Appalachian Author Interviews Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Willie Carver Wants To ‘Poke The Bear’ With His Book, Gay Poems For Red States

Willie Carver was Kentucky’s teacher of the year in 2021. Carver is openly gay. And not everybody was OK with a gay high school teacher. Carver said he — and his LGBTQ students — faced homophobia and were frequently harassed. And so in 2022, he resigned from the high school. Last summer, he released “Gay Poems for Red States.”

This conversation originally aired in the March 3, 2024 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Willie Carver was Kentucky’s teacher of the year in 2021. He taught English and French for 10 years at Montgomery County High School, where he also oversaw several student clubs.

Carver is openly gay. And not everybody was OK with a gay high school teacher. Carver said he — and his LGBTQ students — faced homophobia and were frequently harassed. And so in 2022, he resigned from the high school.

Carver went to work at the University of Kentucky. Last summer, he released Gay Poems for Red States, which attracted a lot of praise and helped turn him into a much-followed, outspoken voice on social media.

Inside Appalachia Producer Bill Lynch recently caught up with Carver.

The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.

Lynch: “Gay poems for Red States,” it’s a catchy title. But I would say right now the climate for LGBTQ people in Appalachia is difficult, especially if you’re trans. So it kind of feels like you were maybe kind of poking the bear a little bit?

Carver: I don’t want to just poke the bear. I want to rip the blanket off of it and knock the door off of its hibernation den and force it to see what it’s doing.

A lot of what happens, and I say this as someone who is queer and Appalachian, is we want to create easy national categories for people who can’t be put into those things. And so I am just as much Appalachian as I am queer and to choose my queerness, as a general rule, in the United States is to move to a coastal city and then look down on the ignorant Red State people. And I think to choose my Appalachian-ness sometimes would be to see those “high falutin’” city folks as uninterested in my life.

And this title was my way of saying, I reject both of those. I’m going to be exactly what I am. And I want you to recognize me doing it. I want both stereotypes to see me doing it, and question their role and why I’m having to poke two bears, really.

Lynch: You’ve lived outside of Appalachia. What was that like to be an Appalachian away and looking back in?

Carter: So, the funny thing is the first place I moved to outside of eastern Kentucky was France. I lived in Picardy, which is in the far north. There used to be a lot of coal mines. Those have shut down. So, now there’s a lot of poverty, regional accents, and traditional know-how that people sort of share with each other to get by. I was so at home. I was like, I might as well be in Appalachia.

Then, I moved to the deep South and I learned that Appalachia is not the South. It is some version of it, some whatever metaphor people want to use to describe that relationship. But the humor of Appalachia doesn’t translate easily into the suburban south, at least.

I think the free spirit, and the not taking stuff too seriously part of Appalachia doesn’t translate itself very well in the South.

I lived in Vermont. It’s beautiful. It’s where I got married. I’ll always be grateful for that, but it was there that I really saw played out, with me being in the middle of it, this sort of ignorance about people from Appalachia, people from the South; people from rural places in the mouths of supposedly progressive people; people questioning my intelligence; people making these assumptions that I must have had to escape some horrific place. I must be so grateful because everything is better.

I said something online that angered a lot of people. So, that must mean I must have said something close to a truth.

Someone had questioned me and said, “Why would a queer person choose to live in Appalachia? I just don’t understand.”

And I said, “Because it will be easier for me to convince Appalachians to treat me with dignity as an LGBTQ person than to convince coastal liberals to treat me as an Appalachian person with dignity.”

And I think, because we sort of collectively, as a country, group, Appalachian people into a political group, no one feels any guilt about the way they treat people with stereotypes. So, I learned living outside of Appalachia, how Appalachian I am and that the parts of me can’t be divided away for anyone’s benefit.

Lynch: This book comes out after everything that happened in 2022. So how far do you go back as far as poetry? Were you writing before then? Or did the catalysts of being “teacher of the year” in Kentucky and then leaving your job — which came first?

Carter: Poetry came way first. I was always interested in language, interested in how my family communicated ideas. I have been obsessed with linguistics my entire life. But I would hear the poetry and how people talked and wanted to replicate it, wanted to capture it. And in college, I had fantastic professors. I credit them with helping me learn to feel like I was a poet.

Once I became a teacher, I basically wrote for my students, that was what it looked like. So, I wasn’t writing to publish, or anything like that. I really conceived of myself as a teacher — I go into the classroom, and whatever my students need, it’s for them, whatever I’m doing outside of the classroom is really going back to my classroom.

So, I wasn’t thinking about writing. But then once I left the classroom, I felt this strong need to do what I’ve always been doing, which is help students. It’s almost like a parent, watching their kids and the parent is actively trying to take care of them, and then you’re sort of pulled away, and you’re like, how do I take care of them right?

In this case, that meant reminding them how strong they are. And so poetry was a natural way to do that.

Lynch: I like some of your imagery and things you use. You come back to food a couple of times. I think about the cornmeal pancakes and even your description of gravy and beans and things like that. Were you aware that you were drawing from those particular things or did they just kind of turn up?

