‘An Imaginative Proclivity’: Gary Carden and “Stories I Lived to Tell”
In “Stories I Lived to Tell: An Appalachian Memoir” (The University of North Carolina Press, 2024, 152 pages), 89-year-old storyteller and writer Gary Carden spends much of his time revisiting his youth and childhood.
At one point, reminiscing about the years he spent in Sylva Elementary School, Carden writes of his best friend of the time, Charley K., and how they wound up together because of what their teachers described as their “imaginative proclivity,” which was “teachers’ talk for saying that we were weird in the same way.”
After his father was murdered by a drunkard and his mother left home when Carden was two, he was raised by his paternal grandparents. Like his teachers, they also thought of him as a “quare young’en.” Often, too, they urged him to fight his “bad blood,” the genes he’d inherited from his mother and her side of the family.
In the 43 stories in Carden’s book, we see again and again how his grandparents, other relatives, and neighbors might have seen him as an unusual child. He reads comic books and lets them take his imagination worlds away. He watches movies and then acts them out, swinging from a rope in the barn and shouting like Tarzan, or later, trying to become Rudolph Valentino, mimicking the Hollywood star’s pouty lips and even learning to tango. “I was seventeen years old and I thought I was seeing magic,” he writes, remembering the time he saw the movie “Valentino” in 1952. “I guess I was a prime candidate to become a devoted fan, and so it was. I emerged from the Ritz like some religious fanatic. I had a hero!”
Enticed by a girl he had a crush on, nine-year-old Carden became a member of the Methodist Youth Fellowship. “So, against all odds,” he writes, “a runty little fellow who lived in Rhodes Cove with his grandparents became Jack Frost in the Christmas Pageant at the town church.” On that stage he discovered he liked being the center of attention. When the play was over, his newfound fame faded until Betsy, the girl of his affections, asked him to tell tales from the movie Westerns he’d seen.
“And so it began,” says Carden, “I learned to tell stories to my classmates, acting out all of the exciting parts…like when Lash was ambushed by some gunfighter hid in the jack pines, or when he stood off an Indian raid with nothing but his whip. When my classmates cheered, I knew that I had found my place.”
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In addition to his sketches of boyhood and adventures and people he knew, “Stories I Lived to Tell” also gives readers a feeling for life in mid-century rural and small-town America. He also slips bits of Appalachian history into this tapestry of tales, like his account of the Kingdom of the Happy Land, a settlement of former slaves which prospered for several decades after the Civil War near Tuxedo, North Carolina, and which fell victim to the coming of the railroad and its own success. And as we become acquainted with his broad knowledge of literature and film, we realize that this acclaimed storyteller possesses talents hidden behind his reputation as a raconteur of Appalachia.
Concealed as well in this collection of tales are some precepts and tutorials for parents and our culture at large, some advice on raising children so casually tucked away that I’m not sure even Carden or his publishers were aware of them. All that storytelling he heard from family members as an adolescent, all the movies he watched and the comic books he read, all his imaginative free play, all the time he spent outside in the woods and fields: add these together, and you have the exact formula for bringing up healthy children that psychologists and writers like Jonathan Haidt in “The Anxious Generation” find missing in childhood today.
Though I am 15 years younger than Carden, my own boyhood in the small town of Boonville, North Carolina, bears a strong resemblance to his descriptions of his life near Sylva. The only electronic screen in our house was the television. School and weather permitting, we spent hours every day romping around the town and in the woods, unregulated by adults and acting out movies we’d seen like “Moby Dick” or “The Alamo.” Like Carden, my friends and I sometimes did dumb things, like blowing up now-banned M-80s unsupervised, or trying out homemade parachutes from a tree.
These were the streams and rivers that filled the seas of our imaginations.
Like his other books, “Stories I Lived to Tell” demonstrates Carden’s love for what William Faulkner once called “my own little postage stamp of native soil.” This love combined with his talents and imagination explains his decades-long success as a storyteller and as an ambassador of Appalachia.
As some older people I knew long ago in Boonville might have said, “You’ve done yourself proud, Mr. Carden.”
Thank you, Gary, for the gifts you’ve given the rest of us.
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
