The Guitar Player

This richly detailed bildungsroman, the follow-up to Kiser's story collection The Guitar Player and Other Songs of Exile, surveys a surprising life, answering over its length the question of how the narrator, Geneva Clay of Kentucky coal country, grew from front-porch nights listening to "tree frogs and the lonely palpitating whip-poor-will" to become the kind of book-minded, art-struck New York City dreamer who describes "a celebrated Goya Christ" as a "mass of dark but luminous energy." The novel bristles with incident and vibrant, everyday life as it considers, year-by-year, Geneva's youth, from the 1940s into the bumptious 1960s, capturing long-gone people and ways of being (making "lye soap with bacon grease, lye, and water," paging through a "Monkey Ward wishbook" agape at the strange contraptions of the women's underclothing). . . . Gorgeous coming-of-age story of coal-country hollows and 1960s New York.

A “green and silver light” shines on these stories, the illumination from a childhood both pastoral and magical spent in the hills of eastern Kentucky. This rustic childhood, shared by most of the story protagonists, was rich in the wonders of the natural world and a large, loving family, but also steeped in hardship and poverty. So the young women in Jo Ann Kiser’s elegant tales have left Kentucky to strike out for better lives in Ohio, or Michigan, or New York City. But longing lingers for all that was left behind. These beautifully crafted stories are for anyone who left childhood behind to fashion a new life from the compelling yet often illusory allures of adulthood. That is, these are stories for all of us.

The Guitar Player and Other Songs of Exiles is an anthology of fourteen short stories by Jo Ann Kiser. Their common theme is that of reflecting on memories of rural (in this case, eastern Kentucky) childhoods from the standpoint of adults who left home, moved away, and established lives, careers, and families in urban or suburban settings elsewhere. The stories are full of the realities and challenges of work, education, health care, family life, and relationships in both fast-moving urban and near-poverty rural settings, as well as the changes that take place inside each of us in the process of going and growing beyond the bounds of our childhood world, as paradisiacal or as stressful as we may remember it to have been. “There are no charmed worlds,” one character concludes, “except those that we create, piece by piece, from our histories.” In The Guitar Player and Other Songs of Exiles, Jo Ann Kiser gives us a wonderful collection of stories that feature finely drawn characters and vividly drawn settings. Just as the beauty of the rural landscape and small towns lies in stark contrast to the impact of coal mining operations and mine closures, family relations vary from the tender, devoted, and protective to the strained, long-suffering, and deadly. We see rural families struggle to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads while some of their children gain education, allowing them to move into very different economic spheres. Coming home to see aging family members and visiting the scenes of their childhood becomes an important journey of rediscovery for each of them. An engaging and emotionally evocative read.

In these memory-tinged stories, author Jo Ann Kiser revisits the scenes of her youth and development in a manner both touching and amusing as she depicts scenarios centered around her home place in eastern Kentucky. In the first of fourteen tales, "The Guitar Player," Kiser tells introduces a guitar player, Hollis Ray, a man it seems without age or history who appears many times in the recollections of Clara, a tough-spirited girl determined to finish her schooling despite the raw circumstances her family is mired in. Her father Otis, brother Luke and she must live in a dingy hotel seeking work to bolster the family finances and get her back to college. Strangely, Hollis Ray is part of the saga, sharing his folkloric talents, singing the old songs. Each of Kiser’s stories are imbued with the symbolism and sad realities of bygone times: many babies lost in childbirth; the struggles between the coal mine operators and the unions organized by desperate miners whose lives are under threat every time they go down in the damp darkness; the diligence of mothers trying to keep families fed on whatever foods can be found; the simple legacies of battered houses, old photos and a wedding ring quilt. Through each scenario there are observers, mostly female but some hard-working men as well. Settings range from “a string of gaunt gray houses perched above a dark greasy river” in a mining village, to the excitements of New York City and the quickly fading comforts of Florida, as characters migrate for money and a new lease on some form of secure lifestyle. The final story, “Encounters of a Close Kind,” links some of the families together in a visit to gravesites high on a hill. There is little doubt that author Kiser is portraying herself, in bits and pieces, throughout this emotive collection. Scattered through the narrations are young women from the Kentucky byways longing to be back in the safety of a school dorm, clinging to hopes vested in writing and editing jobs such as Kiser has pursued in her own ventures away from coal country and factory towns. Though they have different names and disparate heritage, each is devoted in some way to the past, while embracing the alluring prospects of education, improvement, and a brighter future. Kiser’s prose is delicate and poignant, infused with the accents and small touches that credibly reveal her humble beginnings. Readers will hope for more offerings from this strong American voice. Quill says: In The Guitar Player, Jo Ann Kiser has wrapped her many special characters in a cloak of memories - some harsh, some tender, all related in some way to hard times and a poverty-shaded childhood that many readers will recognize and identify with.

