Eric Douglas, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Where Did Pinch And Quick Get Their Names?

There are two communities in northern Kanawha County that, when said together like they often are, sound more like something your grandmother used to do when you were being naughty.

The towns Pinch and Quick are nestled along the banks of the Elk River. They’re only about 13 miles away from Charleston, but they have their own identity, even if the origin of the names isn’t as interesting as it sounds like it should be.

Pinch is named for the Pinch Creek and Quick is named for the Quick family, according to Ellie Teaford, the of the Elk Valley Branch Library. Teaford said the Pinch name came about during a particularly difficult time in the early settler’s history.

“There was a lack of food in the area for the pioneers. So they were literally feeling a pinch in their gut and named the creek after it,” she said. It was originally Pinch Gut Creek.

Without that historical context, it can be kind of funny that two towns named Pinch and Quick are right next to each other. It’s actually led to a lot of jokes over the years. For Kaitlin Jordan, who attended Pinch Elementary School, just saying the school name was a hazard.

“All I know is that I would get pinched if I said it in elementary school,” she said. “The kids would say ‘Hey, what’s the name of our elementary school? I can’t remember,” and then when you said it, you would get pinched.”

A third community in the area has an unusual name, but for a completely different reason. Big Chimney is named for a big chimney that used to be part of a salt production facility along the Elk River.

While it may sound utilitarian, the chimney itself was a local landmark. It even inspired a poem. The verse was discovered on the back of an old photo.

The Big Chimney

Marred and stained by the rush of time

It stood by the riverside

A landmark to all nigh sublime

Who lived round the countryside

Twas the chapel slaves that molded each block

From the plantation just over the way

And quickly, with chisel, fashioned each rock

In the base and coping gray.

The corner was torn by the lightning’s flash

That the vines strove ever hide

And down the face a ragged gash

The years rove wider and wider

Sixty feet it lifted its towering crest

From foundation laid in lime and clay,

A silent sentinel barring expressed 100 years today.

Evan Dockeridge is gone, and plans are forgotten

And the salt making industry is dead

For the ravages of war invaded the spot

And left defeat in thread.

The poem is attributed to William W. Wertz, the mayor of Charleston from 1923 to 1931. A news article from the Charleston Daily Mail in 1928 details the day the chimney collapsed, brought down by high winds.

New Book Examines Appalachian Author’s Work

Denise Giardina is a highly regarded Appalachian author whose works include “Storming Heaven” and “The Unquiet Earth.” Both of those books are set in West Virginia, in the coalfields. They revolve around the miners’ struggle with mine owners and unions, including the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921.

In his new book about Giardina’s work, called “Heeding The Call: A Study of Denise Giardina’s Novels,” author William Jolliff explores the deep theological message in Giardina’s works and how he believes her work should be regarded on a national level. Giardina only read the book after it was completed.

Eric Douglas spoke to both Giardina and Jolliff by Zoom to discuss the new book.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: What’s it like to have somebody write an entire book about you and your work?

Giardina: Well, it’s very weird, because usually it doesn’t happen until you’re dead. So, I kept thinking, as I was reading it, and ‘I’m still alive, right?’ But it was also fun because I haven’t read those books myself, in some cases, in 30 years. I used to do public readings and I had certain parts that I liked to read because audiences seemed to respond to those. So, I knew those parts really well. But then there were parts of the books that I’d totally forgotten about.

I guess, if somebody takes enough time, first of all, to read every book you’ve written, and then to write a book about it themselves, they must actually pretty much like it. I mean, when the opposite happens, it’s usually somebody who is dead and famous and some writer decides they’re going to take them down a peg or two. But in this case, I kind of went into it expecting that maybe he kind of likes my books, and he does. Even better, he understands them. I think he really puts a focus on them that needed to be made, which is that I get pigeonholed as a regional writer when in fact, I’m a theological writer.

Douglas: What does that mean to you?

Giardina: That’s the way I think. And everything I write comes from that theological perspective; believing in God, and all that that entails, morally and ethically and spiritually. Yet a lot of people don’t understand that because, for example, my books would never be carried in a self-labeled Christian bookstore. There’s too much sex and there’s too much violence. But yet, they’re deeply spiritual, I think, and deeply theological, because those are the questions that interest me.

Politics interests me. Certainly, the Appalachian region interests me, although not as much as people might realize. But the things that interest me are sin, redemption, forgiveness, love, fear of death, life after death. Those kinds of things are the questions that interest me and that’s what the books are all about. Every single one of them.

Douglas: Mr. Jolliff, you’re an English professor, right? And you actually teach Denise’s books as, I don’t know if it’s a class itself or as part of one of your classes.

