Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Verna Slone of Knott, Kentucky
On a hillside above Troublesome Creek and Caney Creek, visitors once followed a narrow road to a modest house outside Pippa Passes. Inside they often found an elderly woman in a simple dress, hair pulled back, a quilt over her knees and a cloth doll nearby. They came from down the creek and from far beyond Kentucky, some with her books in hand, others just hoping to hear stories. The woman on that porch was Verna Mae Slone of Knott County, who spent most of her life as a homemaker, quilter, and mother of five sons before becoming one of the most widely read Appalachian storytellers of the late twentieth century.
Slone’s late life as an author grew out of anger and love at the same time. She said plainly that she had “read and heard lies and half-truths about our mountain folks” and wanted to set the record straight by writing about the people she knew on Caney Creek. Her books, interviews, quilts, and dolls form a body of work that still shapes how teachers, students, and neighbors think about eastern Kentucky and the families who have lived there for generations.
A childhood on Caney Creek
Verna Mae Slone was born in Knott County on October 9, 1914, the daughter of Isom B. “Kitteneye” Slone and Sarah Owens Slone. She arrived into a joy that turned quickly to grief. Her mother died a few weeks after Verna Mae’s birth, and the baby was taken in and raised largely by her older sister Lorenda in the tight world of kin and holler neighbors that ringed Caney Creek near the little town of Hindman and, later, Pippa Passes.
In her memoir What My Heart Wants to Tell, Slone looked back on that world as the tenth generation of her family to live in eastern Kentucky. She told stories about how her father Kitteneye courted her mother, about hard winters, cornfields on steep hills, and the long walk to school along the creek. She wrote those stories to honor a father who had raised children alone after tragedy and to capture a way of life that she believed was already starting to pass from everyday memory.
Those early chapters of her life were also marked by work. Like many mountain children in the early twentieth century, Slone left school before finishing high school so she could help her family. Later she married Willie Slone and moved only a short distance from where she had been born. Together they raised five sons in a house that was full of music, chores, visitors, and eventually the dolls and quilts that would become her signature.
Learning to listen and to talk
Before she ever thought of being an author, Slone understood herself as a listener and as someone who loved the sound of her neighbors’ talk. In later years she would say that the older people around Caney Creek were “wonderful story tellers” whose turns of phrase brought humor and character into even the plainest tale.
Her book How We Talked grew directly out of that listening. It is part glossary and part memoir, a collection of mountain expressions, children’s rhymes, bits of folk wisdom, and stories that show how people around Caney Creek used language to make sense of weather, sickness, courtship, and hard times. Slone treated speech as history in its own right. By writing down sayings that she had first heard as a girl, she preserved a living record of Appalachian English at a moment when radio, television, and out migration were changing how people spoke.
In the companion volume Common Folks, later reissued together with How We Talked, she sketched short portraits of neighbors and kin, from stubborn old-timers to playful children and quiet workers whose names seldom appeared in print but whose lives filled the hollers around Caney Creek. The tone is affectionate, but it also insists that so called “ordinary” people deserve the same careful attention that novelists have long given to the wealthy and powerful.
Finding a voice on the page after sixty
Slone did not become a published author until she was past sixty. According to friends and family, she began to write in longhand at her kitchen table, filling tablets with stories about her father and her childhood while still keeping house and piecing quilts.
Those handwritten pages eventually became What My Heart Wants to Tell, first published in 1979. The book is part family history and part local chronicle, centered on Kitteneye Slone and on the hills and bottomland of Caney Creek. University Press of Kentucky later reissued it, and the book found a wide readership among both local people and outsiders who wanted to understand Appalachian life from the inside rather than from the perspective of visiting reporters or social workers.
Slone followed that memoir with the novel Rennie’s Way, published in the mid 1990s. Set in a 1920s and 1930s eastern Kentucky community closely modeled on her home area, the novel fictionalizes the sort of everyday choices and pressures she had described in her first book. The characters in Rennie’s Way wrestle with poverty, family loyalty, and the coming of wage work, yet the book is rooted more in voice and place than in big plot twists. It reads like the spoken stories that once flowed across her porch.