Carter: I was not aware. One of the things I firmly believe about writing is, if you’re writing a collection, whether we’re talking poetry or short stories, I don’t think you should need to actively tease out a motif or figure it out. I think it’s going to show up, right? And whatever your brain or your heart or your soul or whatever is fixated on. And I think in writing this, I was very angry at the fact that my school was choosing silence when its students were in harm’s way. And I had actually gotten to write an angry letter to my superintendent about how furious I was and ended up writing that first poem.

A lot of what was happening as I was writing was I would kind of wake up and there would be this young child inside of me wanting to write, and I would just let him write about whatever he wanted to write about.

And what he wanted to write about was those times when he felt loved, those times when he felt safe in school and in Appalachia.

And in Appalachia, food is love. So, that’s why food is just this recurring motif, because those were the times when I saw people taking care of me and people loving me.

And I think, knowing that right now LGBTQ youth feel very alienated, feel very unloved, feel like they don’t have a place in Appalachia, feel like they don’t have a place in the classroom, as a general rule. And I wanted to — for lack of a better word — rebuke the educational system. I’m going to rebuke Appalachia, both of which I love, but both of which are failing children miserably right now, because they refuse to wrestle with something that makes them uncomfortable.

Lynch: Would you like to read something from your book?

Carter: Sure. Yeah. “Neck Bones.”

It’s fun to watch kids or respond to this. When I go into high schools and grade schools, there’s usually just a few kids who know what a neck bone is. They get so excited to talk about it or don’t want to talk about it at all. I’ve not had a single in between for neck bones.

(Reads poem)

Lynch: That was awesome.

Carter: Thank you.

Lynch: When did you write that? I mean, I’m sure you’ve drawn from your family imagery right there and your upbringing,

Carter: The way I write … Toni Morrison calls it the flood, but she says, you know, your memories, your emotions that live on your skin. And there will be moments in our lives when it floods back to you, and there’s not much you can do to prevent it.

I’m a big gay Appalachian. So, I got a whole lifetime of feeling strong emotions. I’m not afraid of them. I’m comfortable letting them happen. So what I do when I write is whatever that feeling is, I just kind of let it be and wait for it to start articulating themself. And then, I follow that.

But I think a lot of times people are afraid about what they might call sentimentality. It’s a complicated idea. Because if you don’t want the truth of what you’re talking about to be hidden behind something that’s so emotional, that people are going to feel some kind of way about it no matter what happens.

I think if you center what you’re talking about in your skin, if you center it in the emotions, what you remember, then it’s going to come out in strange ways.

Remembering what it felt like to be loved, for example, meant I had to write about neck bones, because that was how it expressed itself. I mean, I was writing about cornmeal and water pancakes. So, that was how our love expressed itself.

It meant tiny moments of my mom pushing back against whatever ideology, whether we’re talking about Mickey Mouse toys, or whether we’re talking about preachers telling us we’re all gonna burn in hell. Her small acts of defiance, those were things that stood out in my mind as moments of being loved.

Lynch: What’s your life been like since you left Montgomery County High School?

Carter: Really, really good. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made. The truth is my presence, because of the way that people responded to me, which is not me, Willy Carver. It’s me, a person who dares be gay and not be ashamed of that. It meant that they were attacking, not just me, but my students. There were people doxing my former students, and those students were getting death threats, because they were LGBTQ.

So, I had to leave because my presence made them unsafe. And what I’ve learned is, I now am a teacher in a classroom with no walls. I have been freed to talk about what I saw in the classroom and how we are harming these students or failing to save them in so many capacities. And that means writing a book, that means working at a Kentucky law project to provide free legal help to students who need support from some outside source. That means testifying before Congress about the needs of Black, brown and LGBTQ students and the ways that we’re failing them. That means getting to meet the president and talking to him about a specific student who needed his help and watching him actually respond to help that student.

It’s funny. I used to say back when I was tired of whatever was being implemented in the classroom, that would require a bunch of outside documentation or work or an unnecessary thing for the teacher to do.

I used to say if ever I won the lottery, I would just go to a library and teach all day. But it would be just teaching. There wouldn’t be interruptions, and there wouldn’t be ball games, or there wouldn’t be having to fill out this in that form or whatever.

That was always my dream. I just want to teach. And now that I’m out of the classroom, that’s what I’m finally getting to do. I’m getting to actually teach. So, I’m grateful. And I’ve met a lot of beautiful Appalachians, and I’m seeing just how good people are. And I think that’s important when you’ve been seeing the ugly for a long time.

Lynch: Do you ever miss being a high school teacher, being at a desk in front of kids?

Carver: Absolutely. I know that I’ve had a very lucky childhood. Even if there were moments of insecurity and poverty, I was loved by the people around me and supported by the people around me. And compared to other gay people, or trans people my age, I’m in the top 1 percent, because the vast majority of people I know, were thrown away by their families.

And so I feel this compulsion because of that, to give back and help. And there is no easier way as a human being that you can know that you are contributing positively to the world, than to tell a young person that their life has worth and that their life has value, and that they deserve to realize their dreams, that they deserve to have whatever it is that they want in life, and that they’re capable. I miss that aspect a great deal and nothing’s gonna replace that. There is no way that you can impact a person’s life in the way that teachers can. But I’m finding other ways to teach and to help and I’m appreciative of that, too.

Lynch: Willy Carver, thank you so much.

Carver: Thank you so much, Bill.

