Barbara Presnell
"My journey in words is the wren’s journey, going out but always returning home to a tangled assemblage of twigs, tightly woven, tucked in a front porch eave or hidden in the stems of a geranium."
Photo credit David N. Durrell
Coming Home
I grew up in the small town of Asheboro, North Carolina, surrounded by family on both sides who had lived in the area for generations. They were Quakers and Methodists, farmers and preachers, good old boys and bridge players. Mine was the perfect childhood, playing in the neighborhood until dark, bringing home arms full of library books to read on summer nights when it was too hot to do anything but read. Words became my tools for making sense of the world at an early age. I’d stretch across the den rug and make up stories, always with a happy ending, and I’d illustrate my stories with pastel chalk and then run to the kitchen and read them out loud to my mother as she cooked supper. I’d crawl in my father’s lap and interrupt him as he read the afternoon paper. “Do another! Do another!” my parents said, and I did. It was a childhood of books and words, art and imagination, and making things, always making things.
After high school, I couldn't wait to get out of my small town and begin a new life, but nearby Greensboro was where I found my academic home for the next seven years. Soon my new husband Bill and I were off to Virginia and later Kentucky. Years later, with a growing son, we returned to the region of our childhoods. Today I carry inside me a small part of all each of those places I have lived and all of the family members who helped raise me, and I remember their stories, even though some of my relatives say I embellish a bit.
Since then, my writing journey has taken me to many states and countries, introduced me to people of all kinds, and changed the way I think about the world. I no longer want to leave the place of my childhood; I want to understand it. I aim to tell the story of ordinary people like me kinfolk, of a region rich with tradition but plagued by heartache, frailty, and a struggle to move forward. In my work, whether poetry or fiction, I hope my readers will find not just the Southern experience but the universal human one that transcends region, dialect, and culture.
Artist statement (or, Why I write)
The tiny wren sits in the palm of my hand, its ordinary coat as dull as a leaf. Common in number, humble in beauty, delicate as a new egg, and largely unnoticed, its teakettle, teakettle sings above the cacophony of human joy and pain. How can a creature so small speak with such authority? What is it saying to us that we need to hear?
I tell the wren stories, the unknown, untold, ordinary stories. I zoom in close and linger on the buff of brown feather. I hear the voices of the millworkers behind their machines, around their kitchen tables with their families. I write of the infantry soldier, the fear that wakes him, the weariness that lies down with him at night, the laughter that keeps him alive. I listen to the everyday radical, fighting for justice, wanting to be heard. I remember my mother, small wings of steel shaped to carry her heavy load and her sorrow. I search for my father—small town textile worker, veteran, family man, grower of backyard azaleas—a wren in the world’s eyes, an eagle in my own.
My journey in words—whether poetry or prose—is the wren’s journey, going out but always returning home to a tangled assemblage of twigs, tightly woven, tucked in a front porch eave or hidden in the stems of a geranium. My place is a troubled South, as tangled as the nest, rooted in family, sprung up in heartache and loss, air so thick it takes the breath away, blossoming like wisteria, that perilous beauty.