Appalachian Author Interviews Story Archives - Page 3 of 11

Folk Medicines Examined In New Book

Appalachian lore often includes medicines made from plants and herbs to cure ailments. A new book by Rebecca Linger and Dennis K. Flaherty examines the components of some of those traditional herbs to see just what effect they have and determine how best to use them.

Rebecca Linger and Dennis Flaherty were both on the faculty of the University of Charleston School of Pharmacy. Both have an interest in medicinal plants but from different perspectives. Dr. Linger teaches graduate courses in ethnobotany and was interested in the chemistry and pharmacology of medicinal plants. Dr. Flaherty, who is now retired, taught graduate toxicology courses and approached the book project from a human toxicology perspective.

The book is titled “A Guide to the Toxicology of Select Medicinal Plants and Herbs of Eastern North America.” Eric Douglas spoke with Linger to understand the history behind these medicines.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Explain to me the interest in herbal medicine and the medicinal properties. Where did that come from?

Linger: I was born in southern Ohio, and my mother’s people come from Adams County, Ohio. My grandmother was someone who pretty much doctored the family and herself and she had some very interesting remedies that she would use on her children. When I was little, I was always getting canker sores, which now that I’m older, I recognize that it’s because I had a thiamin deficiency. My grandma had this little tin of yellow root powder. And she would always give me a little bit of that in a plastic bag and say “Take this home, lick your finger, tap it on the powder and put it on your sores whenever you get a canker sore.” And when I used that stuff, it’s bitter. Being a four- or five-year-old kid, doctoring yourself with an herbal medicine was really, really tough. But I did it because the canker sore would be gone in a day. And if you’ve ever had any kind of mouth sores you know it’s really, really painful. So I trusted it, and it worked great.

Douglas: How did people learn this stuff? Where did that knowledge come from in the first place?

Linger: The answer is that if you look back in recorded history, there have been many medical texts that have been written in all cultures. So the Chinese had the Yellow Emperor’s book of medicine. That actually encompasses many, many different fields. But if you think all the way back to primitive man before recorded history, you’d have to figure that there were observational things. “Is this plant edible? Well, let me eat a little bit of it. Oh, it’s edible. It’s bitter. But it didn’t really make me sick. And it actually helped with something.” The other thing is that the observation of what plants animals ate helped early man to recognize what was there.

But in terms of what plants have medicinal properties, it really was kind of a trial and error that you would have this idea that “Well, let me try this and see if this helps with this problem.”

I do want to point out that there was a Neanderthal grave that was discovered in Germany. And when they excavated it, they noticed that the body covered with a lot of medicinal plants. They thought it was a Neanderthal burial practice. But when they really looked at the flowers in the grave, every single one of them had strong medicinal properties. And so maybe the Neanderthals recognized medicinal properties.

Douglas: For the book, you’ve taken these oral traditions of medicines, but then you break down the chemical properties. As a scientist, what was your thought about this? Were you skeptical? Or were you? “Hey, I know from personal experience this stuff works?”

Linger: There are herbal books that have been written that basically will talk about all the plants that have been historically used as medicine. I did have a certain level of skepticism. It’s like, “Is that really true?” One of the plants out there that has an ascribed medicinal property to it, but there’s nothing in science to support is maidenhair fern. It’s supposed to help you grow a thick head of hair. There’s nothing in it.

After World War II, the United States government shifted its focus from implements of war to implements of health. The National Cancer Institute was founded from that. And one of the processes that scientists there advocated to academics across the country was to find new cures for cancer. The academics went back to the herbals. From that process, we got the mayapple, which is a beautiful spring flower. The fruit is edible, the rest of the plant is incredibly toxic, because it stops your cells from dividing. And so from that we got two chemotherapies that are still in use today. And they’re very, very effective.

The book will allow you to learn how to dose yourself with medicinal plants. But it will also give you the caution that don’t use too much of it, this is the recommended dose, don’t go over this. And this is how it will interact with the organ systems in your body. If you take too much of it, it could harm your liver or your kidneys. Some of them are going to cause your heart to have issues.

Douglas: Were there any big surprises when you jumped into this research?

Linger: I talked about the horse chestnut. I was born in southern Ohio so the buckeye tree is, of course, near and dear to my heart. I was always raised that buckeyes were poisonous, but I would see half-eaten buckeyes in the field. My uncle always teased me that only the squirrel knows which half of the buckeye is not poisonous.

