Victor M. Depta
Biographical Information
Victor M. Depta was born in Accoville, WV in 1939, a town on the edge of Buffalo Creek in Logan County. He attended Man High School, graduating in 1956 and then serving four years in the United States Navy. He returned to West Virginia, earning a B.A. in from Marshall University in 1965. He moved on to San Francisco State College (now University), completing an M.A. in 1968. He spent a year (1968-69) as an English instructor at Morehead State University before earning a Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1972. His dissertation, The Escaping Moon, is an open-form, two-part book of poems, focusing on "a rural, bucolic world and marital relations." It was later published as two books - The Creek (1973) and The House (1978). He joined the faculty of the University of Tennessee at Martin as an assistant professor of English in 1972 and has remained at the University since then, though he spent a year (1987-88) as a Visiting Professor of English at Marshall University.
In 1993, Depta published a third poetry collection, A Doorkeeper in the House, and his first novel, Idol and Sanctuary. Publication of another poetry collection, The Helen Poems, followed a year later. Several years would pass before Depta published another collection, The Silence of Blackberries, in 1999. He followed that collection with the 2000 publication of his second novel, The Gate of Paradise.
In addition to his other works, Victor Depta has also published a collection of four comedic plays, Plays from Blair Mountain, set in West Virginia and peopled with characters that make old clichés about the people of the mountains seem just that. His characters are wonderfully individual and powerfully real, treating the state and her people with a combination of humor, insight, and environmental awareness.
Truly in Victor Depta one finds a man who understands West Virginia, and who appreciates both the power and the poison of its history and traditions.
Critical Responses
A poet and novelist, Depta has published five poetry collections and two novels -- Idol and Sanctuary and The Gate of Paradise. Idol and Sanctuary tells the story of Keith, a young man coming of age in rural West Virginia in the late 1950s. Abandoned by his parents, raised by his aunt and uncle, and eager to escape by joining the Navy, Keith struggles to reconcile his feelings of emptiness, faith, isolation, and erotic curiosity, pulled in many directions be the demands of the people around him and his own desires. It is the story of the young people of the mountains, torn between the values and beliefs they have been raised to accept, and the lure and temptation of the world outside. The Gate of Paradise, Depta's newest novel, is the first of a trilogy of West Virginia novels, also explores the juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane, the mysticism of the mountains, and the tenants of a old Christianity, harsh and unforgiving in its judgments--"as stern and corruptibly beautiful as the Appalachian mountains."
Depta's poetry, like his prose, is filled with a strong mystical sense of the power of the mountains and of the never-far-away influence of mountain Christianity. The Silence of Blackberries, one of Depta's poetry collections, speaks with both energy and stillness, evoking a sense of hard-earned wisdom and seldom-won serenity. The mountains are old and strong, and the power they hold is real -- power to bring peace and stillness, a sense of the spiritual and the mystical, to an otherwise harsh and jarring world.
Works Published
Novels
- Idol and Sanctuary
- The Gate of Paradise
Poetry
- The Creek
- The House
- A Doorkeeper in the House
- The Helen Poems
- The Silence of Blackberries
- Preparing a Room
Plays
- Plays from Blair Mountain
Selected Bibliography
none available
Author Website
none available