Search This Blog

Monday, September 10, 2018

"Kentucky Voices" Edited by James Alan Riley & Elgin Ward (Ass't Ed.)-- Book Review

Riley, James Alan, Ed. & Elgin Ward, Ass't. Ed. Kentucky Voices (Pikeville College Press, 1997)

This book is a collection of short stories by authors with Kentucky connections.  Not all the authors are native Kentuckians but all do have some arguable connection to the state and its literary movement.  The editor is James Alan Riley who has taught Creative Writing at the University of Pikeville since 1987. His poetry collection, Broken Frequencies, has been accepted for publication in 2018 by Shadelandhouse Modern Press. ElginWard, who is listed as the assistant editor, can be found listed as an Associate Professor of English at the University of Pikeville since 1992 although he is not found when a search of his name is run on the university website.

The book has several stories written by well known Kentucky authors such as Ed McClanahan, Jim Wayne Miller, Chris Holbrook, and Chris Offutt.  It also has a few stories by relative unknowns.  In my opinion, the stories vary widely in the quality of work.  For instance, "My Vita, If You Will", by Ed McClanahan, was the title piece in a collection of his work published by Counterpoint in 1998.  The stories by all the established writers cited above are all well worth reading.   "Out Of The Woods" by Chris Offutt is an unusual and highly readable piece of work which uses an unusual plot that reeks of both originality and genuine Appalachian Culture.  A few of the other stories would have been better off left on the cutting room floor. 

One truly baffling aspect of the editorial work, at least to me, is the fact that the stories are arranged in straight alphabetical fashion by author and the story used in the first position is not one that I would have selected to publish at any level.  I tend to believe that such a choice of arrangement speaks to some level of trepidation about making editorial choices such as using the better stories or more well known writers to "tent pole" the placement of the individual pieces. It leads me to believe that the editors chose to avoid the possibility of hurting the feelings of any of the contributors.  For the uninitiated, "tent poling" is a method of placing short stories by a single author in an arrangement where the best works or previously published works are scattered throughout a book to ensure that the reader will be less likely to become bored with too much lesser work running consecutively and, therefore, more likely to finish the entire book.   In an anthology such as this one, "tent poling" would either have the editors bravely choose the best story in the book, in their opinion, and place it at the beginning of the book and to choose a nearly equal story to end the anthology in the hope of leaving the reader well pleased at the finish. 

But the book is worth reading by the person who has an interest in the literature of Kentucky or Appalachia although not all the work is Appalachian or clearly understandable as Kentucky literature.  Some of the stories are just stories which might just as easily been selected for anthologies in Boston or Seattle.  But, I repeat several of the stories are above average such as "Out Of The Woods" by Chris Offutt or "Death Is A Stranger" by Mary Lou Brown-Byrd, one of the lesser known authors in the book.  She wrote extensively in a small town newspaper in Salyersville for years but had no national, or even regional, reputation as an author of fiction.  Yet her story is one of the best and most authentically Kentucky stories in the book.  When you read it, if you know anything about Salyersville, you can see the buildings, know the characters, and smell the Licking River.  


No comments: