Anne Stokely

Partial Transcript: I'm Anne Callison Stokely. I'm married to Jim Stokely who was Wilma's son. And I grew up on Webb Cove Road, which is the other fork—if you follow Beaver Dam Road, and it ends in a fork, we are—Wilma's house is on Lynn Cove and the other fork is Webb Cove. And so I grew up at the head of Webb Cove Road. And my parents bought the land they built their house on from James and Wilma in about the early sixties. And so I grew up at the head of Webb Cove as Wilma grew up at the head of Lynn Cove.

Partial Transcript: Yeah, my parents had bought the land they built their house on from James and Wilma. They lived in Tennessee, so it's not like I saw them every day. I absolutely knew Jim's grandmother a little better than I knew Wilma when I was younger. And I rode the yellow school bus. I went to the same elementary school that Wilma went to. I kind of grew up in a similar environment a generation later. And the yellow school bus would come up Lynn Cove, and I knew that that’s where that writer lady lived. And I knew that my parents had bought land from them, but I didn’t know well until much later.

Partial Transcript: We weren't engaged yet. As a matter of fact, we had a pretty interesting meeting. We were serious, and I actually went over to her house in Tennessee, and they knew that Jim and I had been seeing a lot of each other. And just as I drove up in the driveway from North Carolina, and Jim's father was out in the garden in the back gardening came to meet me at the car and Jim joined us. He was showing us his big vegetable garden at the backyard and—I hadn't been there—but five minutes when there was a thud to the ground, I didn’t know what had happened. I turned around and Jim's father was on the ground and—this is all with hindsight. At the time, I didn’t know what was happening, but he had a massive heart attack and died right there. He was sixty-three.

So, that was quite a way to enter the family. It meant a lot to Wilma that I had known her husband and unbeknownst to either of us, he had apparently targeted me as I—I mean, a girl of eight or nine, and thought he kind of—he knew that we were within the same age range, and he apparently for years had fostered this idea of wanting us to get together, but that we didn’t know that. And it wasn't until so many years later. My impressions of Wilma, very—of course, a little intimidated. I mean, very elegant lady. Also with all the added pressures of—it's kind of the whole meet-the-parents thing.
What? That—oh, that they fall down to the ground? No, it was pretty horrible. It really was horrible. I mean, Jim tried to give him CPR and told me to run to a neighbor's—I've never been to that house before. Anyway, but I had an up stay in a few days as they made funeral plans. And I had not met Wilma before that, but that was kind of the first time we had really met with a sort of the whole atmosphere of "Oh, there's kind of something serious going on between my son and you." So, it was pretty—and I got to know her in a different way because—of course, when somebody is just dying—I ended up shelling peas with her and grandma up till after midnight and talking about her life.

Partial Transcript: I think a lot of what we had in common, and it came to the fore in the wake of Jim's father's death, and our marriage not too long after that. What we had in common so much was that I grew up in beaver dam, and loving beaver dam. And I grew up on a creek. I mean, the land that my parents had bought literally had a creek that—this creek joins into outside my bedroom window. And I know that beaver dam was much lusted about.

This was—Wilma would have grown up a lot in authorities. This was in the sixties, and I was growing up here, but the whole way of life—I mean, the closeness to nature and the spending time of the creek and playing in the creek. I had two rambunctious brothers, so I wasn't like I had the solitary reflective time, but Webb Cove Road goes on up to the parkway, and we would go up into the woods. I mean, that was what we did and that was how you passed your time. I knew where the blackberries were up on the hill. We knew all the wildflowers just from around, and I think it meant a lot to Wilma that even on her place here that I knew what the wildflowers were. I mean, we had Flame Azalea, a bank cover on the bank. And she was so proud of her Yellow Lady slippers by the front door. Truth be told, my father—I mean, they're much more rare than the pink ones, and he coveted those, but he knew that—you couldn’t move them around really. The Heartleaf that’s down by the bridge, that she was very careful to show me. It's kind of shape like a heart and has a really distinctive smell—and Gay Wings and Shortia—and now—Dwarf Iris.

