Submissions for the West Virginia Fiction Competition are open until May 1. The statewide writing contest is held annually by the Shepherd University Center for Appalachian Studies and Communities.
Submissions for the West Virginia Fiction Competition are open until May 1.
The statewide writing contest is held annually by the Shepherd University Center for Appalachian Studies and Communities. It is open to anyone living or attending school in West Virginia.
Once the submission period closes, a group of editors and creative writing teachers will select eight to 10 finalists for this year’s contest.
The final winners will be determined by West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman, who will also write reviews of all the finalists’ stories.
The prize for the first-place winner is $500. Second and third-place winners will each receive a prize of $100. Additionally, one middle or high school student will receive the Judges’ Choice Prize.
The competition aims to “foster an appreciation of Appalachian people, culture and values,” by honoring writers with “distinctive and promising” skills, according to a Thursday press release from Shepherd.
Winners and finalists could also have an opportunity to publish their work in the “Anthology of Appalachian Writers,” an annual literary publication from Shepherd.
For more information on this year’s West Virginia Fiction Competition, visit Shepherd University’s website.
Russell Johnson’s first book, “The Moonshine Messiah,” is a mystery set in the coal fields of West Virginia.
Russell Johnson is an attorney in North Carolina, but he was originally from Charleston and his family comes from McDowell County. His first book, “The Moonshine Messiah,” is a mystery set in the coal fields of West Virginia. Bill Lynch spoke to Johnson about his book and the long road to getting published.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Lynch: When did you take an interest in writing?
Johnson: You know, I think I always knew that I wanted to be a writer – double majored in English and history and minored in creative writing and toyed with the MFA route idea.
I was also pretty sure that I didn’t want to be a starving writer. And so I did the law school thing instead, but I promised myself that I was going to write a book by the time I was 30.
And then I think when I was maybe like 33, I actually started putting some words down.
Then it was when my wife and I found out that we were about to have our second child, I told myself, “You know, if I don’t write a book before this baby’s born, life is just gonna get in the way, and I’m never gonna do it.”
And so, that’s when I really got serious. I got out my calendar and I marked off 100 days. I got up at 4:30 every morning and wrote 1,000 words, and by the time I got to the end of it, I had a book, sort of.
But it was awful. It was really bad. But at that point, I knew I could do it, and I caught the bug, you know, I knew I was hooked.
And so I’ve been diligently pursuing it, ever since then.
Lynch: What happened to that original book? Is “The Moonshine Messiah” that that book?
Johnson:No, that one will never be seen.
My writing journey has been, I think, sort of a lot of what seemed like fast starts and then long delays.
That first book was kind of a John Grisham-esque legal thriller. And so when I finished it, I wrote it and rewrote it like three times and finally got to where I thought I was ready to query, you know?
It’s like, well, “I’ll just approach John Grisham ‘s agent, you know? Why not just start right at the top?”
And so I just shot out an email with a query letter and first chapter,, thought, “what the heck?” and just kind of kept going about my day.
Like an hour later, I had an email back from the agent’s assistants saying, “We liked the first chapter. Send us the first 50 pages.”
And so I did that.
Then, it was like an hour later and they said, “We like this. Send the first 100 pages.”
And so I did that.
And then maybe a day later, they said, “Okay, send the whole manuscript. We’re intrigued.”
I was like, “Wow, I’m gonna get John Grisham’s agent. This is easy.”
And of course, they passed on the book.
Now, I’ve spent probably a few years trying to get an agent for that book, rewriting the book. It just never never worked out with that one. And when I finally gave up on it, and decided to try something new is when I wrote “The Moonshine Messiah.”
I sort of knew what I was doing a little bit by then. So I wrote that one in like six months, and it got an agent, almost right away. And so I was like, “Okay, now, I’ve made it. This is we’re going to be cooking here.”
I wrote this book in 2016. So, it was like –six years, went through three agents, and I ended up placing it myself with Shotgun Honey.
Lynch: Talk about putting together the book and coming up with the story.
Johnson: So originally, I was very influenced by Elmore Leonard. He’s my favorite writer, and I love the “Raylan Givens” character.
I started as a short story where I just kind of had the idea of trying to flip the gender and have a female Raylan Givens-type character.
Instead of putting it in Kentucky, I put it in southern West Virginia, because that’s where my parents are from.
I’ve grown up with some kinds of stories of life in the coal town, and they grew up in McDowell County, and War, West Virginia.
So, I placed it there.
Lynch: It’s a “Mountaineer Mystery.” Were you always drawn to that particular genre?
Johnson: You know, I didn’t realize how much I was until I started trying to write and I kept kind of finding myself writing mysteries, even when I hadn’t set out to.
I’ve thought about this some. When I was very young, my family would go on a lot of car trips.While my dad would drive, my mom would read to us and I guess what she had available were Nancy Drew mysteries.
And so maybe that just imprinted something there on me early on.
