Organizers say the challenging and fun course was designed to honor the hard work and sacrifices endured by U.S. military personnel. The race proceeds will benefit veterans attending Concord University. The Concord Office of Veterans says this will help veterans attend college.
The Office of Veteran Services (OVS) at Concord University will be hosting the “Run For Heroes 5K Race” for the first time since 2014. The race will be held at Callaghan Stadium at Concord’s Athens campus.
At 9 a.m., there will be a moment of silence for fallen soldiers and injured veterans. Immediately after that, the race will begin.
“Student veterans are often non-traditional, juggling a family, work and school. The OVS assists veterans and their dependents in all facets of higher education, from application and academics to financial and social support,” George Williams, Concord’s Veterans Advocate, said.
Participants who pre-register will receive a discount and are guaranteed a race shirt.
Editor’s note: This story is the last in our series, “Plugging the Brain Drain” about young West Virginians deciding whether or not to leave the state.
Over this summer, Abie Reed will graduate culinary school, do a stint as a bread and pastry chef at a diner, plan a wedding, get married, and as if all that isn’t enough, build a house with her fiance — a tiny house.
Abie Reed
They’re planning to move into the tiny home at the end of the summer, and settle in while she takes a gap year to find mentors in the food industry.
“It gives us an opportunity to create a home and have our first house together and everything,” she said. “But if I can’t necessarily find anything that I genuinely would like to be a part of, nothing would stop us from picking up and leaving.”
Her fiance works in Hurricane, West Virginia and has family in the area. They’re building the tiny home there and Reed said they will stay in West Virginia for at least the next five years.
“But after that, honestly, wherever life takes us, we’re really open to going anywhere,” Reed said. “Especially because my sister is in England right now with her husband and then my parents live in South America. And so the world is open to wherever we want to go. We just have to make that decision.”
The food industry is just one of many industries that might require young West Virginians to move away. And whether youth want to become engineers, software developers, stockbrokers, actors, musicians, or chefs — they look around at the state and see limited opportunities to advance that career, whatever it may be.
This was the situation West Virginia native James Rogers found himself in over a decade ago.
courtesy photo
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James Rogers
“When I first started my career, I wanted to be a chef,” He said. “And the best way to learn how to be a chef is to travel.”
Rogers spent 14 years working in restaurants, mainly in Pittsburgh and Baltimore.
“I didn’t expect to move back,” he said. “And I’m not saying that I would never have moved back, nor would I have never chosen to move back. I didn’t expect to because I’ve always liked high intensity, high paced jobs.”
After an injury in 2015, he did return. Last spring, he graduated from Pierpont Community and Technical College with a business management degree and planned to go back into the restaurant world.
That was right before the pandemic.
“The service industry really took a big hit,” he said.
Rogers reevaluated and is now going to school for accounting. He said he’d like to remain in West Virginia but will go wherever he can find a job.
“I’ve reached a point in my lifetime, where I would prefer not moving a whole lot,” he said. “I’ve moved 10 times since I graduated high school.”
After spending much of the last two decades living in busy metropolitan cities, he said West Virginia is convenient.
“I believe in West Virginia, we are provided with quick access, because we have a load of traffic on the roads,” he said. “We have a less dense population. So it’s less stressful to go satisfy all your day-off routines…Whereas in a city it may take the entire day.”
He’s also got a large family in the state and the cost of living is pretty low.
Sam Clagg
Sam Clagg just graduated from the culinary arts program at Pierpont. He’s got a job lined up at a restaurant in Charleston, near where he grew up in Putnam County.
He said he’s always been a family man and would never want to move far away from them.
“My family dynamic is where we always communicate, we never stop talking to each other,” Clagg said. “I think that if I leave that I’ll be leaving a part of myself.”
He plans to stay in the state, not just because his family is here or because he thinks it’s a good place to be a chef but also because he sees potential.
“You see big cities and stuff where they have these restaurants here dedicated for 50 years and stuff, but you don’t see that here,” he said. “You see closed down restaurants, you don’t see a community. They’re trying to get together, but they just need some glue. And I feel like I’m that glue.”
Like many young chefs, he hopes to open up his own restaurant someday.
Clagg tells people who are leaving West Virginia to give it time and wait for the right job. He said some jobs do require leaving but he believes one can build a comfortable life in the state.
“I don’t think I’m ready to live in a big city like Miami, Florida, or New York City, or California,” He said. “I don’t think I was ever born to go there. I think if I stay in West Virginia, I will be working towards my strengths.”