By the 1980s and 1990s, Slone’s work was starting to appear in anthologies that helped carry Appalachian writing into college classrooms. Selections from What My Heart Wants to Tell were included in Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia and in The Kentucky Anthology: Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State, along with a short autobiographical sketch she wrote about her own life. These pieces brought her voice to readers who might never travel to Knott County but who were beginning to study the region’s literature in a serious way.
Her short piece “Home at Last,” printed in Appalachian Heritage, helped scholars think about what it meant for mountain writers to “reclaim place,” that is, to write about Appalachia as home rather than as a problem to be solved.
Quilts, dolls, and the work of her hands
Even as she became better known for her books, Slone remained a quilter and dollmaker whose work traveled through the region in a quieter way. Over the course of her life she is said to have made more than 1,800 quilts and thousands of handmade cloth dolls, many of which went to family, neighbors, and visitors.
Fifteen of her quilts now hang at Hindman Settlement School, only a few miles from where she grew up. They are physical primary sources for her sense of color and pattern. In interviews, Slone compared quilts to life itself, saying that each person is given scraps and that the meaning comes from how one chooses to piece them together.
Her cloth dolls, with their painted or stitched faces and plain dresses, also carried her stories. Some were donated to Hindman, where they became part of the school’s collections. When a devastating flood swept through the Troublesome Creek valley in July 2022 and filled the Hindman campus with water and mud, volunteers and staff sifted through the archives, rescuing photographs, letters, and artifacts. Among the items that survived were dolls made by Verna Mae Slone, saved and laid out to dry along with soaked papers and portraits. Their survival, noted by writer Silas House in an essay about the flood, became part of a newer story about what can and cannot be washed away in Appalachian communities.
Oral histories and the sound of her own voice
Because Slone lived much of her life in the age of tape recorders and video cameras, her legacy includes not only printed pages and textiles but also recordings of her own voice. The Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky holds an interview with her in the “Appalachia: Coal Mining” oral history project, in which she talks about growing up in a coalfield county, raising a family, and writing.
Another set of interviews is preserved in the Dianne Watkins (later Winkler) collection at Western Kentucky University’s Manuscripts and Folklife Archives. The finding aid describes multiple conversations in which Slone recounts family stories and reflects on how her work took shape. Watkins also published “A Visit with Verna Mae Slone” in Appalachian Heritage in 1989, a portrait that mixes interview and observation and captures Slone as a neighbor and storyteller rather than as a distant literary figure.
A one minute video profile produced by Michael Breeding Media for the Kentucky Women Remembered and Dreamers & Doers projects offers a brief moving image of Slone in later life. In the longer documentary Dreamers & Doers: Voices of Kentucky Women, she appears alongside suffragists, politicians, teachers, and artists as one of the women whose work reshaped Kentucky culture in the twentieth century.
Together, these recordings are invaluable primary sources. They let listeners hear her accent, pacing, and humor, and they also show how she understood her own writing in relation to Caney Creek and to the wider world.
Speaking back to stereotypes
Slone always insisted that she started writing because she was tired of how outsiders talked about mountain people. She had grown up during the years when “hillbilly” jokes, missionary reports, and sociological studies often described eastern Kentucky as backward, ignorant, or helpless. In the note that opens What My Heart Wants to Tell, she explained that she began her memoir after hearing and reading so many distorted accounts.
Her books answer those stories in two ways. First, they preserve her father’s life and the lives of neighbors in detail, presenting them as complex individuals with faults and virtues rather than as caricatures. Second, they describe the beauty of the hills and hollers alongside the hardship, insisting that love for place and people belongs in any honest accounting of the region.
Scholars and teachers of Appalachian studies took note. In a roundtable published in Appalachian Journal on teaching Appalachian studies, educators pointed to Slone’s work as a way to introduce students to regional speech and to everyday mountain life without relying on the sensational stories that sometimes dominate the media. Bibliographies of Appalachian women’s writing also began to list Watkins’s article on Slone and her books as key texts for understanding women’s voices from the coalfields.
In recent years writers and activists have invoked Slone as an example of “telling one’s own story” in response to newer stereotypes, including those popularized by national bestsellers that present Appalachia mainly as a place of dysfunction. Essays like “Hillbilly Strong, not a Hillbilly Elegy” and other local reflections draw on neighborly memories of Slone to argue that the region is full of people who have always spoken for themselves when given the chance.
