Ernie Stamper
Georgia Green Stamper is just a woman from a little old place called Natlee.
“Just.”
As if place can define us.
Stamper would tilt her head a bit to the side, steeple her fingers, and say, “Well, doesn’t it?”
Natlee, about 13 miles southeast of Owenton in Owen County, does define Stamper, as much as Ashland, Lexington and Georgetown—some of the other places she’s called home.
Place has a way of rounding edges and creating new ones. Place defines, refines, shapes, grows, stunts and sustains us. Place connects people and stories.
But Natlee is more than a small speck in the road; it’s the place that held seven generations of Stamper’s family. Seven generations hold lots of stories. Georgia’s daddy used to say, “From Natlee, you can go anywhere.” Stamper and her words did just that.
In January, Stamper’s latest book, Small Acreages: New and Collected Essays, released by Shadelandhouse Modern Press in May 2022, was longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
Nominees for the annual award must meet certain criteria. According to the PEN America website (pen.org), the category was open “for a seasoned writer whose collection of essays is an expansion of their corpus of work and preserves the distinguished art form of the essay.”
Stamper’s work was nominated by Virginia H. Underwood, the founder and publisher of the Lexington-based independent publishing house Shadelandhouse Modern Press. Underwood has known about the PEN America awards since her days at Berea College.
“I have had a personal and professional interest in issues and advocacy for freedom of expression and the literary arts throughout my life,” Underwood said. “After I founded Shadelandhouse Modern Press, I began to view the PEN America Literary Awards and the submission guidelines for each genre through the eyes of a publisher.”
Underwood actively looks for opportunities to put her authors forward for awards and recognition. She said that her press “is committed to the publication of authentic, artistic and compelling books for adults and young readers and to the discovery of outstanding new voices and the advancement of writers at all stages of their careers.”
In the spring of 2022, Underwood knew she had to submit Small Acreages for consideration.
“Immediately, my heart began to beat a bit faster because I sincerely believed Stamper and Small Acreages were a perfect match for the submission criteria for the literary award,” Underwood said.
She was right.
Out of 1,744 entries in 11 different categories, Stamper’s work garnered enough attention to be grouped with the other longlist nominees, including essayists Jessi Klein, Jhumpa Lahiri, Frances Mayes, Peter Orner, Suzanne Roberts, David Sedaris, Laurie Stone, Judith Thurman and Alison Townsend.
Good company for a woman from a little old place like Natlee.
In the Place We Find Words
The daughter of a science teacher and a farmer, Stamper wrote poetry during high school and college. At Transylvania University, she reached what she calls an epiphany moment.
“One of my problems as a writer is that I’m a much better reader than I am a writer. I’m a much better discerning critic than I am a writer,” she explained. “I was reading something wonderful by somebody wonderful in one of my classes, and I thought, ‘Well, what’s the point? I can’t do this.’ ”
If she couldn’t write good poetry, she decided, she wouldn’t write poetry. Stamper turned to fiction. Then came marriage to a husband whose “intense career took him literally all the way around the world” and three children whom she adores.
During those years, Stamper wrote but never seemed to be happy with the results. “As my friends say: I didn’t sit in the chair long enough to get it to a better place,” she admitted.
After what she described as “a whole big chunk of life,” Stamper and her husband, Ernie, moved back to central Kentucky when Ernie took a position at Georgetown College.
At the college, it was traditional for sitting presidents to open their home for tea and fellowship. The president at that time was Dr. William H. Crouch Jr. He and his wife, Jan, hosted one such event, where Stamper chatted with Dr. Gwen Curry, a longtime professor in Georgetown’s English Department.
“All of a sudden, these words came out of my mouth, and I still can’t hardly believe I had the gall to ask her this. I just said to her, ‘Would you like to form a writing group with me?’ Me! Who had never written anything much to speak of,” Stamper recalled. “And without missing a beat, she said she would love to and would have it at her house.”
Curry rounded up three or four other women writers, one of whom was Kentucky poet Sherry Chandler. Chandler, also from Owen County, introduced Stamper to the writing community at Lexington’s Carnegie Center. Through the Carnegie Center, Stamper rubbed literary elbows with accomplished author Leatha Kendrick, who would become Stamper’s mentor and friend.
But it was listening to Tony Crunk, another Kentucky native, speak on the importance of place and telling the stories of that place that snagged Stamper’s heart and solidified a purposeful storytelling in her.
“[Crunk] said, ‘It’s a good thing to write from a sense of place, and no one else is going to write about your place if you don’t do it,” Stamper recalled.
To her, the timing of the message was perfect.
Stamper’s mother was in declining health and had limited mobility. Being an only child, Stamper spent the time necessary to meet her mother’s needs. And she listened.
“I think there’s a tendency of many people, once they get a little older, they want to go back through and reflect on their lives,” Stamper said. “Mother certainly did. She wanted to go back through everything that ever happened.”
Those stories became gifts that eventually were published in the Owen County News-Herald in a column titled “Stamper: On My Mind.”
The stories took off. It turned out that people loved hearing about a little old place called Natlee and the people who lived, loved, worked and died there.
At around the same time, Stamper approached public radio station WUKY in Lexington. She read her work, and the station broadcast it in the local time slot on “Morning Edition” and again in the local afternoon time slot on “All Things Considered.”
Her first collection of essays, You Can Go Anywhere: From the Crossroads of the World, was published in 2008 by Wind Publications. Her second collection, Butter in the Morning: Pieces of a Kentucky Life, also published by Wind, followed in 2012.
“I have been bold. And lucky. And at the same time, I’m very insecure as a writer,” Stamper admitted. “It’s hard to write. People who say writing is easy—I’m convinced they only write first drafts. If you really write and revise something to the point of completion, it’s hard.”
From Retelling Stories to Finding a Personal Voice
What began as a way to preserve her mother’s stories has not only given Stamper a way to speak about her own small acreages, it also has connected her acreages to stories of lands far from here. People from all across North America write to tell her how one of her characters sounded just like a member of their own family. One letter writer allows herself to read only one story a night because she doesn’t want the book to end.
“Different readers take different things from the same words, and it may not be the message I think I’m sending,” Stamper said. “You can’t just tell a cute story. What it comes down to is, why is it important that I remember this story? I think families in Kentucky—families in all areas of the country or the world—tend to repeat stories across several generations. Why? You start thinking about it; you finally get to it.”
In the end, it’s the story that resonates with readers. The story of place and people and life.
While Small Acreages didn’t make it past the longlist to the finals, Stamper still considered the longlist nomination a win.
“It’s a win for older writers. It’s a win for independent presses and independent publishers. It’s a win for Kentucky regional writers,” Stamper said. “I think it could be an inspiration for many people who are quietly writing, working away in their home office or their basement on a project.”
It’s a win for little old places like Natlee and for every story just waiting to be told.