I mean, all of that was on the land right around where I grew up. And so I think I grew up in a similar way. I think the other thing, and I've really thought about this too. Lynn Cove and Webb Cove; they're coves, and there's kind of a whole different way of growing up from even on a mountain farm or on a ridge. I mean, you're kind of in a little-protected nook, and I was at the head of the cove as she was at the head of the cove. So, I guess some people feel really hemmed in by that. Other people feel protected. And I share that feeling with Wilma. I think feeling very protected—and this was home. And also just the—we had the sense of being a little bit out of the daily traffic of Asheville. We were kind of in our own little world, and I'm sure a generation earlier that was even much more so in Wilma's time than it was in mine, but I rode the yellow school bus. And Beaver Dam is kind of in-between world, and that it's not part of Asheville city. At least where I grew up was not part of the city, but in terms of schools, we were in the Asheville city school district. I guess in Wilma's time that wasn’t the case. So, we rode the very rural school bus, and we were kind of different from the other kids. I mean, they would announce on the school intercom, the beaver dam bus is boarding. I was the first stop in the morning at the head of the cove and the last stop in the afternoon. So the school bus bumped up to each one of these little side roads, and I knew everybody.

And I think the thing that was—we're always much a part of Asheville, but I wasn’t a part of Asheville. And so, the other thing about that was really socio-economically diverse. She, I can imagine it was even more that way, say in the thirties, but I played across the farm. It was the old Chesterfield farm from me, which had hogs and chickens. And when the hogs would get out of the pens and go all over the woods, our dog—our English Shepherd would—she'd never gone on a farm in her life, but would round them up and take them back down and—but we played—there were tenants on the old Chesterfield farm, and there was a tenant family from Madison County. My dad was an orthopedic surgeon, but by Godly, I grew up playing with these kids on the farm. And at that point in time, Madison County was very notorious. People were all this kind of scared of Madison County. I didn’t have that impression at all because I knew these kids that I played with—and the whole time, they wanted to go back down Madison. They had no interest at all in anything to do with Asheville. They missed Madison County.

And so, I think that sense of really be and able to be around a lot of people who were quite different from you. There was not enough kind of American population up here. And I do think that's a big difference in my growing up from Wilma's growing up is that I grew up during the years of immigrating to Asheville schools. And of course, the schools were—she went to Grace—at that point, it was Grace Elementary. She went all the way to high school there. When I came along, it had just become Ira B Jones School. It was the same school, different building. And then of course, I went to Ashville High school, which at that point, I was introduced to much more than—more urban population at Asheville than Wilma would have been.

But I think the other thing is—I mean, we used to go up on the mountain and try to find where the creek started. I mean just crazy stuff like that. So, again, that whole way of life, I think we shared. And I think another thing—and I've given some thought for this partly for this project, but—both of my parents have died, and you get reflective when there's that changing of the generations. And I think so much of what was unique about Wilma was the particular microcosm of her nuclear family culture—really unique and that she really had a foot in two worlds. Her mother was from here and was really one of seven children and a true mountain family, but her father was from New York. And he had come down as a teenager to herd sheep on Elk Mountain and fell in love with the area, and then went back to his native New York, married, raised a family. His first wife had died, and in the wake of his grief after that, came back down to the mountains and met Jim's grandmother who was almost thirty years younger than he was, and decided to start a new life. He had fond memories of the beautiful mountains that he had been in as a teenager and wanted to build a new life down here, but she had—in her nuclear family, she had that duality that rooted here, but also her father had read Horace Kephart's Our Southern Highlanders, and was really inspired by that. So he was an educated man who kind of had a bird's eye view, some perspective of what this whole area was about.

