by A. Mark Dalessandro

She grew up on a hilltop in rural Barbour County and attended her first few years of formal education in a one-room schoolhouse. Her parents managed to support six children on a schoolteacher's salary by growing their food on a 300-acre farm. They lived in a 100-year-old frame house without indoor plumbing or central heating. She married her high school sweetheart shortly after graduation, at 17, and the young couple had their first child a year later. After six years a second child was born, about the time Irene McKinney decided to pursue higher education at West Virginia Wesleyan College without the support of her husband.

Later came divorce, single parenthood, and living near poverty in a cabin outside of Philippi. But during the past 30 years, the second half of McKinney's life to date, she has produced four books of poetry. She reached a milestone few writers ever achieve when, in 1994, then-Governor Gaston Caperton named her poet laureate of West Virginia.

Wilda Irene Durrett was born in 1939 about 10 miles outside of Buckhannon, on land that has been her family's since the first half of the 19th century, just off what is now known as the Corridor H highway or Route 33. At the age of 29, after earning her bachelor's degree in English and education at Wesleyan, McKinney received a fellowship from WVU, where she earned a master's degree in English and was among the first students to complete a creative thesis, which was directed by Professor Winston Fuller.

She was invited back to Wesleyan, a liberal arts college of about 1,500 students in Buckhannon, as an instructor, in 1971. She also taught briefly at Buckhannon-Upshur High School, where she encouraged one of her students, a 16-year-old named Jayne Anne Phillips, to become a writer. Later that same decade, Phillips—who earned a B.A. in English at WVU and has gone on to publish several critically acclaimed novels and collections of short fiction—encouraged her former teacher to pursue a Ph.D. in a new program at the University of Utah, where students could complete a creative dissertation. McKinney took the advice and earned her doctorate in 1980.

Since then McKinney has taught at Western Washington University; the University of California, Santa Cruz; and Hamilton College in upstate New York. She has received appointments as a visiting writer-in-residence at Alderson-Broaddus College, in a Utah prison, in the South Carolina public schools, and at the University of Kerala, in India. She co-founded the Women's Writers' Workshop in Santa Cruz, co-founded and edited Trellis, a journal of poetry and poetics, served as assistant editor of Quarterly West, and has published more than 60 poems in magazines and journals nationwide. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Workshop, the Utah Arts Council, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, which honored her with its first Alumni Achievement Award earlier this year.

Sunday Morning, 1950 Bleach in the foot-bathtub. The curling iron, the crimped, singed hair. The small red marks my mother makes across her lips. Dust in the road, and on the sumac. The tight, white sandals on my feet. In the clean sun before the doors, the flounces and flowered prints, the naked hands. We bring what we can—some coins, our faces. The narrow benches we don't fit. The wasps at the blue hexagons. And now the rounding of the unbearable vowels of the organ, the O of release. We bring some strain, and lay it down among the vowels and the gladioli. The paper fans. The preacher paces, our eyes are drawn to the window, the elms with their easy hands. Outside, the shaven hilly graves we own. Durrett, Durrett, Durrett. The babies there that are not me. Beside me, Mrs. G sings like a chicken flung in a pan on Sunday morning. . . . This hymnal I hold in my hands. This high bare room, this strict accounting. This rising up.

Through all of her travels and accomplishments, McKinney has continued to feel the pull of her West Virginia roots. Since 1991, she has taught literature and creative writing at her alma mater in Buckhannon, and now lives on 35 acres of her family's farm in a wood-frame house filled with shelves of books and African and Indian art. Her father died last year, but her mother still lives in the original house, and one of her brothers lives next door.

She tells a story: "A man dies and goes to Heaven, where he is greeted by St. Peter. The man looks around and comments on all the beauty he sees, but then over in a far corner he sees a large rock, and people are chained to it. 'Who are those people?' he asks. St. Peter replies, 'Oh, well, those are the West Virginians. If we didn't keep them chained to that rock, they'd go home every weekend."

While McKinney grew up poor, her father had received a teaching degree from Davis and Elkins, when it was a normal school. McKinney's earliest memories are of him reading to her.

"I think the whole heart of my experience comes from reading," she says. "I've always had an enormous hunger for books. I knew of a lot of houses around here that didn't have a single book, but we did. I was like a pack rat, and I remain that way. I read about anything."

McKinney remembers wanting to be a poet since she was 11 or 12 years old.

"I don't know why I thought that was possible. When you talk about role models, I got them from books. That was more real to me than what was going on around me."

McKinney's experiences early in life have developed into a strong desire for independence and a comfort in long periods of isolation.

"I was raised to believe that one should try to be independent, not dependent on the systems of society and other people. At heart, I still believe that."

While she enjoys her rural retreat, McKinney says that "Every once in a while I need be away from here for half a year."

During those periods away from her West Virginia farm, she seeks out the company of other writers and artists, often in cities like New York. "These urban centers have their uses, but it's not where I want to live."

Critics note a strong sense of place and personal revelation in McKinney's poetry. A reviewer of her most recent book, Six O'Clock Mine Report (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), wrote: "These poems are personal the way meditation is personal. These are poems written out of a very grounded, place-anchored life: the West Virginia mountains, abandoned houses, and burning mines of the poet's roots. The landscape is raw, animated, and particular. A beautifully crafted voice is at work here in the rhythmic language of authority that knows a thing and a place well."

McKinney writes "a little bit every day," and keeps a journal of her ideas, dreams, and experiences. She describes her poems as evolving slowly from thoughts, but rarely with the intent to communicate with a reader.

"I think that when people are writing best they aren't thinking about other people, but paradoxically, that is when you are more likely to communicate deeply with people."

She says she was attracted to poetry rather than other forms of writing because she was never able to finish works of prose that she began, often because of the demands of parenthood and teaching. She also believes that poetry is "the last remaining place where a professional writer can write truth without regard for commercial considerations.

"[Poetry] is a place for truth-telling," she says. "In our society, the truth is often obscured, often for commercial reasons, whether it be advertising, a lecture, or a political speech . . . . There is no commercial benefit to poetry. There is no worldly reason to become a poet."

McKinney's poetry, which so accurately describes life in West Virginia, both the beautiful and the painful, has endeared her to readers throughout the state.

"No other state writer so embodies the region's character," says Patrick W. Conner, chair of the WVU English Department and Centennial Professor of English. "Her poems consistently enact the daily joys and hardships of individuals recognizably Appalachian, yet clearly and distinctively American."

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