Honors and a Knott County legacy
By the time of her death on January 5, 2009, Slone had become widely known in eastern Kentucky and beyond as an author, quilter, and dollmaker. She died in Hindman at the age of ninety four and was buried in Slone Cemetery, not far from the creek that had shaped so much of her work.
The Commonwealth of Kentucky soon recognized her contributions. In 2010 she was added to the Kentucky Women Remembered exhibit at the state capitol, where a watercolor portrait shows her surrounded by books and patchwork. The Kentucky Women’s History Project describes her as a source of pride for the people of Appalachia and especially for the community of Pippa Passes, honoring both her writing and her craftwork.
Her inclusion in the Dreamers & Doers documentary further cemented her place in the story of Kentucky women whose achievements changed their communities. Meanwhile, the quilts and dolls preserved at Hindman Settlement School, the oral histories at the Nunn Center and Western Kentucky University, and the continued circulation of her books and anthology selections mean that new generations keep discovering her stories.
For readers and researchers, Slone’s life offers several kinds of primary sources at once. Her memoir and novels present one woman’s view of a Knott County community across the first three quarters of the twentieth century. Her oral history interviews capture the sound of that community in her own voice. Her quilts and dolls give physical form to the creativity that ran alongside her writing. And the tributes written after her death, from newspaper obituaries to blog posts and encyclopedia entries, show how neighbors and editors alike came to see her as a cultural chronicler who had turned a small creek into a place known far beyond its banks.
On that hillside above Caney Creek, the quilts have long since been folded and some of the dolls have found new homes. Yet in classrooms, book clubs, and family living rooms, people still open What My Heart Wants to Tell and hear Slone’s steady voice. For a woman who began telling her story late in life, she has become one of the clearest examples of an Appalachian writer who insisted that the people of her home place were worth writing about, worth listening to, and worth remembering.
Sources & Further Reading
Slone, Verna Mae. What My Heart Wants to Tell. New York: New Republic Books, 1979. Reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813101743/what-my-heart-wants-to-tell/ The University Press of Kentucky+1
Slone, Verna Mae. Rennie’s Way. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813118550/rennies-way/ The University Press of Kentucky+1
Slone, Verna Mae. How We Talked and Common Folks. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813192093/how-we-talked-and-common-folks/ The University Press of Kentucky+1
Slone, Verna Mae. “From What My Heart Wants to Tell.” In Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia, edited by Sandra L. Ballard and Patricia L. Hudson, 570–572. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jcf21 JSTOR+1
Slone, Verna Mae. “Verna Mae Slone: (October 9, 1914– ).” In Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia, edited by Sandra L. Ballard and Patricia L. Hudson, 570–573. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jcf21 Wikipedia+1
Slone, Verna Mae. “Verna Mae Slone.” In The Kentucky Anthology: Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State, edited by Wade Hall, 612–615. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813123769/the-kentucky-anthology/ The University Press of Kentucky+1
Slone, Verna Mae. “Home at Last.” Appalachian Heritage 13, no. 2 (1985): 71–73. https://digitalcommons.eku.edu/appalachianheritage/ Appalachianhistorian.org
Slone, Verna Mae. “I Guess I Will Just Have to Talk Sarah into Being Willin’.” Excerpt from What My Heart Wants to Tell, reprinted at AppalachianHistory.net, 2016. https://www.appalachianhistory.net/ facebook.com
“Interview with Verna Mae Slone, [n.d.].” Appalachia: Coal Mining Oral History Project. Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries. Accession 1993OH322 APP 391. https://kentuckyoralhistory.net/ark:/16417/xt7v154drd78 Kentucky Oral History+1
“Interview with Verna Mae Slone, [n.d.].” Appalachia: Women of Coal Oral History Project. Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries. https://kentuckyoralhistory.net/ Legacy
“Verna Mae Slone Interviews, Dianne Watkins (Winkler) Collection, SC 2141.” Manuscripts & Folklife Archives, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/ facebook.com
