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New Anthology of Appalachian Writers to Be Released

Fans of Appalachian literature will have another reason to celebrate as volume six of Shepherd University’s Anthology of Appalachian Writers is set to be released by the end of April.

According to Shepherd University Professor Sylvia Shurbutt, the anthology’s Senior Managing Editor, the newest volume will feature work from Frank X Walker, this year’s writer in residence. Walker is a poet laureate from Kentucky who coined the term “Affrilachia” with the purpose of embracing the region’s multicultural influences. Walker came up with Affrilachia years ago when he didn’t know how to describe a southern Appalachian writer who was African American.

“It’s a great term and a great phrase and it certainly is very descriptive. Frank deserves a lot of credit I think, through that word showing how diverse Appalachia really is,” Shurbutt said.

In addition to Walker’s work, the annual anthology is also a venue for new writers of poetry, fiction and more. Writers from across the country submit to the publication.

While the anthology is mostly regional to Appalachia, Shurbutt says the pieces within the publication can appeal to a variety of readers.

“All good writing does have a universal quality as well. And certainly writers like Ron Rash, Silas House and Frank X walker, they are appealing across races and regions and they are giving us something that is uniquely appealing,” Shurbutt said

The Anthology of Appalachia Writers comes from the Appalachian Heritage program that was first developed by Shepherd University’s English Department in 1998. Along with the anthology, the program hosts an annual West Virginia Fiction Competition, which is judged by the Appalachian Writer-in-Residence.

Next Year’s Writer-in-Residence will be Homer Hickam who was born in Coalwood, West Virginia, and is the author of novels such as the Rocket Boys trilogy.

Shurbutt said the program is excited to be able to host Hickam as a writer-in-residence.

“Homer Hickam has been for a long time on our short list,” Shurbutt said. “For West Virginia, he is an immensely beloved writer.”

“Though he doesn’t live in West Virginia anymore, he really has captured the essence of West Virginian’s,” she said. “He has been able to get us a portrait of the disappearing coal towns, so he is really valuable in so many ways.”

The Anthology of Appalachian Writers is supported by the West Virginia Center for the Book, which is hosted by the West Virginia Library Commission and Humanities Council.

Chelsea DeMello is a Shepherd University intern and also editor of the student newspaper, The Picket.

New Book Examines the Impact of 'Hippie Homesteaders'

Hippie Homesteaders is the new book by Carter Taylor Seaton.

They’re known as the hippie homesteaders. People who moved to West Virginia in the late 1960s and 1970s to live off of the land. Some considered themselves as hippies, but others just wanted to leave urban environments for rural America.

A new book by Carter Taylor Seaton, Hippie Homesteaders: Arts, Crafts, Music and Living on the Land in West Virginia, examines the impact these people had on West Virginia.

You can find out more about this book at this website.

Forgotten Black Poets of WWI Era Featured on New Website

The nation’s first and only building memorializing African American veterans of WWI is located in Kimball, W.Va. and Thursday evening a celebration of Black History Month will take place there that highlights the work of two previously unrecognized poets from the era.

The two poets were sisters from Beckley who at age 17 and 18 attended the West Virginia Colored Institute, which is now West Virginia State College. An 83 page hard back book featuring their poetry was published in 1919.

Discovering the Book

In the late 1970’s Jean Barnes Peters found a copy of War Poems sitting on a bookshelf in her house in Charleston, W.Va. The authors, Ada and Ethel Peters, were half-sisters to Jean’s husband, Joseph Cromwell Peters.

“And he said I can’t tell you about this book, those young ladies would have been 20 years older than I am,” Barnes Peters said.

Joseph Cromwell Peters, who is now deceased, never met his two half-sisters and didn’t know anything about them because their mother and his father divorced before he was born.

The little book fascinated Jean Peters and she would occasionally pick it up a read some of the poetry, which she describes as long, long narratives.

The preface in the book reads:

The sole intention of the authors in writing these poems is to show the Negro’s loyalty to the stars and stripes in the war with Germany and to show the need of unity of all men in the fight for democracy.

