Eric Douglas, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

W.Va. To Mark 100 Years Since Passage Of Women’s Suffrage

2020 marks 100 years since women in the United States earned the right to vote. The fight for the 19th Amendment followed more than 70 years of struggle that included everything from marches and protests to beatings, hunger strikes and force feeding.

Today, some advocates worry that history has been lost. To mark the ratification of the 19th Amendment, public and private organizations are teaming up to organize events to commemorate the centennial all year long and across the state.

West Virginia Women’s Commission, the state Secretary of State’s office, and the state Division of Culture and History are working with private groups and organizations to host a series of events including plays, an opera and film showings including the Ken Burns documentary “Not For Ourselves Alone” and the feature film “Iron Jawed Angels.”

West Virginia played an important role in ensuring women had the right to vote, according to Renate Pore, the project director for the Kanawha Valley National Organization for Women Centennial Celebration.

“When Congress passed the national amendment to the constitution it had to be ratified by 36 states and West Virginia became the 34th state to ratify it,” she said.

Rita Ray, a past president of the Kanawha Valley chapter of the National Organization for Women, said it is important to remember the struggle women faced and fight they endured to obtain the right to vote, especially at a time when voter participation is low.

“I do not remember learning about the suffrage movement when I was in public school or in college, and I took a lot of history classes,” she said. “It’s a good lesson knowing about this struggle, how important it is for everyone to take advantage of their right to vote, and also to resist any efforts to curtail that and take away and restrict the access to the vote.”

The Secretary of State’s office is hosting a comprehensive calendar of events on their webpage.

Listen to Renate Pore discuss the history of ratifying the 19th Amendment in West Virginia and the unusual steps the governor and the state senate had to take to make it happen.

Creative Residency Program In Fayetteville Provides Time To Work

Sometimes creativity requires breaking away from the normal routine and focusing on one’s work. Now in its sixth year, the New River Gorge Creative Residency at Lafayette Flats in Fayetteville, W. Va. allows writers and visual artists a quiet place to stay and make art.

When Shawn Means and Amy McLaughlin opened LaFayette Flats as a boutique vacation rental space in Fayetteville, they wanted to “change the narrative” about the state. They began by decorating their four rental suites with West Virginia art and loading shelves with books by West Virginia authors.

“We realized that our bookings were going to be much lighter during the winter and we were going to have some space,” Means said. “We thought, ‘How can we use this to better promote the arts?’”

So in January 2015, they decided to host a writer-in-residence.

“We continued with just having the writer-in-residence for the next three years. And then actually last year, we changed it up a little bit and decided to expand it to visual artists as well,” McLaughlin said.

The first several years, the program was a three month long residency. This year, they decided to allow creatives to come for shorter stays. Applicants for the residency had been almost exclusively out of state, but those changes appealed to more West Virginians. This season, they are three creatives, all from West Virginia, staying for one month each.

Matt Browning, a writer-in-residence at LaFayette Flats.

Matt Browning, a Charleston, W. Va.-based author just finished his one-month residency at the end of December.

“At the risk of sounding corny and cliché, I hoped this experience would change me. I learned very early on that it was going to do that,” he said. “Being here has really allowed me to rediscover my creativity. I won’t finish this book that I’m writing while I’m here. You know, four weeks isn’t enough time to write a novel, but I’m hoping to have probably 75 percent of a first draft done.”

Means said the key to the success of this program has been the reaction, and the reception, the creatives have received from the entire community.

“The Fayetteville community is very welcoming anyway, and they seem to have gone over and above welcoming our creative-in-residences. They’ve had people who recognize them on the street just from social media posts and welcome them to the town,” he said. “A lot of local businesses think of the residency as their’s, not just ours at Lafayette Flats. They think of it as the Fayetteville residency.”

You can find out more about the New River Gorge Creative Residency program at Lafayette Flats in Fayetteville on their website. They will begin taking applications for next winter in August.

Memoir Recalls Growing Up Poor In Logan County, W.Va

Katherine Manley grew up in abject poverty in Logan County, W. Va., but went on to teach in the same schools she attended.