Nostalgia runs deep in this poignant collection of rural short stories. A young girl watches the man with the guitar pass her house on his daily trip home. As she grows, her life inextricably winds around him on the smattering of occasions they are together. A woman waits by her old, previously capable, and stoic father as he dies, regret soaked into her marrow. Two siblings trek across the county on a trip—that may be the last—to reconnect with their roots. The Guitar Player and Other Songs of Exile is a debut work rich in sensory detail, nostalgia, and emotion. This collection is set in rural Kentucky. Much of the collection looks to the past—at a time when workers toiled at thankless and dangerous jobs in the mines, where the modern world began to catch up to older sensibilities. There is a desperate sense of being forced to an uncertain future while clinging to an evaporating present. All across the board, the writing in this collection is wonderful. Crisp, clear, with a weight to it that is hard to shake. The stories feel more like pieces lifted right out of life and slapped fresh upon the page. No sense of beginning or end, just the world turning ever onward. As in all collections, a couple of the tales shine more brightly than others. There’s a lovely, if desperate, atmosphere in “Tecumseh,” a portrait of a hard-working, brave, proud man from the point of view of his wife. Relationships are drawn so well in this piece. The love between Sally and her husband has deepened and evolved through their marriage until it is a rock that they can both lean on without ever questioning its strength. In “His Story,” Daisy sits by her dying father, mourning how little she knows of him. Regretting her decision not to come home in times that he had needed her and jealous of those who had known parts of him she never would. It’s a portrayal of the parent-child bond that probably hits too close to home for many of us but is no less tender for it. The viewpoints and experiences of the main characters in quite a few of the stories feel similar. I couldn’t always tell the difference in voice or perspective, which makes some stories bleed into one another, and I wonder what it all could have looked like if one character appeared in multiple stories rather than different characters with such similar back stories. The Guitar Player is a lovely contemplative collection of stories with deep feeling on every page. None of the sentiment is overblown; it is kept in quiet—deliberate, stoic. The understated quietness of the emotion makes this book all the more poignant.

The Guitar Player and Other Songs of Exile provides narratives about individuals who leave home, bond with life in unusual ways, and often return to their roots changed, to find new meaning and reconsider the goals and connections which once drove them into the world. Consider the title and opening story, "The Guitar Player." Here, Clara has left home and moved forward into her life, but returns to reconsider the goals she once held to be motivating forces: "I looked at the photograph of the two of them taken on the beach by a passing stranger and thought that when I went to college, perhaps I would meet a man like Edward, but now I asked myself if I wanted to." As the story takes readers through Clara's life, from childhood to new adult wisdom, several husbands, and the oddities of being older, she reflects on the incongruities of her paths and choices: "Sometimes, though, on awakening in the night, Clara feels some great event in her head, a rush of imminence like an impending heart attack or a sudden psychosis. She sits up in bed and cries silently for the barefoot child who does not recognize the stranger who sleeps beside her." As the story unfolds, readers receive an inspection that delights mind and heart as it reveals the progress of a life under flux and constantly changing in its goals and nature. Each story is a microcosm of discovery and change that resonates and blossoms into unexpected revelations. They are interconnected not by characters and circumstances, but by the manner in which life evolves and transforms the perspectives and choices of each character. The Guitar Player and Other Songs of Exile's literary, social and psychological series of inspections tantalize on many different levels. It's highly recommended for library collections seeking powerful descriptions of past and present lives in flux: "He must sleep, but he is afraid to dream. Now is the time for all good men to pluck gentle memories from the dark and bathe their burning eyes."

The stories in this collection, set in the rolling hills of Kentucky and southern Ohio, offer snapshots of family life in the “hollers” of Appalachia. Kiser’s stories are fashioned together like a quilt, with patterns that repeat to give the whole a sense of artistic unity: multiple young women work in publishing and return to the hills of their childhoods, and characters wonder if they can ever escape the class into which they were born. Kiser’s descriptions of the fictional communities of Osierville and Sarvis Mountain conjure a tense mixture of beauty and dread. For instance, the narrator of “The Wedding Ring Quilt” comments on the incredible flora that surrounds her childhood home: “by fruit trees and, beyond, by waving broomsage and, beyond that, by those green, green hills.” The verdant landscape is evocative, contrasting with the restlessness of the narrator as she goes out of state to college, returning only for the abrupt and somber occasion of a cousin’s funeral. In this story and “Encounters of a Close Kind,” the graves of relatives become physical reminders that one can never really leave one’s past. Indeed, these stories seem to owe a lot to the Southern gothic tradition; the second line in the book, “Locusts give their thin high wail in the dust,” recalls the work of Carson McCullers and establishes a similarly moody, summery atmosphere. This titular story rides a fine line between beauty and dread with its tale of a young professional trying to make ends meet, which culminates in an image of grotesque violence. Most of the collection’s emotion comes from a more subtle and gradual recognition of identity and regret, however. Overall, these are works that somewhat elusively find resonance by the final page. In “The Wedding Ring Quilt,” the narrator notes “I cried for my cousin and for myself”; readers are likely to feel such empathy for all of Kiser’s protagonists. Well-crafted tales of Appalachian life.

"In each of these idyllic stories, through Kiser’s careful writing style, we’re able to follow the story with all of our senses and really dive into the moment ourselves. Despite the heaviness of not being able to return home, Kiser’s beautiful imagery and concisely told stories are infused with humor — at times subtle, at times uproarious and always perfectly placed."