You can use the buckeye as medicine, you can make a tincture out of it, or a tea out of it, and use very, very small amounts of it. And it will actually help with stomach complaints and so forth. It’ll help with inflammation. So it will help a little bit with your arthritis. One of the folktales that I’d always heard was to carry a buckeye in your pocket and you’d never have joint pain.

Douglas: Today, you hear a lot about essential oils and that sort of thing. Is that an extension today of this kind of medicine?

Linger: Definitely. A lot of medicinal properties of plants are in the oils of the plant itself. I’ll give the example of pine oil. It can disrupt some of the pain signaling in your body so that it will alleviate pain and inflammation. There is some truth to that. Smelling lavender oil is relaxing. Cedar wood and sage oil can be very relaxing, too.

But you have to be careful with essential oils because they’re so strong. There are some that are really, really toxic.

One thing about it that needs to be said is that if you are infusing essential oils in your household, be aware of the pets that you have because especially cats aren’t able to metabolize the essential oils and they’ll build up in the system. Essential oils can be toxic to your pets.

“A Guide to the Toxicology of Select Medicinal Plants and Herbs of Eastern North America” is available in Charleston at Taylor Books, the Capitol Market and the gift shop at Kanawha State Forest. It is also available on Amazon.

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

W.Va. Poet Laureate Talks Poetry And Literature In Appalachia

Poetry is not just about Shakespearean love sonnets. It is about the close observation of the world around us. And it is a big part of Appalachian culture.

Marc Harshman is West Virginia’s poet laureate and an advocate for poetry and Appalachian literature. He spoke with Eric Douglas about what poetry means to West Virginia.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Tell me about poetry’s significance in West Virginia, in Appalachia, as an art form.

Harshman: The same time I was appointed poet laureate in 2012, there was a new laureate, appointed for the entire nation of Canada. He wrote, “Poetry has existed since the beginning of humanity, our ancestors gathered around the fire and tried to communicate with mysteries bigger than themselves.” That’s still what we do with poetry. We write with the hope that there’s someone at the other end of our poem.

And that strikes me as so quintessentially Appalachian, if we just change those words slightly and broaden it to storytelling, because we have always been a people in this region that is in touch with a place where we tell stories about ourselves, about our history, to try to make sense of life. And that seems so in tune with what the Canadian poet said that we write with the hope there’s someone there at the other end, we write, to communicate with mysteries bigger than ourselves.

Douglas: Sometimes people will hear the word poetry and they think it will be so dense and obscure that they don’t understand it. To me poetry in Appalachia is the stuff of songs, is the stuff of murder ballads, is the stuff of storytelling, is the stuff of that oral tradition.

Harshman: Along with that comes a keen attention to the little everyday things. Wendell Berry, who has written as persuasively as anybody I know about what it means to live in this region we call Appalachia, has said that the regionalism he adheres to is simply defined as local life aware of itself. And that seems to me, so very true.

Louise McNeil, former poet laureate of West Virginia, said once in her wonderful book, which I recommend to everybody called The Milkweed Ladies, it’s a book of her reflections on this region, that “there were the triangular prints of the rabbits,” or I love this, “the little field mice tracks like delicate lace woven across the snow.” That’s someone who lives in a particular place. That’s not fancy language. That’s not anything anybody can’t understand. But it is close observation, it is paying close attention.

That is what I think the best poetry, and let me expand that, the best literature out of our region does, is pay amazingly close attention to place, close attention to voice, some of the characters and some of our novelists and short stories from the region are just amazing. The way they capture voice for these people

Poet Laureate Marc Harshman

West Virginia poet laureate Marc Harshman reads a poem published in the New York Times last winter.

Douglas: Let’s discuss regional literature in the bigger picture. What’s the effect of Appalachian regional literature?

Harshman: Our state, as small, relatively, as West Virginia is, we have more players on the national stage, it seems a disproportionate amount, in all the best ways. There’s just an amazing wealth of writers of all stripes who are really writing at the top of their game. They’re being published by some of the finest presses in the U.S.

We have everything from a remarkable cabinet maker, cabinetmaker poet, writing poems that are being published by one of the finest university presses in the country. In this generation, we had a steel mill worker winning the Terrence De Pres Prize. We have a young woman raised on a farm south of Parkersburg, who’s writing, translating, doing photography, is fluent in all the languages of Northern Europe, including Faroese and Icelandic. We have another woman who’s an internationally recognized theologian who’s also publishing books of poetry abroad and in the U.S., another who’s a champion fiddler.

There are two young people, both out of Marshall County, who have published major books on the national stage. And not to mention all the amazing people staffing some of our best colleges and universities.

