A MOUNTAIN WRITER
My third novel (the one I am still writing, the one with a looming deadline, the one that is consuming all my waking thoughts) is set in Dunlap, Tennessee, at the very tip of the Appalachian chain. A fellow writer said that now I can call myself a mountain writer. But I’m not worthy of that title, not if my sisters are the likes of Emma Bell Miles.
Jim Minick, a dear friend and author of the critically acclaimed, The Blueberry Years, introduced me to Emma Bell — a turn-of-the-century writer who lived only miles from my home here in Chattanooga. She painted and wrote both fiction and poetry, but it’s her daily writings documenting her hardscrabble life on nearby Signal Mountain that move me the most.
She wrote of mountain mornings, the heavy fog and lingering cold. She wrote of the birds that warbled their songs and kept her company on lonely days. And she wrote of losing her two-year-old son and the responsibility of preparing his body. These words left me grieving her loss nearly 100 years later.
So I went to lift him in my arms for the last time. But what a surprise met me when I lifted the cloth from his face! The dreadful agony was gone; according to the Gaelic phrase, the Smoothing of the Hand. The piteous gasping, straining mouth had eased into the old sweet petal-like curves; it was the mouth that had drawn his first life-milk from my breast, the lips that were always kissing me. Such a fain mysterious smile, as when I have herd him chuckle in his sleep, and turned to wonder what he could be dreaming about.
As I spend day after day writing about the characters that move through the pages of my book, I turn to Emma Bell for encouragement, for knowledge, for inspiration. I’ve been to her home place, to her grave, and to the library that holds her books and paintings and journals.
I feel her with me at times, and I can only hope she is guiding my hand as I tell my own story about a mountain woman who struggled to make a better life for her family.
Emma Bell Miles died too young, at 39, but our friendship has only begun.
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Connie Hein, September 20th, 2011, 5:58 pm
Anita, September 20th, 2011, 6:36 pm
Misty Barrere, September 20th, 2011, 8:08 pm
Becky Brothers, September 21st, 2011, 9:18 am
Charlotte Rains Dixon, September 22nd, 2011, 11:39 am
Amy Franklin-Willis, October 6th, 2011, 10:50 am
Randal patrick, October 13th, 2011, 7:00 am
Sarah Sullivan, December 2nd, 2011, 8:23 am
Randal patrick, December 8th, 2011, 6:51 am
Charley, September 4th, 2014, 7:35 pm
Cathy, October 27th, 2015, 8:26 am
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