New Novelist Pens First Book, THE BIRDS OF OPULENCE

Lexington, KY-Crystal Wilkinson fittingly begins her first novel with these lines since she has been a gatherer of stories and a teller of tales her entire life. Her gift was first recognized as a child in Appalachia, where it was cultivated by her grandmother. That inspiration, coupled with Wilkinson's reverence for home and heritage, took root to yield provocative works of award-winning poetry and short stories. But she gathers stories in more ways than with just her pen. She also challenges her writing students to discover and embody their own inspiration as influential writers. In addition, as the owner of Wild Fig Books & Coffee in Lexington, Kentucky, Wilkinson has found yet another way to encourage creativity within the community and share her love for the written word.

Wilkinson shifts from gather of stories to teller of tales with her first novel, The Birds of Opulence. In it, she introduces readers to the Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch and pillar of the community Minnie Mae. Situating the family in the fictional black township of Opulence nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian, she traces multiple generations through interconnected stories that weave together to form a complex, multilayered whole. Minnie Mae is headstrong and determined, yet plagued by old secrets and embarrassment over mental illness and illegitimacy. Just as her mental disorders echo through the generations of women in her family, her pride and obstinacy have devastating effects on them as well.

Minnie Mae's daughter, Nora Jean "Tookie" Goode is a tortured and broken spirit, her emotional maturity permanently stunted, in part from a beating at the hands of her mother. Tookie was left near death, and she still bears the scars-physically and emotionally. Minnie Mae continues to push and punish Tookie, unwilling to provide the love and forgiveness she desperately needs to move forward and reclaim her life. This leaves Tookie ashamed, in a constant state of unrest: "As usual, when she is alone, she walks back and forth across the living room floor, hands clutched in front of her, both remembering and trying not to."

Tookie's sorrow is inevitably passed down to her daughter, Lucy Brown, where it manifests in her battles with post-partum depression and mental illness. Soon after Lucy gives birth to her daughter, Yolanda, in a squash patch, she slowly and inescapably becomes overtaken by madness. "She touches the child's face as it nurses and then pinches the baby's nostrils together. . . . She watches her daughter struggle for breath . . . until the baby's legs kick and she lets go of the nipple. She does it again until she can feel the child struggling to fling her head free, then she releases and listens to the child settle into being able to breathe again." Seemingly nothing can save Lucy from "living in some world of her own creation," not even the love and devotion of her husband and partner, Joe, the "true, good thing" in her life.

Wilkinson's The Birds of Opulence resonates with a reverence of a people with whom she is intimately familiar: strong, proud, yet flawed Southern men and women, coping with adversities and lives not fully recognized or lived. Each interconnected story portrays a powerful moment in these characters' lives, making the readers bear witness to their most intimate thoughts, pains, and struggles. At its essence, it is a story of love and loss, beauty and pain, and recovery and redemption that only a true gatherer of stories and teller of tales could articulate so fully.

Crystal Wilkinson is the author of Blackberries, Blackberries, winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature, and Water Street, a finalist for both the UK'sOrange Prize for Fiction and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. The winner of the 2008 Denny Plattner Award in Poetry from Appalachian Heritage magazine and the Sallie Bingham Award from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, she serves as Appalachian Writer-in-Residence at Berea College and teaches in the Spalding University low residency MFA in Creative Writing Program.

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