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‘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.

Us & Them: Reading Wars

Researchers say science makes it clear that there’s a direct, systematic way we should be teaching kids to read. But lots of people discount the science of reading.

Researchers say science makes it clear that there’s a direct, systematic way we should be teaching kids to read.

But lots of people discount the science of reading. They say teaching kids to sound out words is boring, and kids will learn to read naturally if they’re read to and exposed to lots of books.

This is more of an angry argument than a polite debate. It’s been raging for years. And there’s a lot at stake. Millions of American adults are not proficient readers.Trey talks with Emily Hanford about her radio documentary, “Hard Words“, which looks at the reasons why kids aren’t being taught to read.

You can hear Emily’s full “Hard Words” documentary here.

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.

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.