Return to Cover
Page
The writing workshop offered during the 1994 Oxford Conference for the Book sold out a month in advance and proved to be one of the most popular events of the conference. It was standing room only in the lecture hall of Barnard Observatory as Barry Hannah, author of many acclaimed works of fiction and writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi, led a panel discussion that featured distinguished guests from the literary world. Stanley Lindberg, editor of the prestigious Georgia Review; Wendy Weil, agent to Alice Walker and Rita Mae Brown; Oxford novelist Larry Brown; and Arkansas bookseller Mary Gay Shipley offered their views on a variety of pertinent issues and answered questions submitted to them.
Hannah opened the workshop with comments on many of the issues that would be addressed in later conference sessions, then guided the panelists toward frank discussion of possible obstacles to aspiring writers. "I would like for America to get back in its fiction a sense of the tale," Hannah said, citing Stephen King's visit to the conference as a positive step in this direction for college writing. Hannah lauded the kind of story that King writes, the "old-fashioned ripper," preferring it to the "fiction of preening consciousness" that often predominates in contemporary writing.
Lindberg agreed, saying, "Readers today are tired of seeing stories that seem to say, `My angst is greater than your angst.'" Of his work at the Georgia Review, Lindberg said, "I'm always looking for a story that has a center, a reason, a focus. We're looking for the best writing we can find, not the biggest name-the best writing."
When asked by Hannah if there were any "constants" such as ethnicity or voice in her approach to finding new writers to represent, Weil said, "I hate categories," and explained that nothing was more thrilling to her than to find "somebody who is very good at what they're doing." Weil discounted the notion that there are "rules" to good writing, stating that the clients she represents are "all writing about things they care intensely about."
Citing Larry Brown as a writer who knows the value of a tale, Hannah recounted Brown's development as a writer of fiction publishable in the motorcycle magazine Easy Rider to one of America's most accomplished new novelists. "It's a long slow process," Brown cautioned the audience. "You have to learn to be your own first editor," he said, relating his experience discovering the works of Joseph Conrad and Flannery O'Connor, and developing a sense of his skill compared to what he wanted it to be. "I saw then it was going to take some more years, some more work."
Shipley cited her practice at her bookstore of quizzing authors about their reading to stay abreast of developments in fiction, emphasizing her belief that good authors read a lot of books themselves. Brown agreed, "Reading was always a major love in my life. I never cared anything about education, but I loved books."
Cynthia Shearer
"Now, my oldest brother, his name was L. C. Well, he never could go to school much. He had to work and get us up, you know, about seven or eight. Then we started to work. We'd go to school three or four days. If it rained we'd go to school. If it didn't, we stayed home and worked breaking land, planting corn, peanuts, all that. . . . So, when we got up big enough to work, I would go to school like today. John Lee would go tomorrow. We just kept doing like that. See, we couldn't never keep up with the rest in the classroom, so we just stopped and went to work."
Eugene "Frog" Hudson
Ichauway Adult Learning Class Student
Center graduate students and faculty are wrapping up the second year of field work on the Ichauway Documentary Project, a two-year study of the traditional culture of a 28,000-acre quail hunting reserve and ecological research site in Baker County, Ga. In addition to documenting the traditional culture of the area, project researchers Aimee Schmidt and Chuck Yarborough have assisted with the Ichauway Adult Learning Class for employees and their relatives. Meeting twice a week for two hours and offering individual tutoring for those who desire it, the class offers members of the community the opportunity to learn to read or to improve their reading skills with the assistance of volunteers, primarily from the staff of the Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Center at Ichauway.
Initiated last summer under the guiding eye of Kay Kirkman, one of the scientists who uses the 28,000-acre reserve as an outdoor laboratory, the program engages students ranging in ability from nonreaders to those completing the GED. Last fall the program produced its first graduate, Ichauway's Tommy Ledford, who earned his GED following tutoring by the Jones Center's Jan Palmer and was able to become a certified mechanic as a result of his hard work.
At the recent Folklorists in the South Retreat held in Oxford, Schmidt and Yarborough heard the pleas of an area high school teacher and members of various state arts councils who requested that folklorists make their fieldwork more accessible to people in all walks of life, rather than simply removing the work to the world of the academy. After considering ways to make the Ichauway Documentary Project more accessible to the community, the two researchers suggested that the Adult Learning Class members create a book of stories. Thus, through the presentation, editing, and rewriting of personal histories, experience stories, tall tales, lies, and family tales, students in the class are creating their own textbook.
This textbook will be used in conjunction with lessons that teach and reevaluate sentence structure, paragraph construction, proper punctuation, spelling, and reading comprehension as well as other fundamental skills specified by the class teachers. Ideally, because of its relevance to the students' lives, the resulting text will enhance student interest, by improving reading skills and encouraging their individual creativity. The book provides an important, tangible piece to students as evidence of their hard work and ongoing success. Schmidt, Yarborough, and other volunteers also discuss the potential fallibility of the written word, thus helping the students to become mature, critical readers.
