Essay Questions

How do the author's poems allow the reader to become entrenched in the situation? What rhetorical devices are used to pull the reader in?

The focus of the poems were the 1920 and 1921 labor battles that took place in West Virginia, primarily the coal workers and their families fighting against the company bosses for better wages, safer working conditions, the right to form a union, and the ability to create their own town. Although these are all concepts that the modern reader would be familiar with, they are not ideas or struggles that draw the reader in. What really draws the reader into the poems and their message is the usage of pathos, or appeal to emotion. Diane G. Fisher vividly describes the horrific tragedies coal families had to go to. From men being blown apart, to children not being able to recognize their burnt dad, to families being kicked out of their homes because their husband was left injured, the author paints a scene that creates empathy between the reader and the families who are suffering, allowing them to sympathize with their cause and entrench them in the plot of the book.

Why do you think the author chose to write the story in poems? How would it have been different from a traditional novel?

An important aspect of the book was that it was composed of various poems. Initially, a reader might expect a story of a single family or a single individual and his hardships with the coal industry. However, by laying it out into different poems, Diane G. Fisher is able to change the context entirely. What it does is that it isolates and puts heavy emphasis on the short story being told in the poem. Readers are more likely to engage in the struggles of that specific family and understand the pain they are going through. Another reason the author Diane G. Fisher might have chooses to wrote the story in a series of poems is that it allows the author to include numerous families and individuals in her story, without seeming chaotic and unorganized. This not only improves the function of her novel, but it allows her to essentially create more "evidence" for her cause and persuade the reader to continue flipping the pages of Kettle Bottom.

Does the author use history in a significant way? What is the purpose of the historical allusions, despite the book being fictional?

The author Diane G. Fisher does put extra emphasis on the history of the 1920 and 1921 West Virginia labor battles in the coal industry. The author even included a little note at the beginning of the book to help explain the significance of what was taking place and the history behind it. She states, "Subsistence wages, the unwillingness of coal operators to slow production for safety reasons, their intransigence with regard to the rights of the miners to organize—these conditions made enemies of the miners and the operators. The situation was aggravated by the organization of life in the camps, which the companies controlled in every respect." She even explains in more detail and talks about how the companies basically create the towns because they are in charge of the houses that the families live in, they are in charge of food and trade, they are in charge of bringing in the doctor to help any coal workers, and they are even in charge of things such as paying the priest and building the church. This might seem ludicrous to the reader but the reality of these historical allusions that the author uses strikes the reader into realizing the tragedy of the situation. So the purpose of these historical allusions was to create a strong backbone and background for the book for which the author can build off of and focus on creating poems without having to worry about what goes behind them. Another purpose is that it wakes the reader from their mental slumber by shocking them with the reality that the events the poems revolve around are based in fact and history.