Jolliff: I do both. I started teaching “Storming Heaven,” because it was in an introductory kind of class where I’m trying to get students to engage with a culture very different from their own. If you grew up in the Northwest, Appalachian culture is very different. And so, it was a great tool in that regard.

Plus, of course, that faith element. I teach at a faith-affirming institution, so students come in with more or less a willingness to look at some of those deep faith aspects. So, I taught it there. And then I started using “Unquiet Earth,” in my 20th century American Literature survey, upper-level course.

Douglas: Mrs. Giardina, I kept flashing back to high school English classes where teachers were trying to tell us, ‘This is what the author was thinking when they were writing this.’ Did he get it right? That’s always the question every teenager has.

Giardina: In this case, I think he did get I’d say 95 or 96 percent. Maybe just maybe two or three percent that was a little off, that if I sat down with him and talked to him about it, I could say, ‘Yeah, but you know…’ But he really did get a lot of it right. And I felt very good about that.

Douglas: Mr. Jolliff, who do you want to read the book?

Jolliff: I want it to be a help for students. Sort of the picture in my mind for the reader is someone who’s far into literature, maybe an upper-level undergrad or someone who’s maybe starting their graduate studies. I wanted this to be sort of a jumping-off point for what those students might think they should study and what they should write about.

I assumed it would find some kind of reception, whether positive or negative or critical, among people who do Appalachian studies. I mean, she’s just really significant in that area.

I shouldn’t say the most important, but certainly always in my mind was the fact that there are a lot of folks who write about theology in literature or who write about religion in literature, whom I would really like to somehow put in contact with her work. Her handling of those aspects is on par with anybody, and better than most. And while I like the idea that she’s an Appalachian writer, I would like her work to enter into that bigger conversation of where people write about and study contemporary handlings of theology.

Douglas: Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that you want to mention?

Jolliff: Only that I maybe I would say this. I started studying her seriously because I was drawn to particular books. And I started teaching her because she fit very well in certain objectives that I had for my classes. But I can’t state too broadly really, or too richly, how much of a great experience it was to get this far into the mind of one great writer.

“Heeding The Call: A Study of Denise Giardina’s Novels” is available through West Virginia University Press.

Jolliff is currently the chair of the Department of Writing and Literature at George Fox University in Newburg, Oregon. Giardina lives in Charleston, West Virginia and has turned her attention to writing screenplays.

This interview is part of a series of interviews with authors from, or writing about, Appalachia.

Novel ‘Poison Flood’ Uses Water Crisis As Backdrop

Poison Flood, a new novel by Jordan Farmer, is set against the backdrop of an environmental disaster in southern West Virginia. It includes murder, theft and riots. The book is described as a crime and noir-style mystery by the publisher.

The disaster Farmer writes about is based loosely on the 2016 West Virginia Water Crisis that poisoned the water of 300,000 central West Virginia residents for more than a week. His version is more devastating than the original, however.

When Farmer spoke with Eric Douglas, he said he wanted to tell an entertaining story, but he also wanted to have a main character that was outside the norm.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

Farmer: First of all, I want them to be entertained. I think that any art that doesn’t entertain you or connect with you on some kind of emotional level, if it’s just all just moral, then I think it fails the test of what art should do. So at first, I want them to be entertained and engaged and to have some kind of emotional reaction to the characters. I want them to love them or hate them or feel sympathetic towards them, and have some kind of empathetic response.

Douglas: Your character Hollis is a tremendously talented musician. But he also had a pretty significant disability. Why did you decide to throw that into the mix?

Farmer: I wanted to write a story with somebody, a narrator or a protagonist, that had what I would refer to as an unconventional body. I kind of have one myself. I have a bone disorder that’s stunted my overall growth so I’m about five feet tall. When I was younger, and was really interested in literature and books, I never found characters who had these kinds of different physical bodies or were physically different in some way.

If I did find a story about them, it was always a story that was entirely concerned with the struggle of being physically different. It was never about them succeeding in business or love or making art or something else. It was always just focused on the body itself.

Douglas: Hollis deals with the stress of his life by composing music in his head, and then has to get a guitar and compose music to help himself calm down. What’s the root behind that? Are you a musician?

Farmer: No, I’m not a musician myself. I play a little bit of a bad punk rock and sort of cowboy-chord country guitar. I wouldn’t call myself a musician, but being a creative guy growing up in a small town without a writer group, or people who were interested in the same kind of art forms I was, a lot of my friends were musicians. And I think I was deeply influenced by the kind of music I grew up around. My grandfather gave me Johnny Cash records and stuff to listen to when I was younger. So I wanted to write about the creative process. But I wasn’t necessarily interested in the idea of writing about writing. Those kinds of books don’t always interest me. I like music and I like the performative aspect of music.

