. SH One thing I loved about the book is the way you play with point of view. For example, the book opens with the narrator describing the day of her birth while still in the womb. And then throughout the book you use the omniscient voice, which is notoriously hard to pull off, and you do it just beautifully. I think it’s one of the best things about the book. Can you talk a bit about that process, and why you chose those approaches? CW From a craft aspect it was hard to wrangle the omniscient point of view, and I couldn’t really get a hold on it until I used my own metaphor and my own theme to kind of [End Page 59] Click for larger view View full resolution Crystal Wilkinson [End Page 60] grapple it, which was the idea of a bird. And so I decided that in my narration that the omniscient point of view wouldn’t go all the way up to the heavens—that...