W.Va. Students To Read ‘Fallingwater’ In All 55 Counties This Week

West Virginia authors Anna Egan Smucker and Marc Harshman, the state’s poet laureate, wrote a children’s book titled, “Fallingwater: The Building of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masterpiece.”

A home built directly into the mountains, just over the state line in Pennsylvania, has become one of the most famous houses in the world. It’s known as Fallingwater and was designed by the master architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

West Virginia authors Anna Egan Smucker and Marc Harshman, the state’s poet laureate, wrote a children’s book about the house called Fallingwater: The Building of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masterpiece. It tells the story of how Wright’s career was nearly done. There was even a rumor going around that he was dead. But then Edgar Kaufmann, of Kaufmann Department store fame, asked him to build him a home.

This story is, of course, about more than the building of a house. It’s about creativity and imagination. Those are the story lines that make it perfect for a children’s book.

West Virginia Public Broadcasting is featuring the story in the Mountain Readers Become Leaders program to celebrate and foster a love of reading in children across West Virginia. The program launched this week.

Harshman and Smucker knew they wanted to tell the story, but it took them several attempts to decide just how to tell it.

“As I recall, and we were just chatting,” Harshman said. “We discovered that we both had this passion for the house known as Fallingwater. We came at it from different angles, but we shared this love of the house.”

Smucker remembers it the same way.

“We just happened to be talking on the phone one day, and I don’t know who brought up that they had just visited Fallingwater,” she said. “But then the other one said, ‘Well, I had too.’ And so I thought, ‘Is that a possibility for a book? And if so, should we try to work on one together?’”

Smucker and Harshman had traveled in the same literary circles for a while but this was the first time they worked together. They described three tries on the manuscript before they found the perfect way to tell this story.

“I don’t know who wrote the very, very first draft, but whoever it was, would have written it, and sent it by electronic email to the other one,” Harshman said. “Let’s say Anna wrote the first draft, she sent it to me and I would tweak whatever she had written, add some things, maybe subtract some things, send it back to her. And we must have exchanged easily 50 or 60 versions. And there were dramatic differences.”

Smucker explained that the original versions of the book started out with a fictional child character.

“The first story, we had created a fictional character Daniel, whose father is employed as one of the workers to build Fallingwater,” Smucker said. “It got so confusing that we just had to throw that story away, even though we’d worked on it for a while. So then we created another fictional character, Amelia, whose father also worked at Fallingwater. But Amelia dreamed of flying. That story is in this third story, that is the book Fallingwater. So finally, we’ve realized that the main character was the house. So we threw out our fictional characters and focused on the house.”

There were some parallels between what Smucker and Harshman did and the work between Wright and Kaufmann. In the case of the architect and the client, Wright spent nearly a year visiting the proposed construction site for the house before he even started to draw up plans.

“I think Frank Lloyd Wright’s whole thing was, a building of any sort should look as if it had grown right out of the ground that it was situated on,” Smucker said. “And it does seem like his very first visit to Bear Run he looked at that outcropping. And it almost seems like right away he knew that was the heart of the house. And it turned out that that rock is the hearth of the house.”

For Harshman, the relationship between the two men speaks to the creative process in general.

“Speaking for myself, it is important to work hard, as I’m quite sure Wright did throughout his career, but also important to leave space for the dreaming time,” Harshman said. “Imagine that vision. Just to look out the window, and let things ferment for a while. The dreaming portion of the creation was essential, but Wright was also a genius. And so where it might have taken someone years of sketching, he did a lot of dreaming, and then could condense that in just a matter of hours into the rough draft on his blueprints and, and thus, the house emerged on paper.”

More than 400 copies of the book Fallingwater: The Building of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masterpiece have been sent around the state and volunteers are reading it in classrooms in every county in West Virginia this week. An estimated 18,000 children will hear the story in person.

ZMM Architect and Engineers donated the books for the project. Adam Krason is one of the principals of the firm and he said just about anyone with an interest can become an architect. It’s a mixture of hard work and creativity.

“When I graduated from high school, I had an interest in art and I had an interest in math,” Krason said. “And for some reason, that combination leads people to say you should be an architect or an engineer.”

Krason said he admires Wright for his ability to adapt his work and to deliver what his clients wanted.

“His career was very interesting in that he was able to design buildings, not only throughout the country, but throughout the world,” he said. “And one thing I appreciate about Frank Lloyd Wright is, although he’s associated very often with a prairie style of house, from his early career, there was no defined style when we talk about an architect really delivering the vision of his client. I mean, Fallingwater has nothing to do with the Guggenheim. And if you look at his prairie style houses, or the work he did in Japan, there might be some similarities, but in every case, he really made an effort to design what his client wanted. And that’s what I really appreciated about Frank Lloyd Wright.”

Classrooms and libraries can visit the Mountain Readers Become Leaders page at wvpublic.org to watch members of the West Virginia Public Broadcasting staff and the book’s authors read Fallingwater: The Building of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masterpiece.

New Children’s Book Looks At 'Affrilachia'

When Frank X. Walker looked up the word Appalachia in a dictionary 30 years ago, he saw it was defined with the phrase “the white residents of the Appalachian mountains.” As a man of color, he said that shook him. His latest work is a children’s book, using the alphabet to identify and focus on people of color who grew up in Appalachia. It is called “A is for Affrilachia.”