When I set out to start writing, I really thought I’d do more kind of legal thrillers, which are in the mystery genre, but whatever reason, I just kind of gravitated more towards crime fiction and traditional mysteries.
Lynch: As it’s mentioned, this is a “Mountaineer Mystery,” which does suggest more than one. What else have you got? Did you have a sequel already planned?
Johnson: Yeah, the sequel is already written. It should come out probably in the May or June kind of timeframe, next year, and I’m working on the third book in the series, which I think is probably gonna be the last book in this series –at least, with Mary Beth, the main character for “The Moonshine Messiah.”
Lynch: What was the most difficult process of putting this book together?
Johnson: I would say the waiting is the hardest part.The writing part is fun and revising is fun.
Trying to get published is really really hard. The worst – rejections are fine. I can handle rejection. The worst part is long stretches of silence.
You know, it’s sending things out and waiting to hear. That, to me, is the most difficult part.
Lynch: The book is called “The Moonshine Messiah.” Russell, thank you very much.
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.
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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.
In a fictional story based in eastern Tennessee, author Charles Dodd White explores this issue in his new novel “How Fire Runs” which looks at what happens when a group of white supremacists come to town. The twist is, they aren’t there to march and protest, but to attempt to gain local political power while setting up their own “racially pure enclave.”
White spoke with Eric Douglas by Zoom to discuss the novel and the inspirations behind the story.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Douglas: Explain to me the premise behind “How Fire Runs.”
White: “How Fire Runs” is a novel that essentially imagines what it would be like for white supremacists to come into a contemporary east Tennessee community. One that has, like much of the southeast in general, a checkered history, racially speaking, and yet is kind of forward thinking to a degree. It looks at how you reconcile that when you’re confronted with this really ugly manifestation of the kind of the worst parts of the American original sin of racial crimes.
How does that community essentially try to save its own soul? How do they fight these individuals who are not just these kind of errant people out on the periphery, but are actually trying to come in and gain political power? Obviously, we’re seeing this, we’re seeing exactly that sort of story playing out. Neo-Nazis and white power movements are in the news on a weekly, if not daily, basis.
Douglas: When did you start writing this?
White: I started writing it right after the rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. People are really more confidently and precisely calling white supremacy, white supremacy. But we started to see a lot of things about white nationalism and Christian nationalism, these kind of code words for this kind of extremist ideology. It seemed to be something of the moment, but it was also something that bothered me. I mean, for obvious reasons. I always feel like good fiction comes from the things that bother the writer. What are the things that will compel them to explore the different aspects and really make it reflect the world truthfully?
Douglas: What’s been some of the reaction? You said this is in eastern Tennessee, where you live? What’s been some of the reaction to the story?
White: It’s been very positive. As far as the reviews, they see it as being very reflective of things as they are today. I think maybe one of the reasons people were hesitant when the book came out in October, was that it was right before the presidential election. I’ve been asked about that. Was that on purpose? I knew it was coming out then, but I don’t think that these problems are limited to November. If anything, I think a lot of these subterranean tensions are maybe more activated now more than ever.
Douglas: Have all of your previous books been this sort of political thriller?
White: No, this is the first one to kind of wade into this. I mean, they’ve all been set in Appalachia, in the southeast. This is my second book in East Tennessee, and before that, I had a couple that were in western North Carolina, but the same general neck of the woods. Political life was usually a little bit more buried. I think that this was a case of a book that very much came out of being upset or dissatisfied with the way that the country was going.
Douglas: What do you want your readers to take away from the story?
White: I think the main thing I would want them to take away would be essentially that nothing is fixed, that as dark as the future, or the present, may seem at times, that there are ways that we can do better, there are ways that we can make amends. And I don’t even think that it necessarily has to be really that upsetting as soon as you just kind of change your way of looking at the world and understanding that.
Taking Faulkner’s quote that “The past is never dead. It’s not ever even past.” I think that may be true, but it doesn’t mean the future has to be the past as well. I think that we have a way of moving forward and really following our best instincts.
Charles Dodd White lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he is an associate professor of English at Pellissippi State Community College. The book is available through the Ohio University Press.
This story is part of a series of interviews with authors from, or writing about, Appalachia.
Poison Flood, a new novel by Jordan Farmer, is set against the backdrop of an environmental disaster in southern West Virginia. It includes murder, theft and riots. The book is described as a crime and noir-style mystery by the publisher.
The disaster Farmer writes about is based loosely on the 2016 West Virginia Water Crisis that poisoned the water of 300,000 central West Virginia residents for more than a week. His version is more devastating than the original, however.
When Farmer spoke with Eric Douglas, he said he wanted to tell an entertaining story, but he also wanted to have a main character that was outside the norm.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Douglas: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
Farmer: First of all, I want them to be entertained. I think that any art that doesn’t entertain you or connect with you on some kind of emotional level, if it’s just all just moral, then I think it fails the test of what art should do. So at first, I want them to be entertained and engaged and to have some kind of emotional reaction to the characters. I want them to love them or hate them or feel sympathetic towards them, and have some kind of empathetic response.
