Homespun Tales

Silas House, ’93

When his first book, “Clay’s Quilt,” landed on the New York Times Best Sellers list in 2001 and brought him national acclaim, Silas House was a 30-year-old rural mail carrier in his native Laurel County, Kentucky. Six more highly successful novels and dozens of nationally prestigious awards and honors later, the 1993 Eastern Kentucky University (EKU) graduate is recognized today among Kentucky’s brightest literary lights. But it’s not fame or fortune that drives this Kentucky Poet Laureate.

“The best compliment I receive is when people say, ‘You made me proud of where I’m from,’” House said. “Nothing pleases me more than that.”

House grew up in a modest coal-mining family rich with storytellers and began writing at an early age. “My seventh-grade teacher changed my life by validating me as a writer,” he recalled. While at EKU, the English major honed his craft under the tutelage of Drs. Barbara Hussey and Bonnie Plummer, among others. He took many of his classes at the university’s Corbin and Manchester campuses, where he “had an incredible experience.”

“I’m proud to be the first college graduate in my family. I also appreciate that EKU is a place that celebrates first-generation graduates,” said House, who also taught at his alma mater from 2004-05. “(A college degree) changes the trajectory of a whole family. I feel like Eastern really helped me.” The success of “Clay’s Quilt” suddenly thrust House into unfamiliar territory, a milieu still outside his comfort zone. “I’ve never got too caught up in the whole literature world,” he shrugged. “In my family, the worst thing you can be seen as is highfalutin.

“Raised country and Appalachian, I will always have impostor syndrome. I’ll always feel out of place. As soon as I open my mouth, people hear ‘poverty’ and (in their estimation) my IQ goes down. It makes me humble but also makes me fiercer. I want to be heard. I want to represent people.”

His second and third novels, “A Parchment of Leaves” and “The Coal Tattoo,” were also family sagas set in Appalachian Kentucky and likewise revered for their sharply drawn working-class characters and realistic portrayal of everyday life in rural Appalachia. In all his works, House “tried to write the most honest depiction” of what he saw all around him. “I’ve always tried to write about people I know,” he said. “My goal is never to romanticize or vilify but to complexify.”

His other novels, “Eli the Good,” “Same Sun Here” (co-written with Neela Vaswani for elementary-aged children), “Southernmost” and “Lark Ascending” (set mostly in Ireland), continued to convey universal themes of family, the natural world, belief and doubt.

“The most important thing to me is that I never write unless I’ve walked it first.”

House’s environmental activism, specifically his fight against mountaintop removal mining, and his work on behalf of LGBTQ causes have sometimes made the author a controversial figure. Now, using his platform as Poet Laureate, he’s working on a signage program to honor the Commonwealth’s “rich literary history. We have a whiskey trail and a music trail. We need a writers’ trail.”

Maybe someday such an attraction will remind natives and travelers alike where House once gleaned inspiration as a rural mail carrier who could only dream that his homespun tales would soon enchant generations of readers far beyond his hometown of Lily, Kentucky.