It’s such a diverse range of voices. And we can expand that easily to the, to the broader Appalachian stage.

Douglas: The thought I had as you were running through that list is that these are people who work with their hands and do things and write poetry.

Harshman: But you’ll notice I did say many fine folks from the universities and colleges because some of those people who make their living working with their hands have nonetheless also interacted with the superb teachers in our universities.

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

‘Pot Plane’ Smuggler Returns to Charleston

The site of the pot plane crash, just down the hill from what is now Yeager Airport in Charleston, West Virginia.

On June 6, 1979, a plane crashed on the side of the mountain at what was then known as the Kanawha Airport in Charleston. The aging DC – 6 was carrying 26,000 pounds of marijuana. The entire episode has since been referred to as the Pot Plane Crash.

Jerome Lill was on board the plane when it went down. He recently wrote the book, “Final Approach: In the Battle of Angels, it’s a God Thing,” about his life and smuggling days, and later, hitting rock bottom and where he is now.

He visited Charleston for the anniversary of the crash and sat down with Eric Douglas in our studios.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Set the stage, six months before you got here. How did all this come to be?

Lill: I wasn’t a cocaine dealer or anything. I wanted to strictly stick with marijuana. I had decided I wanted to be a Colombian marijuana smuggler.

Douglas: Why Charleston, West Virginia? Why were you coming here?

Lill: I wanted to be with my big load of Colombian marijuana. Okay, it was an ego trip for myself, but not even to show other people. I wanted to do this thing. And I just wanted to be with my pot. So they picked Charleston. We didn’t know why they picked Charleston. So we just said okay, Charleston. Now one thing we didn’t do, we never came and looked at Charleston. We should have planned that because when I crashed that plane and I was in the woods, I ran for seven hours. I was running around the Charleston airport in the night with my head split open, my teeth busted. And we kept going around the airport in circles. I don’t know where I was.

Douglas: Where did you cross the coast? You crossed Cuba, did you come up over Florida?

Lill: We didn’t come over Florida. We stayed back out in the ocean. We went out into the Atlantic along the coast then started coming in across North Carolina and Virginia. And David (Seesing) tells (Breck Dana) Anderson we’re coming up on a little rain cell. So David says he’s gonna fly through it, and he tells him to drop the (landing) gear, because we’re gonna wash the mud off so the DEA and the government could not trace it to Columbia. Now, I thought that was kind of stupid at the time. So who cares? We know we came from Columbia. We get busted. We’re busted.

David said Anderson also hit the hydraulic switch and dropped the hydraulics. There’s been all these stories that there was a Colombian crew on it. That we overshot the runway, that the runway wasn’t long enough. All these different stories. The fact is, Anderson, the copilot, dropped the hydraulics. He dumped the hydraulic fluid. So when you don’t have hydraulics, you can’t control the plane properly. He tries to muscle it and keep it straight. We started to list off to the right of that runway at Charleston. And I thought we were going to flip over sideways to tell you the truth. But somehow David fought it. We kept going straight, but we were going pretty quick. And he did a reverse thrust. And then he thought he was going to try to climb again. Panic. And all of a sudden you’re at the end of the runway.

Douglas: This is in the middle of the night.

Lill: Yes, it’s one o’clock in the morning. Okay, bam, flipping over. Smash. I got hit in the head. This is to set the record straight. I’m telling you exactly what went down here. It sounds kind of smart. And it also sounds kind of rinky-dink. We didn’t do a very good job.

Douglas: In your book “Final Approach: In the Battle of Angels, it’s a God Thing” you talk about your own redemption.

Lill: This book is about getting my stuff together to write this. I made a deal with God after I did get sober that I would make him the star in my book and that’s why it says “it’s a God thing.” This is not about glorifying drug smuggling. This is not about that. This is about the fact that I am able to be alive right now and get off of alcohol and drugs. And I wanted to write a book about what happened to me, how I got it together. I wanted to make my book worth something of value.

Douglas: What’s the lesson you want readers to learn? Or what do you want them to take away from it?

Lill: Since I got sober, life’s a lot more fun, because look where I am. I’m sitting here talking about a book I wrote. I could have never written a book in the condition I was in. You can go out and do good things for people. You can be a nice person, and you can find out that there’s a lot of fun in that. I’ve been a criminal. Anybody who ever hears this, who’s a criminal or you have been in prison, you can come out of that. It’s never too late. That’s what I want to do with this.

