Wilma Dykeman: A Biography of “Woods and Words”
From: Appalachian Heritage
Volume 41, Number 2, Spring 2013
pp. 19-26 | 10.1353/aph.2013.0060
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Wilma Dykeman declared every time she wrote a biography that she would never do another one. But in each case, she explained,
these were people who made me think. If I donât write about
their lives they probably wonât have a biography, at least not
now. Each one of them really did leave such a special contribution,
and I guess my sense of mission has always been strong.1
Yet the biography of a similarly strong and thought-provoking voice in American literature has only now begun to be writtenâthat of Wilma Bonnie Dykeman (1920â2006).
Over the past six months, we have taken on that âstrong mission,â as we have had the privilege of getting inside the life of Wilma Dykeman in order to make sure her biography is written. We have talked with her nephew, a fellow bank board member in Tennessee (Dykeman was the first woman to serve on that board), friends from later in her life as she returned to work to preserve the river she loved so and as she took care of her own mother at the end of Bonnieâs long life, and a Republican former state legislator and his Democratic wife who were both close friends with Dykeman. We sat with elementary school teachers, a poet laureate and native son of Western North Carolina, and a newspaper editor.2 We have spent days seeing Newport, Tennessee, through the eyes of Dykemanâs sons and family.
We have rolled up our sleeves in the archives on a search for years of newspaper columns by her published in places as diverse as the Newport Plain Talk and the New York Times, the Knoxville News-Sentinel and the Washington Post. We have constructed great files of the magazine articles she wrote (on her own and in collaboration with James R. Stokely Jr.). We have found her in Ebony magazine, in the literary journal the Prairie Schooner, in progressive Jewish publications, in conservative southern newspapers, in The Nation and in The New Republic, and in the pages of academic and Appalachian journals such as this one. We have found news items about the young, intriguing writer when she visited Washington, DC, and made waves in the drawing rooms and halls of power. We find her reviewers reacting strongly to her full-length novels, biographies, and nonfiction worksâalways with an eye to what she could do on the written page that others could not.
When Wilma Dykeman was a speech and theatre major at Northwestern University near Chicago, Illinois, she wrote excitedly to her best friend, her mother, Bonnie Cole Dykeman: âWhen I realize what life has to offer, it sets me on fire.â3 Her life and lifeâs work reflect her endless curiosity about the world; her determined journalistic instincts made her an observant and thoughtful listener; and her passion for championing social justice and the unsung people working for social progress and reform ignited a mind and a voice we are long overdue in justly acknowledging.
Born in 1920 in the Beaverdam Valley in Asheville, North CarolinaââThe Place,â as Bonnie Dykeman referred to her multi-generational family landâWilma Dykeman grew up in a home filled with books, words, recitation and reading to one another aloud. Sprawled on her motherâs beloved Navajo rugs, she often reminisced about the sounds of her parentsâ voices reading aloud to one another before the fireplace at night. Her father, Willard Dykeman, who was senior to Bonnie by thirty-five years, was from New York and had two grown children from a previous marriage. He came to the mountains of North Carolina after reading Horace Kephart and fell in love with the landscape reminding him so much of the Adirondacksâand with a young, vibrant and smart Appalachian woman named Bonnie Cole. After visiting North Carolina, he returned to New York and sent Bonnie a volume of Thoreau. They married a year later.4
Dykeman began writing poems and stories as a young girl, attended Grace...
