Ashleigh Bryant Phillips: Southern Storyteller

“Perhaps I was never meant to exist at all, but if I hadn’t, a number of my created beings would have been denied their passionate existence.”

– Tennessee Williams

Ashleigh Bryant Phillips isn’t exactly a stranger. She’s a fellow TA in my pedagogy class in UNC-Wilmington’s MFA program. What I first notice about Ashleigh is that she’s got this endearing southern accent and style, the way she says “real good” instead of “really good.” Of course she knows better grammatically, but she talks the way she talks. With white-blonde hair but some southern gothic darkness in her, Ashleigh seems like Alice in Wonderland meets Flannery O’Connor.

Ashleigh hails from Woodland, North Carolina, a rural area with a population of about 600. She didn’t know a “stranger” until she went to Meredith College in Raleigh, NC. She speaks slowly and liltingly, noting, “Southerners listen when you talk because they want to hear what you have to say. They don’t interrupt.”

I find myself self-consciously shedding my own bad habit of blabbering and interrupting to listen, and Ashleigh is worthy of the voice recorder sitting in front of us. She never uses the phrase “oral tradition” but speaks in depth of storytelling, of histories passed down from generation to generation, and this is clearly how she got her start. It was a natural progression from listener to recorder to creator and teller.

Ashleigh speaks of how life in Woodland differs from life outside:

“Everybody tells stories because everybody is so concerned with their neighbors and their church and the people around them in their community, so in a sense, when you go to visit somebody, you have to be able to tell them how you’re doing and how your work is doing and how your house is doing and you’re expected to tell these things. Already, everybody in some sense is a storyteller.

When your immediate life is only the tri-county area, you’re not so concerned about Kierkegaard, Carl Jung, or talking about the Andes or the Gobi Desert. Talking about those things isn’t something you’re going to find in rural life. You’re talking about when the rain is going to come.”

But these conversations are immediately meaningful; they connect one person to another and to the entire community, a community of intertwined stories.

Q: So how’d you become a writer? How’d you get started?

A: So, I didn’t grow up in a literary household. The only books that were read were Christian romance novels by my aunts. And the Bible of course. I got my first Bible when I was five for Christmas from my aunt and uncle. And I still use it to this day. But when I was in third grade my aunt and uncle took me and my sister to the mountains and we went to the Cherokee Indian Reservation and it was my first time seeing the mountains, first time being submerged in a totally different culture, and there is this outdoor musical that they do called “Unto These Hills” and it tells the history of the Trail of Tears and the Cherokee Nation and the whole reason why there’s a Cherokee Indian reservation in North Carolina.”

According to the play, one man (Junaluska) refuses to leave his land and family. After sacrificing himself and his sons, his people are allowed to stay. This was the first play Ashleigh ever saw, and it ignited something in her.

“I remember coming home and feeling very overwhelmed by the whole experience and I didn’t know, I didn’t know… what to do about it. I felt that there were these things that were happening that I couldn’t tell other people ‘cause nobody was gonna get what I was saying. No one was gonna understand me. I couldn’t talk to my sister about it, you know, what am I gonna tell my mama?

I just wrote about how I felt when I was there and how I wanted to go back someday. How big the mountains were …

And I wrote it on a little piece of paper and I put it in an envelope and I put it in my desk and I didn’t tell anybody about it. Because no one, no one did that. First of all, no one read, and no one wrote. And I just continued doing that as I saw fit and then in sixth grade one of my aunts gave me a diary.”

Although Ashleigh’s left Woodland, she refuses to let go of her heritage.

“I don’t need to hide my accent. I shouldn’t be ashamed of being a southerner.”

A high school French teacher, Mr. Dickens (who had studied at UNC Chapel Hill as a Morehead scholar but returned back to farm cotton), once told Ashleigh’s class, “Y’all don’t understand it now, but there’s this connection to the land, it’s almost—magical. It’s almost, this mystical idea that if you get too far from it, you feel strange. And when you return to it, you feel this great strength.”

Upon returning to Woodland, Ashleigh understands this sentiment.