And I think—and my dad was similar—my dad was rural, was country, was a first gen college grad and went to medical school, but he loved the outdoors. He loved to fly fish. He loved to camp, hike. And I was born in Montana where he was in the Air Force, and if he had his way, he would have stayed in Montana. He loved the west. My mother said families back south and—the winters are too harsh out here. So they'll compromise as a couple. They wanted to live in a place where it was beautiful outdoors. And they compromised and came to the mountains of North Carolina. That’s where he set up his practice. And so, I think my dad's adopted home was the mountains. And you know, how sometimes they talk about in religion, how converts can be more zealous than the natives.

I think in a way, Wilma had kind of the roots in the local culture, but her father had this passionate love and perspective of someone who was not from here. So she had a pretty unique perspective. Of course, she had this unbelievable gift too. The way the imagination and the ability to capture it, but I think I understood that way of looking at it. I think another thing about her ability to capture it, maybe short shrift may have been given to her mother in many ways because grandma was not an intellectual in terms of—she was a smart woman, but she had a poetic sense of nature, and she had been voted the class poet at her high school in Barnesville. And I think she may be helped cultivate that way of looking at nature when you get aligned in the French Broad that talks about the wings and the heart, like creeks in the river. I mean, I think that way of talking probably was pretty comfortable to her mother, but the genius of pulling it all together was absolutely Wilma's.

Partial Transcript: Oh, well, I grew up with a smell of Enka in the morning where you could hardly stand it waiting for the school bus. And the mist in the head of the cove where we just settled in the mist—and my dad who loved the fly fish mourn because the Pigeon River had been such a great travel stream and that you couldn’t anymore. So, I was absolutely surrounded by people who didn’t—I mean, they didn’t think twice about it, but they kind of—in my family culture—because we spend a lot of time camping. I mean, we were kind of little more attend-to-it than maybe the regular person, but the ethos was—there's just quite a lot to talk about it frankly. I mean, it's other than the smell of Champion Paper and Enka in Canton, technically. I'm not sure that answered your question.

Partial Transcript: I'm probably not super knowledgeable about that. They were to tell you the truth. I can't say this. It's just supremely ironic, all the emphasis on composting and—I mean, grandma composted from day one. And my parents did, absolutely. I mean, we always had a vegetable garden, and that was just part of what you did. And you didn’t put things in the garbage. And we all had vegetable gardens, and we all grew a lot of food. So, that ethos—but grandma always had a little thing about the kitchen sink. You dump the coffee grounds in it. Then you take it out, and you put it in the compost pile. So, things now that we have to think very consciously about doing.

And I do think just in terms of use of water. I mean, we irrigated from the creek. My dad created a little downflow pipe from the creek that irrigated our garden. He was really proud of that, but again the natural terrain which was downhill, we had gravity to make that happen. But beyond that, I'm probably just young enough that I'm not sure I've really got roots. For example, that you just talked to probably had a lot more inside knowledge of what you're trying to get out than I do.

Partial Transcript: See, I just got to know Wilma much later. I really did. I got to know her much later because I would have been a toddler when it came out. So, I do remember being proud of it. I do remember having read it, and I do remember thinking it was a great introduction to the history of the area, but I didn’t talk with Wilma specifically about The French Broad—the book.
We talked an awful a lot about Return the Innocent Earth because that's really in fictional form, the history of her marriage family, which I was marrying into too. So I learned a lot about the family that way, and also about the kind of the vision of how that had been a family company. How each one of the brothers that started the cannery had a unique talent that they brought, and really created a family business with a true dream of feeding the self. I mean, they had a different approach to it, and kind of how the story of that family company—it's not an atypical story of a lot of other American family companies that started out as a group enterprise and then—with greed, quite frankly—greed and a number of other issues kind of went the way of the world and the original vision got buried under the desire to make money.

