An Appalachian Heritage Interview with Julie Hensley

Abstract

An Appalachian Heritage Interview with Julie Hensley Jason Howard Most artists carry their childhood landscape like a native language," poet and fiction writer Julie Hensley states, an observation that contains the framework for her captivating short story collection Landfall, recently published by The Ohio State University Press. Winner of the Non/Fiction Collection Prize, the book centers on Conrad's Fork, a small Kentucky town conjured so vividly that, in the words of [End Page 54] bestselling novelist Amy Greene, "it's easy to forget [it] is a fictional place." That's due in no small part to Hensley's childhood in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, where Elizabeth Taylor famously choked on a chicken bone and the spectre of John Fox, Jr. continues to haunt the hills. The stories and people she encountered there continue to inform her writing, she says, a legacy to which she pays tribute in this recent interview with Appalachian Heritage. ________ JASON HOWARD Landfall is billed as "A Ring of Stories," and it does seem as if there is a circular structure—the unbroken circle as the Carter Family would call it—to the collection. Can you talk about that? JULIE HENSLEY I struggled for a long time with knowing the book was finished. Many of the stories were part of my MFA thesis at Arizona State University, and I regularly submitted many different versions of Landfall to first book contests for over a decade. I kept changing the sequencing, occasionally adding or omitting a story. The book was a perpetual runner-up in so many contests—the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Katharine Anne Porter Prize, the LindaS. Bruckheimer Award. Finally, it won the Everett Southwest Literature Award, a contest which includes a generous prize but does not actually publish the book. I told myself I would give the project one more year of revision and one more round of submission, then I would let it go and move on. The following summer, when I was teaching for a month in Mexico, I wrote three mornings a week at Café Montenegro, [End Page 55] a little coffeehouse off the central plaza in San Miguel de Allende. As I crafted what became "Expecting," I felt Landfall click into place as a book. It was like I'd been jiggling a key in a lock for years, and suddenly, as the voices of Cora and Grace emerged, the bolts gave and shifted. When that door opened, so many things settled into place—characters I subconsciously had been worrying about just reappeared, pushing their own stories to fruition in the periphery of the narrative. The book itself suddenly, literally came full circle. I might have called Landfall "A Novel-in-Stories" or "A Cycle of Stories." Certainly, books I've heard ascribed with those labels (Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Alice McDermott's After This) were influential. But I gravitated toward the idea of a ring or circle because of the way that shape conveys both continuity and paralysis. A circle goes on for always, but it also creates a kind of enclosure, and by extension, a kind of exclusion. In my experience, small towns can do both: offer protection or cage one inside a tight pattern of conformity. The same might be said for family communities. You could argue certain stories in my book are as much "Ring of Fire" as "Will the Circle Be Unbroken." Ultimately, I believe the book is about connection, though. I want it to be hopeful. JH The book is mostly set in Conrad's Fork, a fictional small town in Kentucky, and you do a great job in this book of showing how the supposedly simple, ordinary lives of small town Americans are actually rich and complex and stressful. Did you feel a sort of responsibility to do that as a writer from a small town, or did that theme just emerge by instinct? [End Page 56] Click for larger view View full resolution Julie Hensley [End Page 57] HENSLEY I always feel a responsibility to my characters to make them real and to make their lives matter. Conrad's Fork is...