The dozen or so young West Virginians we spoke with for our “Plugging the Brain Drain” series have a lot in common.
They recognize the state has issues, and want to see it get better. They have family here but don’t feel like they’re necessarily bound to stay. They think it would be great to find a good-paying job in West Virginia. But if there’s a job offer in Pittsburgh or Los Angeles they’re probably going to take it.
Their future plans aren’t set in stone, much like Reed and her fiance’s tiny home.
“We can literally just attach it to a truck,” she said. “And leave at any given moment.”
Shaye’s Tiny Homes
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A tiny home that Abie Reed and her fiance are modeling their own after.
Most of us learn about poetry as words on a page. But to high school students competing in the national Poetry Out Loud program, the words of poets literally come to life through spoken performance and interpretation. Notre Dame High School senior Ben Long from Clarksburg is one of nine national finalists. Eric Douglas spoke with Long to learn more about the program — and how an unusual year of pre-recorded performances and masked audiences has made things different.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Douglas: Tell me what it’s like to recite poetry. What do you have to do? I mean, there’s no props, there’s just you on stage — you and your voice.
Long: In my particular case we do word swapping, we really go in and do the work to find out the right speed to present the poem. What is the emotional depth of the poem? Where do I inflect? It’s really like making a roadmap. And you do that so that you can get really, really familiar with the poem.
When you get up there and you’re ready to present, it happens through you, it happens naturally. But it definitely is a lot of work. For Poetry Out Loud, it’s you, it’s your body, it’s your movements, your physicality. That is how you bring the poem to life.
Douglas: When you’re on stage, when you’re performing, are you envisioning yourself as the poet, as a character in the poem?
Long: I try to figure out who is speaking. I ask who did the poet write the intended narrator to be? But also, in my interpretation of the poem, who do I imagine the speaker to be? In the one poem that I did “A Blessing” by James Wright, it starts off “Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota…” It’s as if he’s telling a story, so in order to be able to get into that perspective, I sort of imagined that I’m telling the story to a group of friends.
I think my most successful strategy has been just trying to create the character of the narrator and figure out what their motivations are. And then, through speaking the poem, just step into that role.
Douglas: Are you a poet yourself? Or were you interested in this more as a performance?
Long: When I started doing Poetry Out Loud, I wasn’t really writing poetry, it was just a school function through the Performing Arts Conservatory. And I got into it as a recitation competition. But in this past year of doing Poetry Out Loud, I’ve written more original poetry than I’ve ever written before.
I think being involved in Poetry Out Loud, and the resources that surround that, definitely has influenced my interest in writing on my own. At the national level, in the semifinals, there’s an original poetry competition, which I took part in, which is a really cool opportunity, because that gives artists an opportunity to present their own work.
Douglas: You do a contemporary poem, but you also do an older 19th century poem. What’s the greatest challenge for you in that?
Long: I would say that some of the 19th century poetry can be pretty challenging. I do Shakespeare, so I have experience with going in and line by line swapping out words that I don’t understand and figuring out what things mean. But I think there is a challenging aspect to figuring out what the emotional ride of a poem is supposed to be.
It’s really a game to try and find where do I speak softly? Where do I get intense? It’s daunting when you’re doing a poem that’s 40 lines long, trying to figure it out and remember everything. It can be pretty challenging.
Note: This year’s Poetry Out Loud finals will include tape recitations of the poems instead of being in front of a live audience.
Douglas: I’m sure you feed off of the audience to a certain degree. I wonder if doing a pre-recorded talk makes it any different or any more challenging for you?
Long: It’s definitely different and in this year of COVID, I’ve learned so much about how important the energy of an audience is. And even just with the masks how much value there is in a face. I think as a performer it has definitely been a challenging year. Not being able to have big audiences not being able to see the faces of other performers. I’m lucky enough to work with a school and a program who has been willing to do everything they can to keep us on stage.
Douglas: Where do you go from here? Where does this all take you?
Long: For me it’s just an honor to represent the state at this level and to experience the competition. It’s obvious that all of these kids are exceptionally gifted. And so I’ve always thought it was an honor to experience other kids my age, who had put in all this work.
The Poetry Out Loud National Finals will be available through a one-time-only webcast at arts.gov/poetry-out-loud.
If you’ve ever wondered what some of those historical road markers say, and what the story behind the marker is, there is a new book available that will fill in those details.
It is called “Signs of the Times: West Virginia’s Highway Historical Marker Program.”