Douglas: Is your next book also set in West Virginia? Is that something you plan to continue? Or are you moving elsewhere with the next one?

Farmer: Poison Flood, and the next manuscript I’m working on, take place in a sort of a fictional town in West Virginia, much like Faulkner wrote about a fictional area of Mississippi. It’s called Coopersville County, which is my way of being able to have a town similar to the communities that I grew up in, but also to not have complete and total realism.

Douglas: Are you at all concerned about people saying, ‘well, that’s just some West Virginia story’ and not being interested in your work because it is such a small, remote place.

Farmer: I had this idea when I was younger that there just wasn’t a place for stories about West Virginia. Or a desire for stories from small towns or rural America or places where I’m from. Now, I’m not so sure that’s true. Now, I think that as long as you’re telling an interesting story and the themes are something that anyone anywhere can understand, I think people will engage with it regardless of the area. I think that your first concern is simply to tell an engaging story.

Jordan Farmer was born and raised in a small West Virginia town, population approximately two thousand. He earned his master’s degree from Marshall University and his Ph.D. at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Poison Flood was released in May by Putnam Publishing. Listen to other interviews with authors from, or writing about, Appalachia.

Controversial Confederate Plaque Will Get New Home In Museum

The Charleston City Council voted on Monday to donate a plaque honoring the Kanawha Riflemen, a company of Confederate soldiers, to a West Virginia history museum. The resolution didn’t specify which one but mentioned the Craik-Patton House Museum in Charleston as a possibility.

City workers removed the nearly 100-year-old plaque from Ruffner Park on Kanawha Boulevard on June 29, 2020. It listed the names of 92 members of the unit and was dedicated to honoring “those who served in the Confederate Army.”

Across Kanawha Boulevard from Ruffner Park, an historical marker explains the significance of the park and the confederate monument.

The monument was a gift to the city from the Kanawha Riflemen Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1922. It was built at a time when Jim Crow laws enforcing segregation were in effect.

The Kanawha Riflemen was formed by George Smith Patton, one of the namesakes of the Craik-Patton House, and the grandfather of World War II Gen. George S. Patton.

The resolution also requested that the Charleston Historic Landmarks Commission prepare a proposal for a new monument and other historical markers that discuss the history of Ruffner Park.

Novel ‘Shiner’ Looks At Life In Isolated West Virginia Mountains

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Stories of snake handlers, moonshining and the isolated mountains of West Virginia have been around for years, but “Shiner,” a new novel by author Amy Jo Burns, looks at them from the perspective of a 15-year-old girl caught in the middle.

Eric Douglas spoke with Burns to discuss the newly released book.

Douglas: The book is set in modern day, but there are pieces of it that feel like they could have been told 100 years ago.

Burns: I wanted to really try to get inside somebody’s head who just did not have access to things like smartphones. Somebody who lived a very isolated life. I wanted the reader to experience what it would be like for somebody like Ren who lives this very private, secluded, almost timeless life. But then the rest of the world is moving on without her so she feels that tension. She sort of goes back and forth between the two.

Douglas: There are elements in the story that mystical, yet the story is set in modern day and in modern life. Why did you choose that approach?

Burns: I grew up in a faith healing church, which is not a snake handling church. And there’s certainly a difference. But I did grow up in a landscape where people expected God to be doing very mysterious things that weren’t easily explained. So that was a huge part of the way I grew up and the way I approached the world around me. I’ve read so many books about that sort of thing that always seemed to be looking at it from the outside and thinking, ‘Oh, this is such a weird tradition’ or ‘Look how weird these people are.’

[So] I wanted to tell a story that came from inside it and was able to capture the sacredness of those things that aren’t so easily explained, even though they are a little hard to understand and lead to some pretty damaging situations. Even though it was something I couldn’t quite understand, I still had a reverence for it. I think that is really the main tension that Ren is experiencing as she’s coming into her own as a young woman.

Douglas: What’s your connection to West Virginia or Appalachia? Why did you choose to set the book here?

Burns: I grew up in western Pennsylvania. When I was a teenager, in the summers, I visited West Virginia and I just fell in love with it. It’s so beautiful there and I think the landscape is constantly telling a story. In my memoir, which I published about five years ago called “Cinderland,” West Virginia plays a role, too.

In terms of the plot of the novel, West Virginia is actually the only state in the United States where snake handling is still legal. So that was certainly an interesting piece to add into the story, but I think I love to write about places, especially places that I longed for, and I think West Virginia has always held that place in my heart.

