Uncovering Appalachia’s Hidden Heroines: Pauletta Hansel Reveals Untold Stories in Understory
After I had written Understory, I found an interview with Frank X Walker, a remarkable historical poet whose work has influenced my own, who called his process “Memory, Research, Imagination and Empathy”, and I thought that is exactly right! I did not have much in the way of memory to draw from, and the research only got me so far. For example, one of the first poems in the book, “My 10th Great-Grandmother Remembers That Which She Sought to Forget,” is one of the last ones I wrote. In it, I imagine Margaret as a middle-aged woman who, as she experienced the hard work of survival in what by then is the Virginia Colony, “the mattock, hoe, /the wheel and spindle, / the fire and pot and kindling, / churn and bucket, / grindstone for the grain,” looked back on the hardship of her journey across the waters, not missing the ship, but missing the other young women and their shared hope for a better life. Which Margaret got, certainly, but it must have also been a lonely life.
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