Douglas: Tell me what you’re doing with yourself now.

Lill: I’m doing children’s books. I’m doing a book about “Roadie the Rabbit.” It’s about a rabbit that I found on the side of the road on a Sunday. I’m doing a book about my cat, “Ernest Goes to the Keys.” These are all true stories about animals I owned. I’m gonna have a whole line of them.

For more on the 1979 pot plane crash, visit this story, excerpted from Inside Appalachia.

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

New Book Looks At Secret Lives Of Church Ladies

“The Secret Lives of Church Ladies” is a collection of short stories that takes a look at the sexuality of Black women in the church. Written by Deesha Philyaw, the book was recently published by West Virginia University Press.

“The Secret Lives of Church Ladies” has been taking the literary world by storm, winning the PEN/Faulkner Award, the $20,000 Story Prize, and the L.A. Times Award for First Fiction.

Philyaw spoke with Eric Douglas about the book.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Describe for me, in your words, “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.”

Philyaw: It was definitely a passion project, it was definitely a work of my heart. These women have been living in my imagination and in my curiosity, since I was a girl. This book is the fruition of nostalgia and history and memory and wonder and hope for myself and other black women, to get free of the things that hold us back.

Douglas: So I have to ask, were you sitting in the back pew with one of your friends going “I wonder about her,” making up those stories, as all teenage kids do?

Philyaw: Not so much with a friend, but in my own mind. I was very curious about those women and their desires and their sex lives. Because I was trying to figure out what that meant for me, like, what are my options here? I was trying to make sense of what I was being taught and what I was being shown, which was sometimes contradictory. I was influenced by women in the church and women outside of the church. And there were all these binaries, which is so black and white. My body was changing. And I was trying to figure out, how do you navigate these longings that I now know are very human.

Hear Deesha Philyaw read an excerpt from the book

Douglas: I understand you wrote about a black experience, but I think it’s much more universal than that.

Philyaw: That’s one of the things that I hope people can take away from the book. I’m certainly not the first one to observe this, because Toni Morrison observed it, August Wilson observed that. They wrote exclusively about black life, but they both were clear and their work shows that you can tell universal stories through specific black characters and scenarios. Those themes about getting free, disrupting binaries, that’s something that all of us can relate to.

Douglas: The opening quote in the book is from Ansel Elkins in “The Autobiography of Eve.” It says “Let it be known, I did not fall from grace, I leapt to freedom.” That, to me. speaks to the whole concept of the book. There is a lot of sex in the book, but that’s not really what the book is about. It’s about personal freedom and understanding themselves.

Philyaw: That’s right. The narrative we’ve been given about Eve, is that it was a fall. I love that line, that verse, from Ansel, that it’s a reframing and reclaiming the Eve narrative by Eve herself. From her perspective, it was a leap. And it was a leap to freedom specifically. And so what happens if we reclaim these narratives? How do we tell our own stories instead of embodying the stories that have been told about us, which have been lies and distortions, and important things left out. When I say that I want black women to feel seen and heard in these stories, that’s what I mean. I hope that these narratives are a better reflection of them than what we have often seen about ourselves, and in particular, our sexuality.

Douglas: I wonder if in the context of the Me Too movement and some of these other things that this book didn’t land at the perfect time.

Philyaw: I think that so many of us are hungry to be reassured and so if you have been hurt by the church, if your agency around your body has been taken away, and whether that’s from assault to having a mother that wants you to wear a girdle, like in one of the stories, I think the book offers that affirmation and that encouragement that, yes, this happened, it didn’t just happen to you, there are lots of us, because this is cultural.

So the conditions were absolutely right for a book like this. These are things that we whisper just amongst ourselves, or maybe, you know, we only keep it to ourselves. And so this moment, where we’re gonna say those parts out loud, I think the culture was really, really ripe for that.

Douglas: In one of the interviews that you did, you talked about some concern that somebody would ask you to make it less black. But I guess ultimately, that request never came through.

Philyaw: My reason for being concerned was because I heard from other writers, this idea of writing to a white audience and trying to make sure that white people could access the stories. Again, I listened to Toni Morrison and August Wilson, who said, white people can access stories about black people without us having to translate culture, you know. I mean, what do any of us do when we encounter a word or a phrase or something? We look it up. As a friend of mine, another writer from Jacksonville, says she writes so that the people who she’s writing about can understand these words. It’s not about translating for anyone. I knew that there would be that pressure in the industry as a whole. And I’d heard that from individual writers. And so I assumed that I would be confronted with that as well. But thankfully, I wasn’t.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies was recently published by West Virginia University Press.

