×
McKENZIE HALL: “‘Up Elk River’ is what I used to say when someone said, ‘Where do you live?’”
DAN HAMILTON: “At first the bears were standoffish, not rude exactly, but distant, reserved, protective of their privacy.”
PAM PRITT: “Uncle John explained about thin places.”
AUSTIN ISINGHOOD: “As a boy I remember men Coming up the mountain From working In the Hawks Nest tunnel.”
JAKE STUMP: “I am born in the parlor of my grandmother’s house. I come screaming into the world among the only valuable things my grandmother owns.”
HANNAH MAXWELL: “It’s not such a big world anymore, that’s what they said, and I made fun, I said the globe does fit in your hands, but to me the world always felt large and I wanted all of it for myself.”
DIANA MAZZELLA: These are the beginnings of stories from West Virginian people. People who were born here and are still here. People who were born here and moved away. People who were not born here but have become part of the story of this place.
It has felt in the last year like the country searched more than usual for the story of Appalachia — of West Virginia. And the reality is that there are many stories. And the stories often conflict. Some are on farms. Others are in cities. Some are gentle. Others are hardened. Some are both.
Some of those stories are in “Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods,” an anthology from Vandalia Press, an imprint of West Virginia University Press, of more than 60 fiction and poetry entries from West Virginia.
I’m Diana Mazzella and this is Sparked, a podcast that focuses on people who are changing Appalachia’s future. In this episode we wanted to have a conversation with some of these writers about how Appalachians tell their stories to each other and how those stories are received — or are not received — in the rest of the world.
I spoke with Doug Van Gundy, who put the anthology together along with fellow English professor and author, Laura Long. He told me that before this book, there hadn’t been a West Virginia literature anthology as comprehensive with such a diversity of voices. He calls it a “state of the state” of West Virginia literature.
One of the writers is Jessie Van Eerden. Van Eerden is sitting in a tiny seat with a desk attached — like the ones you’d see in a high school. She’s inside the library at West Virginia Wesleyan College where she deliberately answers questions in a way that shows she thinks about many of them often. Her voice is smooth and low, lending gravity and lightness to her words.
She’s reading from her story, which appears in the collection — “Edna” — about an older woman who looks back on the moment she decided who she was going to be.
JESSIE VAN EERDEN: “Mrs. Gibson gave me a whole dollar and it shamed me. Outside I could not find Jimmy Flax. It was as if he’d read my thoughts, already saw me turning my back to him and his plans for us so I started walking along the road alone, walking tall and then taking the path through the woods that we’d walked together earlier. I came to the rise that was hill enough to hide the wood’s floor ahead.
And all at once there was a flock of turkeys filling the air, flying and squawking, maybe 15 altogether. Maybe more. They burst from among the trees, wild, a wingspan wide like that of a more majestic bird. They whipped fine young branches back so that the wood shivered, such a spectacle, feathers drifting down, birds above me, over me, over the rise into other trees. And here came Jimmy waving his arms and running behind them, scaring up this flock of turkeys for me. His face a beautiful book I could read cover to cover. Beautiful pages, each one. The last turkey lighted in a tree and he laughed, ‘Edna, how rich we are,’ he said. I wept. I put my Ivory-smelling hands to my face, my hunger so keen it cut. And I ran through the woods so fast that Jimmy couldn’t catch me. I ran and ran and never gave Janie Drimmell the dollar. I threw it in the weeds.”
The younger, 15-year old Edna makes a decision to essentially break from who she has been her whole life. A poorer person in love with Jimmy who is also a poorer person and who has a different conception of what it means to be alive.
MAZZELLA: Van Eerden grew up on a rural area of Preston County, West Virginia, called the Whetsell Settlement. She started mimicking writing and scribbling on magnets then moved on to bad poems as a second grader. Jessie Shafer, the neighbor she’s named for, would encourage her.
VAN EERDEN: And I felt like it was a strange greenhouse for imagination, you know for writing and for putting down record of maybe what I felt like at the time was sort of an older, slightly diminishing culture.
MAZZELLA: Van Eerden went on to get her bachelor’s degree at West Virginia University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She lived away from the state for a long time. But she was still a West Virginian.