Partial Transcript: Well, this was—her book was a novel. I should make it clear. So it's not—but the book was Return the Innocent Earth, and the family company—and that book has a different name, but it's in fictional form, the story of the Stokely Canning Company, which her husband's father was the first president of and—but they were five Stokely brothers and three Stokely sisters, but the Stokely brothers that really started this canning company with their mother, Anna Rorex Stokely.
Well, I think they started out primarily canning tomatoes, but they canned a lot of other vegetables too. And it was a major employer in New Port. They ended up eventually merging with a canning company, Van Camp's, and I think part of the strength of the company was that they were able to grow crops and bring them to ripeness earlier because it was in the south. Jim worked in the cannery in New Port as a kid in the summer. It was eventually—and I don’t want—but the way I talked about with Wilma that was of interest was the human story. The human story about how at various little turning points personalities came into play. Someone would kind of—based on what drove them and the turn in the business at that point. And that's what interested me. And then also, I got to know who in the characters in the book were kind of modeled on who they were in real life. Not all of them had an exact counterpart.
Well, they also used a spray. They also used a spray. And I don’t think anyone had really used—an old woman dies from the use of a spray that was supposed to hold the fruit at its point of ripeness long enough for them to be able to harvest it and get in into the canning process. And there's an effort to not address what happened to that older woman. And that was kind of a fictional device that she used to give her the opportunity to talk about what we are doing to the environment in broader terms. And at that point in time, it was pretty unique.

Partial Transcript: The awareness of the Native Americans was something—I think her father brought with him as well. She seemed to—she approached just the way she approached nature was similar to Native Americans. You live with nature. You don’t dominate it. And I even look at the way this house is situated kind of in the woods where so many newer houses—they want to be on top of a ridge and dominate it. So everybody else has to look at it, but it's kind of the difference between the indigenous peoples and the Greeks and the Romans who like, you know, the Parthenon is built upon a hill where everybody can look at it instead of kind of fitting into it like Taos Pueblo or whatever. But she just seemed instinctive to approach the land—and maybe it was because that was the way her parents had approached the land living with it. And she really wanted her grandchildren—our children to understand that. We were living far away, but when they would come down here, she would always—takes them above to Cherokee, and it was really important for her to meet some of the elder craftspeople and to—I guess, the museum was fairly new when they were young and to—but she knew a lot of the people that had been involved in getting that started, but I think it was important for her children to understand kind of the native way of approaching the land. And I wish, I could think of some specific stories that would illustrate that, and that’s what I'm kind of—the cogwheels are turning—

Partial Transcript: Well, I was pretty young. See again, that’s where that kind of comes into play, but I knew people whose parents worked there. And boy, they—you know, it was a huge, huge rob because a lot of peoples' livelihoods depended on it, and a plenty of people whose kids were in the Asheville city schools worked there. So, it was a very—I do remember it being very contentious, but I do remember that my dad whose—I mean, he was not politically inclined. He was a doctor first and foremost and wanted to be a doctor, but he was enough of an environmentalist because of how he loved—he spent so much time in the outdoors that he was completely against Champion and that, and so our family conversation around the dinner table was how you just can't be allowed to do that. Of course, his livelihood wasn't dependent on it either.
Stinky-inky. You've heard that. Yeah.
Well, they hated it, but there were plenty of people who said it smells like money. You've heard that expression that too.
Well, I think they just said that they would shut down. I mean, why they weren’t going to have jobs, but not the threat. I mean, I—
Well, so tremendous fear. I do remember that from the kid perspective where there was fear about parents' jobs. That was kind of more my perspective.

Partial Transcript: Wow! Well, she's a tough act to follow as you can imagine. She was not a traditional feminist. She didn’t even like the word, feminist. She really kind of was beyond feminism. Honestly, it was kind of like people are people. And she did not like defining herself as a feminist. She—like it was really just really almost beyond it. And that sense of—the power of the individual—I mean, truly appreciating the power of the individual to make a difference; I think that’s a big part of the legacy, and that you don’t have to be famous. You don’t have to—you can work quietly in your own community. That’s the plot of one for other books. The tall woman—how a very ordinary mountain woman just in the circumstances that she finds herself in can make her community a better community—a more fair community. She got up school started. She addressed social injustices as well as environmental problems.

