Appalachian Memory: A Survivor's Tale - Paperback

Mary Jane Salyers Biography I grew up in a rural county in East Tennessee during the 1940s and 1950s. My family had fifteen acres, a third of which was not tillable, and cows for milk and butter, and raised chickens, hogs, rabbits, and goats. A big garden provided food to eat and preserve. Without Financial Aid and Community Colleges, many of my friends could not afford higher education, but expected to find a job after high school, get married, or join the military. My parents, both high school teachers, managed to send four of their five children to college, and three became teachers. In seventh grade the teacher asked what we wanted to do when we grew up. I decided then that I would teach during the school year and write novels in the summer. Writing was more a whim than a real plan, and I didn't do much about it for many years. I attended Carson-Newman College where I met Bill Salyers, and we were married after I finished my degree. I majored in English with a minor in history, and earned a secondary teaching license. During the next 40 years, I taught in four states and one foreign country in both secondary schools and colleges. My father, a high school teacher and coach, was also a Baptist pastor. My mother was an ideal pastor's wife, and I followed her example and married a preacher boy. Bill served as pastor of several churches in Indiana and as chaplain at a large state institution for the mentally disabled. That institutional experience helped make me more aware and sensitive to persons with intellectual difficulties. During those busy years, I continued to teach, earned a masters degree from Indiana University, and gave birth to three daughters, who have all grown up to be powerful women and have provided us with four grandchildren and two great-grandsons. In 2011 we moved to Hillsborough, NC. As I approached retirement, I again began to dream about writing a novel. I remembered all the rich stories, language, events of my years as a Tennessee mountain girl. At a fiction writing course at the University of Chicago I wrote one of the chapters that appear in Appalachian Daughter. After retirement I attended several writing workshops: Green Lake Writer's Conference, Appalachian Writers Workshop, and Antioch Writers' Workshop and continued to write. Encouraging feedback from dozens of friends and family who read the draft, finally convinced me that "Appalachian Daughter" was ready to publish.