Remembering Irene McKinney
Women writers, and all who write about the working class
and farmers and miners of Appalachia, lost a sterling voice over the weekend. Irene
McKinney, former poet laureate of the state, teacher, editor, and light in the darkness,
died
February 4, on her family farm. She was only a few weeks shy of her 73rd
birthday.
The daughter of a schoolteacher, she grew up in Belington, WV,
and returned to those acres after a life that took her first to West Virginia
Wesleyan College, just down the road, then West Virginia University, and finally
the University of Utah. She traveled widely beyond those academic settings, but
her heart was always home. “I’m a hillbilly, a woman, and a poet,” she once
said, “and I understood early on that nobody was going to listen to anything I
had to say anyway, so I might as well just say what I want to.” But people
listened. She gathered up honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the
Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the MacDowell Colony, the West Virginia
Commission on the Arts, the Utah Arts Council, the Kentucky Foundation for
Women.
She wrote six books of poetry including The Girl with the Stone in Her Lap (1976); Six O’Clock Mine Report (1989), which was chosen for the Pitt Poetry Series; and Vivid Companion (2004). Unthinkable: Selected Poems 1976–2004 was published in 2009. Another collection, Have You Had Enough Darkness Yet? No, I Haven't Had Enough Darkness, will be published posthumously by Red Hen Press.
She wrote six books of poetry including The Girl with the Stone in Her Lap (1976); Six O’Clock Mine Report (1989), which was chosen for the Pitt Poetry Series; and Vivid Companion (2004). Unthinkable: Selected Poems 1976–2004 was published in 2009. Another collection, Have You Had Enough Darkness Yet? No, I Haven't Had Enough Darkness, will be published posthumously by Red Hen Press.
Irene was always reaching out to other women and other
writers in West Virginia and beyond. As a newbie writer, I was awed by her gifts
and her assurance when I first met her at a West Virginia University gathering.
I would go on running into Irene for the next 20 years, at writing conferences
large and small.
She invited me to speak at a writers’ conference at West
Virginia Wesleyan College, where she taught up to and past retirement. This
small liberal arts college, built around a “quad” at the edge of Buckhannon, attracted
a who’s who of Appalachian writing for these events – Jayne Anne Phillips,
Maggie Anderson, Richard Currey, Gerald Stern – I sat at table with them and
just drank in the writerly goodness.
Irene was also my introduction to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs,
which is having its annual gathering right now. She asked me to be on a panel –
with Denise Giardina and Tom Andrews – and I questioned her decision. I was
just a newspaper reporter and farmer, with some poetry to my credit, and a
single novel. When she introduced me, it was as “a woman of letters.” I’ll
never forget her generosity.
Like Churchill, she believed that you never, ever give up. The
last time I saw Irene was at the West Virginia Book Festival. Her poetry
collection Vivid
Companion had just come out from WVU Press, which also published my short
story collection Fidelities
that year. She had just recently been diagnosed with the bone cancer that would
take her life. Yet she was writing, and cogitating over the plans that would
occupy the last three years of her life, founding and directing the Low
Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at West Virginia
Wesleyan. Her last wishes were that donations be made to help support students
enrolling in that program.
She was a sparkler – powerful, illuminating – at the end, thin
but still red-topped and glowing, refusing to just let go.
Here’s a link to a poem that so many who knew her are
quoting today: “Visiting
My Gravesite: Talbott Churchyard, West Virginia.”
So sad. It was very sweet of you to dedicate a post to her and share her story with others.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for this piece, and for commenting on my blog piece. The one you found is still pretty drafty (the wind blows through the lapses in grammar and continuity). My more official (but hastily written) piece was this one:
ReplyDeletehttp://bethwellington.blogspot.com/2012/02/irene-mckinney-presente.html