Mountain State Press recently published her memoir, “Don’t Tell ‘Em You’re Cold” about her upbringing and how she overcame those challenges. The book’s title refers to a time when she was begging on the streets of Logan with her father. He was afraid the authorities would take her away if she told anyone she was cold.

Manley explained that the book covers her life from approximately 6 to 19 years old. Her father was disabled from a train accident and the family scraped by on welfare and begging on the streets. As a teen, Manley’s mother abandoned the family.

But Manley said family is supportive of the book.

“I have a brother in Pennsylvania. He was glad that I told the story because it helped him see what we went through. He was much younger than I was. And my three children, they said that I’m giving them a look into my life that they probably never would have known about,” Manley said.

She added that she thinks of those days as “just a way of life” and that the family was “very resourceful.”

Not uncommon to memoirs, Manley said writing the book was an emotional journey.

“I cried a lot. I cried and I’d have to push the keyboard back. And some of the chapters I laughed about. I learned that I was probably stronger than what I thought I was,” she said.

Manley tells the story of her childhood, but to address the emotions she was feeling at the time, she included “letters” to God and her mother, among other people.

“I remember those evenings when things were difficult. I would lay in bed at night and I would just, I would talk to God,” she said. “I would just look out the window, part the curtains and say ‘God, I know you’re up there somewhere.’ And I would just start talking. So I thought, ‘What about a letter?’”

Manley explained that she hopes readers are strengthened by the book. She said she wants them to realize they can make it out of poverty; that it will inspire them.

“If there’s anyone going through a challenging situation right now, just realize that nothing is permanent. I mean, whatever you’re going through today, you can wake up in the morning and it’s a new day. There’s a way you can make it out. Never give up hope,” she said.

After overcoming those challenges, Manley said she has learned a lot about poverty.

“The thought that poor people will never matter is so wrong. I’ve actually heard someone say to me, ‘Oh, they don’t matter.’ But yes they do. If we don’t do something to reverse the cycle of poverty, then this is just going to be another chapter written in history,” she said. “And so that’s my platform as I travel around the state and other places, to get children to realize they are important, but they must dream. They must set a goal for themselves and as adults, we must help them.”

This interview is part of a series of occasional interviews with our in-house author Eric Douglas. He talks to writers from, or writing about, Appalachia. You can find more of these interviews on our website under “Appalachian Author Interviews.”

West Virginia Author Mesha Maren Writes Noir Story Set in Greenbrier County

West Virginia author Mesha Maren’s debut novel “Sugar Run” is set in a fictional version of Greenbrier County. Maren is from Alderson and currently splits her time between North Carolina and West Virginia.

“Sugar Run” tells the story of a woman named Jodi McCarty. The story begins as she is being released from prison. She wants to head back to where she grew up in southern West Virginia, to live on land owned by her grandmother. But before she does that, she wants to make good on a promise she made before prison.

The book has received dozens of glowing reviews, including a review in the New York Times book section.

“It really broke my brain that Charles Frazier wrote a review for The New York Times to be totally honest with you,” Maren said.

She said she began crying when she read Frazier’s review in a grocery store where she went to buy the Sunday paper.

“That was way more than I expected and just shocking in a really great way,” she said.

Frazier’s review described “Sugar Run” as “Southern Noir.” Maren said when she saw that, she wasn’t exactly sure what “noir” meant and had to look it up.

“I mean, I’d heard of noir before and I thought about noir movies and I’d heard of noir books, but I realized all of a sudden that I didn’t actually totally know what that meant,” she said.

Maren explained that noir fiction often features a protagonist who is a little bit of an antihero with the odds stacked against them. The character may be a bit morally dubious, but they’re trying to make their way through a world that’s throwing up all kinds of problems along the way. She explained that noir fiction often does not resolve itself in a tidy bow at the end of the story, either.

“When I heard that definition, I thought ‘that makes a lot of sense.’ There are a lot of those aspects in my book, but I didn’t really I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t think about that genre of books when I was writing it,” she said.

Maren is currently working on her next novel, called “Perpetual West.”

