Liz McCormick sat down with Pancake while she was in Shepherdstown to discuss what inspires her writing, what’s next in her career and how Appalachia has evolved since she wrote “Strange as This Weather Has Been.”
She is best known for her acclaimed 2007 novel Strange as This Weather Has Been. It follows a southern West Virginia family affected by mountaintop removal.
The novel has won numerous awards and accolades including the Weatherford Award. It has also been designated the 2023 One Book, One West Virginia Common Read.
Liz McCormick sat down with Pancake while she was in Shepherdstown to discuss what inspires her writing, what’s next in her career and how Appalachia has evolved since she wrote Strange as This Weather Has Been.
A shorter version of this interview originally aired in West Virginia Morning.
On this West Virginia Morning, West Virginia author Ann Pancake is the 2023 Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence at Shepherd University. We speak with her about her acclaimed novel Strange as This Weather Has Been – and what’s coming next in her career.
On this West Virginia Morning, West Virginia author Ann Pancake is the 2023 Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence at Shepherd University. We speak with her about her acclaimed novel Strange as This Weather Has Been – and what’s coming next in her career.
A longer version of this conversation can be found here.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University.
Caroline MacGregor produced this episode.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
On this West Virginia Morning, Kentucky author Barbara Kingsolver won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her newest novel Demon Copperhead. In light of this achievement, we are listening back to our interview with Kingsolver last fall, when she was recognized as the 2022 Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence at Shepherd University.
On this West Virginia Morning, Kentucky author Barbara Kingsolver won a 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her newest novel Demon Copperhead. In light of this achievement, we are listening back to our interview with Kingsolver last fall, when she was recognized as the 2022 Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence at Shepherd University. To listen to the extended version of this conversation, click/tap here.
Also, in this show, the Joint Standing Committee on the Judiciary discussed the potential uses, and concerns, of artificial intelligence technology during an interim meeting this week. Shepherd Snyder has more.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Concord University and Shepherd University.
Caroline MacGregor is our assistant news director and produced this episode.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
Kentucky author Barbara Kingsolver is the 2022 Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence at Shepherd University. While Kingsolver’s fiction takes readers all over the world, she says her Appalachian roots inspire key themes and ideas in her stories. Liz McCormick sat down with Kingsolver to learn more.
Kingsolver has won numerous awards and accolades over her career, including the National Humanities Medal, the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction in Britain, and her 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible won the National Book Prize of South Africa, held a spot on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year and was an Oprah Book Club selection.
While Kingsolver’s fiction takes readers all over the world, she says her Appalachian roots inspire key themes and ideas in her stories. Last fall, Kingsolver was recognized by Shepherd University as the 2022 Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence. Liz McCormick sat down with her at that time to learn more.
Listen to the extended conversation below:
EXTENDED: Author Barbara Kingsolver Reflects On Appalachian Writing, Climate Change And Upcoming Novel
The transcript below is from the original broadcast that aired in West Virginia Morning on Oct. 7, 2022. It has been lightly edited for clarity.
Liz McCormick: What does it mean to be an Appalachian in your own experiences, in your own words?
Barbara Kingsolver: To me, it means home. It means recognizing and celebrating my own people. I grew up in the eastern part of Kentucky. I left my little rural town, as young people do. I lived all over the place on several continents, doing low paying jobs. And as I traveled the world, and this country, I encountered a lot of shocking stereotypes, a lot of condescension that made me mad, it still makes me mad.
After trying out a lot of different places, I came back home to Appalachia, and I now live on the other side of the mountains in southwest Virginia. But it’s the same culture. It’s the same language. It’s the same emphasis on community, and resourcefulness, and kindness that I grew up knowing and loving.
So as a writer, I see it as sort of my mission to represent us in a way that is seldom seen and seldom understood outside of Appalachia.
McCormick: Barbara, you’ve written a lot of diverse stories, ranging from novels, short stories, poetry; some of these stories take us all over the world. What sort of impact do your Appalachian roots play in your writing? Like with The Poisonwood Bible, it took place in the Congo, how does your background and roots here in Appalachia impact your writing?
Kingsolver: You know, they say that every writer is really writing the same story over and over again. And if that’s true, my story is about community. If I really examine all my works, even though I work hard to make each one entirely new, not just a new place and set of characters, but I ask a whole new question.
