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State’s Public Libraries Seek Funding For Maintenance, Expanded Services

Monday was Library Day at the West Virginia Legislature. The day was a celebration of public libraries throughout the state, but also an opportunity to request funding.

Libraries are best known for their books, but in recent years they’ve expanded their offerings to include everything from board games to power tools. They can also be a gathering place for communities.

Erika Connelly, the library director of the Kanawha County Public Library system, said that during the COVID-19 pandemic, libraries became even more critical for community connection.

“Libraries became very, very important during COVID to connect people with internet, with Wi-Fi hotspots,” Connelly said. “We got creative to get information to our communities with take-home crafts, and online storytime. These are our goals, to continue those great services to our communities.”

According to Connelly, West Virginia ranks among the lowest states in terms of funding for public libraries, and state aid hasn’t increased in more than a decade.

“We have a line item in the budget, it’s been zero for several years. It’s $5 million for capital improvements, deferred maintenance. We’re in a lot of old buildings in our communities, and in our towns,” she said. “We’re also looking for $2 million in supplemental funds. West Virginia lost a lot of population. As a result, a lot of counties lost library funding, so we’re looking to replace that with $2 million.”

According to the West Virginia Library Association, in 2017 the state’s public libraries evaluated their building needs to be more than $56 million.

Connelly said West Virginians value their freedom to read and express themselves, and libraries continue to stand for that First Amendment right.

“There’s a lot of legislation that targets libraries, school libraries in particular, that are alarming and concerning,” she said. “We just want to make sure that we’re here to uphold the First Amendment. We want everybody to have the freedom to read what they want. It’s a parent’s choice what their children read.”

New Christmas Book Looks At All 55 W.Va. Counties

The holidays always bring out a wealth of new Christmas books. Among those hoping to find a place under the tree and on your shelf this year is “Christmas Eve in the Mountain State.” Written for children or just fans of all things West Virginia, it celebrates the state county by county.

Bill Lynch spoke with author Marly Hazen Ynigues about her very “pun-y” book.

Lynch: Marly great talking to you tell me a little about Christmas Eve in the Mountain State. When did you start this?

Ynigues: I started writing Christmas Eve in the Mountain State in 2016.

More recently, I’ve found a wonderful artist to work with, Emily Prentice in Elkins, from the Mycelium Creative Art Space.

She’s a graduate of fine arts from Davis and Elkins College. And she really helped put some more fun West Virginia touches into the story.

Recently, I’ve been working with Joshua Singleton, a voice artist from Grafton, who’s working on creating an audio book of the story.

Lynch: Why do a Christmas book about all 55 counties?

Ynigues: Everybody knows how exciting it is to see West Virginia get a shout out in the news or in a piece of entertainment. And I wanted to make sure not only do we see West Virginia celebrated, but we see everybody celebrated, even in your own individual counties; in many cases, in hometowns across the state.

So, you have a lot of fun tidbits like, “Kanawha” celebrate with you and rally around the tree?”

Everybody’s a part of the story here.

Lynch: Well, 55 counties, and some of them are kind of a mouthful. What was the most difficult one to work in?

Ynigues: I’d say there are a couple of them like my own county of Monongalia, where it doesn’t lend quite as easily to rhyming, as it were. Some of these kind of act as more of a stand in for the names. I am working on including them more in some future stories. So, I’m trying to make sure everyone’s a piece of the story. And everyone has a colorful way to remember it.

Lynch: How difficult was it to line everything up, to make it all work?

Ynigues: It has just been a labor of love. There’s so many wonderful people who’ve supported along the way and given great feedback and, you know, help to become a representation of West Virginia. It was tough, but definitely worth it to be able to tell a part of our story here.

Lynch: What’s your favorite part about the Christmas season in West Virginia?

Ynigues: I love the snow. I just I love sledding. I grew up somewhere where we might have one day of snow a year and then maybe every few years, we get up to three inches of snow. So having these wonderful, beautiful snowy hills is just so much fun.

Lynch: Where are you from?

Ynigues: I’m from Memphis, Tennessee, originally.

Lynch: Well outside of writing a children’s book, what’s your day job like? What do you do besides that?

Ynigues: I do communications. So, I love storytelling. And I was also a history student and learned all about Appalachian culture and did some research on a mine war’s community. And previously I’ve also been a city councilor in Elkins. So just appreciating the culture, from learning about it as a new arrival, and then just really getting involved.

This taught me so much love for the state.

Lynch: Any big plans for the guest the holiday season?

Ynigues: I’m just excited to help share West Virginia story with everyone.

