never enough Kentucky books
Yesterday I attended the annual Kentucky Book Festival for, I think, the fourth time. It’s one of my favorite days of the year, as both a reader of Kentucky books and a Kentucky writer myself.
I packed a few books I already owned to get signed by their authors (There’s Nothing Left for You Here by Allegra Solomon, The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife by upfromsumdirt) and planned to buy one or two new books.
Reader, are you surprised that I bought more than that? I knew I would buy Number’s Up: Cracking the Code of an American Family because it’s a University Press of Kentucky title that seems to have similarities to my book and because I attended a great panel with author Johnisha Matthews Levi. But I didn’t stop there.
As we arrived, I held the door open for former UK basketball player Cameron Mills. When I investigated why he may have been attending, I found out that his wife, Susan Mills, writes children’s books. We bought several for our niece’s birthday and Christmas presents.
I decided to buy Marion: The Marion Miley Story 1914-1941 because author Christopher Newman was on a great Lexington history panel and said Marion was “religious in her diary keeping.”
Extroverted poet John Campton was sitting next to upfromsumdirt and persuaded me to flip through his poetry collection, which includes a poem that starts “typewriters congregate / in the river.” So his poetry collection came home with me, too.
Then I recognized an author from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, Julia Flint, so I said hello and bought We Were Promised: How an Appalachian Grandmother Fought a Corporate Giant.
I haven’t read any of these books yet, but I trust that they will be wonderful — that I will learn about Kentucky and writing, two of my great loves.
The Kentucky Book Festival made me think of one of Alice Dunnigan’s two books, The Fascinating Story of Black Kentuckians: Their Heritage and Traditions. Luckily I have my own copy now, which I found on my and Loui’s first wedding anniversary at Poor Richard’s Books, where we got married. (“These two got married at a bookstore,” my former professor Julie Hensley — with a new book out called Five Oaks — told Allegra Solomon as she was signing my book yesterday.)
One of my favorite small pieces of Alice’s writing is in this book’s introduction, in which she explains the several reasons why she decided to write a book limited “almost exclusively to the history of Kentucky.”
Here is her list in its entirety:
“(1) It is the state in which I was born.
(2) It is the one spot in the world which I love most.
(3) It is the section of the country with which I am most familiar.
(4) It is a state about which very little has been written regarding its black citizens.
(5) It is a state with a very fascinating and diverse history.
(6) An accurate account of Kentucky’s early political procedures might prove to be both informative and impressive to the uninformed and skeptics.”
What a joy it is to read books from Kentucky, the place in the world that I, too, love most.