West Virginia Native
Writes "From the Homeland"
Author Belinda Anderson
Profiled
By Claudia O'Keefe
I open the book to the right
place and glance up at my workshop students. Jake, my
seventh-grader looks like he's ready to start crawling
from chair seat to chair seat under the library table
again. Two of the girls whisper secrets to each
other, giggling and totally ignoring me. I sigh.
"This is a really great
book," I tell them. "It's by someone who lives
right here in Greenbrier County, who grew up and has
lived almost her whole life in this area."
Jake stops mid-crawl.
"Someone here wrote a book?" he says, finally showing
interest. The girls stop whispering. "Is she
famous?" he asks.
"Why don't you tell me?" I
suggest, and begin reading Junior, by West Virginia
native Belinda Anderson.
Junior is just one of
seventeen short stories from The Well Ain't Dry Yet,
a recent debut collection by Anderson, who has
Faulkner's gift for turning deceptive simplicity on its
ear. She writes from and to the homeland in all of
us, taking the most basic of human elements and making
the reader reexamine
the life-altering importance
beneath our day-to-day lives.
In Junior, a young boy is
abandoned by his prostitute mother, dropped on his
daddy's doorstep, who until that time is unaware that he
has a son. The boy's father has just been left
himself, by his girlfriend. In a few short pages,
father and son not only come to grips with their
relationship, but form the tentative beginnings of a
family with the father's mother, who using a raked pile
of autumn leaves shows them that life is good and
capable of being renewed.
By the time I'm finished
reading to the workshop, there isn't a fidget in the
house. Spontaneously the kids begin discussing the
story, debating back and forth as they analyze the
characters. As far as I'm concerned, Anderson has
worked magic.
"This is a culture that
loves storytelling," says the author, who wrote her
first personal journal at age 9, recording her thoughts
on a visit to Organ Cave and other spots around
Lewisburg. "There's a richness of soul, both in
the people and the land that I want to convey."
Though she sold her first
short story at 16, a classic tale of a student's moral
struggle to cheat or not, her second story didn't
sell. Anderson knew she had to be a writer and
decided if fiction wasn't the best way to make a living,
she would try journalism instead. A bachelors
degree in news-editorial journalism earned her as spot
as a reporter for the Roanoke Times in Virginia,
where she moved for several years and also took a
masters in liberal arts studies from Hollins University.
"But the mountains called me
home," she says, "And I'm so glad to be back."
What Anderson never forgot
about fiction writing, was the thrill of that first
acceptance letter. She remembers being so tenuous
about the contents of the envelope that she carried it
the mile walk from the mailbox, where the bus dropped
her after school. When she got home, she hurried
to her room, and opened the letter in secret.
"And then I just let out a
great big whoop!" she says.
Anderson began writing
fiction again ten years ago, and has not only won
numerous state and national awards for her short
stories, but is a 2001 recipient of a professional
development grant from the WV Division of Culture and
History and the National endowment for the Arts.
Mountain State Press published The Well Ain't Dry
Yet, her first collection, as a Fall 2001
book.
"Being a book author is a
brand-new experience for me," she says. "It's satisfying
to have a bit of West Virginia culture preserved."
Anderson thrives on the
desire to share what she's learned about mountain life,
whether it's a fact or an epiphany. She asserts
that one of the greatest advantages of being a writer
from West Virginia is a tremendous sense of place, an
almost tangible sense of roots connecting her to the
mountains and its people.
"West Virginians have more
resiliency than they often give themselves credit for,"
she claims, adding that, "Hope is a theme running
through my stories. The stories don't necessarily end
wrapped with a ribbon and bow, but they do usually
conclude with possibility."
A perfect example of this is
"The Bridge", another story from her collection, in
which a character named Johnnie decides he's going to
commit suicide on New Year's Eve. He then meets a
girl standing at his chosen spot on a bridge, and
despite themselves, they struggle their way back from
the emotional brink.
Anderson's work isn't
usually as somber as it sounds. Frequently, it's
just the opposite. "Even when I contemplate writing a
story with an ethereal or formal tone, once the
characters stroll onto the page," she says, "they always
speak with a down-to-earth, humorous frankness.
It's the voice of my people."
Listen to the author read
one of her stories aloud--for instance "Hauling Evelyn",
in which a single mom with three kids, Rocky, Conan, and
Leia, carts her too-perfect sister's ashes with her in a
bucket in the trunk of her car--and you'll soon key into
that awareness of self-fun as opposed to self-mockery
that characterizes the classic West Virginia sense of
humor. It's that bit of devil in her otherwise
quiet gray-blue eyes which speak of a happy wisdom she's
eager to share with readers and audiences alike.
"My editor, Carolyn
Sturgeon, once introduced me as, `a country woman, a
woman of the country.' I wasn't sure what I thought of
that at first," Anderson says, "I mean, I've ridden an
escalator, I can surf the World Wide Web. But
that's my fictional voice?"
Even though she feels
opportunities can sometimes be tough to come by for
writers from the Mountain State, another of the
advantages she sees to being a West Virginia author is
that "there is so much material, both in fiction and
nonfiction," to draw upon. She often points this
out to her writing classes and workshops at Greenbrier
Community College and the Greenbrier Valley Theatre in
Lewisburg. When she teaches a new course, "Writing
From the Homeland," at Carnegie Hall in Spring 2002,
Anderson will encourage students to do as she strives to
do and, "free what already lies within."
Future fame and fortune
aside, Anderson's main motivator as she sits down to the
write hasn't changed much from that of the industrious
nine-year-old who jotted her impressions and thoughts in
a notebook. "I write to entertain myself. If
I can make myself laugh, it's been a good day."
Recently Anderson was going
through some files and came across that very first
journal of hers. While many authors squirm
uncomfortably when they look back at writing they
haven't seen in years, her response is refreshingly
honest. "I guess I was struck by the zest of my writing
as a kid, the unabashed eagerness--this is great and I
want to tell you about it! And I suppose I'm still
doing it--this is so interesting and I want to tell you
about it!"
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