Lynch: The book is called “Christmas Eve in the Mountain State.” Marly, thanks for talking with us.

Ynigues: Thank you so much Bill. Happy holidays!

Army Dad Makes It His Mission To Read To Son, Even When Away

Athens resident Darrell Fawley IV, who is 5-years-old and known by his family as Dary, almost always needs a book read to him by his dad before he can fall asleep at night.

“I like when we read a new book and then Dary summarizes the plot,” said Darrell Fawley III, Dary’s father. “It is dedicated time together without electronics or anything else that we get, and books tend to lead to other conversations and can be great segues into important discussions and life lessons.”

While reading to children is an integral part of many families, there’s a twist in the Fawley family: Darrell Fawley III is a commander in the U.S. Army with 21 years of service and four separate deployments under his belt.

Despite his changes in duty stations and deployments, Fawley III has managed to encourage the love of reading that Dary has and foster important emotional connections through United Through Reading, a non-profit organization created to bring military families together through the sharing of stories.

“It was founded by a Navy spouse who believed in the power of reading,” said Sally Ann Zoll, CEO of United Through Reading that was created in 1989. “She saw sailors leaving to deploy for six to eight months, and she worried about what little children would think of those sailors when they came home…would they remember them because they were gone for too long?”

What began as sailors recording themselves reading books on VHS tapes for their children to follow, it quickly grew into the organization today, which has more than 2 million military families nationwide participating.

“What we have found over the years that there are so many different levels and layers to this,” Zoll said. “We started hearing from the service members who were away who said, ‘Wow, this was great because I was able to step aside from my mission and go to a quiet place and sit down and select the book to read to my child…It made me feel like I was really doing something to support my family.’”

Darrell Fawley III discovered the program during a deployment to Afghanistan in 2012 and initially sent videos to his niece. When Fawley and his wife Lindsey had Dary, Fawley was able to bring the impact directly to his own family unit.

“Sometimes you can’t connect through video or telephone for days,” Fawley III said. “Having a recorded book allows for a continued connection. I deployed (back to Afghanistan) when Dary was less than 2-years old, so having something to connect him to his father was a great way to ensure he remembered me when I came home.”

Fawley III additionally utilized United Through Reading during a deployment to Poland in 2020.

Today, Fawley III is a professor of military science at Ohio University at Athens and Dary is a big brother to 1-year-old LillyAnne Fawley, who also is beginning to enjoy reading.

“Darrell and I love to read a variety of different books, so we knew reading would be a big part of our lives as parents,” Lindsey Fawley said. “It has been wonderful to see the connection that reading together has given them, and when Darrell has to be away, Dary loves being able to hear his dad’s voice and try to follow along in the books on the recording as dad reads. I think that it will become even more important as Dary becomes more of an independent reader and more times of family separation occur.”

‘The Visit’ Looks At Life In Appalachia 100 Years Ago

Nellie Canterbury was born in 1933 in a mountain home above the railroad town of Hinton. She was the fifth of six girls and today is the last surviving sister from her family. She is also a writer.

In her book “The Visit,” she writes about her family from the time her parents met to when her mother died. It is a family love story, told as she and one of her sisters sit down for a visit to discuss their lives. The story goes into detail about their farm lives, growing up, preparing their meals and going to church.

Aunt Nellie, as she prefers to be called, explained that she changed the names of the characters in the book slightly, but it is based on her own life and a series of actual visits with her older sister.

Eric Douglas spoke with her over Zoom to learn more about the book and her life.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: When you were writing “The Visit,” coming up with the story, you go into a tremendous amount of detail about their lives, about their courting, how they got together, and all of that sort of thing. Tell me tell me where all that came from?

Canterbury: Well, I had four older sisters. They told me a lot of these things. And of course, my mom talked about it a lot, too.

Douglas: These are the family stories that were passed down over the years, and you decided to write them all down?

Canterbury: Oh, it’s the truth. When she (my sister) was born, her name was Thelma Ann, but she didn’t like her name so she called herself Peggy. She was No. 3 of the six girls and I was No. 5. I visited her when she lived in Arizona for many years. And I visited with her when we were there and she would tell these stories and talk about her past and all that.

Douglas: These are the things you remember and then the family stories that were passed down.

Canterbury: It was just the way we lived. It was the times that I grew up in. And the area, you know. It makes you think and it makes you appreciate what you do have.

Douglas: So tell me a little bit more about your parents. You talk about the way they met in the book and go into a lot of detail.

