About the Author – Mary Jane Salyers

I grew up in a rural county in East Tennessee during the 1940s and 1950s. This county had very little industry–a few small coal mines and sawmills, so most people made their living as farmers or traveled out of the county to find jobs. Many families lived on small tracts of land, often on hillsides or in hollows, where they eked out a living from the soil–enough to survive. At that time, my county was among the poorest counties in all of Appalachia.

My family had our little fifteen-acre plot, about a third of which was not tillable. We kept cows to provide milk and butter and raised chickens, hogs, rabbits, and goats, and sometimes horses. During the summer we raised a big garden and canned and preserved food to see us through the winter and raised corn and hay to feed our animals. From the time I was in the seventh grade until I graduated from high school, I milked two cows every evening and often on mornings as well. My father thought work was important for growing children, so we all had our chores. We learned not only how to raise and harvest crops, take care of animals and the property, and lay up provisions for the winter but also learned how to work hard, solve problems, and cooperate to get a job done.

In those days before Financial Aid and Community Colleges, many of my classmates could not afford to attend higher education, but expected to find a job somewhere after graduation, get married, or join the military. My parents, both high school teachers, had barely enough financial resources to send their offspring to college but hoped we would all do so. Four of their five children fulfilled that expectation–and three of us became teachers.

I remember in seventh grade the teacher asked what we wanted to do when we grew up. I hadn’t thought much about it, but decided then that I would teach during the school year and write novels in the summer. The writing bit was more a whim than real desire and I didn’t get around to doing much about that for many, many years.

I enrolled in Carson-Newman College where I met and began to date Bill Salyers, and we decided to get married only after I finished my degree. I majored English with a minor in history, and earned a secondary teaching license for the State of Tennessee. During the next 40 years, I taught in four states and one foreign country in both secondary schools and colleges. As this would indicate, we moved around a good deal, mostly for Bill’s jobs.

In addition to being a high school teacher and coach, my father was also a Baptist pastor. My mother was an ideal pastor’s wife, so I followed her example and married a preacher boy. Bill attended seminary during the early years of our marriage. We often said that he was working on his ThM degree and I was working on a PhT (putting hubby through). He served as pastor of several churches in Indiana and as chaplain at a large 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, but also 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 wonderful grandchildren and two great-grandsons. In 2011 we moved to Hillsborough, NC, to live close to our youngest daughter and her two children.

As I approached retirement, I began to think again about writing a novel. I kept remembering all the rich stories, language, events of my years as a Tennessee mountain girl. I took a fiction writing course from the University of Chicago where I wrote one of the chapters that appear in Appalachian Daughter. Later, after retirement, I attended several writing workshops: Green Lake Writer’s Conference, Appalachian Writers Workshop, and Antioch Writers’ Workshop, where I received helpful instruction, advice, and critiques of more of the chapters. I