Ruralite Cafe: Published 03/21/02

By Lynn Hotaling - Associate Editor

Zuber's book connects generations

That changed several weeks ago. While reading Isabel Zuber's first novel, Salt, I took time to look closely at all the pieces that make my quilt and remind myself of Frances Elizabeth Bolton and the two women in between us - my mother and grandmother.

Zuber's moving debut novel, some 20 years in the making, was inspired by a packet of letters she found that her great-grandmother wrote to her grandmother.

Though she set out to write a memoir, she found that the factual information she needed did not exist. So she took the threads of stories she knew about her grandmother and great-grandmother and wove them into a beautiful tapestry of love and longing.

Salt's heroine, Anna Stockton Bayley, is not her grandmother, Zuber said, "but an imagined, composite creation."

Zuber, who will read from her novel Saturday night at Sylva's City Lights Bookstore, introduces Anna through a set of letters written to her by a lover but delivered - almost two decades after Anna's death - to her oldest son. Anna's story unfolds gradually, until the reader finally learns who wrote the letters and why.

"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 said, and I think it has. Every word in Salt rings true. Even before I learned of the letters that inspired Salt, the novel struck a familiar chord.

As Anna lay dying of cancer, she feverishly worked to sew embroidered coverlets for each of her children. Reading that section, I began to wonder anew about my great-grandmother, who lived during the same period (turn of the 20th century) as the fictional Anna. Left widowed with two small children, she sewed to provide for them. I can see in my quilt the neatness and symmetry of her stitches and the attention to detail.

Her practicality and forced thriftiness are evident as well. The small pieces of printed cotton that form the star are uniform and perfectly matched. Except for two or three that are the wrong shade or a different print. When I asked my mother about that, she told me that her grandmother would never waste anything, and that she'd never, ever, spend money on extra material to complete a quilt, no matter how lovely the pattern.

Anna would have done the same, but she would have longed to be able to do it right. Reading the book, placing myself in an earlier, harsher time, I begin to see that my great-grandmother must have hated not being able to finish her quilts with material that matched. She must have yearned for enough of the right fabric so that she could make things for her own family that were as beautiful as the ones she was paid to sew.

Anna's character in Salt is reminiscent of women created by another favorite Appalachian author, Lee Smith. Like Smith in Fair and Tender Ladies, Zuber opens her novel with a poem by Cullowhee poet Kay Byer.

Zuber said that she loves Byer's poem "Empty Glass" (from Wildwood Flower) and was delighted when Byer said she could reprint it. "I love (the poem's) defiance and the daring courage it expresses in the face of the eternal powers arrayed against human beings," Zuber said. "A reporter who interviewed me commented on what a beautiful poem it is. I hope it sets a tone for the entire novel."

Byer, for her part, is happy to see her poem in Zuber's book. The two have been friends for years, and Byer dedicated Wildwood Flower to Zuber. "Of course I'm delighted when anyone uses my poetry; it shows that it has made a connection. A poem can distill a story, an emotion or a theme in ways nothing else can," Byer said.

During a recent program at Western Carolina University, Byer said much of her poetry has been inspired by Appalachian women she's known - local women like Annie Lee Bryson and Willa Mae Pressley. A mountain woman named Alma is the narrator for the poems in Wildwood Flower. Byer said she can see a link between the women who have inspired her poetry and Zuber's novel.

"Anna Bayley, Alma, and other of my voices would understand each other; they could meet over tea in some room of the imagination and have long conversations, like kinswomen," Byer said.

I think my great-grandmother would fit in, too.

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