That’s when the poet coined the term “Affrilachia” with his writing group. He said it has driven him to show readers that our region is made up of more than one race.

His latest work is a children’s book, using the alphabet to identify and focus on people of color who grew up in Appalachia. It is called “A is for Affrilachia.”

News Director Eric Douglas spoke to him about poetry and the new book.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Explain to me — as a person who admits that they struggle with poetry — tell me what will make it clear for me.

Walker: I don’t know if I can make it clear, I can make you feel less responsible. I think the challenge of poetry is that a lot of other people have given poetry a bad reputation. Because of the way it was taught in schools, if your first introduction to poetry is through a Shakespearean sonnet, and you’re 15 years old, and everything about Elizabethan England, is so, so far away from your world, versus your family, and where you live, and how you live and your diction and your language, and your culture and your music. If none of that is in poetry when it’s introduced to you, why would it not feel like a foreign concept?

I want to write poems that my grandmother might enjoy. Or even my father with an eighth grade education, that he would hear these words and not have to run to a dictionary, or feel left out, or even be mystified by the fact that he doesn’t recognize the people being talked about, the places being talked about. But if he hears that work, and it sounds just like some of his favorite music on the radio, without the music, that he’s not lost. If you think of poetry as a cousin to say, country music, or the blues, and you enjoy those two art forms, you can enjoy poetry.

Douglas: Explain to me, the genesis of roots of Appalachia, you’re credited with coining that term, but also the Appalachian poets. And where did all that start?

Walker: Right here in Lexington, about 1991. I have a group of friends who were meeting once a week, sharing our brand new poetry only with each other. This was before the big spoken word movement and cafes with poetry nights, that wasn’t happening at all. This was the 90s. It was even considered not a positive thing for young men to be walking around claiming to write poetry. So it was kind of a secret to most people. But we were doing it in our small group and we also started to go to public events. And we went to an event that was credited with showcasing the best writers from Appalachia. We all enjoyed the event. And I came home and I looked up the definition of Appalachia and in my dictionary in 1991, the definition of Appalachia said, “white residents of the mountainous regions of Appalachia.” And it shook me because I immediately thought, “What are you if you aren’t white?”

So I wrote a poem that kind of teased out that question at the very end of the poem. I wrote the line, “Imagine being an Affrilachian poet.” And I brought it back to my group that next week to share, and I fell in love with the word and we decided the same evening to name ourselves. We’d been meeting for about a year, unnamed and not even thinking of ourselves as a group, but we decided in that moment that there was something about the word that was electric enough to make us feel something, so we named ourselves The Affrilachian Poets.

About 10 years later, the dictionary, based on the amount of use that was happening with the word and a region, picked it up and decided it was a legitimate word. In the dictionary definition, it limited membership to descendants of Africa and African Americans living in the region. Our group from the very beginning was not all Black. We were multicultural. We had Asian Americans, Puerto Ricans and Lebanese descendants. So the multicultural, multi-gender, multi-age, very eclectic group of writers who just love poetry and writing, and enjoy proximity, and kinship groups and opportunities to work and live in and out there, the region of Appalachia. That’s the definition of the word, and the group. And even today, we’re still active as a group of writers presenting. We made a couple of documentaries, all of us either teaching or administrating. But we’re all definitely still writing books. And the group has grown from that small group of about a dozen to about 40 plus members, almost 30 years later. And we’re still creating and still feeling like a family.

Douglas: You’ve written books and essays, both with poetry and prose, but let’s talk about this children’s book. Why was it important for you to develop a children’s book?

Walker: People want to try to find Affrilachia on a map and I’ve always insisted that Affrilachia is an idea, not a geographical specific region. It is bigger than the ARC [Appalachian Regional Commission] definition of designated counties that make up Appalachia, particularly those communities that feature out migrants from the region, like Cincinnati, which probably has the largest number of Appalachian out migrants. I lived there for a while. People have these ideas about the space between rural and urban, but you almost never hear about the urban connections.

I’ve been telling stories about the region that really focused on the diversity and been struck by the fact that when you consider luminaries like Booker T. Washington and even John Henry stories, or Henry Louis Gates, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, Bill Withers, they’re always discussed separately from the space they come from. People almost never connect them to the region of Appalachia. What I wanted to do was do a children’s book that also educated the people who read to children because most of the stuff in the book, their parents don’t know this information either.

Douglas: The glossary really impressed me for that reason. I mean, I knew most of the names, but I had no idea that Chadwick Boseman or Nina Simone were from the region. I recognize these people and their significance, culturally, but had no idea that they were Appalachian, or that they had Appalachian roots at all.

Walker: To me, I think that’s really important. And that it challenges the “why.” It blows the negative caricatures out the water. If you hold up Snuffy Smith and the Beverly Hillbillies, and then say, Chadwick Boseman, Jesse Owens, Nina Simone, in the same sentence, it is hard to say, well, I know who lives there. And it’s hard to leave out a group of people who’ve been there since the beginning, as well. It’s not a traditional children’s book in the sense that children read it and be hypnotized by the sound of the ABC’s. It’s more of a kind of subtle way to teach important history and to challenge people’s notion of what Appalachia is and and what Appalachia might feel like and look like.

Douglas: Who do you want to read the book?

