ASHLAND — The rugged hills and hollows of Greenup County don’t yield crops easily. Left to themselves, they would remain blanketed with trees — beautiful, perhaps, but wild. It takes work and dedication to turn untilled bottomland into a cornfield.
The human mind is like that. Genius doesn’t always spring out by itself. It, too requires work and dedication, even from a mind as fertile as that of the late Jesse Stuart.
Without the cultivating inspiration of a good teacher, Stuart might never have followed his muse and entire library shelves in the “S” section might be empty.
That teacher was Lena Wells Voiers, who coaxed Stuart, then a teenager discouraged at his poor showing in algebra, back to school. Stuart took heart from her confidence and went on to literary history.
On Saturday, Stuart and Voiers walked out of history and into the conference hall of the Jesse Stuart Foundation in downtown Ashland, channeled by Vanceburg attorney Lloyd Spear and retired teacher Carol Campbell of Concord. Spear and Campbell portrayed the writer and his teacher in a retrospective that touched on key events in their lives.
Drawing on original letters, pictures, documents and other writings, they recreated the intersection of two strong and lively intellects that nourished one another for a lifetime.
--The key moment when Voiers hiked over the hills to W Hollow to challenge Stuart to master his algebra — and planted in him the possibility that he might one day publish a book.
--The times Voiers popped up when Stuart was working his way through college and graduate school.
--The travels, Stuart and his wife along with Voiers and her husband, out West and across the Atlantic for the grand tour of Europe.
Watching the presentation were two people in a position to judge its accuracy: twin sisters Helen Smith and Mary Hampton, the nieces of Lena Wells Voiers.
“They get better every time,” Smith said.
Smith and Hampton thought of Voiers, who had no children of her own, as more of a grandmother than an aunt.
“She was important to us. She read to us and brought us things from Europe. She was interested in our lives and education,” Smith said. “She was just truly interested in people. She had the knack for encouraging kids to go on.”
Voiers gets much credit for guiding Stuart onto his literary path, said Carl Leming of Florence, a member of the foundation’s board of directors.
“Would he have become the person he became if she hadn’t gone out there and shamed him into going back to school? He had given up,” Leming said.
Spear and Campbell will repeat their presentation at the foundation, at an open house and celebration of Stuart’s birthday on Aug. 8.
MIKE JAMES can be reached at mjames@dailyindependent.com or at (606) 326-2652.
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