across the
college green
Coming home
Author takes personal journey through West Virginia
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n each issue of Ohio Today, we feature a brief review written by a staff or faculty member of an Ohio University Press book. Here, we highlight a collection of stories by Earlham College writer-in-residence Sarah Beth Childers, an author from Huntington, W.Va.
“Shake Terribly the Earth: Stories from an Appalachian Family” by Sarah Beth Childers; Ohio University Press, Series in Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia
Sarah Beth Childers’ collection of 15 wellcrafted stories is about a personal journey on which she is accompanied by several generations of her West Virginia family. They liked to tell stories, and Childers liked to listen to them. “My Dead-Grandmother Essay,” for instance, describes regular visits to Granny’s. While her dad walked through the alleys and her mother wrote checks to pay Granny’s bills, the children “followed Granny back to a tiny sitting room … and sank into the recliner, gathered around a card table thick with Yahtzee scorecards. Granny talked constantly, teaching us about life in between rattles of dice.” In “The Tricia Has Crashed,” Childers asked her other grandmother, MaMa, to tell stories. She told about the Great Depression and her great-grandfather’s job in the glass factory. She told her how for years, he’d “stood next to a furnace and blown through a tube inflating molten glass like a balloon.”
How he had been able “to build a house with a freestanding staircase and enough room to accommodate four boys and six girls. The front parlor had had fine carpets and a piano.” Then he lost his job. Childers’ mother is both the subject and the source of many of the author’s memories. In “O, Glorious Love,” a story about funerals, hymns and Christian rock, Childers inserts this aside: “One of Marcy’s favorites was Jimmy Swaggart, back in his preadultery days. Taking inspiration from his sinful cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis, Reverend Swaggart preached the evil of rock and roll along with redemption. … He performed only the most church-appropriate flourishes and chords. Moved by Swaggart’s sermons, Marcy smashed her record collection and kept her radio tuned to a station that played only preachers and hymns.” The family’s generosity in sharing their stories with her allows Childers to capture the drama of family dinners and reunions, the sadness of funerals, the humor in daily events and the confusion of Fundamentalism. From the gifts of her families’ stories, Childers has built her own enthralling story. » Betty Pytlik is a professor emerita in English at Ohio University.
Other recent publications Ohio University’s published authors are many, and alumni across all majors have found inspiration in poetry and prose. This list includes recent publication announcements; authors should send their information to Ohio Today, 213 McKee House, 1 Ohio University, Athens, Ohio 45701 or via email to ohiotoday@ohio.edu. The Formula: How I Found It and What It Can Do For You, a relationship book based on the author’s 38 years of marriage, by Bernard Bushell, AB ’58 • Their Greatest Victories, a compilation of 24 stories of athletes who made incredible comebacks after disease or disability, and Mary Norton of New Jersey: Congressional Trailblazer, by David Potter, MA ’65 • Our Millie Leaves Home and Other Stories and Blue Suede Shoes and Thunderbirds by Judith Potter Allen, BSED ’67 • Behind the Curtain: A Career in EEO by Charles Duffy, BA ’67 • Landing Right Side Up in Nehru’s India: Field Notes from a Punjab Sojourn, the latest book by Jean Durgin Harlan, MS ’68, PHD ’78 • Starting Up Silicon Valley by Kathie Lehmann Maxfield, BA ’69 • Streetwalker and the culinary mystery Mission Impastable by Sharon Arthur Moore, BSED ’69, AB ’73, MED ’73 • Billy’s
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Adventure, an illustrated children’s book by Roberta Magill, BSED ’72 • Ezra, a memoir by Stella Spiropoulos Elliston, BGS ’75 • John Wesley Powell: His Life and Legacy, a biography of the famed explorer of the Colorado River, and Jim Jones: The San Blas Years, by James Aton, PHD ’81 • Cartoon Carnival: A Critical Guide to the Best Cartoons from Warner Brothers, MGM, Walter Lantz and DePatie-Freleng, an ebook by Michael Samerdyke, MA ’89 • Hiking West Virginia, second edition, by Mary Reed, BSJ ’90, MA ’93 • The Cucumber King of Kedaini, a short fiction collection by Wendell Mayo, PHD ’91 • It’s All a Kind of Magic: The Young Ken Kesey, a biography by Rick Dodgson, MA ’95, PHD ’06 • Super Boys: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the Creators of Superman and American Mastodon, a poetry book that won the St. Lawrence Book Award, by Brad Ricca, MA ’96 • Marie Antoinette’s Head: The Royal Hairdresser, the Queen and the Revolution, a scholarly history about Versailles court fashion that made the New York Post’s “must-read” book list, by Harold Bashor, MA ’00 • Powerful Phrases for Dealing with Difficult People by Renee Aschbrenner Evenson, BSS ’04