I’ve written about climate change and why that’s so hard for us to talk about. I’ve written, as you said, a book set in the Congo, which is about cultural arrogance, and how what one nation will do to another. So these are big, big questions, sort of urgent, modern themes. But if you sort of dig down into the heart of every one of these stories, it’s about community, what is our duty to our community? How do we belong to it? How does it belong to us? And how does that play against the really powerful American iconography of the individual, the solo flyer, the lone hero that’s supposed to be the American story.
But as a woman, and as an Appalachian woman, I always see the other people behind the solo flyer. The people who gassed up his airplane, the women who packed his lunch. I mean, there is no such thing as a lone hero. I’m interested in the heroism of people who think they’re ordinary, and people who are helping each other, creating families for each other or safety networks for each other, who are aware of their indebtedness to their neighbors and their people.
McCormick: I understand you have a book that is soon to be hitting bookshelves on Oct. 18. And that is Demon Copperhead. I want to ask you to talk with us about this book, and what can readers expect when they read this?
Kingsolver: Readers can expect a page turner. I live in deep, deep southwest Virginia, which is the epicenter of the opioid epidemic. So we are living with this, and I wanted for several years to write about it, and I couldn’t think of a good way in that would make this story interesting and appealing to people, to readers, because it’s a hard subject. It’s dark, it’s difficult. Kids coming up in this environment.
And then I sort of had a conversation with Charles Dickens, and I realized the way to tell the story is the way he told David Copperfield. Let the child tell the story. That’s what I realized I needed to do. So this kid who’s called Copperhead, because he has red hair. He has Melungeon heritage, if people know what that is, and he’s the child of a teenage, drug-using mother. He’s born on the floor of her single wide trailer home. And he comes into the world with this fierce — if a newborn can have an attitude, demon has it — he tells you his story from his point of view, mostly taking place in his teens and early 20s, as oxycontin is released into Lee County, where he lives.
But he tells this story in a way that’s in his own voice. In a way that will just give the reader a reason to turn every page because you need to know how he’s going to come through this. How he’s going to survive because he is a survivor. He’s funny, he’s fierce, and he’s passionate.
Born and raised in Huntington, Manilla identifies as an “urban Appalachian” and strives to show that side of Appalachia in her writing. Education reporter Liz McCormick spoke with Manilla over Skype recently to discuss how she uses her work to push change in West Virginia and around the world.
In the extended version of this interview, Manilla shares an excerpt of her writing — an essay titled, “Powerless,” which explores her travels west in 2012 to see the Badlands and the Wounded Knee memorial.
The excerpt recounts a side venture she and her husband took that she said “shot her right back to West Virginia.”
Listen to the extended version of the interview for more of the conversation.
Extended: Author Marie Manilla Says There's More To Appalachia Than Hollow Dwellings And Coal Mines
McCormick: You identify as an urban Appalachian author. Would you talk a little bit more about what that is and why that side of Appalachia is important to you to show to the world?
Manilla: When I grew up in Huntington, we probably had 65,000 to 70,000 people at the time, and I truly felt like a city girl. Riding that bus into town and shopping in all those lovely clothing stores that we had down there. When I started writing fiction, I was writing about people like me, and I noticed when I tried to get them published in journals that focused on Appalachia, I wasn’t being accepted with open arms. In fact, one editor sent me back a note and said, ‘You know, I love the writing here, but could you send us something more Appalachian?’ And I understood that what a lot of Appalachian themed journals at the time were wanting to write about are the hollow dwelling, coal mining experiences, which I absolutely love to read about, but that’s not the West Virginia I grew up in, and it’s not the one I could authentically write about.
So I just continued to write my stories and I set them in larger cities with the city issues. And what I’m seeing [now] is that more and more writers in Appalachia are wanting to write those stories, too. That’s also a part of Appalachia. There are big cities in Appalachia, there are urban problems in Appalachia that also need to be dealt with in fiction. So I’m delighted that there’s a renaissance going on in Appalachian literature. And a lot of writers are tackling these issues.
McCormick: You said that you see this renaissance in Appalachian writing. Could you talk more about that?
Manilla: I think what this renaissance is about is showing to people beyond our borders, and I don’t just mean West Virginia, I mean all of Appalachia, that we are not one monolithic thing, as the world often wants to believe — and as the publishing industry often wants to perpetuate, or used to, I think, historically. They only wanted to present the grit lit side of Appalachia, you know, the dark, lots of animals being killed and murders and all that — the deliverance type of stories. They want that to be all that we’re about, and that’s not all that we are about. We are urban, we are city dwellers, we are gay, we are straight, we are transgender. So this renaissance is giving voice to all of those people, and I love it. I absolutely love it.