“But eventually I started to scrutinize what they were saying and it was protest, which seemed unusual for teenage girls in 1919 in rural West Virginia to be even knowledgeable in WWI just before and just after and how badly Black soldiers were treated,” Barnes Peters said.

Sharing the Book

The fifth poem, written by Ada Peters, is called The Slacker. It was this poem that caused Jean Peters to bring the little book to the attention of Joel Beeson, West Virginia University visual journalism and new media professor, and his students.

Mrs. Peters was invited to attend an event back in 2011 at the Kimball Memorial for an exhibit the students created on World War One soldiers.

“And there was a poster that said ‘The Colored man is no slacker,’” Beeson said. “And she said there’s a poem in this book I have called The Slacker.”

The poem begins:

God forbid ere man was born To crush honor beneath his feet That the light of day should dawn Upon one, who from duty flees While on Freedom’s Bleeding Alter, His Noble Comrades have bled But he stands idle a slacker Disgraced before living and dead.

“These young women who are 17 and 18 were commenting very intelligently on their times,” Beeson said. “And the things they were saying were protest, they were asking for civil rights and this was back in 1919 before the internet, before television, before radio.”

So Beeson and his students took on a new project that includes an interactive web site called War Poems where you can page through the book, read the poetry, learn about its history, and the story of how Jean Barnes Peters found it on the bookshelf in her house.

Beeson said one goal is reaching young people through new and interactive media.

“That’s the language and that’s the medium that young people use,” he said. “So hopefully this is a site where we can get young people enthusiastic and inspired about these two young women whose voices were kind of left in the past and we’re trying to bring that to life.”

Engaging the Public

An event took place Thursday evening from 7-9 p.m. at the Kimball War Memorial that included a demonstration of the web site and presentations from Beeson, Barnes Peters and some of the students who worked on the project.

Beeson’s class is also worked with classes at Mountain View Middle and Mountain View High Schools Friday, where students learned about the War Poems site and Kimball Memorial. They also participated in a poetry contest in which they Tweeted poems from the web site.

W.Va. Courthouses are Living Monuments to Democracy

The Wood County Courthouse, the Wetzel County Courthouse and the Kanawha County Courthouse look strikingly similar. Each are tan stone block buildings…

The Wood County Courthouse, the Wetzel County Courthouse and the Kanawha County Courthouse look strikingly similar. Each are tan stone block buildings with deep red roofs built in the Richardsonian Romanesque style popular in the 1890’s and 1910’s when they were designed and constructed. That’s just one thing you’ll learn when browsing through the pictures of a new book about West Virginia’s courthouses. “West Virginia’s Living Monuments: The Courthouses” is a product of the West Virginia Association of Counties and was just published this year.

“West Virginia’s Living Monuments: The Courthouses” was published in 2013 by the W.Va. Association of Counties.

“West Virginia’s Living Monuments: The Courthouses” was written by Debra and Richard Warmuth and is published by Black Tie Press of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Book of ghost stories from Berkeley Springs writer lands in time for Halloween

Today is All Hallows Eve, or Halloween, which traces its roots to Gaelic culture when it was believed on this day the boundaries between the living and dead overlap.

It’s also a great day to read a ghost story, which is why Berkeley Springs writer John Douglas made sure his new book, A Fog of Ghosts: Haunted Tales and Odd Pieces, was published this month.

Douglas is the former editor of the Morgan Messenger newspaper and he started writing ghost stories in the mid 1970’s. Every year he’d pen one for the paper’s Halloween edition.

“And people loved them, the years I didn’t do it they asked where it was,” Douglas said.

Douglas made some of the stories up and some were based on local legends and stories he heard about haunted houses. The book contains about a dozen previously published ghost stories and several new ones.

Two chapters focus on a 1950 cold case in which a red headed woman was found dead. One chapter talks about police efforts to identify the woman and solve her murder. The next chapter is Douglas’s fictionalized version with a possible answer to who killed the woman and why.

