Jim Wayne Miller was an erudite man guided by a truly international consciousness. In 1986, for example, he traveled to both Central America and Europe, and his works include translations from the German as well as original writing in English. The focus of his impressive writing, his compelling public speaking, and his quietly effective leadership was the field of Appalachian Studies.
Miller was so sought-after by academics that for several summers in the 1980s he led simultaneous seminars at both the University of Tennessee and Appalachian State University, driving back and forth across the mountains several times a week! He gave so many workshops and readings at so many places that it seemed the only time he had for himself was driving on the Interstate--in fact, one of his volumes of poetry is entitled Nostalgia for 70, referring to the speed limit!
One of the chief sources of Jim Wayne Miller's wisdom which made him so sought-after in academic circles was his willingness to learn from ordinary people. His first book of poetry and his third as well focus on his appreciation for his grandfather, an humble hill farmer. His second poetry collection contains many tributes to mountain people who had scarcely any formal education. His fourth and fifth collections are spoken through the voice of "the brier," a quintessential mountain man whom city people treat disdainfully.
"The Briar Sermon" in The Mountains Have Come Closer can easily be considered one of Miller's most powerful and important poems. Through this sermon, Miller urges his readers to carefully examine their heritage and consciously choose which aspects deserve to be perpetuated and which should be discontinued. Throughout his career Miller insisted upon this, distinguishing himself from both the regional chauvinists and those who would denigrate Appalachia as a whole. Clearly Miller was as comfortable in the role of preacher as teacher. Without the slightest hint of self-righteousness, Jim Wayne Miller shared his convictions with his audiences, speaking opening about important issues even when they were sensitive or controversial.
Yet Jim Wayne Miller never pushed himself forward. A quick glance at his bibliography reveals that he put almost as much energy into preparing collections of other writers as he did compiling his own work. When asked to give a reading, Miller always read from the works of other writers as well as himself, and he was likely to read a poem from a junior high drop-out alongside an internationally recognized classic. His presentations typically conveyed a message on a particular theme with his poetry woven in, along with that of others, to support his message.
Jim Wayne Miller was born in Leicester, North Carolina, in 1936. Miller was raised with five younger brothers and sisters on a seventy-acre farm very near the farm houses of his grandparents on both sides. His mother's people were uneducated tenant farmers and his father's people were well-educated and prosperous land-holders. Miller's father commuted to Asheville to work as the service manager of a Firestone Tire Store. In 1954 Jim Wayne Miller entered Berea College in Kentucky. He spent most of his junior year in Germany with the Experiment in International Living, and in 1958 he graduated and married a Berea classmate, Mary Ellen Yates, a native of Carter County in Eastern Kentucky. Miller's first job was teaching German and English at Fort Knox, but in 1960 he got an NDEA Fellowship to study those subjects at Vanderbilt University. There in Nashville his two sons were born.
In 1963 Jim Wayne Miller accepted a teaching position at Western Kentucky University in the Department of Modern Languages and Intercultural Studies which gave him the freedom to complete his Ph.D. in German Language and American Literature at Vanderbilt in 1965. While serving on the Western faculty, he raised his two sons and a daughter born in 1967, and supported his wife as she completed her doctorate in English and joined him on the Western Kentucky University faculty. Awesomely intelligent, witty, and deeply considerate of others, Miller sustained his intense life style with cigarettes and coffee in the mornings and liquor and cigarettes in the evenings. He died of lung cancer in 1996 days before the beginning of the fall semester at Western having taught there continuously through the Spring 1996 semester.
Through his indefatigable travels, Jim Wayne Miller made an inestimable contribution to Appalachian Studies as a writer, a lecturer, a teacher, and an administrator or consultant to innovative programs. He is generally considered one of the founders and sustainers of that enterprise. Certainly only a handful of people have ever been as knowledgeable as Miller on Appalachian Literature, and he was a past Chairman of the Appalachian Studies Conference.
His best poetry is bound to last, while his prose fiction, delightful to many, suffers only from an unwillingness to stereotype which prevents his characters from achieving the kind of archtypical relevance required of prose classics.