Walker: Grandmothers, parents, high school students, middle school students, you know, young people who are literate enough to read on their own. And even people who just enjoy beautiful images, to flip through the book and enjoy the images, and then ask questions of whoever was there with you. I hope it’s a multi-generational experience. Every family should own one of these books, in my opinion.

The book is being published by the University of Kentucky Press and will be out in February.

W.Va. Native Looks At Depression, Treatment In New Novel

Debut novelist William Brewer teaches creative writing at Stanford University, but his Morgantown roots have deeply influenced his writing, and even the main character of his new book — "The Red Arrow" — is also a West Virginia native.

Debut novelist William Brewer currently teaches creative writing at Stanford University, but his Morgantown roots have deeply influenced his writing, and even the main character of his new book — “The Red Arrow” — is also a West Virginia native.

Brewer also wrote a highly acclaimed book of poetry that focused on the opioid crisis in West Virginia called “I Know Your Kind.” He will be speaking at Taylor Books in Charleston on Wednesday, Aug. 10.

News Director Eric Douglas spoke with Brewer about the book and growing up in the Mountain State.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Tell me a little bit about the plot of the story in The Red Arrow.

Poet William Brewer, whose debut novel ?The Red Arrow? will be published by Knopf in 2022. Brewer is also a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.

Brewer: So the book begins with a narrator sitting on a train in Rome that’s about to depart for the north of Italy. He’s heading towards Modena, a town in the north, hoping to find a physicist that he works for as a ghost writer. He’s working to try to write this guy’s memoir to clear a huge debt he’s gotten himself into. He got into debt by taking a ton of money to write the ‘great West Virginia novel,’ which he sort of BS’d his way into and then quickly realized he had no business doing. So the book begins as the train is leaving the station. And he starts reflecting on how he got himself into this position. And in the meantime, what happens is he reflects on his failed career in the New York art world, a large chemical spill disaster in West Virginia, the phenomenon of psychedelic therapy in northern California. And then lastly, some experience of travel in Sicily and Italy.

Douglas: It’s interesting, you chose the chemical spill. Obviously, some of the facts have changed, but you set it about 20 years previous to the actual water crisis here in West Virginia. Why did you choose that as a seminal event?

Brewer: Something that’s really amazing about being from West Virginia, and then not living there and meeting other people, is they really struggle to believe the number of chemical and environmental disasters that have happened in the state and those disasters keep happening from a relationship with industry. People just don’t believe it’s possible.

They say that there’s no way you could do that. They’re like, I’ve never heard of it, so it couldn’t possibly be true. And so there’s two phenomena there. One is the scale of these events when they happen, and how often they’ve actually happened over the history of the state. If you look up the number of water crises that have happened, it’s quite a long list. But at the same time these things could be so big and so common, and yet people never know about them. And there’s something quite challenging about that in my mind.

The one that I fictionalize is, in some ways, cobbled together from any number of events; a detail from this one, a detail from that one. And the parameters sort of replay themselves over and over again.

I grew up in Morgantown, the river is sort of the central artery of the area. And it’s how you orient yourself. And I think that’s pretty much true throughout much of the state. There’s almost always a river where the towns are. And so when this sort of thing happens to the water, how quickly it has the ability to impact basically everybody’s lives in that town, and then how they each sort of struggle to deal with it in their own ways.

Douglas: I’m interested in your book of poetry as well. Tell me a little bit about that.

Brewer: The first book I wrote was a book of poems. And its main focus is the opioid epidemic in West Virginia. At the time, when I was going from undergrad up through grad school, and when I was writing my first book I was realizing this was happening all around. And I think people in West Virginia knew that this sort of epidemic was taking place, really before much of the nation caught on to it.

I think that was really by design, I think people who were moving these drugs through the state knew that the world wouldn’t notice right away. So I became really interested in that phenomenon and why it was happening. That’s sort of how these pharmaceutical companies treated people in the state in a way that was not unlike how timber treated people, and then how coal for much of its history treated people, which is more broadly to say the relationship between industry, these big industries with a great deal of power, and the people themselves that actually live in these places and have real lives.

Douglas: So what’s the name of the book?

Brewer: It’s “I Know Your Kind,” and it was published by the wonderful publisher called Milkweed Editions

Douglas: How does one make the transition from writing a book of poetry to teaching creative writing to your debut novel “The Red Arrow?”

Brewer: I started reading really seriously when I was about 15. And then I just sort of followed it wherever I went. One of the gifts of growing up in a place like West Virginia is that I was aware at a very early age that I was living somewhere that was vastly different than a lot of other places. And the times when my family would leave and travel to other parts of the Eastern Seaboard, it was very clear to me that where I lived was very different. And I mean that both in the landscape, the very distinct quality of the place, but also the quality of the people and the culture. And also how the state lives in relation to the rest of the country, that it’s this place that the country has been sort of built off the labor of, especially coal.

As a young person, when I would say, “I’m from West Virginia,” people would say, “I have cousins in Arlington.” And I don’t live in a state with Arlington. And so realizing that I was in this very specific part of the country, and yet, it was a part of the country that most of the country didn’t recognize, that piqued my attention at a really young age. And it sort of made me observe really heavily for much of my life. And if you’re going to write stuff, you have to be relatively good at paying attention and seeing the world around you. West Virginia was like a crash course on how to do that.