“This book absolutely provides all kinds of wonderful information all through the book about all the historical markers all across our highway system,” Gov. Jim Justice said.
The first roadside marker in the state was in downtown Charleston designating the original location of the state capitol on Capitol Street. It was placed in 1937.
This book updates a version that was originally published in 2002. The 2021 version includes approximately 300 new markers that were added since the original book was published.
Crystal Wilkinson isKentucky’s new poet laureate, the first Black woman to have this title in the state.
Wilkinson grew up in Indian Creek in Casey County. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, and over her career she has focused a lot of her writing on Black women and their experiences in Appalachia.
She recently spoke with Inside Appalachia’s co-host Caitlin Tan. Wilkinson began by reading a poem that is an ode to tobacco and her grandfather. The poem is featured in her soon-to-be-released collection of poems, ‘Perfect Black.’
**The following has been lightly edited for clarity.
Crystal Wilkinson: ‘Oh, tobacco. You are the warm burnt sienna of my grandfather’s skin. Soft like ripe leather. I cannot see you any other way but as a farmer’s finest crop.
You are a Kentucky tiller’s livelihood. You were school closed in August, the turkey at Thanksgiving, Christmas with all the trimmings.
Crystal — Oh Tobacco.mp3
Listen to the poem here.
I close my eyes, see you tall, stately green, lined up in rows, see sweat seeping through granddaddy’s shirt as he fathered you first. You were protected by him, sometimes even more than any other thing that rooted in our Earth.
Just like family, you were coddled, cuddled, coaxed into making him proud. Spread out for miles you were the only pretty thing he knew. When I think of you at the edge of winter, I see you brown wrinkled just like granddaddy’s skin.
A 10-year-old me plays in the shadows of the stripping room. The wood stove burns. calloused hands twist through the length of your leaves. Granddaddy smiles, nods at me when he thinks I’m not looking.
And you. You are pretty and braided, lined up in rows, like a roomful of brown girls with skirts hooped out for dancing.’
Caitlin Tan: Crystal, that’s beautiful. The imagery that that provokes is incredible. Did you write most of these poems in the past year? Or has it been accumulation of over many years?
Wilkinson: Some of them are fairly new poems. In most ways, this is a book of collected poems, some of them going back for a decade or more. But when I looked at the themes, I realized that the same themes that haunt me now are themes that have haunted my writing for a while.
Tan: When you say things that haunt you now, can you expand on that?
Wilkinson: Well, you know, issues of girlhood, particularly black girlhood, racism, political awareness and how you gain those things, as a young girl growing up in a rural area. How those sort of socio-political issues affect a rural person, and how they affect an Appalachian person perhaps differently than they would an urban person.
Tan: It’s been a really crazy past year. Obviously, we’ve had the pandemic and quite the presidential election, but our country has had almost this reckoning with social justice issues — everything from Black Lives Matter and police brutality, but then also, more recently, Asian American hate crimes. I’m wondering, what have been your reflections from this past year?
Wilkinson: I think it’s been a difficult year. But, I like to dwell on hope. I see a rising Asian movement that is parallel to the Black Lives Matter movement, and I hope that they become the same movement — that collectively we can make change. I feel like our collective backs are against the wall, and it has to end in change.
Tan: That’s interesting how you’re saying that it becomes a “collective movement” — kind of almost one.
Wilkinson: I can almost start crying when I’m talking about it. But, this sort of injustice that we’re seeing, and the lives that are continuing to be lost, and people being beat up on the streets just for being of Asian descent — this all has to stop in some way. We all have to be a part of stopping it and speaking out.
I see that as marching in the streets and holding the government accountable, holding the people who are doing this violence accountable, but also holding our individual selves accountable and our family members. Even when no one’s watching — stopping people in their tracks when they say something disparaging about another race or ethnicity is the way that we have to combat it. I think it has to both happen on a national level and it also has to be simultaneously happening on an individual level to be able to evoke change.
Tan: I want to rewind quickly. Can you tell me a little more about your granddaddy? I just love the imagery that came from that poem.
Wilkinson: I think as a rural man, regardless of race, my grandfather, his love was quiet. He was really concerned about providing for his family. We all knew that he loved us, but his main thing was the crops and making sure that his daily chores were done. I think I do remember him saying that he loved me, but not without provocation. Not without me saying, “I love you, granddaddy.” And then he would say, “I love you” sort of sternly, but I think that was the generation that he came from.
