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By Aila Boyd
aboyd@mainstreetnewspapers.com
Corrie Williamson, a Botetourt County native and graduate of James River High School, released her second book of poetry, “The River Where You Forgot My Name,” on Monday.
The book combines her voice with that of Julia Clark, the daughter of Colonel George Hancock and wife of General William Clark.
There are several points of comparison between Williamson and Clark. The first being that like Clark, Williamson was raised locally.
While on his infamous expedition with Meriwether Lewis, William Clark named the Judith River in Montana after Julia, who he had met in Fincastle.
“I’ve been fascinated by the story of Lewis and Clark ever since I was a little kid. They were Virginia boys who went off on this wild expedition,” Williamson said. “Julia was 16 when they got back. She married Clark and went with him out to St. Louis.”
Like the woman whose voice she embodies in the book, Williamson has a connection to Montana as well. She currently resides in Helena, Mont.
“I’ve been working on this second book ever since I moved to Montana,” she said. “It’s influenced by Montana, as well as Virginia.”
The book captures Williamson’s experience living in Montana through the topics of developments in technology and the collision of industry and development with the wilderness. The other thread of the book is the voice that she imagines for Julia, featuring her time growing up in Fincastle and then her move to St. Louis. “She’s thinking about the same things I’m thinking about in Montana, but 200 years earlier,” Williamson said.
Embodying Julia’s voice, Williamson said, was complicated. In order to feel more comfortable, she started researching Julia. “There’s not that much out there about Julia because she wasn’t famous. She married someone who became famous,” Williamson said. Clark’s letters to Julia were particularly helpful, Williamson said.
“I was as true to things as I could be. There’s a lot in the poems that I learned about through historical research, but I also wanted to use her perspective,” she said. “She was a real person who had a complicated and sad life. She died of breast cancer when she was 29.”
Williamson spent roughly five years working on the book. It was selected by Allison Joseph as the winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry’s 2018 Open Competition.
“I’d written and thought about Lewis and Clark for a really long time, then I became interested in Julia as a character because she was living far away from her home in a place that was very wild at the time. I realized that I was doing the same thing in Montana,” Williamson said.
Williamson, the daughter of former Buchanan District representative on the Botetourt County Board of Supervisors John Williamson, received an undergraduate degree in poetry and anthropology from the University of Virginia before earning a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry from the University of Arkansas. She currently teaches English at Carroll College in Montana.
Her first book, “Sweet Husk,” was the winner of the 2014 Perugia Press Prize and a finalist for the 2015 Virginia Library Award for Poetry.
“The River Where You Forgot My Name” can be ordered on the Southern Illinois University Press website at siupress.com.