Watkins, Dianne. “A Visit with Verna Mae Slone.” Appalachian Heritage 17, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 22–27. Available via Appalachian Review / Appalachian Heritage archives and JSTOR. https://journals.scholarsportal.info/browse/19405081/v17i0001 Scholars Portal Journals+1
“Verna Mae Slone.” Kentucky Women’s History Project, Kentucky Women Remembered. Biographical profile. https://kywomenshistoryproject.com/kentuckywomenrememberedexhibit/ Kentucky Women’s History Project+1
“KENTUCKY WOMEN REMEMBERED EXHIBIT (page 1).” Kentucky Women’s History Project. Overview of the capitol watercolor portrait exhibit including Verna Mae Slone as a 2010 honoree. https://kywomenshistoryproject.com/kentuckywomenrememberedexhibit/ Kentucky Women’s History Project+1
“Kentucky Women Remembered.” Kentucky Women Remembered (state capitol exhibit entry, with summary line for Verna Mae Slone). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky_Women_Remembered Wikipedia
Michael Breeding Media. “Verna Mae Slone.” Short video profile (Kentucky Women Remembered / Dreamers & Doers project). Vimeo, 2015. https://vimeo.com/ Kentucky Women’s History Project
Dreamers & Doers: Voices of Kentucky Women. Documentary film. Michael Breeding Media for the Kentucky Commission on Women, 2015. See KET and Kentucky Commission on Women press materials. https://ket.org/pressroom/release/new-documentary-celebrates-accomplishments-rich-history-of-kentucky-women/ KET+1
“Asheville’s Smith-McDowell House Museum Presents Women of Appalachia.” Exhibit coverage quoting Verna Mae Slone on “lies and half-truths” written about mountain people. Asheville.com Arts. https://www.asheville.com/ facebook.com
House, Silas. “Pulled from the Flood.” Garden & Gun, August 3, 2022. Essay on the 2022 Hindman flood that notes dolls made by Verna Mae Slone surviving at Hindman Settlement School. https://gardenandgun.com/ OUP Academic
“Verna Mae Slone (1914–2009).” Find A Grave memorial, Slone Cemetery, Knott County, Kentucky. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/ DOI
Eblen, Tom. “Verna Slone Obituary: Kentucky Author, Quilter and Dollmaker.” Lexington Herald-Leader, January 5–6, 2009; reprinted at Legacy.com. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/kentucky/name/verna-slone-obituary?pid=122250552 Legacy
“Obituary Information for Verna Mae Slone.” Hindman Funeral Services, Hindman, Kentucky, January 5, 2009. https://www.hindmanfuneralservices.com/obituaries/Verna-Mae-Slone?obId=1567501 Hindman Funeral Services
“RIP: Verna Mae Slone, Writer, Homemaker, Cultural Chronicler.” Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues blog, January 6, 2009. https://irjci.blogspot.com/2009/01/verna-mae-slone-appalachian-writer-dies.html The Rural Blog
Ballard, Sandra L., and Patricia L. Hudson, eds. Writing Appalachia: An Anthology. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2020. Includes biographical note “Verna Mae Slone: 1914–2009.” https://www.kentuckypress.com/ facebook.com
Hamm, Mary Margo. Appalachian Women: An Annotated Bibliography. ERIC Document ED370754, 1994. Includes annotated entry for Dianne Watkins, “A Visit with Verna Mae Slone.” https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED370754.pdf ERIC+1
Farr, Sidney Saylor. Appalachian Women: An Annotated Bibliography. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813152479/appalachian-women/ The University Press of Kentucky
Hayslette, Sandra, Chad Berry, Mark Banker, Steve Fisher, and Roberta T. Herrin. “A Conversation about Teaching Appalachian Studies.” Appalachian Journal 29, no. 3 (2002): 232–252. References use of Verna Mae Slone’s work in the classroom. https://appalachianjournal.appstate.edu/ Appalachian History+1
“Hillbilly Strong, Not a Hillbilly Elegy.” The Holler (online magazine), c. 2010s. Reflective essay on eastern Kentucky that invokes Verna Mae Slone as a neighbor and model of telling one’s own story. https://www.theholler.org/ The Holler+1
“Verna Mae Slone.” Wikipedia entry summarizing her life as an Appalachian author, quilter, and dollmaker from Knott County, with references to her books, quilts at Hindman Settlement School, and state recognition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verna_Mae_Slone Wikipedia
Author Note: As a historian and Appalachian storyteller, I wrote this piece to gather Verna Mae Slone’s words, quilts, and interviews in one place. I hope it helps you meet her first as a neighbor from Knott County and only afterward as a name in anthologies and exhibits.