McCormick: The drug epidemic has shaped a lot of your writing. But I look at some of the other issues that we’re dealing with today. We’re all in this global health pandemic, there are issues of racial justice, and poverty continues to be a big problem. Looking at these issues, how are they shaping your writing today?
Manilla: Well, a project that I spent the last several years writing tackled the drug addiction problem that I see out my front window. I really kind of dove headfirst into that. Plus, I’ve also been writing a lot of essays. That’s what I did during the pandemic. I spent a year writing essays and I’ve been writing them for four to five years now. But I noticed that what I’m drawn to write about are the same issues that I’m drawn to write about in my fiction, which are issues of race and class and gender.
I think the reason I’m drawn to those is that I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, when I saw on the news, the fights for civil rights and women’s rights were constantly on the news. And what I noticed was the fierceness of all those marchers. But what I also saw were the folks on the sidelines, hurling the cruelest epithets at those marchers. You know, wielding baseball bats and spitting at them. And I knew which side I wanted to be on, which was the side of inclusiveness and equality. So that stayed with me. And I think that’s why I’m drawn to write about those issues in my fiction, and now in my nonfiction.
So, when I started writing nonfiction, I wanted to write about the #MeToo movement. I wanted to write about issues of racial inequality that I witnessed, you know, growing up here in West Virginia. We’re in 2021 now, but what we’ve seen over the last few years is that those issues have never gone away, they just went underground. And now they’re out in the open again, which is good. That’s the only way we can tackle them is to look at them head on. We have to be citizens of the world. And if I can use writing to address that, that’s the tool that I’m going to use.
McCormick: Marie, you’ve recently been recognized as the 2021 Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence at Shepherd University. One big part of that has been your book, The Patron Saint of Ugly, published in 2014. It won the Weatherford Award that year and has been translated into French. It’s a book that has done incredibly well and continues to capture the fascination of readers.
As part of the Appalachian Heritage Festival this year, it has been chosen as the One Book One West Virginia Common Read by the West Virginia Library Commission’s West Virginia Center for the Book.
Talk with us about this book and why you think it continues to capture readers today.
Manilla: The main character is a young woman named Garnet, who was born with port-wine birthmarks covering her body that look like a map of the world. And those landmasses shapeshift over time, depending on what’s going on geopolitically around the country. And if that’s not enough, Garnet may or may not be able to heal people.
One of the reasons I wrote the novel is that I love magical realism. I’ll give you a brief description for your listeners. Writers create worlds that are very much like the worlds that we live in. It’s here on planet Earth, however, unusual things happen that are treated as normal. So in The Patron Saint of Ugly, when Garnet’s birthmarks shapeshift, it’s kind of treated as normal, as are her hit or miss healing abilities. And one of the goals of magical realism is to have readers look at this world that’s being created in the novel with a new set of eyes, so that when they put the novel down, and then look at their very real world, they may look at it with a new set of eyes.
And that was my goal in The Patron Saint of Ugly. I wanted to present a view of us not only to outsiders, but to insiders, that would make them look at us in a new way. I wanted [Garnet] to be beautiful, and while that’s a struggle for her to believe throughout the course of the novel, by the end of the novel, she does begin to believe that she is beautiful and that she is a saint. And one of the things I talked about at the Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence Festival was that so many West Virginians, and Appalachians I think, have been crushed by all the demeaning, belittling stereotypes that we’ve endured over the last 150 years or so. We’re not immune to it. And we often don’t feel as if we’re deserving or worthy of love and respect. But we are. And that’s one of the goals of the novel — to show not just outsiders but to ourselves that we are deserving and beautiful and worthy of love and respect.
We’re not expendable, as many outsiders would have us believe.
Wilkinson was born in Hamilton, Ohio in 1962, but she grew up in Kentucky with her grandparents Silas and Christine Wilkinson.
Her grandfather was a farmer who grew tobacco, corn and sorghum, and her grandmother worked in the homes of local schoolteachers in Casey County.
Wilkinson studied journalism at Eastern Kentucky University, and then she received her MFA degree in creative writing at Spalding University in Louisville.
Wilkinson is a member of the Affrilachian Poets founded by Frank X. Walker.
In 2000, Wilkinson wrote her first book, Blackberries, Blackberries; in 2002, she published Water Street; and in 2016 she published The Birds of Opulence.
Wilkinson is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky in the MFA in Creative Writing program.