And so I think that’s the legacy to our immediate family just to make a difference where you are, and that had a huge impact on both of our children in different ways. Our daughter who was named partly after her, Elizabeth Dykeman is—been really involved with social justice as she was primarily in South America, and her husband’s first language is Spanish, and she is working for a firm that does microfinance in developing countries. So, the social justice piece has sort of—your focuses were on the environmental legacy, but I would have to say her legacy of fighting—it’s all related. I mean, how can you separate—how you treat the environment reflects, how you treat people. And so, with Wilma, we were just so woven together that I think, I couldn’t—but she has had a huge impact through both of those—on both of her grandchildren and on me. It’s different—as I watched from her, I mean, had different skills, different interests, but she was not someone to try to force you into any conformant, any certain mold, make a difference where you are—not terribly eloquently stated, but there you go [laughs].

Partial Transcript: She is a very elegant lady, just the way she carried herself, which was from her theater training. The way she spoke, her theater training served her really well. It made her a very effective speaker, and she didn’t really have an accent strongly one way or the other. She must at some point have had to work on that, I don’t know. Her father was from New York, so maybe she did not have a real southern accent or a mountain accent. She was very focused on the person she was talking to. She really—kind of like a very skilled teacher would be. And she also was one who would not—if she was talking to you, she was talking to you. She wasn’t going to be diverted, but she would not ignore the little people either. She always was equally attentive to someone who might be poorly dressed or not well-spoken as to one of the most powerful people in the room. So she had that—and again, I have to think that something about how she grew up—the culture of the cove—because I experienced a lot of that as well. We just live so much more segmented lives now, but the school bus that I rode on, there was one house that had fourteen kids that lived in it. And it was a tiny little house, and they kept coming out and coming out and coming out, and you thought there was no end to the kids coming out to get on to the school bus, but we lived and played together.

So I do think some of that ability to relate to a really wide range of people had to be at least in part from how she grew up. And there was a sense of being a part of Asheville, but kind of separate firm as well. I mean, this was truly its own world. And I think the other thing—so she just really could command an audience in a room, and it was a skill that she worked for. It was not just handed to her, but she had it. She actually just really loved people too. She wasn’t introvert completely, and I'm not. So she—being around people drained her. And so, I've seen her after many events just exhausted, but she—that’s different from saying that she didn’t love people. I mean, she was always very curious, and I think that something we shared is that we were always interested to know about somebody’s life. There are writers who tend to be much more impressed with themselves.

And many years later, when she came to visit us, we were living on the north shore of Boston, and we were coming out of our little congregational church, the minister had sort of heard that she was sort of somebody down in North Carolina and Tennessee, and the minister—she was introducing herself to the minister on the way out of the church, and the minister said, "Well, I have to say I must apologize. I haven’t read any of your books." And she said, "Well, that’s fine. Many people have led long and happy life, and they haven’t read my books." [Laughs] So she just had that self-deprecating way, but there are plenty of writers who—she wasn’t there to impress in that way and to her detriments to some extent because I do think that’s one reason maybe she is—she didn’t promote herself.

And I think the other reason is that she just had so many different talents. It was hard to really sort of—I think that makes it a little harder to pull one part of her career and say this is what she was known for, but a very kind person. And I say that as a daughter-in-law, and frequently a mother-in-law, a daughter-in-law relationship can be tricky, and she supported me. I was interested in going to New York right after college. She knew that her son was interested in me. She didn’t discourage me from that. She gave me the opportunity to write for her newspaper column and her syndicated column. When we saved all our money—when we were first married for three years and went around the world, she gave me the opportunity to write in her column. She—when I was interviewing for jobs in New York connected me with her publisher. So she was absolutely—yeah, she was a friend. She really was a friend, and I had grown up in a very different family culture where my father was a very traditional guy, and she just didn’t have that mindset. So that was very appealing.

