Erik Reece
Buckeyes leafing out in April near Erik Reece’s Woodford County, Kentucky home.
“The literature of Appalachia is a literature of place,” Erik Reece writes in Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness. Published in 2006, Lost Mountain was the first book to expose the devastation of mountaintop removal coal mining. Land plays such a vital role in Kentucky literature, Reece says, because “we live in landscapes that can be taken away. In Vermont, there’s no sense that you could blow the tops off of mountains.”
Reece’s sense of being a writer of place was slow to take root. Originally from Louisville, he studied at the University of Kentucky, after which he moved to Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1997, he returned to Lexington, where he teaches writing at the University of Kentucky. “Just about every Kentucky writer went away and came back… Sometimes during a class I’ll have a kid saying ‘I can’t wait to get out of here,’ and by the end he’ll be saying ‘maybe I will go back to that plot of land.’”
In 2013, Reece and his wife, Melissa Young, moved from Lexington to a steep enclave of woods above Clear Creek in Woodford County. There’s a wide slab of limestone at the water’s edge where he often sits and writes nowadays. After writing about threatened or destroyed landscapes, he has found joy in the stability of this place, and he has noticed a difference in his writing: “It’s not angry,” Reece says. “At the same time, I’ve got to be careful, because I can’t get too complacent.”
Listen to Reece talk about maintaining a sense of sanity in the face of ecological destruction, and the strong sense of place among Kentucky writers.
Reece often sits and writes on this slab of limestone at the edge of Clear Creek.