LISA KOGER

by Kristina Stollger

A native West Virginian currently living and writing in Somerset, Kentucky, Lisa Koger writes fiction which gives a voice to a long-neglected group: the Appalachian middle class. "My material comes from . . . the people of this region-- these are the people that I'm interested in," says Koger. "It's their stories that I'm interested in" (interview). Unlike works which overplay the poverty and ignorance of the Appalachian region or those which tout the ideal of rural life in harmony with nature, Koger's stories are realistically true to a part of the country which has moved, with the rest, into a comfortable middle class lifestyle. With her feet planted firmly, often literally, on Appalachian soil, Koger writes of what she sees just beyond the screen of her laptop computer, and that view includes new roads, old churches, Golden Fried chicken joints, and satellite dishes picking up reruns of Gunsmoke. Her conclusions about the good and bad aspects of present-day Appalachia are gently drawn and often mixed. "I think I write to make sense of things," says Koger (interview), who sees herself writing toward a vision of the world as she would like it to be, from the world as she knows it to be (interview).

Lisa Koger is an educated author who holds degrees from West Virginia University, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Iowa. During her time at Iowa, she wrote "Structural Changes," which she says is the story she is "proudest of technically" (interview). The story sympathetically reveals an Appalachian woman's inner struggle as she attempts to reconcile her beloved past with the inevitable changes of the future.

The action of the story takes place in and around Eva's one-hundred-and-thirty-year-old farm house. The importance of the house is evident early in the story when its history is given in phrases which echo a biblical genealogy: "Her house-- house of her father, Ben, house of her grandfather Lemuel, house of her great-grandfather Ozrow" (209). Koger uses the classic symbol of the house to represent not only Eva's mind, but her whole person. The limited omniscient narrator gives little physical description of Eva, but the description of the house seems almost equally apt for an aging woman. Koger writes, "The upstairs porches sagged a little, giving the impression the house suffered from progressive curvature of the spine, and after several hard winters, the white paint on the weatherboard siding had lost a little of its luster. But overall, Eva thought that her homeplace appeared structurally sound." (209)

Such subtle parallels between the old "homeplace," as Eva thinks of it, and the owner herself emphasize the link between the woman and her heritage. Both the house and Eva have been modernized to a certain extent. The house was wired for electricity in 1956, and a bathroom installed the following year (210). Eva enjoys watching reruns of Gunsmoke by means of her recently purchased satellite dish (220), but her acceptance of modern conveniences is not without limits. The bathroom is located off the kitchen, rather than in the hallway near the bedrooms; there it would have been more convenient and private but would have meant adding an unsightly "extra section to the side of the house" (210). The house, and what it stands for, are too important for Eva to allow this. "The prospect of a little convenience was not enough to persuade her to participate in the sacrilege of structural changes" (211), writes Koger. Similarly, the structure of Eva's basic value system has not changed as she has accepted certain changes in her world. The once-thriving three-hundred-and-fifty-acre farm is now largely "buried under a sea of multiflora rose" (350), but Eva's dreams and concerns are still fixed on passing it and its heritage on to future generations. The narrator says, "She could die a happy woman, she often thought, if only she could hold the sixth generation in her arms" (214). This seems unlikely, since her only daughter, Margaret, is a thirty-eight-year-old divorcee who shows as little interest in remarriage as in running an old-fashioned farm. Nevertheless, Eva clings to her cherished hope.

The main action of the story does not move Margaret toward marriage, but rather depends on the mundane fact that the roof leaks badly. Getting it fixed is a primary concern of Eva and her daughter during the time span of the story. To parallel this, another shared concern is the increasingly frequent tendency of information to leak out of Eva's mind. At one point Eva forgets what she wants to say next, and the narrator says, "as usual, whatever it was had escaped her-- seeped out of her skull, floated upward and disappeared like wisps of wood smoke in the clear spring air" (216). When Eva becomes confused during another conversation with Margaret, the daughter asks sadly, "What's happening to you?" (221) As the house is decaying, so is Eva's mind. It is Margaret who hires a workman, though unsuitable in Eva's eyes, to fix the roof; and it is Margaret who is responsible for carrying on the heritage her mother values so strongly. Koger highlights this when she pictures Margaret pausing in a doorway with her hand "on the door facing in what could have been the gesture of a woman trying to prevent a wall from caving in" (222). It seems inevitable that the walls will cave in and that the world as Eva knows it will end when Eva's memory ends.

