For me, creeks are thin places, where the barrier between the physical world and the spiritual world attenuates, where the boundaries between god, ghost, and human disappear and the tethers between past, present, and future blur. Creeks: the clear tinkling sound of water rippling forward, hidden worlds under smooth, wet stones, ancient watering holes. Creeks: the ever-present threat of flood with each storm, the potential to drown a town after a night of heavy rainfall. The Appalachian Mountains are filled with creeks winding their way through the mossy beds of forests, through cow pastures and tobacco fields, through backyards, and behind strip malls in a dualistic path of peace and threat.
I’d posit that Appalachian creeks are a metaphor for mental health—introspection and outward projection in precarious balance, inner peace and chaos in limbo, a yin and yang of the physical self and the spiritual. My novel, But For Fortune, tells the multi-generational story of two Kentucky women, Corinth and Mary Esther, who wrestle with mental illness in vastly different ways decades apart. Like the creeks of Appalachia, and like the many Appalachians suffering from psychiatric illness, the experiences of Corinth and Mary Esther are nuanced and their potentials are manifold; the same holds true for the narrators and main characters of the books I recommend below. Like the creeks of Appalachia, their stories ring tender, but also roar.
Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson
In the rural, black township of Opulence, generations of women, Mae, Tookie, Lucy, and Yolanda, are plagued by fraught relationships, the strain of caretaking, loss, and mental illness. Written as a series of interlinked vignettes that focus on the different protagonists, Crystal Wilkinson writes in lush, lyrical prose that made me stop and reread sentences for their pure beauty and tenor. There is one scene in the book, when Lucy’s newborn baby slips from her lap, a shocking moment that embodies the downward slide of Lucy’s postpartum sanity, that I will never forget. Despite their trials, the women of Opulence find strength in each other. They share work and grief. They shoulder trauma and embrace friendship, and, despite life’s trials, they create moments to celebrate with feasts and fellowship. As Lucy says moments before her baby tumbles to the floor, “Woman always does what she has to.”
I Could Name God in Twelve Ways by Karen Salyer McElmurray
Born in Eastern Kentucky, Karen Salyer McElmurray writes about her search for self through world travel as a young woman. She treks from the narrow valleys of the Appalachian Mountains to the Grand Canyon to the crowded banks of the Ganges to a guesthouse in Nepal and to the sandy coasts of Thailand and Greece, all while wrestling with what it means to be a woman in this large and rambling world. Like Wilkinson, her prose is rich and invites the reader to revel in details and description. While the entire memoir contemplates identity and relationships with family and lovers, two essays focus specifically on mental health. McElmurray describes her own struggle with mental illness in the essay, “Blue Glass.” In another essay, “Stella, in the Upstairs Room,” she relays the story of a distant cousin who, due to psychiatric ailments, spent her life sequestered in a family member’s home much like the woman in the attic in Jane Eyre. McElmurray writes with poignant honesty, bravely baring vulnerabilities that are so often bottled up and hidden.
In order to write Lock Her Up, poet Tina Parker researched the records of 19th and early 20th century female patients at Southwestern Lunatic Asylum in Marion, Virginia. Her efforts culminated in a lyrical tribute to history’s institutionalized women in this hauntingly beautiful collection penned from their own words. The poems consist of legal documents committing women to the asylum, patient intake forms, and lists of prohibited objects, such as needles and pins. The collection’s first poem, “Pleas For Admission,” catalogues reasons women were admitted—vulgarity, widowhood, laziness, “a constant aberration”—diagnoses that ring absurd to modern sensibilities. Parker chauffers the sorrow, pain, and yearning of these largely forgotten women from the past to the present and allows their stories to echo far beyond the walls of a Virginia archive.
During the 1930’s F. Scott Fitzgerald stayed at the historic Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina while his wife Zelda received psychiatric treatment nearby at Highland Hospital, an institution that employed cutting edge and innovative therapies to treat mental illness for the time. Lee Smith, a powerhouse in Appalachian literary circles, chronicles Zelda’s time at the hospital, blending real-life characters with fictional ones in a novel rich in historical details about psychiatric care. Overshadowed by her husband and often relegated to the one-dimensional role of “mad wife,” Smith’s novel gives voice to Zelda Fitzgerald and the recognition she deserves as an artist and woman who was both talented and complex.
A year without months by Charles Dodd White
Charles Dodd White, an author based in Knoxville, Tennessee, offers an essay collection that speaks to the experience of bearing witness to the mental health challenges of loved ones. Having a father, an uncle, and a son who all died from suicide, White contemplates the loss of family members to psychiatric illness, while examining his relationships with them. He also explores his understanding of masculinity and shares his deep admiration for nature. The prose is deft and quietly ushers us in and out of the shade of the woods, a place White continually finds respite. After finishing the book, I reflected on its title, both the word choice and the paucity of capitalization. White’s essays show us that years are long and occasionally rife with life-changing moments, but that wisdom can also be found in simpler moments—the everyday conversations, afternoon hikes, games of Yahtzee, living room arguments, old dogs and sweet kittens, hammered nails and broken bottles. It’s these lowercase moments added end to end that create a life.
Night Watch Jayne Anne Phillips
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Night Watch begins in the mountains of western Virginia in the wake of the Civil War. It follows twelve-year-old ConaLee as she accompanies her mother, Eliza, to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia after Eliza has been abused by a wandering, opportunistic thief and rapist, a trauma that renders her mute. The novel balances the past as ConaLee and Eliza survived dire wartime conditions alone on their mountain homestead with their present reality of living at an asylum. The novel explores female agency and tenacity during a tumultuous time of American history in gauzy, dream-like prose that ushers the protagonists to an ending that is as triumphant as it is bittersweet.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Erin Miller Reid is a writer and physician from southeastern Kentucky. Her work has appeared in North Carolina Literary Review, Still, Appalachian Review, Women Speak: Women of Appalachia Project, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, 100 Days in Appalachia, and the anthology Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky. She earned her master of public health and doctor of medicine degrees at the University of Kentucky and completed education in narrative medicine at Columbia University.