Vicki Lane

Though I write about these mountains and their people, I always issue a disclaimer: since I’ve lived in Madison County for only 33 years, I’m a transplant -- one of those “damn Florida people.” I can’t pretend to know Appalachia like a native but I can bring to my efforts at depicting mountain culture, the eyes and ears of one to whom this place is utterly fascinating -- at times as familiar as the memory of my grandmother’s voice, at other times as indecipherable as a song heard at a distance -- and sung in an unknown tongue.

Like me, Elizabeth Goodweather is a transplant who put down roots that grew deep and took nourishment from an adopted home.  We may be Florida people but at least we saw the error of our ways and moved to the mountains where we learned to raise tobacco, plow with mules, milk cows and butcher pigs. We got to know our older neighbors and tried to learn from them, to work with them. Rather than sealing ourselves away in an exclusive compound comprised of other newcomers, we tried to make a place for ourselves within the existing community.And how much there was to learn from that community! Those folks who had lived for generations on and with and by the land had a wisdom that couldn’t be found in books.  They were attuned to the weather, the seasons, the phases of the moon in a way that seemed almost uncanny to someone like me who’d grown up in suburbia where central heating and air conditioning made weather almost irrelevant and the moon was only occasionally glimpsed through a web of power lines and television antennas.

Like the song catchers who once roamed these mountains, writing down the old ballads and recording the old tunes, I listened and learned and remembered and jotted down some of the wonderful things I saw. And when the day came that I began to write a novel, there was all this  material just begging to be used. My books are, in a way, a love song to Madison County in which I write about a world that is fast slipping away. My husband and I were fortunate to have moved to our farm at a time when many people were still living as they had in the early years of the century, when there was no television, no internet, no cell phones. Instead, conversation, story-telling, and home made music on the front porch were the entertainment. These people are the backbone of my stories and readers write from all over to say that they are reminded of their aunt, their granny, their great uncle, their childhood. 

But I have to write about the changes too – the new people of all sorts who are moving to the area. Elizabeth’s Marshall County is a world full of change, where the old rubs up against the new. Like our own, Elizabeth's world is seeing an influx, for good or bad, of all sorts of pilgrims from all sorts of places – Florida people looking for cooler summers, Northerners looking for warmer winters, earnest organic farmers, telecommuters with jobs in far off cities, artists and artisans, New Age seekers, Latin American laborers, all adding spice and savor to what was once a dish with only one ingredient.