Writing Dialect – Tattooing on the Bones

By Drema Hall Berkheimer

Linda deRossier, Kentucky author and professor, wrote in her memoir, Creeker, that when folks find out you’re from Appalachia they subtract a hundred points from your IQ.

If they judge intellect by dialect, I’m in trouble.

At a recent meeting at my house, I cautioned a group of writers leaving the table to be careful, the rug was hooved up. Eyebrows shot up like I’d turned into an alien. In a way I had, because once again I’d reverted to my native tongue, Appalachian. We have a penchant for using words unfamiliar to those outside the clan.

People tend to judge Appalachians by the stereotypes they see on TV, and those do exist, along with a fair share of doctors, lawyers, merchants, and chiefs. And rocket scientists. And yet Appalachia remains exotic and heroic—a place where coalminers still put on helmets like gladiators before descending into the dark to dig what could become their grave, like my father did. Appalachia is complex. There’s a romance to it that defies definition. My family migrated to Florida, so I’ve only been back to my hometown once since I left sixty years ago. I became the Methodist I’d decided to be at age five, decided not to be a gypsy after all, and retired from a big corporation. I thought I’d left it all behind. How silly of me.

Appalachia is imprinted on me as surely as if it were tattooed on my bones.

I love all dialects, and I’m especially fond of the Appalachian way of speaking. But if I drop every ‘g’ and write comin’ and goin’ and givin’ and takin’, I find it tiresome to read. I’m not sure why. Southerners do drop those g’s, every last one of them. But too many apostrophes winkin’ and blinkin’ all over the page are, well, too many. It’s the same if I’m reading an Irish brogue—I can only take so many “wee bairns” before I want to strangle something. Then there’s the English with their blimey this and blimey that. No matter where we’re from, we have a dialect. It applies to corporate-speak too. My husband is an IT guy, and I’ve heard him hold entire conversations in computer mumbo-jumbo. But if he wrote a book with an IT setting, his tech-talking characters would have to show us some mercy.

So if too much dialect in writing can become a distraction, and in many cases an annoyance to the reader, what’s the answer?  For me, it was less is more. When an artist paints a rocky road, he may paint only a few rocks, allowing us to visualize a rocky road without noticing the technique. The same is true with dialect—a little goes a long way.

I used some Appalachian dialect in the memoir I wrote for my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and those yet to be born. I wanted them to know they come from coal. I wanted them to feel the proud Appalachian DNA rushing through their veins. I wanted them to hear the twang of the voices and see the glory of the hills and hollers. And I wanted them to see it through my eyes as a child. Of course, that was not possible, so I did my imperfect best to write it down.

And sometimes I dropped the ‘g’.

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Drema Hall Berkheimer was born in a coal camp in Penman, West Virginia, the child of a coalminer who was killed in the mines, a Rosie the Riveter mother, and devout Pentecostal grandparents. Her tales of growing up in the company of gypsies, moonshiners, snake handlers, hobos, and faith healers, are published in numerous online and print journals. Excerpts from her memoir, RUNNING ON RED DOG ROAD and Other Perils of an AppalachianChildhood, won first place Nonfiction and First Honorable Mention Nonfiction in the 2010 West Virginia Writers competition. She is a member of West Virginia Writers and The Writer’s Garret. She lives in uptown Dallas with her husband and a neurotic cat who takes after her. Her husband is mostly normal. Drema Hall Berkheimer’s Social Media links are: dremahallberkheimer.com
http://www.dremahallberkheimer.com/im-just-sayin/

https://www.facebook.com/drema.berkheimer  published by Zondervan, a HarperCollins Company 

Writing Memoir—a Cautionary Tale

By Drema Hall Berkheimer

                          

Writing Memoir is high on my list of Top Ten Ways to Torture Yourself. But if you are compelled, as I was, to tell your story, don’t say I didn’t warn you. My memoir, RUNNING ON RED DOG ROAD and Other Perilsof an Appalachian Childhood, was recently published by Zondervan.

It was a story I needed to tell.

Born and raised in Appalachia in the forties, I was the child of a coal miner killed in the mines, a Rosie the Riveter mother, and devout Pentecostal grandparents.

Writing about these people and this time and place was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It took me six years to complete the book, and for several of those years I wrote nothing at all, blindsided by memories that struck me dumb. Although I come from stoic stock and never cried, I could not write a page without a meltdown.

It was embarrassing. But I could not stop.

I was emotionally spiritually physically wrung out and hung up to dry.

Then, as often happens, fate intervened. A friend, struggling to complete her second novel, asked if I’d join her for morning writing sessions—the misery loves company thing. We’d log on at 7:00 AM and write for two hours. It was spring, and we were to finish by the end of the year. I rolled my eyes at her over the phone, but I agreed. Every morning I’d head to my office, settle in, and begin to write. It was awkward at first, and painful too. When there were tears, and there often were, I wrote through them. I kept at it—morning after morning became week after week then month after month. By the end of the year my friend finished her novel and, despite my eye-rolling, I finished my memoir.

I grew up in a remarkable multi-generational family in East Beckley, West Virginia, with gypsies, hobos, moonshiners, faith healers, and other quirky kith and kin dropping in to play character roles in my life story. It was an idyllic life, with some sad chapters, sure, but many more happy ones. Why then, if it was so wonderful, did this writing leave me drained? It was an enigma—until I realized that all the kin I wrote about are dead, except for me. Writing as child narrator, I got to know them on a whole new level—a strangely deeper and more mature one. I had not cried at their funerals, but I cried over them now. I’d had to resurrect them, live with them, and bury them again in order to tell their stories.

And yes, it was the hardest thing I’d ever done.

It was also the best.

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Drema Hall Berkheimer was born in a coal camp in Penman, West Virginia, the child of a coal miner who was killed in the mines, a Rosie the Riveter mother, and devout grandparents. Her tales of growing up in the company of gypsies, moonshiners, snake handlers, hobos, and faith healers, are published in numerous online and print journals. Excerpts from her memoir, RUNNING ON RED DOG ROAD and Other Perils of an AppalachianChildhood, won first place Nonfiction and First Honorable Mention Nonfiction in the 2010 West Virginia Writers competition. She is a member of West Virginia Writers, Salon Quatre, and The Writer’s Garret. Berkheimer will be on the panel with Homer Hickam at his Writer’s Workshop in Beckley WV in October. She lives in downtown Dallas with her husband and a neurotic cat. The cat takes after her. Her husband is mostly normal. Drema Hall Berkheimer’s books are Running on Red Dog Road And Other Perils of AnAppalachian Childhood. You can connect with Drema at  dremagirl@aol.com, dremahallberkheimer.com

http://www.dremahallberkheimer.com/im-just-sayin/, https://www.facebook.com/drema.berkheimer