Some of the stories have a Civil War theme, including one Douglas created for the newspaper about a young woman who was fascinated with Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson. The woman hid in a creek along the side of a country road hoping to get a glimpse of her hero. Instead she was accidentally shot and killed by a soldier who mistook her for a rabbit and, the story goes, she still haunts that stretch of road today.

“It’s funny, there was a Michigan college professor who was doing a Stonewall Jackson tour and he was doing some legwork to figure out where he was going to take his people,” Douglas said. “He called me up a couple years after the story was in the paper and said ‘all the old people out there on Winchester Grade Rd. tell me about this old story about the girl being shot who wanted a glimpse of Stonewall Jackson.’”

Douglas had to tell the professor that he made the story up for the newspaper.

JohnDouglasReading.mp3

Hear John Douglas read a ghost story from his book that's based on a tale from Morgan County, W.Va.

But, does Douglas believe in ghosts himself? Not really.

“I think there are things we can’t explain, but I don’t know that I believe in ghosts,” Douglas said. “We carry things around in our mind and we superimpose our own minds on the places we are.”

Stories from the Lost River Valley

Stories and photographs from the Cacapon and Lost River Valley are featured in a book just released by West Virginia University Press.

Listening to the Land features the stories of several owners throughout the watershed who have chosen to preserve their land through the Cacapon and Lost River Land Trust.

“When we signed some of the first easements that the Land Trust did, people started sobbing, literally, in the easement signing in the attorney’s office,” Nancy Ailes, executive director, said. “And I started realizing that there are these great stories behind those tears.”

Ailes wrote a grant proposal and received $50,000 from National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to produce the book. The Trust hired documentary writer Jamie Ross and photographer Tom Cogill to traverse the valley documenting the people, their land and their stories.

“The land is beautiful, I think this valley could be a national park,” Cogill said.

Cogill is primarily a portrait photographer so he approached the landscape the same way he would if he were capturing an image of an individual. There are photos in the book of teenage girls hauling in a deer they shot, scenes of farms, livestock and hay, as well as the highway and power lines bisecting the land.

Cogill is particularly fond of a photo that shows a weathered wood plank wall with graffiti scratched in it.

“It’s the two page spread for the section called ‘The Pull of Home,’” Cogill said. “Probably 100 people have written their name and the date, just kind of scratched it on the wall, some of them have extended stories, others it’s just initials and dates.”

“It’s a portrait, it’s a short story, it talks about the people who live here without showing any of them,” he said.

While Cogill shot photos, Ross interviewed people. The Land Trust chose about 30 whose stories might be interesting, including those who still live in the valley as well as those who grew up there and moved away.

The 150 page book documents families like the Hahn’s, Mongold’s, Slonaker’s and Mills as they participate in activities such as hunting, farming, enjoying meals and gathering mushrooms.

One of Ross’s favorite stories is that of Josh Frye, who comes from a long line of Frye’s who have worked on the family’s farm near Wardensville since Colonial times. Frye’s father and two of his brother’s died in farm accidents.

“And still they could not bring themselves to sell the property,” Ross said. “And part of that too goes with all the funny stories that go along.”

The book details how Frye’s mother was embarrassed when her husband bought a hearse that he parked in the field so he could sleep there and keep an eye out for predators trying to eat the turkeys raised on the farm.

“And Josh speaks so warmly about farming when people used to move from farm to farm to accomplish the task,” Ross said. “They would do haying as a group and move from one place to the next.”

Another profile features Bobby Ludwig from Baker, who the book says went off to college in New England and built a lucrative career on Wall Street.

Ludwig no longer lives full time in Hardy County but he’s bought and preserved thousands of acres of farmland to prevent developers from building houses on it.

Ross said Ludwig had a good comeback when officials wanting to widen the state highway near his farm suggested he could just go buy another piece of property in exchange for the one they’d take.

“And he said ‘well how about I take your girlfriend and spend the night with her and you just go get another one,’” she said. “It’s not just the attachment it’s the wit and wisdom and everything.”

Ross said there were two thoughts she heard over and over again as she interviewed people: it’s important to leave the land better then you found it, and your word is your bond.