Douglas: It’s an interesting perspective that forced you mentally to pay attention, to be an observer. And then that extends into your writing.

Brewer: It shows you the relationship between people and where they live. And that’s something that you don’t necessarily get everywhere you go. I’ve certainly been to parts of the country where there’s these vast, sprawling suburbs, and you really could be anywhere. That’s never the case in West Virginia. When you are there, there is no doubt about where you are. And that’s something that I really became interested in.

Douglas: I thought it was interesting you chose a narrator, so the book is in first person, rather than a more traditional third person for a novel. Why did you choose that perspective?

Brewer: For this book, specifically, one of its concerns is how people lose track of reality in their minds. That their perceptions can get the better of them. And specifically, in the case of mental illness. I think the book is definitely interested in depression, but even sort of a kind of hyper awareness and a pressure of anxiety. And these are situations that I think are running rampant in America at the moment. I think the last two years of the pandemic made that all the worse with people being isolated, and strange for their jobs and just their own health.

The book is really interested in how mental illness functions in the mind. One of the ways to do that, to explore that in a book is to really sit squarely in a person’s mind. But the speaker has found freedom from this sort of oppressive depression that he’s lived with for much of his life. One of the ways to do that in the book is have this person speaking from the other side of the sort of burden of depression, which then allows him to reflect on his own mind from within his own mind. It sort of gives the reader the closest examination they can hope for.

Douglas: What haven’t we talked about?

Brewer: One of the blockbuster topics in the book that people are probably starting to learn about is the subject of psychedelic therapy. A documentary that just came out on Netflix called “How to Change Your Mind,” which is based off of the book by Michael Pollan. That book recounts the use of psychedelics towards how they function in the human mind demystifying them as these really, really dangerous drugs, but also showing how they can help people that are undergoing serious suffering.

I’m always interested in how humans change their minds, how they change consciousness. My poetry book relating to the opioid epidemic is part of that. If we look at something like the opioid epidemic, it doesn’t suggest to me that West Virginia has a problem with a lot of people that just want to use drugs. It has a problem with a lot of pain, and it’s a place that’s had a lot of pain put on it. If one drug gives people the power to numb that pain, and those drugs being opiates, the alternative then is these psychedelics, which used in a therapeutic context, are being shown time and time again, at places like Johns Hopkins University, for example, that are running huge studies and have now opened an institute for the study of these chemicals, that they offer immense potential in helping people be alleviated from that suffering.

People want to tiptoe around it as a subject, but my job as a writer is to dive headfirst into it. I based the book off my own experience. It completely changed my life. I encountered it here in northern California, but it’s something that I believe would offer immense help to places like West Virginia, for example, where I think people want help.

Douglas: In the book, you referred to the mist, which is a euphemism for depression, for feeling like you’re kind of walking through a cloud. Tell me a little bit about that.

Brewer: I experienced depression pretty severely for much of my life, and I’d read a lot about it. But in a lot of books, they talk about it in the abstract. Something I wanted to do is make it sort of a presence. That’s certainly how it felt. For me, it felt like this thing that was with me at all times, but was not me. I hoped that it could show people the kind of physical power of it, how it really becomes this thing that interrupts your experience of reality, that anyone who has been around someone who has a really hard walk with depression.

It can be really hard to even get your words to them. By making it this cloud, this misty figure really articulates the physicality, the sort of derangement of it. I live here where there’s the famous Bay Area fog all the time. That’s often a quite common component of life. And in the mountains of West Virginia, there are these foggy, misty mornings that hang on for much of the year. Those always stayed with me. I have very visceral memories of walking to the bus stop through these foggy mornings, and I think I’ve never stopped thinking about them.

Douglas: You went through this psychedelic therapy, and by all accounts, it has changed your own mind.

Brewer: It completely changed my life. It liberated me from the disease of depression. And it taught me a lot about how the human mind works. It sounds to some people very hippie dippie. But it’s the most immense experience I’ve ever had. Besides meeting my wife, easily the most important thing that’s ever happened to me. But it also made the most sense in terms of mental health care of anything I’ve ever experienced. It’s like having open heart surgery on your mind.

A Celebration Of W.Va. Books And An Anthology Focuses On Sense Of Place

Recently, NPR published a list of 50 books for 50 states to celebrate summer reading. The one they identified for West Virginia was “Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry From West Virginia” edited by Doug Van Gundy and Laura Long.

It’s summertime. We go swimming, we travel, we see our friends, and many of us also love to read.

Twenty years ago, West Virginia poet laureate Irene McKinney edited an anthology of West Virginia fiction writers and poets called “Backcountry.” A few years ago, Van Gundy and Long — working with WVU Press — began a project to compile an anthology of West Virginia writing since Backcountry’s publication — that’s how “Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia” was born.

This anthology features a collection of 63 fiction writers and poets talking about the unique sense of place they find in the Mountain State.

News Director Eric Douglas spoke with Van Gundy and Long about the process for creating the book. But before we get into that conversation, we asked to hear from you.

What are your favorite West Virginia books that you would recommend? The type of book that makes you think of the Mountain State.

We asked you on Facebook, and here’s what you told us:

Over a two-and-half-day period, we received 34 responses, ages 30 to 84. Most of you were from West Virginia: 85.71 percent from the Mountain State, and 14.29 percent of you from out-of-state.