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

Conor Knighton’s Country Roads Led Him To CBS, National Parks Journey And Book

Conor Knighton is an Emmy Award-winning CBS Sunday Morning Correspondent. He’s also a Charleston, West Virginia native who spent a year on the road visiting every national park in the country.

Knighton, who wrote a book about his journey titled “Leave Only Footprints,” spoke with Eric Douglas about his epic trip and how growing up in West Virginia influenced what he saw.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: One thing that really intrigued me about this book, Leave Only Footprints, was — probably on the second page — you were talking about your West Virginia roots and comparing that to some of the adventures you were setting out on? How did that play into your excursion out to visit all of the national parks in the country?

Knighton: It’s so easy to trace my love of nature back to West Virginia. I grew up with so many different hiking opportunities right out my front door, whether that was Kanawha State Forest or a trip to Watoga, we spent a lot of weekends camping. It’s just a beautiful state. And it continues to be a type of landscape that I appreciate — maybe even more now that I’ve seen so many other places.

Douglas: So tell me why you wanted to take this journey, why it was important for you to see all the national parks in the country.

Knighton: I saw a news article at the end of 2015 about the upcoming centennial of the National Park Service. This journey took place over the course of 2016. At the time, I was freelancing for CBS Sunday Morning, and I thought, ‘Well, hey, that’s something we might do a story on.” Before I sent that email, I ended up completely revising my pitch to a whole series of stories on all of the parks. We could find the same types of stories about food and family and art and architecture that would be at home on any episode of Sunday Morning, and just happened to take place in the parks. So I outlined this, looking back, very outlandish pitch that my boss said yes to. But he rightfully decided that we should only do some of the parks for the show.

At the time, there were 59 national parks. We decided to do 20 or so for the broadcast. But then I just got really excited about the idea of trying to tackle them all. And so it was at that point that I decided to give up my place in LA, put my stuff into storage, sell most of the rest, and then hit the road and spend the entire year living full time on the road.

Conor Knighton’s love of nature started young. Here he is as a child in Kanawha State Forest.

Douglas: One of the stories in the book that stands out for me is the Hot Springs story.

Knighton: When you hear ‘national park,’ you think of a place like Yellowstone or Yosemite. And so when you roll up to Hot Springs National Park in Hot Springs, Arkansas, it’s in the middle of a city. There’s a few trails out in the hills that you can hike, but that is a park that was protected for its history — for these historic bath houses. And those all exist because of the water. There was this belief back when that area was protected, that the healing powers of that spring water could cure everything from syphilis to polio. We have since learned that penicillin is maybe better medicine than water.

Douglas: What was the process for pulling the book project together? Did you take notes along the way?

Knighton: I wish I had taken better notes. I did take some because and in the back of my mind, I thought that maybe it’s a book one day, but I was just too embarrassed to admit that to anyone else. I didn’t know how I was gonna finish this journey. For all I knew I was gonna break my legs in Glacier National Park and that would have been the end of it.

At the conclusion of the journey, I finally sat down and started looking at all that together and almost felt like I was solving a crime where I would have threads and note cards all up on the walls. The potential downside is you’ve set up an expectation that you’re gonna hear about all of the parks. So I wanted to make sure I at least featured every park with some getting more attention than others.

Douglas: Were there any of the parks that were a surprise to you?

Knighton: So many of them. And actually what convinced me to take on this project was when I looked down the list of the parks, I was surprised how many I’d never even heard of. I mean, everyone knows the Everglades and Yosemite and Yellowstone. But Great Sand Dunes in Colorado? I had never heard of that park before. Most of the Alaskan ones, there were at least half that didn’t even register.

For the broadcast for the Sunday Morning side of things, those were the ones I tended to focus on. Just mentioning the fact that there is a national park in American Samoa, that’s news to a lot of people. It was news to me. And so that was unbelievably memorable.

Douglas: Can you name one of those? One that stood out?

Knighton: I think Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado is, from a scenery perspective, very memorable. It is an unexpected park where it looks like the Sahara Desert has been transposed on to the Rocky Mountains. It is an incongruous mashup that just doesn’t compute when you see it for the first time, because it’s just a massive dune field in the midst of the Rocky Mountains. It’s also one of the quietest places on earth. That ended up becoming a story that I tell in the book all about the importance of quiet.

Douglas: What was it like when you pitched this project to CBS?