Yarborough and Schmidt tape-recorded and transcribed an interview with each class member. With the transcript in hand and the help of their volunteer teachers, the students are editing and rewriting their stories. To avoid excessive editing or rewriting, which might stifle the life of the stories, the volunteer teachers emphasize suggestions that maintain the vibrant nature of the tales.
The people of Ichauway want to improve their reading skills, and many are taking advantage of the opportunity now available to them. These students are grateful and appreciative of the help volunteer teachers give them. "For us to withhold our ability to assist adult learners would be a grave mistake," says Schmidt. "It propagates misconceptions that folk culture, and all of the beauty among people the term implies, can only exist among the poverty-stricken and the undereducated and that helping members of a traditional culture attain skills they desire is some form of `cultural intervention' that should be discouraged." In fact, documenting life stories of Ichauway natives and teaching the adult class are complementary pursuits that have strengthened the Ichauway Documentary Project.
The literacy and adult learning work sponsored on Ichauway by the Jones Center has a 60-year-old precedent in the work and commitment of Robert W. Woodruff, founder and owner of Ichauway until his death in 1985. A renowned philanthropist with a broad interest in the improvement of health care and education for the people of Georgia, Woodruff served on the Georgia Illiteracy Commission from 1930 until 1934 under appointment by Governor L. G. Hardman. Additionally, Woodruff's interest in education is evident through his generous gifts to institutions throughout Georgia and the South.
Chuck Yarborough
Barbara and I waited awhile before we went in because we knew we were going to get a whipping about being up in the tree from the beginning. Monkey wasn't saying a word. She was just sitting there with her mouth open and her eyes stretched.
Ma asked, "What's wrong with this girl?" We didn't say a word.
I was just flipping fast. I said, "She swallowed a fish bone!"
Ma asked, "Where she get the fish from?"
Barbara and I looked at each other, "We gave it to her."
"Don't y'all know not to give Monkey no fish? She don't know nothing
about eating fish."
By this time Monkey's eyes were getting akin to fifty cents! She wouldn't swallow. She wouldn_t do nothing. She just sat there choking. Ma took some white bread, balled it up in her hand, and put it in Monkey's mouth. She was trying to spit it back out, but Ma said, "You are keeping this bread in your mouth!" She kept it in her mouth, and when she swallowed that bread that bone went on down. From that day to this day, Monkey does not eat fish! That's no joke!
"Oh, no, Mamma, it ain't gonna rain." And about five minutes after we said that up come one of the worst storms!
But, now, this is what I had done. We got this thing you call a Georgia Thumper. It's a big old something that looks like a grasshopper. A man named Johnny Williams said if you bury them alive, put his head in the ground and leave about half of him out and pack the dirt around him, that it'll rain. Well, I didn't want to shake peanuts that day. So I got behind the peanut stack, and I dug a hole. And I put that thing down in there, and I packed that dirt down around him. Then we went on to the house. That's when grandma told us about the cloud that was over the sun.
"No, Mamma, it ain't gonna rain." Next thing, it got to storming and blowing, and she grabbed all of us. There were four of us, me, John Lee, Sam, and Leola. And old John Lee, he knew I had buried that old Georgia Thumper. That wind and those trees blew every which way! We ran. We had left from the house. She told us, "Let's go to the barn." We left out the house because it looked like the wind was taking the tin off the south end of the house. It had blown a big cedar up. And she grabbed us, and we ran down there to the barn and got up under that shelter. John Lee was standing there with his old big-mouthed self.
He told her, "Mamma."
She said, "Huh?" Well, first she told him, "Be quiet."
He said, "Gene done buried a Georgia Thumper out yonder behind that
peanut stack!"
You know, she made me go dig that thing up out in all that wind and stuff blowing! Yes, sir. She said, "You gonna go get him up." And I went out there and got him up. Now, it might not be nothing to it, but five minutes after then, it was all over!
I remember when I started to school, me and my brothers had to walk because there were no school buses. I guess we went about two or three miles from where we lived, and we had school in a church. The older children would sit in the front of the church, and the little ones would sit in the back. When summer came, when we got big enough to pick cotton, we would pick cotton to help buy our school clothes. I never could pick a hundred pounds of cotton no matter how hard I tried. My grandfather would pick two, three hundred a day. I never could understand why he could pick more than I could!
I can remember when my grandfather used to farm on halves. He used to farm with mules. I used to watch him hitch up his mules in the morning and go to the field. When he had planted his crops he would work for the boss until the crops were ready. Then he would stop and gather his crop. We would help him pull corn and pick his cotton. The way we gathered corn was to put a sack on and put the corn in the sack. When the sack was full we'd put it in a pile. After we pulled all the corn and piled it, he would hitch up his wagon and get tin tubs. He would drive the wagon along the field, and when he would get to a pile of corn, he would stop the wagon. We filled up the tubs and put it on the wagon. After the wagon was loaded, we would go to the barn and unload it. I remember when we would shell corn and carry it to the corn mill to be ground up for corn meal. It was put in brown bags, and after we got home Grandma would pour the meal in a large tin can. She would cook corn bread.