Reviewed by Teddy L. Friedline
Winner
of the 2023 Nonfiction Prize from
Autumn House press
October 2024
168 Pages
$19.95
By and large, my people are West Virginia people. My parents were both born in New Martinsville, a small town on the Ohio River. I grew up making annual or biannual trips to visit my grandparents there for Christmas or Thanksgiving, seven or eight hours by car with candy and Mad Libs, singing “Country Roads” when we crossed the state border. To me, it was up north, a patch of soil from which I had been pulled as a sapling to be planted somewhere else – both innate and foreign. Inherently contradictory.
Of all the West Virginia narratives I’ve heard (and trust me, I’ve heard plenty), none have captured that contradictory nature so well as does Deep & Wild: On Mountains, Opossums & Finding Your Way in West Virginia. Laura Jackson’s debut essay collection, winner of the 2023 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize, is a thoughtful, raucous love song to Jackson’s home state, its landscape, and its culture.
Though the book’s first essay serves as an introduction to Jackson as a speaker, the second, “Being West Virginian”, serves as an introduction to West Virginia as a place, from an insider to an outsider. She articulates much of what I’ve felt about WV my entire life: “We’re compelled, by some odd mix of shame and pride, to not only claim this land as our home, but also to justify why we’ve chosen to be of this place. West Virginia is inconsistency. It’s beauty and misery, freedom and addiction, devotion and resentment” (12). Jackson honors West Virginia’s brackishness like pointing to a faraway animal: look there, through the trees. This is something brand new. You’ve seen it all your life.
From this description, Deep & Wild may not sound unlike West Virginia itself: dense and jagged with its weary mountains, intimidating to outsiders either for its roughness or its earthiness. Reader, I must tell you: just as much as Deep & Wild is earnest in its love for West Virginia, it is uproariously funny. Jackson’s voice walks a difficult line between the personal and the humorous – how does one joke about a place so often mocked, derided, as West Virginia, out of love? Jackson refuses to take anything, including herself, too seriously, accepting her children’s pity at her inability to catch crawdads, describing a backyard possum she named Eugene, or admitting she married her husband “maybe a little bit for his bat bravery” (90).
At the same time, she is willing to be as open with us, the reader, as she is with the Appalachian landscape. Jackson weaves sentences throughout her humor that share her vulnerability. In the collection’s first essay, “To Catch a Craw,” just after describing a dobsonfly as if “an earwig had a threesome with a dragonfly and a rhinoceros beetle” (9), Jackson reflects on her family’s pity towards her that she failed to catch a crawdad, writing, “Maybe, when all is said and done, I’m grabbing at something I’m not meant to catch” (9).
Perhaps Jackson’s greatest feat in Deep & Wild is her ability to blend scientific research and folk wisdom without discrediting or valorizing either. She blends her own West Virginian upbringing, everything she’s learned about Appalachia from her own experience, and the results of her own research and her studies in the sciences, all with her humor and vulnerability. The result is a text that is both deeply endearing and educational, a voice both approachable and trustworthy.
Even more than it is funny, brackish, or vulnerable, Deep & Wild is wondrously joyful. West Virginia is a place about which it is easy to despair. It is easy to point to the erosion of natural resources, to the disenfranchisement of rural working-class Americans, to the lingering health effects of a dangerous and grueling industry. In short, it is easy to look at West Virginia, at its sky that always feels grey no matter how blue and clear, and feel sad. Laura Jackson encourages us to step through sorrow or pity into joy – to look harder when our instinct is to look away. She shows us nature is always nature and beauty is always beauty, regardless of what comes to pass.
As part of his Christmas gift this year, I’ll be passing my copy of Deep & Wild on to my father, a WVU alum and Knight of the Golden Horseshoe (sorry for ruining the surprise if you’re reading this, Dad). He and I have very different literary tastes, but we’re exceptionally close, our relationship not unlike West Virginia’s own brackishness. I think a book that loves his home state so much, that can see so much joy in it, will speak to him in a way I can’t. In some ways, Deep & Wild contradicts itself the same way West Virginia does. It is both funny and earnest, both human and wild, both informer and inheritor. Emotional enough to be moving and gentle enough to be joyful, Deep & Wild opens the door to West Virginia’s incredible landscape to anyone willing set off into the holler.
Teddy L. Friedline (he/they) is a queer poet based in Pittsburgh. His work has appeared in Vagabond City, Hood of Bone Review, Fauxmoir, and elsewhere.