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I don’t often think of the 1980s when I returned abruptly to Kentucky and a ranch house in the suburbs. I’d never imagined myself—or any writer—living in a suburb, this one still very new, with dug foundations for future houses full of water and red mud, spindly young trees, and grass brought in from a sod farm and laid down in squares, like a rug. My two young sons didn’t like the move, and I knew no one from the times, twenty years before, when I had grown up in a nearby but very different house. I was single and at that time and in that place, single women seemed slightly suspect; when I called the local ballet company to order one ticket, I was told they were only sold in pairs.

Several positive developments saved my life. I’d forgotten these until a box of my published writing from that time came back to me, grace of Eleanor Miller, my sister, who had inherited our parents’ belongings. I was surprised to see that they’d collected all my early writing.

The first saving grace was my introduction to teaching a basic course in creative writing (is there another kind?) at the University of Louisville.

I was given a very fine anthology of short stories, put together and edited by a woman, to use as a basis for my course, and told to go to it. Having never taught before, I was anxious, and to bolster my authority I dressed in a suit and red high-heeled shoes.

It soon became apparent that my class of twenty or so undergraduates was eager to learn, especially those minority students whose high school literature courses had been lacking. I found my voice, for the first time in years, leading discussions of these prime short stories, especially one by Joy Williams, whose work I’ve followed ever since. My students struggled with their own writing, especially those who’d never been taught spelling or grammar, but they read aloud their short stories with increasing confidence.

My course and the entire creative writing department was sustained by a remarkable teacher, Leon Driskell, who created something like a salon for writers in his house. He and colleagues published a literary magazine called Adena to showcase writing about the history and culture of the Ohio Valley. It published the first fiction of mine that proved to me I was still a writer (and always would be). Called “Lawing,” I based it on a news story about an Eastern Kentucky woman, Mrs. McKean, whose small frame house, her only possession, was being undermined and would eventually be destroyed.

“It is not coal that is tearing down my house,” Mrs. Mckean tells her friend, Mrs. Shay, the co-owner of their television set, after Mrs. Shay says, “If it had of been coal, you’d have been on the front page all these years.” Instead it was a stone company quarrying in the mountains above her house, creating debris in the form of enormous stones crashing into her foundations.

As always in the Kentucky mountains, destruction comes in many forms although the only one we know about is coal.

Later in my story, Mrs. McKean goes to town to meet her new lawyer who replaces the lawyer who has represented her for years. The new lawyer condescends to her, telling her that she will never win her long fight with the stone company and that she should drop it and instead spend her time, as his wife does, volunteering at the local hospital.

Mrs. McKean refuses to give up and goes home, disheartened. Taking off her shoes and lying down to try to rest, she feels her house “creak and shift on its ruined foundations like a boat in a high wind with the ocean shifting and falling away beneath it.”

I never imagined it at the time, but Mrs. Mckean could be Margaret Erskine’s (in Taken by the Shawnee) great-great-great-great-great granddaughter.

So the lineage of powerful women continues in my writing and many others, and my faith in myself was restored.

[For more on Leon Driskell and the writers he published in Adena, a 2-hour interview from 1985 is available online from the Kentucky Writers Oral History Project.]

In Kentucky, Writing Taken by the Shawnee Kentucky Writing