VAN EERDEN: Well I think, you know I always say Appalachia definitely forged the fires of my imagination. So even when I’ve lived elsewhere, in Philly, or Seattle or Oregon, I definitely felt like the grooves have been made already in my psyche from this place. And there’s a whole big conversation about what makes Appalachia distinct and how is it — you know categorize how many Appalachias are there. You know that’s a huge cultural conversation and an important one I think now in this era when we’re simply deemed monolithically Trump country as though there’s nothing else that’s springing up here. But I think when I was working on my first novel it was sort of required of me. I felt like I have to write a book set in West Virginia that speaks to concerns that I really I have to wrestle through. So I wanted to write about pop religion in Appalachia. I wanted to write about sibling relationships. A sort of decaying town. Not a mining story because I don’t know that landscape of West Virginia personally.
MAZZELLA: That first book was Glorybound, the story of two young women in a small drought-stricken town who are striving to become prophets.
After living away, Van Eerden returned to West Virginia and runs the low-residency Master of Fine Arts writing program at West Virginia Wesleyan College.
Van Eerden sees the role of the Appalachian or West Virginia writer to be much like any writer: to show readers how they appear through a mirror and an image of the world outside through a window. She first heard of the concept of using a mirror and a window in writing from Jacqueline Woodson, author of “Brown Girl Dreaming.”
VAN EERDEN: You know if it’s all window then it's like you kind of feel yourself unvalidated you know like I don’t belong in the greater, bigger narrative, and if it’s all mirror than there’s a little bit of a lack of exposure to imagining the other. So I think story I think it needs to push the Appalachian kind of in both ways, of saying yes yes the beans and cornbread you grew up with and the trailer you lived in and the way your brother said that word and it echoed in your head, that is all legitimate for what makes for beautiful literature. But we have to imagine ourselves out beyond that and not necessarily be tribal or have boundaries set up, fearful boundaries that leads to xenophobia.
MAZZELLA: When we return to our story, we'll hear from author and WVU professor Glenn Taylor.
Hey listeners, we at the Sparked podcast don’t just produce a podcast. We also have an online magazine. You can check it out at wvumag.wvu.edu. There you’ll find stories about people that will inspire you from Pulitzer Prize-winner Margie Mason who helped to free thousands of enslaved fishermen, to Rusty Moore who led the rescue of hundreds of horses after Hurricane Katrina. You can also discover our most popular story about the creation of the University’s logo, the Flying WV.
Now let’s get back to the podcast. We left off speaking to Jessie Van Eerden. Now, we speak to another writer who appears in the Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods collection.
Like Van Eerden, Glenn Taylor has captured life in Appalachia, especially its characters. All three of his novels have been set in West Virginia. Taylor, an associate professor at West Virginia University, started reading books like “Somebody Up There Likes Me” by the boxer Rocky Graziano. After a childhood of writing stories about kids from the street becoming boxers, something with which he had no personal experience, he discovered West Virginia’s literature.
TAYLOR: You know it's funny, I grew up in Huntington about 10 miles, 15 miles down the road from Milton, West Virginia, where one of our more famous writers was from, Breece Pancake. But I didn’t even know about Breece Pancake or Pinckney Benedict or Jayne Anne Phillips or any of these more contemporary West Virginia writers until I went to college out of state.
MAZZELLA: For those of you who like me were not familiar with Breece Pancake, he was a young man whose short stories mostly appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. His editor said she couldn’t remember another new writer that provoked such a strong reader response. His style was compared to Ernest Hemingway’s. His voice is clear. His characters are disillusioned. He’s remembered for the quality of his writing and what it said about his home. And what it said about his home was heartbreaking, though the way he said it was beautiful. And when he’s mentioned, it’s said that he died too young. In 1979, Breece Pancake committed suicide at the age of 26.
Glenn Taylor learned about Pancake and other contemporary West Virginia writers, and then went on to write his first novel “The Battle of Trenchmouth Taggart,” about a man who tries to flee his past as a teenage sniper in the West Virginia mine wars of the early 1900s. Like Trenchmouth Taggart, all of Taylor’s novels are set in West Virginia.
