Magazine and educational project. In 1966 Eliot Wigginton began teaching ninth- and
tenth-grade English at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, a private religiously oriented
institution in the Appalachian Mountains of northwestern Georgia. His failure to interest
students in the conventional curriculum encouraged him to seek new pedagogical
methods. Publishing a magazine appealed to the students, who determined that at least
part of its subject matter would involve the region’s folkways, particularly those that seemed to be in danger of disappearing. Consequently, the first issue of Foxfire, which
appeared in 1967 and sold out of two 600-copy printings, supplemented the standard fare
of student-published literary magazines with material on local folk beliefs and traditional
remedies. These were illustrated with photographs and drawings, the entire production
being the work of students under Wigginton’s direction.
The local reception of the first issue of Foxfire encouraged Wigginton and his students
to plan a second. Gradually, short articles on such subjects as soap making, planting by
the signs, butter churning, and ghost stories dominated the contents of the magazine,
which within a year had become a quarterly. Special issues on topics such as the “oldtime religion” and logcabin building also appeared. Several other special issues of
Foxfire have surveyed the history and culture of mountain communities near Rabun Gap.
Publicity by the local and state press, as well as awards from state education associations,
resulted in notices in national newspapers and magazines, and by 1970 Foxfire had
achieved considerable recognition. Wigginton emphasized student involvement in every
stage of the magazine’s production and distribution: researching (usually through
interviews) and writing the articles, editing, developing layouts, soliciting subscribers,
and determining costs, for example.
In 1972 Wigginton edited the first anthology of material from Foxfire. The
commercial success of The Foxfire Book (with more than two million copies sold)
contributed to public awareness of the magazine and helped ensure the financial stability
of the Southern Highlands Literary Fund (later the Foxfire Fund), the organizational base
that Wigginton had developed for his project. Moreover, Foxfire’s reputation attracted
the attention of the Washington-based Institutional Development and Economic Affairs
Service (IDEAS), which sought funding to encourage other schools from around the
country to undertake similar programs that allowed highschool students to write pieces,
usually based on interviews with family members and neighbors, about local history and
folklore. The first Foxfire-inspired magazine started under the auspices of IDEAS was
Hoyekiya, published by Lakota students on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
Other projects that have imitated Foxfire include Loblolly (Gary, Texas), Salt
(Kennebunkport, Maine), and Nanih Wayah (Neshoba County, Mississippi), all of which
emphasized regional culture. In terms of visibility, among die most successful of
Foxfire’s imitators has been Bittersweet, begun in 1973 by Ellen Gray Massey in
Lebanon, Missouri. Two anthologies of material from this Ozark-oriented student
magazine have been published (cf. Massey 1978).
The successes of Foxfire and The Foxftre Book have also generated a considerable
publishing phenomenon. By the mid-1990s, the original anthology had been followed by
nine other collections of material originally published in the magazine, most edited by
Wigginton; a cookbook featuring Appalachian foodways; a volume on Christmas
customs; a book on toys and games from the region; a biographical study of Aunt Arie
Carpenter, one of the principal sources from whom Wigginton’s early students collected
their information on Appalachian folkways; and several books by Wigginton detailing his
pedagogical philosophy and methodology (Wigginton 1975, 1985). Some of these were
originally published locally by the Foxfire Press and reprinted by national presses. For a
time, Foxfire had its own record label, and the Foxfire String Band, comprised of student
musicians, appeared on the Grand Ole Opry and at the Knoxville, Tennessee, World’s
Fair. Moreover, Foxfire has inspired a play of the same name written by fantasy novelist Susan Mary Cooper and actor Hume Cronyn. The play opened in New York City in 1983
with Cronyn and Jessica Tandy heading the cast.
Since becoming aware of Wigginton’s project, academic folklorists have had mixed
feelings about Foxfire. On one hand, many have recognized that having high-school
students collect folklore provides rich possibilities both for die students, who thereby
have the opportunity to learn more about their own heritages, and for the study of
folklore, which may benefit from the data so collected. Wigginton’s students, for instance, have documented the material
culture of their community, a complement to the record of folksong and folk narrative
that folklore collectors have been making in the Appalachians for almost a century.
Moreover, the positive reputation of Foxfire has contributed to an educational climate to which folklorists involved in public-sector work have responded. For example, programs
funded in part by local, state, and federal arts councils, whose support may have been
easier to obtain because of the publicity surrounding Foxfire, have brought tradition
bearers into classrooms to demonstrate their skills.
At the same time, though, many folklorists deplored the antiquarian emphasis in
Foxfire, which seems to equate folklore exclusively with a way of life that is growing
increasingly obsolete. Though Wigginton’s students often did not even use the term
“folklore” to refer to what they were gathering from their neighbors, reviewers of the
magazine and the anthologies have usually identified the publications’ contents as
folklore, thus reinforcing one popular view of the term’s meaning. Folklorists have also
criticized the nostalgic romanticism in the methods and presentation of the material in
Foxfire, a tone derived in part from Wigginton’s unfamiliarity with the formal study of
the subject. To his credit, Wigginton responded to the criticisms of folklorists by
attempting to involve them in his work. Richard M.Dorson, for example, wrote an
afterword for Foxfire 4, which came out in 1977, and folklorists such as Edward D.Ives,
Joseph Hickerson, and Ralph Rinzler have served on the magazine’s advisory board.
George Reynolds, who had taken a master’s degree in folk studies at Western Kentucky
University, joined Wigginton’s staff in 1976. Respondents to critics of Foxfire have also
stressed that the project’s intention has been to employ cultural journalism to teach basic
communications skills, not to teach folklore research methods.
William M.Clements
References
Dorson, Richard M. 1973. The Lesson of Foxfire. North Carolina Folklore Journal 21:157–159.
Massey, Ellen Gray, ed. 1978. Bittersweet Country. Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday.
Puckett, John L. 1989. Foxfire Reconsidered: A Twenty-Year Experiment in Progressive Education.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Wigginton, Eliot, ed. 1972. The Foxfire Book: Hog Dressing, Log Cabin Building, Mountain Crafts
and Foods, Planting by the Signs, Snake Lore, Hunting Tales, Faith Healing, Moonshining, and
Other Affairs of Plain Living Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday.
——. 1975. Moments: The Foxfire Experience. Kennebunkport, ME: IDEAS/The Foxfire Fund.
——. 1985. Sometimes a Shining Moment: The Foxfire Experience. Garden City, NY:
Anchor/Doubleday.