Douglas: When you start talking about snake handling and West Virginia, that brings up some stereotypes that make some people uncomfortable.

Burns: I think what I wanted to do was to break apart the stereotype. The man who takes up serpents is named Briar Bird. There’s a legend about him that is larger than life that no human can live up to. It is a stereotype. I wanted to create a man in the book who was like the men that I knew when I was growing up ⁠— someone who had a lot of ambition that had nothing to do with money. It had nothing to do with travel or leaving home but had a real sense of wanting God’s presence to show up in a really powerful way.

My hope is that I got the mystery across in the book and all the problems that come with it. It’s also about what happens to women who were caught up in that cycle. I didn’t set out to write a book that was meant to speak for everybody in West Virginia, everybody in Appalachia. I wanted to tell a nuanced story about somebody who does some very difficult things to understand.

Douglas: Is there anything we haven’t touched on anything you want to add?

Burns: I feel like what’s going on in our world is so uncertain and so scary. It’s been a real journey for me to process what it means to be putting a novel out in the world at this time. On the one hand, it can seem maybe frivolous or purposeless, but the more I’ve been able to think about it, the more grateful I am that I get to share something like this with the world.

This interview is part of an occasional series with authors from, or writing about, Appalachia.

Sharing The Love Of A Father For His Daughter

Thomas Burger was a stay-at-home dad during the 1970s. Back then, only two percent of fathers stayed home with the kids. He said people often seemed confused when he told them he was a stay-at-home dad.

Forty years later, the number of stay-at-home dads has climbed to four percent. A Pew Research Center survey from 2013 found that eight percent of people in the U.S. said children are better off if their father is home and doesn’t work. More than half think kids are better off if mom stays home.

In 2018, Burger sat down with his daughter, Renee Frymyer, inside the Storycorps recording bus in Charleston West Virginia and told her what it was like.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Burger: I remember the first time I held you. And I can remember I saw your eyes. I didn’t want to scare you. In fact I thought, it’s a good thing babies can’t bring everything into focus because it’s so different out here than it is in the womb. I remember saying, ‘I hope you’re never afraid when I’m around.’ Anyway, I do remember that. But your birth was a big moment in our lives.

I took a year off to be a full-time father, an at-home dad from the time you were a one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half. Lots of good times during those years. Your mom was teaching school; we had moved to Milford, Delaware so she could teach school and support us while we did this so-called experiment.

Frymyer: At the time, this was 1978, ‘79 and there weren’t a lot of full time stay at home dads.

Burger: There weren’t. Well, not at all in our circle. We were always active in church, in the United Methodist Church, and we joined a church there. I remember taking you to bible study, and there were women with their kids around the circle and here’s me with you. People would ask me, ‘What are you doing?’ and I said, ‘I’m a full-time, at-home father.’ People couldn’t quite understand that. I often joke that they said, ‘Okay, what are you really doing here? Do you have some kind of terminal illness and you’re just kind of waiting? What are you doing? Nobody just stays home.’

Well, I learned later that lots of fathers who are out of work, they’re taking care of their kids at home. There are lots of circumstances where many men, fathers, would stay at home and take care of their children. I certainly wasn’t a pioneer or the only one. But I wanted to experience fatherhood. I wanted to show your mom that I was committed to raising you. It wasn’t just her job. And it was a real blessing.

I remember I had a bike and we had a little baby carrier in the back, not baby but a toddler carrier. It was a seat and we buckled you in. It’s not like today where everything’s surrounding you and you’re wearing a hard hat and everything else. The only thing you had on your head was a little wool woven beanie, no matter where we went.

We would go grocery shopping. I had baskets, wire baskets on the back there just below your feet, where I put the groceries on the way home. And we were pedaling through the parking lot and a couple little ladies in a car drove by and said, ‘Look, look, look, look,’ I said ‘What?’ I turned around and you had gotten the carton of eggs and opened it. [You] just watched them roll out onto the pavement. Plop, plop, plop, there are eggs on the pavement.

You and I took a little walk down to the local pond that was not far from the apartment there. And I told you that [it was] steep there, you might roll into the pond. Well, you wanted to see the pond up close. So you kind of toddled over there and sure enough, headfirst right into this fishy, dirty old pond.

I picked you up, I don’t remember if you cried or not, but I picked you up and hurried back to the apartment. Your mom was right by the door sitting at her desk grading papers or doing some teacher thing. And she said, ‘Oh, what’s that smell?’ I said ‘That’s fish. Your daughter fell in the pond.’ Anyway, we got you cleaned up and we moved on. We had a wonderful year, I thought.