Although the demise of Eva's heritage seems certain, the story moves from hopelessness to hopefulness. It begins in the cellar, where Eva experiences an earthquake-- probably real, but possibly imagined-- which she at first interprets as the end of the world. Discovering that it is not, she recalls her Sunday school teaching about the final destruction of "a third of the earth and the trees" (209), and her attachment to her homeplace is underscored in her joy that "it wasn't her land and her timber" (209). The remainder of the story takes place on the main floor of the house and in the yard, until at the end Eva's mind seems to lapse and she climbs the workman's ladder to the roof. In her mind, this new perspective puts her above the confusion and gives her a view of an orderly, familiar world. The narrator reveals her thoughts: "Clearly, it was a world without end" (234). Although this scene could be the sad record of an old woman's final descent into senility, within the structure of this story it is much more. The reader, sympathetic to Eva, has journeyed with her from the cellar, where the end seems imminent, to the roof, where the world is endless.

The feeling of comfort in "a world without end" does not come solely from the reader's sympathy for Eva as her mind deteriorates. It is supported thematically in the two dreams Eva has which reveal her own changing views of the past and the future. In the first dream, which occurs the evening after the earthquake, Eva returns to her childhood to wade in the farm's clear creeks, but is charged by a herd of cattle. Waiting for them to trample her, she realizes what she can say to stop them. Koger writes, "'Slow down!' she yelled until her lungs ached. 'Slow down, slow down, slow down!'" (223) The cows in her dream stop, but she notices that one of them near her "ran on wheels and smelled of burning rubber" (223). This dream suggests that she is being overrun by forces which are out of her control and which she does not fully understand. Her desire to "slow down" change is evident; as she tries to pray in the cellar she can only wish for more time (207). Even after the world's end is postponed, the phrase she repeats to stop the stampede is "the same words she'd wanted to say to Margaret earlier that evening" (223). But unlike the cows, which do stop before they trample her to death, technology and time continue forward relentlessly.

The second dream occurs after Margaret's friend, Al, who was hired to fix the roof, has worked his first half-day on the old homestead. Eva dislikes his white, hairless skin and the gold earring he wears, and she does not fully understand his relationship with Margaret. Therefore, she dozes on the porch while her daughter and Al eat lunch. This time Eva dreams of babies-- many babies crawling beneath her house. She is horrified to see that "Instead of being fat and pink, they were as pale and hairless as new pigs, and each one had a gold ring in its ear" (233). It is in trying to escape these creatures that she begins to climb the ladder to the roof. Although Eva appears to get what she wants-- "grandbabies galore" (214)-- she finds that it is not as pleasing as she had expected. Perhaps this dream serves as a reminder that Margaret's babies would necessarily be someone else's as well, while in thirty-eight years the only acceptable husbands for her have existed only in Eva's mind. With the help of this dream, Eva seems to relinquish her dependence on Margaret to preserve her heritage. From the height of the roof, she views a land that goes on forever with little change. Her comfort comes from a fresh perspective on the land, which endures the changes of generations.

Eva's strong sense of the past is shared by Koger, who says, "I have always felt . . . that there is a very old woman in me" (interview). Although Koger uses an increasingly senile old woman as the main character of this story, the perspective that Eva gains on the rooftop is one that all who appreciate their heritage and mourn its passing can draw comfort from. The dramatic effects of modern technology on Appalachian life fade into the background when they are viewed from the proper perspective; perhaps they are not, after all, structural changes.

Koger, Lisa, personal interview, 15 October 1994.

---. "Structural Changes." Farlanburg Stories. New York: Norton, 1990. 205-234.

by Kristina Stollger

Books:

Farlanburg Stories. New York: Norton, 1990.

"Writing in the Smokehouse." The Confidence Woman. Atlanta: Longstreet Press, 1991.

Periodicals:

"Baby Luv." Kennesaw Review 1:1 (Fall 1987).

"Bypass." Kennesaw Review 1:1 (Fall 1987).

"The Druther Stage." South Carolina Review (1992).

"A Heritage of Faith." Vista 80:16 (20 April 1986).

"I Lived to Die." Sunday Digest (27 August 1989).

"The June Woman." Seventeen (June 1985).

"Monster Fur." Highlights for Children 44:2 (February 1989).

"Nursing Home Life Satisfaction and Activity Participation: Effect of a Resident-Written Magazine." Research on Aging: A Quarterly of Social Gerontology 2:1 (March 1980).

"Ollie's Gate." Groundswell 4:1 (1990).

"Rabbit in the Foot." Chattahoochee Review 10:3 (Spring 1990).

"The Retirement Party." Ploughshares 16:1 (Spring/Summer 1990).

"Structural Changes." New Myths/MSS 1:1 (Fall 1990).

Book Reviews:

Atlanta Journal Constitution. April 7, 1991.

Atlanta Journal Constitution. January 5, 1992.

New York Times. February 10, 1991.

New York Times. September 8, 1991.