For his convictions, for his competence, and for his concern as well as for his wit, his whimsy, and his wisdom, the field of Appalachian Studies in all its dimensions is the richer because of the dynamic presence of Jim Wayne Miller in its formative years.
An Annotated Chronological Jim Wayne Miller Bibliography
by George Brosi
Copperhead Cane by Jim Wayne Miller. Nashville, Tennessee: Robert Moore Allen, 1964. A 44-page poetry collection dealing with life on mountain farms. Reprinted in 1974 and 1978 with Dialogue with a Dead Man and as a separate volume in 1995. **Click here to order**The More Things Change the More they Stay the Same by Jim Wayne Miller. Frankfort, Kentucky: Whippoorwill Press, 1971. 64-unnumbered pages of poetic ballads, limited to 500 paperback copies. This is Miller's most explicitly political poetry collection, often celebrating, for example, Eastern Kentuckians who resisted strip-mining. **Click here to order**
Dialogue with a Dead Man by Jim Wayne Miller. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1974. A 78-page poetry collection which includes all the poems in Copperhead Cane. The title's dialogue is between Miller and his recently deceased grandfather, a barely literate farmer. Reprinted in 1978. **Click here to order**
The Figure of Fulfillment. Translations of the Poetry of Emil Lerperger by Jim Wayne Miller. Owensboro, Kentucky: Green River Press, 1975. Translations of an Austrian poet. 89 pages. **Click here to order**
Dialogue with a Dead Man by Jim Wayne Miller. University Center, Michigan: Green River Press, a 1978 reprint of a 1974 release. The dialogue is between Miller and his grandfather, a mountain farmer. An 80-page poetry collection. **Click here to order**
A Checklist and Purchase Guide for School and Community Libraries in Appalachia by Jim Wayne Miller. Boone, North Carolina: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1979. 15 pages. **Click here to order**
The Mountains Have Come Closer by Jim Wayne Miller. Boone, North Carolina: The Appalachian Consortium Press, 1980. A 64-page compilation of Miller's most significant poetry up to that time. Re-printed in its entirety in The Brier Poems, 1997. **Click here to order**I Have a Place, Jim Wayne Miller, contributing editor
. Pippa Passes, Kentucky: Alice Lloyd College, 1981. A 220-page anthology of Appalachian Writing for high school students. **Click here to order**Vein of Words by Jim Wayne Miller. Big Timber, Montana: Seven Buffaloes Press, undated, but known to be 1984. A 61-page poetry workshop in verse. **Click here to order**
Reading, Writing, Region: A Checklist, Purchase Guide and Directory for School and Community Libraries in Appalachia by Jim Wayne Miller. Boone, North Carolina: Appalachian Consortium Press, undated, but probably 1984. An up-date of Miller's 1979 Checklist. 46 pages. **Click here to order**
Nostalgia for 70 by Jim Wayne Miller. Big Timber, Montana: Seven Buffaloes Press, 1986. A 60-page eclectic collection of poetry which the author sums up as depicting "life in the American funhouse." **Click here to order**Sideswipes by Jim Wayne Miller.
Big Timber, Montana: Seven Buffaloes Press, 1986. A satirical essay. 19 pages. **Click here to order** The Wolfpen Poems by James Still. Edited and introduced by Jim Wayne Miller. Berea, Kentucky: Berea College Press, 1986. An 82-page poetry collection. **Click here to order**Songs of a Mountain Plowman by Jesse Stuart. Edited with an Introduction by Jim Wayne Miller. Ashland, Kentucky: The Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1986. This volume brings together for the first time in print many of Stuart's earliest poems. 162 pages. **Click here to order**
His First Best Country by Jim Wayne Miller.
Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1987. A page chapbook, a staple-bound paperback. The author's own blurb for this short story reads, "Jennings Wells undertakes a condescending investigation of country music as part of his courtship with Roma Livesay, only to discover that country music has researched him, confronting him with his past and turning his life in an unexpected direction." This story formed the basis for a play written by Miller and produced at the Horse Cave Theater in Kentucky in the summer of 1992. **Click here to order** * The Examined Life: Family-Community-and Work in American Literature, Jim Wayne Miller, contributing editor. Boone, North Carolina: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1989. Described by Miller as "the culminating item in a three-year seminar for the Southern Highlands Institute for Education." 89 pages. **Click here to order** Brier, His Book by Jim Wayne Miller. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1988. An important 68-page poetry collection containing Miller's most internationally-aware poetry. Reprinted in its entirety in The Brier Poems, 1997. **Click here to order** The Wisdom of Folk Metaphor: The Brier Conducts A Laboratory Experiment by Jim Wayne Miller. Big Timber, Montana: Seven Buffaloes Press, 1988. A little polemic essay of 16 un-numbered pages. **Click here to order**A Ride with Huey the Engineer by Jesse Stuart. Edited by James M. Gifford, Jerry A. Herndon and Jim Wayne Miller.
Ashland, Kentucky: The Jesse Stuart Foundation, a 1988 reprint of a 1966 release. 111 pages including the full text of "Huey, the Engineer" published in 1937 in Esquire and as a book in 1960. **Click here to order**Round and Round with Kahlil Gibran by Jim Wayne Miller.
Blacksburg, Virginia: Rowan Mountain Press/Pocohontas Press, 1989. A six-page chapbook of satire focusing on what poetry is and is not. **Click here to order** Newfound by Jim Wayne Miller. New York, New York: Orchard Press, 1989. A 213-page hardback youth novel set in East Tennessee but with autobiographical overtones. Portrays the protagonist, Robert Jennings Wells, from 7th grade through high school. Named one of the "Best Books of the Year" by the American Library Association and an "Editor's Choice" by Booklist. Reprinted in 1996. **Click here to order**The Beatinest Boy by Jesse Stuart. Edited by Jim Wayne Miller, Jerry A. Herndon and James M. Gifford.
Ashland, Kentucky: The Jesse Stuart Foundation, a 1989 reprint of a 1953 release. A 96- page children's book which tells a compelling Christmas story. **Click here to order** Southern Mountain Speech by Cratis Williams. Edited by Jim Wayne Miller and Loyal Jones. Berea, Kentucky: Berea College Press, 1992. This 133-page non-fiction work is the most authoritative and useful book in the field. **Click here to order**A Gathering at the Forks. George Ella Lyon, Jim Wayne Miller, and Gurney Norman, contributing editors.
Wise, Virginia: Vision Books, 1993. An eclectic 445-page anthology which celebrates fifteen years of the Hindman Settlement School Appalachian Writer's Workshop. **Click here to order** His First, Best Country by Jim Wayne Miller. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1993. This 216-page novel is an expansion of the short story published as a chapbook in 1987 and a sequel to Newfound (1989). It centers upon the relationship between two natives of the Tennessee mountains. Robert Jennings Wells has just returned after being away and pursuing a professional career. His new love interest, Roma Livesay, is a woman who never left. **Click here to order**Brier Traveling by Jim Wayne Miller.
Louisville, Kentucky: White Fields Press, 1993. A sewn paperback poetry chapbook of eight un-numbered pages produced in a limited edition of one hundred copies. **Click here to order** Appalachia Inside Out. Robert J. Higgs, Ambrose Manning and Jim Wayne Miller, contributing editors. Knoxville, Tennessee: The University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Volume One, "Conflict and Change," is a 347-page anthology of Appalachian fiction and non-fiction organized roughly chronologically. Volume Two, "Culture and Custom," pages 349-753, also contains both fiction and non-fiction but is organized topically. **Click here to order** Copperhead Cane by Jim Wayne Miller. Middletown, Kentucky: Green River Writers and Greg Press, a 1995 reprint of the 1964 release with translations into the German by Jim Wayne Miller and Thomas Dorsett included along with the original English versions. **Click here to order** Newfound by Jim Wayne Miller. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, a 1996 edition of a 1990 release. Published this time as a trade novel, a coming-of-age story. 213 pages. **Click here to order** The Brier Poems by Jim Wayne Miller. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1997. This 159-page posthumous collection of Miller's poems using the "Brier" persona includes the complete text of The Mountains Have Come Closer and Brier, His Book as well as some poems from Brier Traveling and a few previously unpublished poems. It brings together in one volume the work for which Miller will probably be best remembered. **Click here to order**