I remember being sort of taken aback as a child when I would go with him out into the fields — how tenderly he treated and doted on his crops. As an early writer, I made these sorts of observations and that was one that stuck with me, that he really loves this land. And I remember thinking, “Does he love me the same way?” And so then I began to look for signs that weren’t verbal, or that weren’t necessarily physical signs of affection toward me. And so I think those thoughts stayed with me, all of these years, and particularly, these early poems in the first section are sort of an ode to my grandparents.
I was raised by my grandparents, and I was reminded of all of that during this pandemic. Living in the city now, being a professor and being sort of tied to Zoom, I got a little stir crazy. One of the ways that these poems began to bubble up was I started ordering seed last year, and I got out there and dug around in the dirt and planted tomatoes and peppers and sort of gave myself an everyday routine in that way when we were sort of on lockdown. Of course, it took me right back to my childhood and remembering those things that I did when I lived back back home in the hills and the work that my grandparents did daily. I remembered how important it is and was, to have your hands in the dirt — for solace, for nutrition and all those other things, too. But there’s sort of a spiritual connection, I think, that I was able to return to.
Tan: Do you think you will have a garden again this year?
Wilkinson: Yes. I feel my ancestors would be ashamed of me because I was so bad at it. Like I went out there with an attitude, like, “I know how to do this. This is part of my upbringing, part of my muscle memory. Of course I know how to plant tomatoes. This will be great.” And my tomatoes were horrible, and my squash died — it was just a mess.
I’m gonna do it again. Hopefully, redeem myself as a woman of the hills. Hopefully, I haven’t gotten outside my raisin’ and remember I can do better this time.
Tan: Can you tell me a little bit about the title of the collection of poems, ‘Perfect Black’?
Wilkinson: Well, it’s part of one of the poems. There’s a poem called ‘Fat and Black and Perfect.’ So that’s about body positivity. But I started thinking about this idea of blackness. So it became a part of the book as well, as far as an overall theme.
In a way, this book is sort of dispelling these sorts of stereotypes about blackness. I think many people think of blackness as being a rural phenomenon. So I think that so many of us who are from the mountains from Appalachia are sort of dismissed or sort of invisible to mainstream society — others don’t really think that we’re here. So the title also sort of leans into that idea that a rural blackness and an Appalachian blackness can also be a perfect blackness. There is no one way to be black in America.
Tan: I think it’s very important. And another thing that you mentioned was the poem about body positivity. I think that’s such an important topic, and it’s something that a lot of people, especially young people, really struggle with. I think that’s really cool that you touched on that. Is there any chance you’d be willing to read one of the body positivity poems?
Wilkinson: I’ll read this one called, ‘Black Body.’
‘My black body is a boulder, a stop sign. Sometimes I think my body is graceful, a song of freedom. Sometimes I think it is something that every eye casts away. I must concentrate if I want to fit into small spaces, slip into the eye of America’s needle.
crystal — Black Body.mp3
Listen to the poem here.
Twice last week, I went without eating, filling up on self loathing and discontent, only to give in to a slice of pound cake and a bowl of ice cream. To stay awake, I drink a glass of tea and watch the flawed reality of television housewives.
Before bed, I stretch myself out along the couch and place my feet in my husband’s lap. I can’t stop thinking about the little black girl in the back of Lando Castillo’s car. “Mommy please stop screaming so they won’t shoot at you.” At four years old, she saw her mother’s unarmed boyfriend shot, bleeding, dead on the front seat — “I can keep you safe,” she tells her mother.
My body embarrasses the famous white woman at the writing conference, as if my fat will rub off on her if she gets too close. When I’m sick I want buttered, sweet rice and a tender hand moving in circles on my back.
Yesterday I ate meatloaf, mashed potatoes and green beans at the Cracker Barrel in Tennessee. The white waitress called me, “baby doll.” Once, I remember feeling the quickening of babies in my womb. Four tiny hands pressing against my navel, four tiny feet pressing against my ribs.’
Tan: Wow. Crystal, the way you’re able to touch on your childhood memories and then your current day experiences and then the Black Lives Matter movement. I didn’t expect you to be able to touch on all of those and within one body positivity poem. Remarkable.
Anything else you want to share or that you’re looking forward to this summer?
Wilkinson: I just had my second shot. So, I’m looking forward to hugging my children. I’m looking forward to getting out of the house a little bit more and having at least some normalcy to my life. That’s what I sort of hope for, for everybody else to be able to get to that. And maybe we can get some distance from this pandemic. So I’m definitely looking forward to that.
Tan: And better tomatoes.
