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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