Uncovering Appalachia’s Hidden Heroines: Pauletta Hansel Reveals Untold Stories in Understory
L.L.: I want to talk about the project — because it certainly was that — a project. The process of writing Understory has much to do with travel, research, documenting, photographing, synthesizing, and more. It’s also a unique form, told in sections of travelogue and prose coupled with poetry. Often content informs form, and I’m curious how this came together for you?
P.H.: In Understory I write about one of my trips that, “as usual, what am I calling research is embarrassingly haphazard, with only a few moldy breadcrumbs to guide me.” Believe me, that statement is not false modesty. The book and its form came together through intuition, obsession, persistence (aka, hard-headedness), curiosity, listening to early readers’ suggestions, and a whole lot of luck. Though I recognize you have to do the work to put yourself in the position to get the luck. I began by writing poems, mostly about Margaret, and about the big picture of the eventual family’s movement into Appalachia. But I knew that for the poems I wanted to write, I needed to travel to the places the family had lived. I needed to smell the rivers and put my hands in the soil.
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