In the Mountains of America

(...)In the Mountains of America is a beautifully-written, tenderand clear-eyed collection of short stories set in Appalachia inwhich the reader is invited to shed big city ways, and settleback--way back like the country people who inhabit these mountainhollows and tales and who enjoy a good story themselves--and to"just listen. Listen." Meredith Sue Willis's characters areworth listening to. Distinctive, quick-witted, and touching,they, like all of us, are searching to make sense of livesbounded by family, community, geography and social class. Willis creates dialogue you can hear, details you can see. In "The Little Harlots," Roy Critchfield, a ninth-grader,struggles to reconcile "the raw burden of his body" with his burgeoning desires and his father's strict religious views. "Idon't chew my cud twice," his father snaps at Roy after hismother leaves home and refuses his father's angry demand toreturn. In "The Birds That Stay" the meaning of a young woman'sdeath is examined through the four voices of her daughter,grandmother, father, and mother. Jody Otis, the dead woman'sfather, mulls violence. He sits in the kitchen glaring at thepassing thick-soled shoes of his daughter's "pit viper" husband,Buddy, the man he blames for her death, while Ellen Morgan Otis,the dead woman's mother, wants only "to feel love for all thesefine pople here today grieving with us," understanding by thestory's end that no matter how strong one's desire to affix causeand blame to life's tragedies, we dwell somewhere betweendarkness and beauty, in an "unknown" middle. This understanding permeates each of these twelve stories. In the luminous "Family Knots," we follow Narcissa Foy, apatchwork quilter, from childhood into middle age as she createscomplex quilting patterns that parallel the unexpectedcomplexities of her own quiet mountain life. As a child,Narcissa has always liked "the crazy quilts best . . . followingtrails of color wherever they led and then later discover[ing]shapes that contained [her] discovery." Narcissa bears fivechildren, the next-to-last a difficult labor. Her breasts becomeinflamed and she dreams of a quilt "the color of her struggle tonourish this baby," a quilt with colors that "trickle and formpaths like veins, twisting, weaaving, plaiding, bursting openlike fireworks or zinnias unfurled"--a pattern called FamilyKnots. Its creation ushers in a period of Narcissa's limitedrecognition as an artist by city collectors. When Narcissa'scollege-educated daughter, Lou, implores her to move to the cityand study art--"It will smother your talent, never leaving here,"insisted Lou--Narcissa wonders "if she had been smothered, andallowed it was possible that something had been, but somethingelse had been made strong." Her destiny has been more thanquilts. It has also been raising a family, stitching together"the pattern of people"--and she, Narcissa, "was in the pattern." Some of the stories in In the Mountains of America arel