I will say one other thing. Just going back to the way we grew up because I wish I could say, the way I grew up in beaver dam was so special. The relationship to the woods and in some ways I'm sad that our children didn’t have that. We grew up close to woods in New England, but it was a very different vibe obviously, but you're aware of nature in a way. That's not—it's just a part of how you live. I mean, you don’t have to read in the newspaper that we're in the middle of a big drought because the creek outside is low. You just—I mean, we weren't a farming family, but the water outside was a barometer for what was going on with the climate constantly. And it makes me really sad right now the creek that I grew up by is virtually dried up now because the building that’s going on up the mountain is just unbelievable. There were only two—well, three, if you count the house I was in, houses on Webb Cove Road after the pavement, and when I was growing up. And now, they're all the way up to the Parkway, and I don’t know if it's the building that has stopped, but the water flow is much less than it used to be and—but again, you had an awareness of nature because of the creek right outside your window, and the rhododendron leaves when they were really, really tight, you knew it was really cold outside. It was like a little thermometer. You didn’t have to look at the—but it's a whole way of living in nature. And my children didn’t really have that, and I'm sorry for that. They had a lot of time down here playing on both of their grandparent’s places, but—

Partial Transcript: Well, you're never bored, if you're connected with outside. Number one, you're never bored. And I mean, spiritual richness. I mean, human beings and nature are kind of—there was no dividing line. We're all of a piece, and so I just think an awareness of that. And she used to laugh. She and her mother both—when we had—our children were babies about how people would shower children with toys, and how ironic that was. That first of all, you're spending money you don’t need to spend, and she observed that it kind of made the parents feel maybe like they were providing something. So it's really to make the parents feel good, not to make the children feel good, but also just how you lose that ability to just lose yourself in the world at any point in time. And we did hike a lot as a family. I said to Jim, it was interesting to me because my dad was kind of sort of presaged a different generation of people who loved the mountains because he was much more—the backpacker or fly fisher kind of guy. And I said to Jim, "Your mother talks about camping, but I never got the sense of what she meant about camping." And he said, "Well, think about it. Do you think the mountaineers ever really can’t?" And I thought, "Well—" So she just kind of came of that period where they would go out in a buggy—

Just to give you a sense of how connected she was with the world that went afore was that we were newly married, and Jim’s grandmother decided she wanted to have my entire family over for Christmas Eve dinner. And it was in the winter time at Christmas, and there was a lot of snow on the ground. And a big snow came, knocked out the power. And my extended family was about fourteen or fifteen people. This was how many people she had invited over here. Well, we assumed because there was no power, that the dinner would be off and whatever. And Grandma said, "Come on." So, we did. We managed to slide over here, and Grandma had stoked a big fire in this fireplace. She had grown up learning how—she knew how to cook on a fireplace. Wilma did not really, so it was an interesting contrast to watch her mother be in charge, and Wilma taking orders from her mother. She cooked the most elegant Christmas meal completely. And this was for a big crowd on that fire with the skillets—the long handle skillets and the hooks that kind of move out, and the entire house was lit by candlelight. She had the old kerosene lamps. And it was the most magical—she stoked up the fire really big for warmth.

It was the most magical Christmas Eve dinner, and my entire family still talks about that, but that was to show how rooted she was, just one generation removed from that way of living. She understood it in a way that I didn’t change. Jim didn’t want to—we were talking earlier though about how Wilma really was rooted in two worlds. And I think part of what was unique was she was at a transitional time transitioning from the old-world environmentalist to the new-world environmentalist. And I think her own life really had led her to that point because her mother’s family was from the old-time mountains, and her father as an outsider had given her a different awareness of what was being lost. But I do think she provided a unique transition in terms of the time of the environmental movement from those who had thought about it and much more limited terms to a whole new way of approaching what the myriad of issues was in terms of economic value versus environmental value. And of course, her great genius was to say there really was no division that what was good for the environment was also good for the economy. And that I would say was really leading into where we are—where we are now. Anything else you want me to say?