Canterbury: My daddy was a veteran of World War I. My mother was a schoolteacher. My daddy had been discharged from the service and was walking along a dirt country road and passed by the schoolhouse and my mother was the teacher there. They were having recess and he was singing the song “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” He went on down the road and she ran as far as she could in the schoolyard and hopped up on a log or stump and watched him until he walked out of sight. They were just attracted to each other immediately.

My mom was a little fluffy. She was a little on the fluffy side. And she loved to cook. She was the backbone of the couple, because I’ve seen her help my daddy do things that most men did. I’ve seen her shoe horses, pick up their big hind legs and nail a horseshoe to their hoof and then trim it down. She was an all around woman. She wasn’t masculine. She was feminine. But she worked hard. She could do just about anything any man around could do.

Douglas: She was fairly young. She was a school teacher, but she was 17 or 18 when she started the school?

Canterbury: Probably about 18 years old. You could go to the county seat and take a written test and if you passed, they would grant you a teaching certificate. In the little one-room country schools you had grades one through eight.

Douglas: Did you go to a one room schoolhouse, too?

Canterbury: The school that I was raised in was called the Canterbury School. My daddy went to the Board of Education. There were a lot of children that lived back in those halls then and they needed a school so they built a school. My daddy gave them an acre or two of ground for the school with the condition that if it were ever abandoned, the land would revert back to his farm, which it did.

Douglas: What’s fascinating about this book is that you do have such detail that historians can read this and learn from it to understand what life was like 102 years ago. The way they cooked meals and all the work that they did around the farm just to survive.

Canterbury: When we lived on the farm on the mountain, we had to work like boys. We raised fields of corn because we had our corn ground and the corn meal. We had wheat fields. We had wheat ground into flour. And my dad, he would cut timber. We had some boundaries and virgin timber and he would cut timber.

“The Visit” is available through Pocahontas Press.

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

Marie Manilla's 'The Patron Saint of Ugly'

For many people, summer is a time to get lost in literature. And this year, Huntington author Marie Manilla’s new book, The Patron Saint of Ugly is ending up on many summer reading lists. The story is set in a fictional West Virginia town, and most of it is told in the form of transcripts of archived tapes.

Manilla’s lead character, Garnet Ferrari, is believed to possess magical healing powers. Her bright red hair and port-wine stains all over her body lead pilgrims from all over the world to seek help through her supposed powers. Yet, Garnet is dead set on dispelling rumors of her abilities, blurring the lines between fact and fiction–furthering the mystery of who she might be.

W.Va. Author Tells Stories that Come 'Out of Peel Tree'

There’s a new novel out from a West Virginia native about a place that’s very special to her. The book is a collection of family stories about life in Appalachia.

Laura Long lives in Charlottesville, Virginia now but she grew up in West Virginia. She recalls going to visit her grandmother while traveling from Buckhannon to Clarksburg. Her grandmother lived near a place called Peel Tree. She says the image of that place stayed with her for years, until she was ready to write her first novel.

“Peel Tree is a spot of town that was on the road to Clarksburg to Buckhannon, that we passed through to go to my grandmother’s house. Riding in the car, I was dreaming, and the sense of a tree peeling, it stayed in my imagination for decades,” she said.

“I just love the name and the sense of peeling away layers and stories being layers of reality, and layers of a family.”

The book is called ‘Out of Peel Tree,’ and it’s a collection of stories about an extended family that lives in parts of West Virginia. The stories range in tone from humorous to tragic, and follow the lives of characters in one particular family, as they struggle with love and loss.

There’s a matriarch, a grandmother, who appears in several of the stories. Long says the character is loosely based on her own grandmother.

“I think all novelists, they usually say they write about people they know, but they are composites of people they know. I revered my grandmother,” she said.

“My sense of respect for my grandmother and grandfather, helped me be fascinated by what it meant to grow old in time, which is one of the big mysteries, what happens to us over time. When I started the book, I wanted to write about an old woman, and that was partly from seeing my grandmother.”

The stories occur over a period of several years, and the reader follows several characters as they age. The stories deal with family loyalty, hope, and love. Long reads one of the stories.

Long says she first thought she would like to be a writer when she was a young elementary school student. She wrote a poem that inspired her.

“When I was in third grade, we were instructed on how to write a poem. I wrote a poem about a candle that had a handle, and wore a sandal,” she said.

“I was so delighted that I could create this through language, I believed in it. I believed in the reality of what I had created in words. I wanted to become a writer, after I realized it was magic. That language had magic in it.”

Long says she still feels magic when she writes.