Listen Here (57 page)

(April 8, 1954–)

For generations, Barbara Presnell's family has lived in the rolling hills of Randolph County, North Carolina, where she was born and grew up. “Family,” she claims, “both my nuclear and my large, extended family, past and present, is perhaps the most important ingredient to my sanity and success, insanity and failure. My birth family and kin, though many are long dead, continue to inspire and limit me.”

She completed two degrees in English from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro: a B.A. in 1976, as well as an M.F.A. in creative writing in 1979. She also earned an M.A. in English from the University of Kentucky in 1989 and has done additional study at the University of Iowa (1989), Lexington Theological Seminary (1991–1992), and the University of Minnesota (1998).

In 1980, she married newspaperman Bill Keesler, and they have one son, born in 1985.

She has taught expository and creative writing and literature in a number of colleges, including Hazard Community College, Lexington Community College, and the University of Kentucky. She has worked as an Artist-in-Residence for the North Carolina Arts Council and the Kentucky Arts Council. Currently, she is a faculty member of the English department at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, North Carolina.

During the years when she lived in Kentucky, she explains, “after nearly 20 years of prose writing,…I began writing poetry, and I don't think it was mere coincidence. Rather, I believe the richness of the land, the language, the stories, and the people—all familiar from my own home in N.C.—metamorphosed my writing into a new form, more natural and far more satisfying.” Settings for her work are usually in either her birth home of North Carolina or her “adopted” home of Kentucky.

Her work has been supported by the Kentucky Foundation for Women (1987), the Kentucky Arts Council (1993), the Lexington, Kentucky Arts and Cultural Council, and the North Carolina Arts Council (2001–2002). She describes her first poetry chapbook,
Snake Dreams
, as “a collection of mountain-grown poems.” It won the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society.

Poetry:
Los Hijos
(2002),
Unravelings
(1998),
Snake Dreams
(1994),
“Words Are My Only Way To Get Free”: A Celebration of Poetry
(1990),
“A Word Explodes”: Poems From the Mountains, A Collection of Works By Students in Leslie, Letcher, and Perry Counties, 1988–1989
(1989),
“The Mountains in Winter are Like Mashed Potatoes”: Poetry in the Schools: A Collection of Poems by Students in Breathitt, Knott, Letcher, and Perry Counties (1987–1988)
(1988).

Annalee Allen, “Local Author's Poems Relate to Life's Common Situation,”
The Dispatch
(4 February 1999), A5. Juanita Bouser, “Catawba Professor Finds Poetic Bliss,”
Salisbury Post
(24 September 1995), B4. Jill Doss-Raines, “Mexico is Focus for Poetry”
The Dispatch
[Lexington, NC] (17 October 2002), A5. Claire Johnston, “UK Instructor Attempts to Bridge Literary Gap”
Kentucky Kernal
(27 April 1995). Ellis Normandi, review of
Snake Dreams, Wind Magazine
(1995), 97. Shelby Stephenson, “Presnell Poems Show Her Tar Heel Roots,” review of
Snake Dreams, The Pilot
[Southern Pines, NC] (27 February 1995).

from
Snake Dreams
(1994)

They mound like a grave on today's front page,
covering the news that a soldier was hung,
strung up like a ham, in some faraway country.
My mother, my grandmother, my aunt, me.
We snip heads from beans,
unthread their sides then snap the green flesh
into finger joints we'll cook for supper.

I listen as they talk of cancer,
how suddenly it comes, how quickly it works,
how Herbert Combs planted his corn
on the slant of his hill two weeks
before he died, how old Ethel,
thin as a vine this Sunday at church,
won't last long.

The soldier's smiling face peeks at me
through beans in my pile. His newsprint eyes
dampen with dew that came in from the garden.
His skin softens. He is a boy,
my son's age, arms and legs
like tender pods, plucking beans
from stems before the season
takes them to seed.

We are a family of women
who grow older than oaks.
Every summer we string beans,
slicing out the imperfections
with a blade. Grandmother strings
slowest of us all, for beans slip
between her thick fingers too often
for speed.

I am waiting to die, she told me
two nights ago. Now she says
how good these beans will taste
with a spoonful of grease and a
bite of cornbread.

from
Snake Dreams
(1994)

An ordinary woman, why her?
she wonders. A sinner, even, not
musically inclined, just one half-tuned
ear and a taste for rock and roll.
But there he is, night black
hair that wind and rhythm wave,
lip snarling when he smiles, eyes pure
and blue as the sky over Graceland.
She watches him, eight-year-old
boy tight as an E string,
riding his bike like any other boy.
He doesn't know who he is,
how he'll change the world,
how already he's changed her,
how at night while he sleeps,
she kneels by his bed
cradling his immaculate hand,
whispering thank-yous for miracles
to the moon and stars
that stud the blue suede sky.

from
Snake Dreams
(1994)

At the shopping mall at Christmas,
in a sheet cold hospital bed, or
just to age,
it doesn't matter when or where:
first your breath will stop and
you will think you are going to die.
Your head and face will pound like
someone pummeling you with years,
and though you have been here
a hundred times, you will not know
where you are.