Wilkinson: Yes, please. I’ll call on my ancestors and hopefully they’ll remind me of who I really am.
Crystal Wilkinson, Kentucky’s new poet laureate, has a new book of poems called ‘Perfect Black,’ available this August.
Jett Morton is pretty good at installing new shelves for his growing collection.
Between the “Typewriter Room” in his parents’ basement and the four large metal shelving units in the living room of his Morgantown home, his collection of antique typewriters take up a lot of space.
“I was at over 300 machines,” Morton said. “I had lost counts between 300 and 350.”
Driven by nostalgia, typewriters have gained a surge of popularity in recent years. Before typewriters were cool (again), there was an existing worldwide community of people like Morton who collect, repair and use typewriters.
For him, this hobby started at the age of seven when his parents would take him to yard sales and flea markets.
Morton already had an interest in regular computers. At a yard sale, he saw something that looked like a computer: a typewriter.
“I didn’t know where the monitor was,” Morton said. “I didn’t know what it was. So my dad showed me. He got it for me. I typed on it, thought it was neat.”
Duncan Slade
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WVPB
Morton types on an Oliver typewriter
After this first typewriter, he went to visit a family friend in Morgantown who owns over 800 typewriters.
“He gave me the first typewriter that he got when he first started collecting,” Morton said. “That’s what really fueled me to start getting more antique machines.”
Morton’s parents had a spare basement room that became the typewriter room. It was wall to wall with typewriters pressed up against each other.
“I had several rare Olivers and I liked the design,” Morton said, “I thought ‘Well let’s see how many Olivers I can get.’”
He sold off some of his other machines and the number of Olivers is up to 54. He says it’s likely the largest Oliver collection in the world with some of the rarest machines.
Jett Morton
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Reverend Thomas Oliver (photo now owned by great-grandson Lester Oliver).
Thomas Oliver, the founder of the Oliver Typewriter Co., was Canadian by birth. As a Midwest pastor in the late 19th century, he wanted an easier way to write his sermons.
He designed one of the first “visible print” typewriters.
“Before the Oliver, when you type on the keys, the tight bars used to swing up from underneath to hit the platen,” Morton said as he showed the Oliver’s mechanism. “You couldn’t see as you type until you were done.”
The preacher’s original design was patented in 1891 and became the Oliver One.
Over a million Oliver machines were manufactured in Chicago, up until the Great Depression when the company was sold to investors in England.
British Oliver produced typewriters until the company closed in 1959.
The design was also licensed around the world under names like Courier in Austria and Stolzenburg in Germany.
In Argentina, the Oliver name was already trademarked. So they called it Revilo (That’s Oliver spelled backwards).
Duncan Slade
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WVPB
Morton shows Oliver Typewriter memorabilia.
Morton’s favorite machine is a special edition Woodstock Oliver typewriter. It’s over 130 years old and named for the factory location in Woodstock, Illinois.
This rare version of the Woodstock was made exclusively for department store Montgomery Ward.
“They only made 19 of them,” Morton said. “There was an advertisement in the Montgomery Ward catalog of 1898 that had this machine.”
For years, Morton said, collectors have seen this advertisement but not the actual typewriter.
“They made only 19. I mean, that’s not going to be around. And one day a Woodstock showed up on eBay.”
Morton bought it.
Duncan Slade
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WVPB
Morton’s Woodstock Typewriter
He gets a lot of machines on eBay or other online forums these days. His eye looks for rare stuff like the original Oliver One model, a German model known as Jacoby, and a few Italian portable models.
“I probably have a list of a couple dozen Olivers with this and that I don’t have,” Morton said. “It really just depends what shows up for sale.”
Morton said over the past few years the worldwide typewriter community has rapidly expanded online.
In 2016, a documentary called “California Typewriter” starring Tom Hanks, an avid typewriter collector himself, attracted new attention for the typewriter community. Morton even had a cameo in the film.
“The main thing, I think that is my fascination with them is that they are perfect devices,” Hanks said to the PBS NewsHour in 2017. “They do one thing and only one thing. You can’t make a phone call on a typewriter and you can’t pull up today’s New York Times.”
Hanks owns hundreds of typewriters, wrote a book about typewriters and types on them a lot. Morton doesn’t type on his machines; it’s all about collecting the Olivers.
Still, they’re both members of the same worldwide community of typewriter collectors.
“The community is what makes typewriter collecting what it is today,” said Morton.” I mean, it’s about the machines, but it’s more about the people and the history of the collecting and meeting the people that you meet.”
