Zuber's new novel, 'Salt,' has Cullowhee connection

By Lynn Hotaling

That's because Zuber chose Empty Glass, by local poet Kay Byer to set the stage for Salt, which tells the story of Anna and John Bayley and their turn-of-the-20th-century Appalachian family.

"I've always loved this poem, its defiance, the daring courage it expresses in the face of the eternal powers arrayed against human beings." said Zuber, who will read from her book at 7 p.m. Saturday, March 23, at City Lights in Sylva. "I was delighted when Kay said that I could use it, and I certainly hope that Anna partakes of the spirit portrayed in it. I hope it sets a tone for the entire novel."

Byer is equally complimentary about Zuber's writing.

"Isabel worked very, very hard on this novel. It's an undertaking that spans years. I read the first version of it a few years back, and I can tell you she has revised and revised it until it is a novel of the first order, a real achievement," Byer said. "It should be an inspiration to every struggling novelist to see what she has accomplished. She was stubborn, she was determined to make this into a wonderful book, and she did. It's a moving book."

"Isabel and I have been close friends for many years. I dedicated Wildwood Flower to her," Byer said. "Anna reminds me very much of these women - imaginative, vulnerable, yet with an inner strength that grows out of sensitivity to nature, language, story and myth. Anna and Alma are like sisters - or at least very close first cousins."

Salt follows Anna Stockton Bayley from birth to her painful death in early middle age. Anna grows from an imaginative child exulting in a rare, wild freedom on the mountainside into a young woman possessed of romantic yearnings and a great love of books. Hungering to make a new kind of life for herself, she marries twice-widowed John Bayley and begins a family.

Zuber, who has previously published two volumes of poetry, found inspiration for her first novel in a packet of letters written by her great-grandmother to her grandmother.

"Very little else belonging to my grandmother survived her death," Zuber said. "As in the novel, a new wife had set out to obliterate her. The letters she had saved, though to and not from her, opened a tiny window to her experience."

Thinking to write a memoir or family history, Zuber asked questions and took notes.

"But the dead could not be raised," she said. "The evidence was not there. Still, the impulse, one shared by many writers, was strong and could not be resisted.

"I have read that characters take over and speak for themselves, and fortunately, I found this to be true. Anna is not my grandmother, she is an imagined, composite creation, as are the other characters in Salt, but perhaps some part of the truth, the past, the real, has come into existence on the page along with the fiction. I hope so."

Zuber's most direct and powerful inspiration for her novel was "place, the North Carolina mountains themselves," she said.

"Salt touches on many of the feelings that I had growing up in the hills, and it tries to envision a way of life that has been lost."

Salt was 20 years in the making, said Zuber, who describes herself as a "Eudora Welty type writer."

"I produce bits and pieces, all out of sequence, just as they spring into mind. I have to have a notebook handy at all times to keep ideas from getting away," she said. "No work ever starts at the beginning and moves inexorably to the end. Most notes and first drafts are in long hand since I still do not compose very well on a keyboard. I suspect that none of this is unusual and is probably typical of any number of writers. It is probably more atypical to start and write straight through. But I wish I could."

Zuber set her story in a North Carolina town she called "Faith" before she thought to check to see if there really was such a place.

"By the time I got around to that needed research I had already invested so much meaning in the name that I felt I couldn't change it. I apologize at every reading to the inhabitants of the non-fictional Faith (near Salisbury) for using the name of their town and hope they don't mind," Zuber said.

Salt has garnered high praise from a number of Appalachian writers such as Fred Chappell, Haven Kimmel, Robert Morgan and Lee Smith.

"Salt is the story of the many roots and branches of a woman's life, a powerful story with the savor of wit and lustiness, of earth and loyalty and the romance of time," said Morgan. "This novel of marriage reaches across time and brings to life the many voices of a whole family connection, a whole community, and the impact one special woman can make."

"Genuine through and through - authoritative even - and it is beautifully, often brilliantly, done," said Chappell. "It deserves to be showered with prizes."

"Isabel Zuber has lent her poetic eye to the past and given us a lovely, moving tale," said Kimmell. "The world she has resurrected is so real it seems I might walk into it, just on the other side of a forgotten door."

"Salt is a big, beautiful book," said Smith. "I loved reading it."

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