BOOKPATHS

Southwestern Virginia, and beyond

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: a Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver (2008; first published in 2007)

By inviting readers to follow her and her family during a year of local eating in Southwestern Virginia, Barbara Kingsolver broadens her reach, encouraging all of us to reexamine our own relationships with home and food.  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a lovely, funny, wise, and needed book.

We set out upon a journey.  It seemed so ordinary on the face of things, to try to do what nearly all people used to do without a second thought.  But the trip surprised us many times, because of all the ways a landscape can enter one’s physical being.  Like most of the other top-heavy hominids walking around in shoes, failing to notice the forest for the mashed trees reincarnated as our newspapers and such, I’d nearly forgotten the truest of all truths:  we are what we eat. – from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: a Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver

Related Websites

Barbara Kingsolver Website

Publisher’s Website

Bookpath: Tinker Creek, Roanoke Valley, Virginia

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard (various editions)

Written in 1974, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek shares Annie Dillard’s pilgrimages into the natural world along the creek beside her Roanoke Valley home. Considered a classic, each page of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is filled with mystery and beauty.

I propose to keep here what Thoreau called ‘a meteorological journal of the mind,’ telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead. – from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard

I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge. An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about. The creeks – Tinker and Carvin’s – are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection. The mountains – Tinker and Brush, McAfee’s Knob and Dead Man – are a passive mystery, the oldest of all. Theirs is the one simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given. Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountail will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home. – from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard Official Website

Tinker Creek Greenway

Virginia

Lynn Neary talks with Barbara Kingsolver and her husband, Steven L. Hopp, about Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: a Year of Food Life, a chronicle of their year-long “experiment” in “learning to eat deliberately.”

“The family leaves their home in Tucson, Ariz., and heads to Kingsolver's family farm in Virginia to live off the land. The clan grows a large garden and spends the summer storing food, jarring tomatoes, braiding garlic and stuffing turkey sausage.” – from “Back to Basics: Kingsolver Clan Lives Off the Land,” by Lynn Neary, NPR – Weekend Edition

Near Gore, Virginia (Route 50)

Willa Cather b. December 7, 1873

Willa Cather was born on December 7, 1873 in Back Creek Valley, Virginia. Virginia Historical Highway Marker B-17 commemorates her childhood home, Willow Shade. According to the Virginia Landmarks Register, “the gaunt Greek Revival house was built ca. 1853 for Cather’s grandfather and his wife, Emily Ann Caroline Smith Cather, both descendents of early Frederick County settlers. After Willa Cather’s birth nearby…her Cather grandparents moved to Nebraska and turned Willow Shade over to her parents.” Willa Cather’s family moved to Nebraska in 1883, but a house similar to Willow Shade is described in Sapphira and the Slave Girl.

It was a brilliant, windy March day; all the bare hills were still pale fawn colour, and high above them puffy white clouds went racing like lambs let out to pasture in the spring. I was something over five years old, and was kept in bed on that memorable day because I had a cold. I was in my mother's bedroom, in the third storey of a big old brick house entered by a white portico with fluted columns. Propped up on high pillows, I could see the clouds drive across the bright, cold blue sky, throwing rapid shadows on the steep hillsides. The slats of the green window shutters rattled, the limp cordage of the great willow trees in the yard was whipped and tossed furiously by the wind. It was the last day I would have chosen to stay indoors. -- Willa Cather, Sapphira and the Slave Girl

Photograph is by Mark Kissel, courtesy of Women Writers website.

Richmond (and Charlottesville), Virginia

Poe Museum, Richmond, Virginia

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, but following his mother's death in 1811 he went to live with John and Frances Allan in Richmond, Virginia. After a childhood spent in Virginia and England, Poe entered the University of Virginia on February 26, 1826, but left in 1827 after a quarrel with John Allan. He returned to Richmond in 1835 as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, a position he held until 1837. During this time, Poe married "his young cousin, Virginia Clemm." In 1838, Poe left Richmond for New York, but was unable to find work. Later that year he moved his family to Philadelphia.

You can "retreat" into Edgar Allan Poe's Richmond by visiting the Poe Museum. Housed in the Old Stone House, "the museum is only blocks away from Poe's first Richmond home and his first place of employment, the Southern Literary Messenger." The museum "boasts the world's finest collection of Edgar Allan Poe's manuscripts, letters, first editions, memorabilia and personal belongings."

Even if you can't visit the Poe Museum in person, visit their website. There is information on Poe's life and work, educational resources, and an online store.

The Poe Museum is at 1914-16 E. Main Street, Richmond. For information phone 804-648-5523 or 1-888-21E-APOE, or visit their website. The museum hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. and Sunday, 11:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

For information on Edgar Allan Poe's time at the University of Virginia, visit The Raven Society of the University of Virginia website. The Raven Society, "the oldest and most prestigious honorary society at the University," was founded in 1904. It "works to protect and celebrate the legacy of Edgar Allan Poe's time at the University of Virginia." Online, you can find information about "Poe as a student," peak into "Poe's room," and read a full text of, not surprisingly, "The Raven."

Then this ebony bird beguiling my said fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
'Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, 'are sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore--
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!'
Quoth the Raven 'Nevermore.'
--from "The Raven," by Edgar Allan Poe

BOOKPATH: Virginia and beyond

The Known World, by Edward P. Jones (New York : Amistad, 2003)

"We owned slaves. It was what was done, and so that is what we did." -- from The Known World, by Edward P. Jones

This powerful, Pulitzer Prize winning, novel should be required reading for all who live in the United States. Although the setting is the fictional "Manchester County," Virginia, the landscape of the book belongs to the institution of slavery and its ramifications. The Known World is a mournful book that is filled with spirit. Each multi-faceted character is necessary, allowing readers a glimpse into what was and what might have been. Whether slave or free, black or white, male or female, each "could have done much more in a better world." The Known World is a necessary book. Its complexity and understanding expands heart and mind.

"The hitter can never be the judge. Only the receiver of the blow can tell you how hard it was, whether it would kill a man or make a baby just yawn." -- from The Known World, by Edward P. Jones

"No, people were viewing an enormous wall hanging, a grand piece of art that is part tapestry, part painting, and part clay structure -- all in one exquisite Creation, hanging silent and yet songful on the Eastern wall. It is, my Dear Caldonia, a kind of map of life of the County of Manchester, Virginia. but a 'map' is such a poor word for such a wondrous thing. It is a map of life made with every kind of art man has ever thought to represent himself. Yes, clay. Yes, paint. Yes, cloth. There are no people on this 'map,' just all the houses and barns and roads and cemeteries and wells in our Manchester. It is what God sees when he looks down on Manchester. At the bottom right-hand corner of this Creation there were but two stitched words. Alice Night." -- from The Known World, by Edward P. Jones

Websites
Reading Group Guide
http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides3/known_world1.asp

The Pulitzer Prizes
http://www.pulitzer.org/