Our next Sunday with Friends event is on Sunday, March 8 at 3 p.m. Learn about one of the forgotten classics of Appalachian literature, Anne Armstong’s “This Day and Time,” which is set on the South Holston River in the 1930s in the Big Creek resort community, now flooded by South Holston Lake.
The realistic novel is the story of Ivy Ingoldsby, a resilient young woman who has been deserted by her husband and is raising a young son in the mountains after having tried working factory jobs in town. The novel has lyrical descriptions of the landscape and careful, authentic use of Appalachian dialect.
Armstong, a business executive, came to the area from Knoxville in the 1920s as the Assistant Manager of Industrial Relations for Eastman Kodak. In the 1930s she retired to the Big Creek community. In addition to writing fiction, she wrote articles on the emerging role of women in business.
In the 1950s she moved to Abingdon, where her friend Robert Porterfield encouraged her to adapt “This Day and Time” to play form. The adaptation was performed under a new title, “Some Sweet Day.”
The speaker will be Linda Behrend, a librarian at the University of Tennessee, who has edited a critical edition of the novel. She also has edited Armstong’s memoir, “Of Time and Knoxville: Fragment of an Autobiography.” Behrend’s articles have been published in “Against the Grain,” the “Encyclopedia of Appalachia,” and the “New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.”
Also check out other Arts events in Abingdon, Literary Art events in Abingdon.