Most of you recommended “Rocket Boys” by Homer Hickam, while “The West Virginia Encyclopedia” took second place.

All together, we received 19 book recommendations. You described these books as reminding you of your childhood, “beautifully written,” “chock full of information” about West Virginia, “inspirational,” “more than stereotypes,” “complicated,” “authentic,” “empathetic,” “historical,” and as one of you proclaimed, “it’s a great story!”

Here’s a list of all your book recommendations, in no particular order:

Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam
West Virginia Hollow Tales by John E. Jordan Jr.
When I Was Young in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant
In the Country Dark by Mike Mallow
Gauley Mountain by Louise McNeill
Shrapnel by Marie Manilla
Far Appalachia by Noah Adams
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
The Dark and Bloody River by Allan W. Eckert
The West Virginia Encyclopedia
The Miner’s Daughter by Gretchen Moran Laskas
Dismal Mountain by John W. Billheimer
So Much to Be Angry About by Shaun Slifer
Foote: A Mystery Novel by Tom Bredehoft
Another Appalachia: Growing Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place by Neema Avashia
Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina
The Unquiet Earth by Denise Giardina
At home in the heart of Appalachia by John O’Brien
The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant

This interview with Van Gundy and Long has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Which one of you came up with this idea? Or was this one of those projects that started over a couple beers during a conference somewhere.

Van Gundy: Abby Freeland, who was then the Acquisitions Editor at WVU Press, approached me. She was visiting the West Virginia Wesleyan low residency MFA program. And she said, “What do you think of this anthology, “Backcountry,” which was edited by Irene McKinney about 20 years ago?” And I said, “Oh, it’s essential.” And she said, “What do you think about updating it?” I said, “Oh, that would be great. You guys should do that.” She said, “What do you think about you doing it?” And [I said], “Oh, okay. Sure.”

We thought that Laura would be a great collaborator on this. And as Laura writes poetry and fiction, I’m primarily a poet, we thought it’d be great to have a couple of perspectives. And Laura and I are old friends and have worked together off and on for a long time. And we thought we could probably get along well enough to pull together an anthology. And it ended up being just a joy.

But the bones of the thing came together at an Appalachian studies conference in Huntington, where we all ducked out to have dinner together. And we sort of hammered out what we wanted for the book. And Laura brought her ideas, and I brought my ideas, and Abby brought her ideas. And by the end of dinner, we sort of had a mandate and direction.

Douglas: How did you solicit the writers? How did you edit down the content – that sort of thing?

Van Gundy: We each came up with suggestions for the list. We wanted authors that had books out from national presses, generally. And then we each brought lists. And when we went around and asked some of the people who were on our lists if they would like to be included, we always asked them, “Who do you think should be in this book?” So that way we were able to find writers that I didn’t know of, that I’ve since become a fan of. But just through the web of connectivity of West Virginia writers, we just kept getting more and more suggestions as we went on.

Long: We also divided the work up so that I did the fiction and Doug did the poetry. When we wrote to people, we asked them to send work that they felt connected to a sense of place, of West Virginia. So the authors themselves chose work that gave them a strong sense of place. And I think that’s a real strength of the book, that self-selection by the writers, of the things that they felt were very much West Virginia-centered or had that feeling for them in whatever way. So they each sent us more than one work. And then we chose among the pieces that each writer sent to us, so the book would balance out well. And what we felt was the strongest.

Van Gundy: I remember going back and forth for quite a while on how to sequence this thing, because the work is so various and so broad, such a broad reach and such a chorus of voices and perspectives. We finally settled on alphabetical. It just seemed the most egalitarian.

Douglas: Any big discoveries? Anybody that you didn’t know about or anybody that surprised you?

Long: There were a number of poets that I didn’t know their work. So I was surprised by many of the poets. I was just rereading it this morning and remember being surprised again, actually, because the poet’s are just amazing. And not many of them are that well known because people don’t read poetry that much. I can’t name just one.

Douglas: You said in your introduction to the book, and you both alluded to it, that you were looking for stories with a connection to West Virginia, or that sense of place of West Virginia.

Van Gundy: I remember a conversation that Laura and I had, where we said we wanted the book to represent the state of the state of fiction and poetry in West Virginia. And we wanted to be sure that it was not monolithic. We wanted to be sure that it represented as many various voices that are present in our literature as possible. One of the things that I love so much about my West Virginia, is that there’s room for everyone. I think there is, at its core, a kind of inclusivity that if you’re willing to put something into the community, if you’re willing to belong, then you’re welcome. And I think that this book reflects that.

Douglas: Laura, do you want to add anything?

Long: Speaking of poets that I didn’t really know before, Norman Jordan, who was associated with the Black Arts Movement of the 60s and 70s, was a writer that I didn’t know, even though he wrote five books of poetry. And his poem is about the Hawks Nest tunnel. And so the writers that are not at all stereotypical are deeply embedded and entwined with a sense of place.

So, the place does connect people who, in other scenarios, might not seem connected. Rajia Hasib, who’s an amazing writer in Charleston, whose work connects with others in these surprising ways. That’s another person that I didn’t know before [who] I’ve gotten to know because of the book. And, with people like Rajia Hasib, who was so happy to be part of the book, you realize how connected people feel, even when she came to West Virginia from Egypt. And we realize how many people are happy to make a home in West Virginia, as well as people who are born and raised here. People feel connections because they’re born here, but they also feel connections because they make a life here with their family. So I feel that the book does connect people in ways that West Virginia itself connects people.

