Writer Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Creative Residency Program In Fayetteville Provides Time To Work

Sometimes creativity requires breaking away from the normal routine and focusing on one’s work. Now in its sixth year, the New River Gorge Creative Residency at Lafayette Flats in Fayetteville, W. Va. allows writers and visual artists a quiet place to stay and make art.

When Shawn Means and Amy McLaughlin opened LaFayette Flats as a boutique vacation rental space in Fayetteville, they wanted to “change the narrative” about the state. They began by decorating their four rental suites with West Virginia art and loading shelves with books by West Virginia authors.

“We realized that our bookings were going to be much lighter during the winter and we were going to have some space,” Means said. “We thought, ‘How can we use this to better promote the arts?’”

So in January 2015, they decided to host a writer-in-residence.

“We continued with just having the writer-in-residence for the next three years. And then actually last year, we changed it up a little bit and decided to expand it to visual artists as well,” McLaughlin said.

The first several years, the program was a three month long residency. This year, they decided to allow creatives to come for shorter stays. Applicants for the residency had been almost exclusively out of state, but those changes appealed to more West Virginians. This season, they are three creatives, all from West Virginia, staying for one month each.

Matt Browning, a writer-in-residence at LaFayette Flats.

Matt Browning, a Charleston, W. Va.-based author just finished his one-month residency at the end of December.

“At the risk of sounding corny and cliché, I hoped this experience would change me. I learned very early on that it was going to do that,” he said. “Being here has really allowed me to rediscover my creativity. I won’t finish this book that I’m writing while I’m here. You know, four weeks isn’t enough time to write a novel, but I’m hoping to have probably 75 percent of a first draft done.”

Means said the key to the success of this program has been the reaction, and the reception, the creatives have received from the entire community.

“The Fayetteville community is very welcoming anyway, and they seem to have gone over and above welcoming our creative-in-residences. They’ve had people who recognize them on the street just from social media posts and welcome them to the town,” he said. “A lot of local businesses think of the residency as their’s, not just ours at Lafayette Flats. They think of it as the Fayetteville residency.”

You can find out more about the New River Gorge Creative Residency program at Lafayette Flats in Fayetteville on their website. They will begin taking applications for next winter in August.

Hurt and Beauty in W.Va.—Author Ann Pancake Tells All

Ann Pancake always wanted to write about far away lands. However, once she traveled there she realized the best stories she had were about her home in West Virginia. Her first novel Strange Has This Weather Has Been portrays a family living near a strip mine, and it’s one of the most popular Appalachian novels of the past decade. Her new collection of stories Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley also takes place in West Virginia.

A Paradoxical Sense of Place

Writer Ann Pancake now lives in Washington State, but her heart and mind are still in West Virginia. Growing up in Romney, Pancake wrote stories about fantasy trips she dreamed of taking outside of West Virginia. Today, however, her focus is much closer to home. Her new book Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley continues to focus on the same themes as her earlier work Given Ground and Strange as This Weather Has Been. She examines closely want it means to be from West Virginia, while juggling issues such as generational conflict, drug abuse, and environmental concerns. However, she didn’t always think she would write about West Virginia.

After Pancake graduated from West Virginia University, she left to teach English overseas and to search for material to write about.

“Then when I got there I was homesick for West Virginia and I was writing a lot of pieces about West Virginia and I realized that the pieces about West Virginia were real stories,” she said. “So being really far away from here gave me the perspective to see what we had back here.”

Pancake’s 2007 novel Strange As This Weather Has Been tells the story of family living near a mountain top removal site in southern West Virginia. One of the main characters, Lace, moves away from her family in southern West Virginia and attempts to adjust to life at college only to return and raise her own family there. For Lace leaving home is just as hard as staying.

Pancake sees this in a lot of West Virginians.

“You see it in the younger people who are feeling the pull to leave,” she said. “There’s a lot of hurt in West Virginia and there’s a lot of beauty in West Virginia. So to grow up holding both that beauty and loss and hurt develops a paradoxical relationship to identify and to land that a lot of us have.”

The Priority of the Character’s Experience

As Ann approached the controversial topic of mountaintop removal in Strange As This Weather Has Been, she looked to the failure of political novels of the 1930s to discover the best way to address the issue. While she wants the book to educate people and sees it as a call to action, she knew that couldn’t be the focus of the novel.

“If I wrote it with those as my priorities it would fail as a novel. It would fail as a piece of art,” she said. “What I did was to always put the priority on the character’s experience. I figured if I could show what is was like to be a person living under a mountain top removal mine, especially a child. That the politics would come through organically.”

Author Details New Work About Lincoln Assassination

Dr. Samuel Mudd, the physician who set John Wilkes Booth’s leg after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, has been portrayed in a variety of media as an innocent victim who was wrongly accused for conspiring with Booth.

Mudd is the subject of Berkeley County author, Ed Steers’ newest work and his first play titled, “The Trial of Dr. Mudd.”

Ed Steers is a local of Berkeley Springs. He got his PhD in Molecular Biology in 1963, but retired in 1994 to pursue writing fulltime.

Steers is now known as one of the leading experts on the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, appearing on numerous television and radio shows like PBS’s Morning Edition with Bob Edwards, NBC’s Today Show, CSPAN’s Book Notes, and more.

Steers has written eight books about the Lincoln assassination, with a total of fourteen books to his name and an assortment of articles.

In 2009, Steers completed his first play, “The Trial of Dr. Mudd,” which deals with the controversy and intrigue surrounding the trial of Dr. Samuel Mudd, a Maryland native who was imprisoned for conspiring with John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of President Lincoln.

This year, the play was picked up by the Morgan Arts Council also located in Berkeley Springs and will premiere on stage in February.

Auditions for “The Trial of Dr. Mudd” will be held on Sunday, December 14th from 2-4 PM and Monday, December 15th from 7-9 PM at the Ice House in Berkeley Springs for a staged reading of Steers’ play. It will be directed by Kirsten Trump.