“When I would drive home and see the flat stretch of fields that go on and on and on forever and you know that beyond that is only these woods that go on and on and on forever—that expanse, that space! I did feel strength.

My family before me, they sacrificed everything for their family, for the land, for the community, and they worked the same land that I grew up on. And they’re still working it now. Their blood and sweat is down mixed into it. I ate watermelons that came out of that dirt. And they were buried in that dirt. It’s like this great intermixing. So it does make sense in some beautiful way that there is this magical connection.

Clyde Edgerton was telling me that all of his life, this writer Tim McLaurin carried around a little bag of dirt from his family farm. And when they put him in the casket, that’s what he was buried with. All of that is who I am, so it’s in my writing—whether or not I want it to be.”

Although Ashleigh doesn’t continue to work the family’s land like some of her other relatives, she does believe her work serves her family.

“I’m attempting to preserve all of those voices and places and people in the best way that I can. Some people don’t have the choice to do for themselves. All the people before me were storytellers, but maybe there was one that if they didn’t have to be in the field from dawn until dusk, if they were able to read and write, what would they have written? There’s this sense that I’m doing it for my family that couldn’t do it before me. I’m trying to save this place and all its nuances because they didn’t have the choice or the opportunity.”

Q: So where’s your inspiration to write come from now?

A: Curiosity. I want to know why people do what they do. My favorite pieces of literature, my favorite experiences in life as well, are when my limits of compassion have been stretched to a point I didn’t know that they could go to and I realize that there’s more room for love that you can have towards another person. Someone who you never thought you could have compassion for.”

To Ashleigh, it isn’t a writer’s job to write a happy story or to write sentimental characters. It’s not a writer’s job to directly moralize, and there’s no responsibility to “shine a good light” on anyone.

“I wanna shed a “real light” in writing, because it’s in the real moments where you have the opportunity to learn so much about humanity! I think literature is the study of life. It’s not about how beautifully you can string a couple of words together. That’s not it for me. It’s how can I capture and show something so real to the best of my abilities so that when someone is done reading, they feel something, and they remember forever how that feels.”

“The purpose of every good piece of art, whether it’s food or film or a blanket, is it’s supposed to make someone feel something.”

Here’s an excerpt from a piece Ashleigh started during our pedagogy class’ discussion of the “good light” versus Ashleigh’s preferred “real light”:

I look out across the yard and tell myself that not all life is bad. There is good that happens for me. Jason’s been dead five years now. Five years ago I found him hangin’ in the shed. I picked him up to help him from choking, but he was too heavy. He was already dead. Five years ago today I found him. And I can’t help on days like this to think back at all the other things that have happened to me in my life. I think back on them all and cry for all that I’ve lost.

“I wanted to say this is not a happy story, and it’s okay. I think you can only find real happiness and strength and character and who you are through times of immense sadness or loneliness or struggle.

From there, the speaker recounts other bad things that’ve happened, how she’s gone on to question God, but still in the end she finds strength. The very first sentence is—I tell myself that not all life is bad! She believes it through all the awful things she’s been through. She still has her faith in God to pull her through. That’s an interesting idea in itself.”

Ashleigh understands that life brings with it suffering, but she sees the importance, even necessity, of living through the worst of times.

“I think that life is like a Thomas Hardy novel, this thing you have no control of, this awful thing you don’t have control of happens. And if it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will. But don’t be afraid of it because you’re going to be better because of it.”

…

Ashleigh doesn’t believe in the cooped up author or the reclusive MFA program. Rather, she aims to be involved in Wilmington’s community. She volunteers with the MFA Reading Crew which coordinates free readings throughout the year as opportunities for people who are in the graduate program to read in the downtown Wilmington area. She wants to “expand our literary bubble”—a lot of people in Wilmington know there’s an MFA program, but there’s too little community interaction. Connecting the program to the community, to open us up, is one of Ashleigh’s goals.

The next reading will be Thursday, October 29th at Ironclad Brewery with two fiction, two nonfiction, and two poetry readers. It’s an all-ages event with a costume contest.

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