Knighton: I was untested. I’d worked in TV for a decade at that point, and in some form or another for Sunday Morning for four years. But this really was a commitment on their part to believing in me. I produced all these segments on my own while I was traveling, and working remotely before that was a thing that everybody was doing. At the time, I would make a segment, send back the footage via FedEx, interact with the editor through Vimeo links. That was new for our show. So that was a bit of a leap of faith on their part that, I think, worked out.

Douglas: You got what 20 or so broadcasts out of it, you got a book out of it.

Knighton: If no one read it and no one watched it, it was a life-changing experience for me. What I got the most out of it was a shift in my own perspective.

The Isle Royale National Park, off the coast of Michigan, is so remote, that it has some of the highest durations of visitation. If you’re going there, you’re there for days because it’s just hard to get to and hard to get back from.

You really have to go far into nature to experience that. I came to treasure that. to have those times with myself, to really unplug and plug more into that natural world.

Knighton’s book “Leave Only Footprints,” is now available in paperback.

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

Huntington Celebrates 150th Anniversary by Naming Literary Laureate

In celebration of its 150th anniversary, the city of Huntington has created a Literary Laureate. The first person to hold the position is Daniel O’Malley.

Originally from Cedar Hill, Missouri, O’Malley went to graduate school at the University of Florida and then moved to Huntington in 2012 to work at Marshall, specifically teaching in the English department with a particular interest in creative writing.

He spoke with Eric Douglas about his new role.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Are you teaching a variety of classes or just focused on creative writing?

O’Malley: I’ve taught a whole range of classes in composition, literature at the introductory level, advanced-level graduate courses, but my main area is creative writing, specifically fiction writing. That’s what I studied in graduate school. That’s the kind of writing that I do, myself.

Douglas: Tell me about your own personal writing.

O’Malley: Mainly what I’ve been focused on is short stories. I took a couple of writing workshops when I was in college and I’ve been fairly obsessed with short stories ever since. I’ve been working on a collection of stories, publishing them in literary magazines here and there. But now I have a manuscript for a collection of stories I am finishing up right now.

Douglas: Short stories are always a challenge, because just as important what you leave out is what you actually leave in the story.

O’Malley: I agree and I think sometimes it can seem strange to an outsider that a finished story is three or four pages long. But it takes quite a long time to get there. Even if I can write a first draft fairly quickly, I spend a lot of time just going back over that draft, setting it aside and coming back to it. I’ve had stories that are 1,000 words, but I’ve worked on that 1,000 words for four or five years.

Douglas: Tell me about the literary laureate program and about your vision for it.

O’Malley: My hope is to be able to emphasize the importance of literature and writing in the community. One of the first things I appreciated when I moved to Huntington in 2012 was how lively the literary community was; the number of readings and events and writers groups around town. It felt like a very nurturing community. The creation of this literary laureate position is a nice extension of that, a way to formally emphasize the importance of literature and writing in the community. One of the things I hope to do in this position is to encourage people to get involved in literature and in writing. Trying to encourage people to have a role beyond being an audience for literature and writing, to think about how they can engage in those things themselves.

There will be some activities that are specific to the sesquicentennial celebration, some public readings for myself or other writers, to coincide with other events around the city.

I’m also planning to put together a Huntington literary festival that will include public readings, but also writing workshops and a collaborative storytelling event where I’m going to try to get people at different locations around town to each contribute a sentence or a line to a story or to a long poem.

Douglas: There are a lot of people out there who would love to write. What, as the literary laureate, can you do to inspire those people who want to write and just don’t know how to get started?

O’Malley: That’s a great question. I think one of the things that this position can do, just the very existence of it, is serve as a reminder to people that they can write. It’s something they can choose to do.

You can’t develop as a writer without spending time writing. A lot of that process involves experimentation, trying, failing, trying again. But I’m not aware of any shortcuts. I think a lot of times when people are looking for advice, what they’re hoping for is some way to expedite that process. At least in my experience, it just takes time spent writing and time spent reading.

The process should be fun in some way, which isn’t to say that you’re just smiling and laughing the whole time. The process can also be rigorous, painful, and it can stir up strong emotions. But it should be something that you get immersed in, and that you feel compelled to do. And it shouldn’t just be a chore.

Douglas: Is there anything we haven’t talked about?

O’Malley: One of the things that I talked about with the people here in Huntington in my proposal for the position is creating opportunities for people to tell their own stories about Huntington, whether those are true stories or works of fiction.

I am hoping we can all get a deeper sense of the place, the community and the people through the stories that people tell.

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