Van Gundy: As you’re saying that, Laura, it makes me think that whether or not we’re born here, we have family histories here. Every one of us, and every one of the voices in this book, is a West Virginian and by choice, you know, we choose again and again to stay where we choose. We choose to write about the place, and so we are all West Virginians by choice.

And that’s something that unites us.

Appalachia’s Health Problems Are America’s Health Problems, New Book Says

A new book called “Appalachian Health: Culture, Challenges and Capacity” explores major challenges and opportunities for promoting the health and well-being of the people of Appalachia. The book is a collection of essays on various topics, looking at health’s intersection with social, political and economic factors.

Eric Douglas spoke with Dr. Randy Wykoff, one of the book’s two editors, to get a better understanding of the issues facing Appalachia and how solutions used here can be used to improve the health of the whole country. Wykoff is a founding dean of the College of Public Health and professor in the Department of Health Services Management and Policy at East Tennessee State University.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: The word that you used in your book is that Appalachia is not monolithic. But we still do think of Appalachia as a bit of an island, within the middle of the country. Let’s talk about that just for a second.

Wykoff: Many of the health challenges that face the country are simply more concentrated in Appalachia: poverty, lack of educational achievement, lack of access to health care, poor health behaviors. And there are reasons why that has happened. But I think for me, understanding Appalachia helps you understand the health challenges of Americans everywhere. It’s not that our problems are unique, it’s not that we’re unique, we’re not different, necessarily. But we have this series of health challenges that are worse here. And if we understand and can deal with the health challenges of Appalachia, we can deal with them anywhere.

Douglas: At the beginning of the book, there’s a list of health outcomes, that in the United States as a whole are lower than the rest of the industrialized world. Birth outcomes, injuries and homicides, adolescent pregnancy, things like that. But then you say that in Appalachia, they are even lower. Why do you think that is? Why is it a problem in Appalachia?

Wykoff: I think the way I think about it is that most of what we see in Appalachia is the result of multiple intergenerational cycles. We know that if you’re born poor, you’re likely to stay poor. We know if your parents are less educated, you’re likely to be less educated. We know if your parents are smokers or obese, you’re more likely to be smokers or obese. And these cycles get worse and worse over time.

In fact, in our country overall, the gap between rich and poor has been widening for over 50 years. So part of what we’re seeing in Appalachia is the outcome of these intergenerational cycles. And I think the reason the U.S. ranks worse than other countries is because we have so much diversity in our health outcomes within the country. We’ve compared central Appalachia to the non-Appalachian counties in the same six states of central Appalachia. They’re less healthy. It’s not a southern phenomenon. It’s an Appalachian phenomenon related to poverty and intergenerational cycles.

Douglas: So what do we do about it?

Wykoff: I think the key is recognizing that there is not one solution. Oftentimes, people say, “Well, if we’ve got a problem with health, we just need to get more providers into the community.” And that’s a real problem. As you know, a lot of Appalachian communities have no health care at all. We’ve seen rural hospitals closing. But the real secret to improving health long term is economic development, jobs, education and changing behavior.

That’s not to say access to health care isn’t important. It’s really important. But we’ve got to recognize that those things are interrelated. Think about it this way, every employer you talk to will tell you they need a healthy, educated, drug-free workforce. Those are so interrelated, that what we’ve got to do really is get those folks that are working on the education side, those folks working on economic development, those folks working on behavior change, get them to work together. That’s really the secret to improving health and Appalachia, in the southeast, in the US/Mexico, border region, everywhere in our country. We talked about canary in the coal mine and to me, Appalachia fills that role. We are a bellwether for health conditions throughout the country. And I guess by extrapolation, if you solve the problems here, it can help in underserved rural, impoverished regions throughout the country. The issues that face Appalachia are not fundamentally different from the issues that face other parts of the country. They’re just more common here.

Douglas: Okay, magic wand time.

Wykoff: I’m trained as a pediatrician, so I tend to think of issues from the child standpoint. To me, anything we’re going to do in Appalachia, or in tribal lands in the US/Mexico border, or rural America, anywhere is going to have to start with early childhood interventions. You want every mom to get prenatal care. You want every baby born in a safe environment, you want mom to know that baby should go to sleep on the back, that they should breastfeed for six months, they should be in a car seat, someone can be reading to that baby. It’s not rocket science. But we’ve got to change it incrementally. The analogy of turning a great freighter in the ocean is probably the one for us, right? You’re not going to turn on a dime. But if you start turning a little bit in time, we’re gonna see major changes.

Douglas: Why aren’t we making these changes? At the beginning of the book, you alluded to Lyndon Johnson and the War on Poverty. That was 60 years ago, or very close to it. So why haven’t we made these changes?

Wykoff: The gap between rich and poor in our country has been widening for 60 years. And if you believe as I do that poverty is one of the great predictors of poor health. You just see this gap widening and widening and widening. And you know that poor communities have less money to invest in their school systems, the way taxes are distributed. I mean, it’s multiple cycles that overlap each other. I think we’re starting to see some important improvements. But you know, it’s going to take a while.