“My new my new novel has a totally different set of characters and it takes place in West Virginia and in Texas on the border with Mexico,” she said. Maren said it does use some of the same themes as “Sugar Run,” however, like home and identity.

This interview is part of a series of occasional interviews with Eric Douglas. He is our in-house author and talks to writers from or writing about Appalachia. You can find more of these interviews here.

Following Daniel Boone’s Trail Leads To Appalachia Understanding In New Book

In 2013, Jim Dahlman, a journalist and professor of communications at Milligan College in Tennessee, set out to learn more about Appalachia by walking Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road from Tennessee into Kentucky.

The walk inspired the recently published book “A Familiar Wilderness: Searching for Home on Daniel Boone’s Road.” It is a collection of history, modern observations and interviews with people Dahlman met along the way.

In March of 1775, trapper and explorer Daniel Boone set off from what is now Kingsport, Tennessee to blaze a trail through the recently purchased Transylvania Land Company tract. At the time, Kentucky was regarded as the wilderness. It was up to Boone to mark a trail for settlers to travel through the Cumberland Gap.

Dahlman explained he walked between 275 and 300 miles. He started at Sycamore Shoals State Park just outside of Elizabethtown, Tennessee and ended at Fort Boonesborough, Kentucky. He said his journey was very different than hiking the Appalachian Trail.

“About 90 percent of my mileage was along the sides of highways. I walked a lot of asphalt because this road that Boone traced back in 1775 became the basis of very popular travel paths,” Dahlman said. “And over time they grew up to be overwritten and became the basis of a lot of our road systems.”

The decision to walk Boone’s “trace,” as it is properly called, came from Dahlman’s journalistic curiosity. He wanted to understand what the 240-year-old path meant to the people living along it today. He added that he had lived in the area 13 years at the time, but still did not feel at home. He grew up in New York City and Tampa, Florida, and as an adult he lived in several states and in England.

“I don’t know what home was actually supposed to feel like but it felt like I wasn’t quite there yet,” he said. “And so the trip became, in part, a personal desire to get to know my adopted region better.”

He said he learned several lessons about Appalachia on his trip.

“Appalachia is more diverse than a lot of people give it credit for,” Dahlman said. “There’s a lot of diversity in the way people think — attitudes about everything from belief in God, to their attitudes about the land, a lot of diversity in economic situations.”

‘Blood Creek’ Tells Mine Wars Story From Woman’s Perspective

In her new novel, “Blood Creek”, author Kimberly Collins writes about the strikes that gripped the southern West Virginia coalfields in the early 20th Century from the perspective of the women who lived through them.

“Blood Creek” is the first in the Mingo Chronicles series. It starts with the strike at Paint Creek and Cabin Creek in 1912. Collins used real characters from history in her books, several of whom she is related to.

“The story starts with a character named Ellie, and Ellie was a real person,” Collins told West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Eric Douglas in an interview. “The overarching theme of the book is the mine wars and the thread that’s kind of woven through the entire book is the relationship between Ellie, her sister and her cousin,” she said. “So it’s a book about relationships and just the fighting human spirit getting through some pretty pretty dark, violent times in southern West Virginia.”

Collins said the idea for the story came about when a cousin told her stories about her own great-grandmother she had never heard.

“I just thought it was important to tell the women’s stories because coal is a man’s world. And the women really played a huge part in it, but I don’t think that that story is told enough,” she said.

“Blood Creek” is about the 1912 coal mine strike in Paint Creek. Collins said she began writing about the 1920 mine wars in Matewan, but stumbled across a story about the real-life Ellie and knew she had to write it into a book. The Matewan Massacre will be the focus of the second book in the “Mingo Chronicles” series.

Collins is from Matewan, although she now lives in Tennessee. She said the research she did for the book has opened her eyes to her own history.

“I realized that my heritage, my Appalachian heritage, is pretty amazing. I learned so much about the people of Appalachia and southern West Virginia, and that they were hardworking and intelligent, and smart and clever, and really fighting for their rights,” Collins said. “All those things that came before me have made me who I am today.”

This story is part of an episode of Inside Appalachia that explores tourism in southern West Virginia and the lasting impacts the Hatfield and McCoy feud has had on the region’s identity.