You will gather your wits like deputies
and say, we will find him,
he isn't really gone.
There, peeking in the toy store window,
there, by the fountain,
standing with those shoppers,
moving quick as deer through
red and coated crowds, his hair,
his clothes, his face.

You will imagine that someone else has him,
some other kind mother,
perhaps, some criminal,
you will picture him grown
to manhood without you.

You report that he is missing:
there was a small boy, they tell you,
by himself, in those same clothes.
Your senses are as sharp now
as they will ever be. Your eyes
could see the scar on his chin in Africa,
you could hear his voice calling you
from Mars, and if even one hair
of his arm brushed yours,
you would know it.

Then if you are lucky
you will see him, squatting
by the trains, staring down
at the trains, and just like that,
he will show you how they
go round and round and tell you
again and again how he loves them.

But maybe he will not be there,
and not in the toy store,
not waiting on the sidewalk,
not today, not this week, this
month, this year. Still you search
in the faces of children, you will reach
for his hand as you walk,
in the hollow night
you will hear him cry,
in your dreams, he will sleep
against you, his body
pressed to you, his perfect curve
from now on the perfect curve
of you.

from
Snake Dreams
(1994)

Last night I dreamed a rattlesnake
moved into my house like
it was his and he was home at last.
In his slick belly a lump
exactly the shape and size of a
hummingbird throbbed like a heartbeat
and I swear I saw a smile
on those reptile lips. Even the cats,
mean as mountain lions, ducked behind chairs
when he trilled his tongue.
Let's just let him have the place, I said.
I've been wanting a larger house,
a smaller house, whatever.
But my sister stepped toward him,
let him nudge her leg like a colt
then strangled him with her fingers,
pinching just below those green eyes.
He played the tambourine until he dropped.

Now I know there are many things in these mountains
to be wary of besides rattlers.
I know too what they say about
snake dreams, that I am running from
some man, or ought to be.
But it was only yesterday I was thinking,
Spring is coming to these hills.
See how pale green splatters against
winter-burned trees, red Judas bleeds
like birth. Stand at the top
where rattlesnakes are waking up
and look down at the twisting North Fork,
how it yawns and stretches then coils,
pulsing with the overflow of the season,
see how it spills out and moves in,
brown and venomous.

(September 8, 1954–)

Poet Rita Quillen's roots go five generations deep in the hills of southwest Virginia. She was born in Hiltons, Virginia, and grew up on the family farm in Scott County first settled by her great-great-grandparents. She received both her B.S. (1978) and her M.A. in English (1985) from East Tennessee State University. Married to her “high school sweetheart,” Quillen has two children.

Her M.A. thesis,
Looking for Native Ground: Contemporary Appalachian Poetry
, published by the Appalachian Consortium Press in 1989, remains an indispensable reference work. Other contributions to Appalachian literature include her work as associate editor for
A Southern Appalachian Reader
(1988) and her bibliography “Modern and Contemporary Mountain Poets,” published in
Appalachian Journal
(fall 1985).

In 1987, Quillen's chapbook,
October Dusk
, won favorable reviews. “Rita Quiilen's poems are the result of her craft chipping away imaginatively at her experience,” said Jim Wayne Miller. “Coming on one of her poems is like finding an arrowhead turned up in a freshly plowed field.” A second collection of poetry,
Counting the Sums
, elicited praise from Robert Morgan, who said, “Rita Quillen has a voice you will not forget.” Fred Chappell observed that “Rita Sims Quillen shines with truth, even in her darkest lines, and what she says is as true as the world's unceasing breath.” In her review of
Counting the Sums
, George Ella Lyon says, “She looks at life and herself through the lens of birth-family and marriage-family, building to a conclusion about her job as a writer, the one between generations who must speak for and to them all.”

Quillen lives in southwest Virginia and is on the English faculty at Mountain Empire Community College in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. When asked to describe herself, Quillen says, “I can flatfoot, shoot well, burp extremely loud for a girl, have really, really good teeth, and hope I don't look like my driver's license photo.”

Poetry:
Counting the Sums
(1995),
October Dusk
(1987).
Autobiographical essay:
“Counting the Sums,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 219–24.
Essays on poets and poetry:
Looking for Native Ground: Contemporary Appalachian Poetry
(1989).
Recorded interview:
Tell it on the Mountain: Appalachian Women Writers
(Appalshop, 1997).

George Brosi, “Booklist and Notes,”
Appalachian Heritage
26:2 (spring 1996), 74. Joyce Dyer, “Rita Quillen,” in
Bloodroot
, 218. Don Johnson, “Staring at the Wind: A Conversation with Rita Sims Quillen,” in
Her Words
(2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 220–34. George Ella Lyon, review of
Counting the Sums, Appalachian Journal
24:1 (fall 1996), 76–77. Barbara Smith, review of
October Dusk, Appalachian Heritage
15:4 (fall 1987), 67.