MC alumna Halle Hill ’17 honors Good Women with her debut book, out Sept. 12
Aug. 23, 2023
Halle Hill ’17 grew up surrounded by good women.
The Religion major, who went on to earn her master of fine arts degree from Savannah College of Art and Design, was enthralled by the oral storytelling tradition of her grandmothers, her aunts, her cousins. As a Scot who changed career directions in the back half of her MC journey, she found herself mentored and encouraged by Christina Seymour, an assistant professor of writing communication at Maryville College.
In the shadow of the Southern Appalachians, the mountains with which she’s felt a keen connection since childhood, she learned from them how to find her voice — which makes the forthcoming publication of her first book, the aptly titled Good Women — out Sept. 12 via Hub City Press — all the more poignant.
“I think there is this unshakeable mysticism of being a Southern Appalachian person, and for a long time, I struggled to claim that,” Hill said. “Most of my life, I grew up in the suburbs, but when I was born, I lived in the working-class neighborhood of Mechanicsville. My family and I shared a big house that I believe was over 100 years old with my aunt and uncle, while my uncle worked toward his engineering Ph.D. at UT. That’s my beginning, but we moved away soon after.
“I remember my friend, the writer Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, writing about how all people, especially Southern people, come from rural people who worked in rhythm with the cycles of the natural world. That reminder of a sense of connection grounded me. I believe we all long for that natural rhythm, and for me, I always felt a sense of pride in being Appalachian.
“My mom would tell me growing up that when we would drive through the mountains, I would just be overcome with emotion and would tell her, ‘This is my home!’” she added. “I have deep respect for the indigenous people who lived here before us, and for my family’s deep roots here, but place distinctively became really important at Maryville College.”
Born with a writer’s heart
As she came to the end of her academic career at the Christian Academy of Knoxville, Hill weighed her options carefully when choosing a college. Academics were important, but so too was faith-based learning that was both all-encompassing and flexible, she said. Remaining close to home was optimal, but the University of Tennessee felt too big. Having attended Maryville Adventures in Studying Theology (MAST) — now known as the summer program Expanding Horizons — as a teen, she was already familiar with the MC campus, and the financial aid she received as part of her offer letter sealed the decision.
“Affordability, academic rigor, and I knew I wanted to go to a more rural school,” she said. “Plus, it’s just beautiful at Maryville College. If you visit in the fall, you’re kind of sold.”
Although she chose Religion as her major, literature in all of its forms had been a lifelong love. As a girl, she accompanied her mother to the public library weekly, listening to books on cassette before she could even read and picking up the pen when she was old enough to create her own stories. Until the second half of her MC career, however, she hesitated to describe herself as a writer.
“I enjoyed my English classes, and I excelled at them, but I was self-conscious about saying it,” she said. “It wasn’t until I took a class from Christina that she pulled me aside afterward and said, ‘I read your stuff, and I think you’re a poet. I think you’re a writer. And I think you should continue that.’”
At the time, she was considering divinity school or seminary for post-graduate work, but that encouragement, along with her experiences writing for The Highland Echo campus newspaper and working alongside Kim Trevathan and other professors in the MC Division of Languages and Literature, led to a change of plans.
“I started sharing more of my writing that I was passionate about with other people, and even though it was hard to accept that as an identity, Maryville College helped me find the confidence to do that, to change my mind, to embrace challenge, and to try,” she said. “I had to make a pivot pretty quickly, and so I looked at MFA programs and even used some of my articles from the Echo for my admissions portfolio.”
As a graduate student at the Savannah College of Art and Design, she continued to write but it wasn’t until he completed her MFA that she was published professionally for the first time — a break that was unexpected and life-changing, she said.
A prize-winning debut
On her first attempt, Hill won the debut fiction call in the magazine Oxford American, a prestigious publication with a focus on the American South. Out of 500 submissions, her short story, “Bitch Baby,” was selected as the winner among stories by new writers. A tale of two siblings, one of whom has lost his sight after an incident of police brutality, it opened doors previously unavailable, she said.
“It changed my whole life,” she said. “I was able to really see that you’ve got to move fast and with substance, and that it might lead to an opportunity to publish a book.”
The most obvious material for one, she added, was the thesis work she did for her MFA. She knew she wanted to focus on short stories in the beginning, and that she felt most comfortable writing fiction. Fleshing out Good Women became an exercise in drilling down into her roots as a Black woman, as a keeper of ancestral stories and heritage, and as a resident of Southern Appalachia.
“I think my voice is direct, but I also try to make it subtle and somewhat refined,” she said. “I think it’s funny, and I know it’s very woman-centered. Ultimately, it feels very comfortable for me, and cultivating it took some time. I didn’t want to be confined by my own experience, so nonfiction didn’t hold a lot of appeal, but I’ve always paid attention to the things around me. In shifting toward fiction, something clicked, and I felt free.
“Leaning in on being as specific as I could about my experiences and my ways of seeing the world and oral storytelling from my family — just borrowing and remembering the ways my grandmothers and aunts and cousins spoke growing up — became the basis for this book. Part of the journey was just wandering around a bit, writing down those stories and going through old journals, taking maybe 20% of reality and filling in the gaps with creativity.”
Her publisher describes Good Women as “darkly funny and deeply human,” a book that “observes how place, blood-ties, generational trauma, obsession, and boundaries — or lack thereof — influence how we navigate our small worlds, and how those worlds so often collide in ways we don’t expect. Through intimate moments of personal choice, Hill carefully shines a light on how these 12 women shape and form themselves through faith and abandon, transgression and conformity, community, caution, and solitude.” It’s already received a starred write-up from Kirkus Reviews, which declares Good Women as “a stunning slow burn brimming with observation, emotion, and incident,” and Publishers Weekly heralds Hill as “a bright new talent.”
“I also think my book is resistance, in a way, to the ideas that people have about what Appalachia is and the people who live here, especially Black women,” she said. “I realize that it’s a place some people mock, but there are all types of people here. There’s community here. There are good people doing really important work to take care of this precious place where we’re from, and I get mad at the way the region is treated and the gimmicks people use to describe it.”
More than anything else, Good Women is built on the foundation stones of everyday life. Her own powers of observation and intuition have taught her to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, and her abilities as a writer — a title she finally accepts as a truth and not just as a vocation — have allowed her to share those observations with the rest of the world.
And Good Women is just the beginning.
“Right now, I’m filling the tank back up. I’m reading a lot of poetry and reading more non-fiction lately, and I’m grateful for my publisher,” she said. “Hub City Press is based out of Spartanburg and is entirely woman-run and woman-led, so it’s a natural fit for me, because they value pushing diverse voices from across the American South. For me, I’m certainly not the first, but to have a foothold and to stand on the shoulders of other Black women and other people of color within the literary tradition does sometimes feel like some responsibility, even though we’re certainly not a monolith.
“I think this book is, above everything, just me trying to honor my family and honor the women I come from, remember our stories, and to thank my family and to thank where I’m from. I couldn’t have become a writer, and I wouldn’t have found a sense of purpose, without going to Maryville College, and for that, I’m very grateful.”