TAYLOR: If what makes a place interesting is its contradictory nature, in other words it almost seems self contradicting, then that is why West Virginia is an interesting place. And not just for the easy reasons that people say in the national press like they vote against themselves and they vote against their own interests and stuff like that.
MAZZELLA: There are the contradictions of a state that was entwined with organized labor, a relationship that has since fallen away. Then there’s the War on Poverty in the mid-20th century that gave the rest of the country a stark image of the state and region that it still holds onto. Taylor says that there are these images that are at odds between a rugged pioneering Mountaineer and workers who are out of work and on public assistance.
TAYLOR: What you start to realize particularly if you move back after living away for 18 years is that most of it’s just bogus, and it’s like any other place. It’s just people doing the best with what they have. And I do find that they’re a little more interesting and quirky and tough and have wilder stories it seems like than most places I’ve been. That’s the part I’m drawn to.
MAZZELLA: People inside the state might get this. But people outside the state, if they think about literature in West Virginia, or the state at all, it’s in broad strokes.
TAYLOR: I went to New York recently for the annual meeting of PEN, and it was great and all but I got the sense that everyone up on the stage talking about the role of the writer and the artist in the time of Trump, that they kind of were doing just a little bit of lip service when they would say — they would put the words so-called in front of flyover country, but they were still kind of thinking of it as flyover country like they never would want to come here. And they also were very self aware about living about what they were calling moral bubble but they’re still living in the moral bubble.
MAZZELLA: Doug Van Gundy, an editor of the “Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods” collection, told me that they chose the title line from an Irene McKinney poem because it describes how people passing through or flying over the state might see it. In the poem, the eyes at the edge of the woods belong to animals in the forest. To someone passing through on Interstate 79, those eyes represent West Virginia’s people. Visitors see them but don’t know who they are.
[MUSIC]
My co-producer Raymond Thompson Jr. and I are sitting with Taylor on his back porch in Morgantown, West Virginia. Taylor has already shared a pot of French press coffee with us, which he says turned out too weak. He’s wearing flip flops, plaid shorts and a T-shirt that says “Remember the Alamo,” a reminder of his days in graduate school at Texas State University. Birds have been chirping throughout the interview. And his Bassett hound, Lucy, is laying on the porch, unwilling to move unless absolutely necessary.
We ask Taylor to read from his story in the anthology. His story is called “Cortege” and it’s about a guy who takes it upon himself to chase down and lecture a stranger who cuts through a funeral procession. The story is funny, irreverent and laid back. As Taylor reads from his story, it feels true to our surroundings.
TAYLOR: “I winked at the little curly headed girl and patted big boy on his shoulder again and then I squeezed it hard and looked him in the eyes. ‘Remember,’ I told him, ‘a funeral procession is a solemn occasion, and if we don’t yield right of way to its vehicles, we are worthless.’ He nodded a little bit. I thought momentarily of going on, of asking him to imagine how none of this washing machine foolishness would have ever transpired if he’d just stayed in line until the cortege had run its course, but he was doing that swallow again, the one that men do when they can’t produce enough spittle to speak or make a move. I have always felt sorry for men with this condition. ‘Let’s get to getting,’ Albert said. He was already limping back to the car.”
MAZZELLA: The stories and poems you heard at the beginning of the episode were “In the Chemical Valley” by Anita Skeen; “Bear Country Blues” by John Van Kirk; “Thin Places” by Denise Giardina; “Appalachian Ghost” by Norman Jordan; “The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life” by Lee Maynard; and “Edna” by Jessie van Eerden.
Thank you for listening to Sparked, a podcast of West Virginia University Magazine. This episode was recorded and produced by Raymond Thompson Jr. and me, Diana Mazzella. You can find the “Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods” fiction and poetry collection on the West Virginia University Press website, wvupressonline.com, or wherever books are sold.
A big thank you to Hillary Kay and John Posey, WVU alumni who form the band Kay and Posey for graciously allowing us to use their song, “Sweet Fire” in this episode.
You can find more podcast episodes on our website at wvumag.wvu.edu. Don’t forget to drop us a line to tell us what you thought of this episode.
Sparked is a production of West Virginia University located in Morgantown, West Virginia.
