Recollections and Connections Transcript -

[Transcript of interview with Kenna Wiggins, recorded as part of the Springfield-Greene County Library District's 2010 Big Read. For more information contact the Library at 417-883-5366 or visit us on the web.]

I: “We are here at the library center on Sunday, March, 7, 2010. This is part of the big read for the library. The name of our presenter today is Kenna Wiggins and she’s going to begin.”

Kenna: “My mother, Dorothy Louise Tillie Weick, was a Bohemian at heart. An artist and poet to her core she struggled with domestic constraints all her life. A child of the great depression she grew up in the most impoverished part of Appalachia. Her clothes came from Good Will packages or from feed sacks purchased yearly for her families hard scrabble farm. Electric lights didn’t make it up her road until an August evening in 1948 when her father decreed “By golly the house looks like the Waldorf Astoria.” So my mother grew up reading by oil lamp or else by filtered sunlight as she devoured books in a hollowed out tree. She also read on the front porch rail reciting her brothers love letters loudly as he returned from the fields at the end of the day. But she read she dreamed and she was a brilliant student, top of her class in high school and college. In college she could only afford one cola in all four years, a fact she often shared latter with her spoiled children. She also entered a contest during World War II to win a pair of nylon hosiery. The idea was to put as many dots as possible into a one inch square. By the oil lamp she drew those dots, straining her eyes, and won the stockings. After college she became an art supervisor for a down state city school system living with friends, sharing girlish giggles. In that magical year she drew books of pictures, painted a gallery of water colors and oils, wrote poetry her creative mind was never still. By all accounts she was care free and fun, loving single life in the city. But then she bowed to the times and married the only man she had ever dated. Returned to the mountains and became a mother, four times. The painting stopped, the writing stopped, her teaching stopped. She became a full time mother ill suited to domestic life. She didn’t drive, she hardly cooked, she couldn’t sew. She shunned social groups we children were often in fear of her flashing temper. Once she said she wanted to walk on railroad tracks until she ran into a train, so she could feel something. She learned to drive when I did then practiced the route to the town’s middle school and return to the class room when my baby sister started school. In the classroom mom was a master teacher alive in her literature demanding and getting the best of her students. Once she even entered a bar to pull out on of her under age students. At home she disappeared into her room where she graded tests and planned lessons until her bed time every night for years. Then finally we were grown and out of the house. She decided one winter night to retire and she never went back into the classroom. The painting never returned but the writing began. The muse visited at night so mom kept a note book pad by her bed. The poems flowed from her mind. Poems of a secret life a dream life of laughter and yearning, joy and heartbreak and stolen kisses from a love suspected but never could prove. These revelations became clear when my father collected all of my mother’s poems into a book that he published after her death. This was a sacrificial labor of love for him. Oh, and what a treasure my mothers poems could stand against Dickinson in there simplicity of style and wealth of meaning. In those poems the mother I never knew, the person, came to light. One of my mother’s poems expresses the tenuousness of the relationships in her life specifically that of mother daughter. Gossamer: This mother daughter thread is so fragile. My mother, my daughter two ways there. To let it stretch just far enough but not to break. But not break. Another verse captures her longing for her youthful hopes. You kissed me once but that will last for all eternity. Until the stars throw down their spears and time removes the sea. Mom’s life is now more vibrant than when she lived. Oh, that she could have lead the adventures life of her dreams.