Douglas: Your character Hollis is a tremendously talented musician. But he also had a pretty significant disability. Why did you decide to throw that into the mix?
Credit Courtesy photo by David Hager
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Farmer: I wanted to write a story with somebody, a narrator or a protagonist, that had what I would refer to as an unconventional body. I kind of have one myself. I have a bone disorder that’s stunted my overall growth so I’m about five feet tall. When I was younger, and was really interested in literature and books, I never found characters who had these kinds of different physical bodies or were physically different in some way.
If I did find a story about them, it was always a story that was entirely concerned with the struggle of being physically different. It was never about them succeeding in business or love or making art or something else. It was always just focused on the body itself.
Douglas: Hollis deals with the stress of his life by composing music in his head, and then has to get a guitar and compose music to help himself calm down. What’s the root behind that? Are you a musician?
Farmer: No, I’m not a musician myself. I play a little bit of a bad punk rock and sort of cowboy-chord country guitar. I wouldn’t call myself a musician, but being a creative guy growing up in a small town without a writer group, or people who were interested in the same kind of art forms I was, a lot of my friends were musicians. And I think I was deeply influenced by the kind of music I grew up around. My grandfather gave me Johnny Cash records and stuff to listen to when I was younger. So I wanted to write about the creative process. But I wasn’t necessarily interested in the idea of writing about writing. Those kinds of books don’t always interest me. I like music and I like the performative aspect of music.
Douglas: Is your next book also set in West Virginia? Is that something you plan to continue? Or are you moving elsewhere with the next one?
Farmer: Poison Flood, and the next manuscript I’m working on, take place in a sort of a fictional town in West Virginia, much like Faulkner wrote about a fictional area of Mississippi. It’s called Coopersville County, which is my way of being able to have a town similar to the communities that I grew up in, but also to not have complete and total realism.
Douglas: Are you at all concerned about people saying, ‘well, that’s just some West Virginia story’ and not being interested in your work because it is such a small, remote place.
Farmer: I had this idea when I was younger that there just wasn’t a place for stories about West Virginia. Or a desire for stories from small towns or rural America or places where I’m from. Now, I’m not so sure that’s true. Now, I think that as long as you’re telling an interesting story and the themes are something that anyone anywhere can understand, I think people will engage with it regardless of the area. I think that your first concern is simply to tell an engaging story.
Jordan Farmer was born and raised in a small West Virginia town, population approximately two thousand. He earned his master’s degree from Marshall University and his Ph.D. at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Poison Flood was released in May by Putnam Publishing. Listen to other interviews with authors from, or writing about, Appalachia.
Stories told in serial fashion are stories with chapters released on a regular basis, often weekly. Publishers began releasing serial fiction in the 1800s. The format really took off in the 1920s with cheap publishing options and penny magazines. Authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who penned the “Sherlock Holmes” short stories and novels, published in serial form.
Author Nora Edinger is using the internet to add a unique twist to this older technique. Her novel “Suspended Aggravation” is being released weekly on Weelunk.com, a website devoted to daily life in Wheeling, West Virginia. The romance story features locations in the north-central West Virginia community.
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Weelunk.com
Author Nora Edinger beside the Wheeling Suspension Bridge from her serial story Suspended Aggravation.
Edinger said she wrote the story as a novel and always intended for people to read it on paper, but the opportunity to publish it weekly through Weelunk, a Wheeling-centric website, came available and she jumped at the chance.
“I thought ‘this sounds like fun to me,’” she said. “Both the serial nature and the localization nature really appealed to me as a way of almost interacting with the community and in a fictional form. It feels like it is unfolding in real time in Wheeling.”
Rather than writing the story as she goes, the book is done. But as she prepares each weekly chapter to be posted online, she reviews and localizes it a bit more. Edinger also updates the story to stay in line with current events, as appropriate.
“We’re trying to put together one month of releases at a time and I’m working with editors that we love and photographers that we love, who are looking at each chapter as it comes out,” she said. “We’re deciding what photos that we want to use to illustrate and we’re trying to sneak some local people in cameos either into the photos or into the story.”
She did caution, though, that she will never put fictional words into a real person’s mouth.
“If we see something happening in the news that we know people will remember like the [Jennifer Lopez] halftime show at the Super Bowl or the potholes that opened up on I-70, we realized that’s something that we could slip into the story,” she said.
Edinger explained that the story is a romance with an element of suspense to it. She said she attempted to keep it light and humorous.
“It’s a love story. It’s a story of hope,” she said. “I’ve lived in Wheeling for about 14 years now and about 25 years total in the state of West Virginia, and I’ve really watched this community in its early stages of reinvention. And I think it’s kind of neat to have a story of hope that focuses on two young people during a time when the city seems to be experiencing a real resurgence of hope and reinventing itself.”
