Introduction

Fred Chappell said it best in the Foreword to Nancy Dillingham’s first book New Ground:

“What makes this writer’s work memorable [is] her earnestness of purpose, her refusal to back off from a situation, to prettify or heighten tone with rhetorical device and her acceptance—almost matter-of-fact—of her characters.”

Chappell goes on to say that “[a] writer with vision will exhibit certain constancies in her work,” and that, in Dillingham’s stories, “the main theme . . . is the relationship between men and women, but where one might expect dialogue or some give and take of thoughts and feelings, the incidents seem to happen in an abyss of silence. Here are pages where muteness is so continual, so pervasive, so appalling it achieves a dimension of dread that physical violence usually does not attain.”

Though the preponderance of Dillingham’s stories appear to be set in another time, the title story seems particularly current, given the cultural shift taking place in relationships between men and women fostered by the Me Too and Time’s Up movements of today.

What does a woman want? The answer to that eternal question, according to Dillingham, appears to be that a woman does not want to be thrown curves but that the inevitability of that happening is a given.

Praise for Nancy Dillingham

The late book reviewer and historian, Rob Neufeld, wrote the following about Dillingham’s body of work:

Dillingham, independent of universities and New York publishing circles, has developed a mastery of her craft as well as a distinctive style. The wondrous grim and familial in her mountain experience come to light in . . . lines that are both facets of and links to her narratives.

What we get is poetic . . . and accessible.

About the Author

Nancy Dillingham is a sixth-generation Dillingham from the community of Dillingham in the Big Ivy section of western North Carolina.

She is associate editor for the online poetry journal Speckled Trout Review. Her collection of poems, Home, was nominated for a SIBA. Her latest publications include poems in Persimmon Tree, Cowboy Jamboree and the books and chapbooks Like Headlines: New and Selected Poems, A Wild Shining, Evanescence of Spring, Promise, and No Time Like the Present: A Memoir in Essays. She lives in Asheville, NC.