Partial Transcript: Well, I really miss her right now just because of how divisive politics is. She really had an ability to speak to people as people and bridge so many other divides that we have right now from class, education, politics and to talk to people as human beings. And she brought that perspective around the world. I mean, she saw the people in China were dealing with all the same issues that we're dealing with here. So, I really missed that voice of being able to bring people together, and we need her right now. That’s not very eloquent, but that’s my best shot. Why do we need her legacy now? Jim, help me. Why do we need her legacy now? She really did have an ability to bridge all kinds of divides for whatever reason, and she was so—she was such a powerful communicator to communicate so beautifully. That was her genius. A lot of people—even people who are willing—able to bridge divides face-to-face are not able to put it on paper and capture it to inspire people who come after you.

Partial Transcript: Well, she had an ability to use humor and stories to get her point across. That was the way that’s not didactic. She—it was a particular skill that she had, and I think that’s rooted in mountain humor too. There's a very raw kind of a mountain humor, and she knew those stories firsthand from around the dinner table, but she could pull them out at key points—key moments on the conversation to get her point across. And it had the effect of disarming people. She could use humor so well. She wasn’t didactic. And I can get passionate and earnest, but I can click into being a little more didactic, and then you just lose your potency.

So, I think she really—I'm trying to think in terms of special memory, so like shelling-peas where she was just laid bare naked figuratively after her husband died. I mean, I—God-lover, I had arrived on the scene. It was already a family situation froth with all kinds of tension anyway meeting your son’s serious girlfriend, and then your husband drops to the ground and dies. I mean—so she was just absolutely distraught, and I think one insight I had with her at that point was how much they had worked as a team. He was such a unique man, and that he really did not have the need to take credit. He knew how uniquely gifted she was, but he was very willing to let her be in the limelight. But in that dark night shelling peas till after midnight together, so much was about how she had lost her partner. And even if she was doing the writing, frequently the ideas and the mapping it out had been done with James, and she just did not know how she was going to be able to do it without him. That was where her relationship with her mother came in to play—and her mother who was in that same shelling-peas conversation, her own husband died young—like he was much older than she was but died early in her marriage, so she had a fourteen-year-old daughter to raise on her own at the height of the depression. And grandma would say, "Well, you can—you will make it because you have to make it. You don’t know that right now, but you're stronger than you know, and you can make it because you'll have to."

And so I kind of got an insight into how those two people in her life were just so important. Her mother who was just a deep spiritual resource—and having spiritual in terms of nature. I mean, that really was so much of where she got her just spiritual appreciation for nature, but also the strength of being able to—there were the two of them against the world for so many years. I mean, Grandma lost her college savings in the stock market crash. And I think there was something unique about the two of them forging their way in the world together. She cut it—it was a source of strength for her. It was a source of strength for her to know that she can—you can do this. And I think that was one reason why she wrote under her maiden name as well. I mean, she took the social convention of her husband’s name and all the appropriate situations, but when she wrote a book, she wanted—I mean, that was her book. That wasn’t anybody else’s, and she was going to put Wilma Dykeman on it, and James had the graciousness to—he didn’t have a problem with that. But I think that sense of herself of being able to make her way in the world really was from her mother—both from her mother as someone who had grown up in the harsh mountain culture, but also as someone who would truly have her make her way as a single mother, guiding a daughter to adulthood.

Partial Transcript: Well, her Newport home was on a cliff, overlooking the Pigeon River. And you literally had to go over a bridge over the river and then climb up the hill to their house. And I do have a very clear memory of going to her house in Tennessee, and the smell of the river. I mean, you could just smell it, and it's just a very different perspective when there are houses literally high overlooking the river. It's not over there somewhere. You are in—and it was—made a powerful impression—just the visual, which was—it was churning and brown and frothy and the smell. And it was in your face all the time. You couldn’t get away from it. [Laughs] So, that I do have a very clear memory.