Their project would illuminate rural Appalachian traditions and, as it expanded, augment the creation of a pioneer myth of Appalachia. While some students recorded the interviews, others joined in whatever skill was being demonstrated, like how to make soap or how to use a broad axe. Their task was to document a skill or craft. The students traveled to remote areas, carrying their notepads, microphones, cameras, and recorders. Wigginton encouraged this approach because, as he wrote in the introduction of the first book, traditions practiced by older rural people-like planting by the signs-were soon to pass from collective memory. Together, they decided that the magazine would focus on stories based on interviews with their grandparents and other elders in the community. The students voted to call the work “foxfire” after the bioluminescent fungi that grows on decaying trees and emits a blue-green light in the dark. The book collated the articles from the student-run magazine, a literary project begun in 1966 following a discussion in Wigginton’s English class. It has also been adapted into a Broadway production and television movie. Wigginton had connections to a New York publishing house that found the project appealing and published The Foxfire Book, the first in a series of twelve that quickly became a bestseller, selling more than two million copies over a decade. He helped them edit and publish the interviews in the Foxfire Magazine, and it became a local hit. They did so as part of a school project their teacher Eliot Wigginton started. In 1966, thirty or so tenth-grade students from Rabun County, Georgia (population about eight thousand), set out to document the lives of elders in their community. Published in 1972, The Foxfire Book carried the reader into the mountains of North Georgia, near the East Tennessee hills where my parents grew up and where I was raised. They were his wellworn Bible How I Made a Million Dollars in Mail Order, and You Can Too and The Foxfire Book. I grew up in a house full of books, three of which belonged to my dad.
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