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.
Continue reading “6 Appalachian Books that Explore Mental Illness, Recommended by Erin Miller Reid”
