The winners of the 2024 PBS Kids Writers Contest at West Virginia Public Broadcasting (WVPB) have been announced. Eighteen stories written and illustrated by children in grades K-5 were chosen out of more than 175 entries from across the state.
Charleston, WV – (April 4, 2024) The winners of the 2024 PBS Kids Writers Contest at West Virginia Public Broadcasting (WVPB) have been announced. Eighteen stories written and illustrated by children in grades K-5 were chosen out of more than 175 entries from across the state.
“This was another successful year of creativity for our annual PBS Kids Writers Contest. The children of West Virginia are excellent writers capable of captivating stories. Thank you to the West Virginia Drug Intervention Institute (WVDII) for sponsoring the event again this year,” said Maggie Holley, director of Education at WVPB.
“The Institute is pleased to sponsor this important event. We know that keeping kids safe and preventing them from using or misusing illicit and prescription drugs requires activities that keep youth engaged with positive and meaningful activities. Writing, much like sports, is one of of those protective factors,” said Dr. Susan Bissett, president of WVDII.
“As a winner of a writing contest when I was 10 years old, I also have a special place in my heart for this event,” said Bissett.
Winners will be contacted by WVPB with information about our awards ceremony in May held at the Culture Center in Charleston.
All participants will receive a prize pack mailed to them by WVPB and PBS Kids.
The PBS Kids Writers Contest at WVPB is an annual competition that encourages West Virginia children in grades K-5 to explore the power of creativity by writing and illustrating their own stories.
The PBS Kids Writers Contest at West Virginia Public Broadcasting is an annual competition that encourages West Virginia children in grades K-5 to explore the power of creativity by writing and illustrating their own stories.
Voting is underway for the West Virginia Literary Hall of Recognition, which seeks to honor lesser-known writers in the Mountain state.
Voting is underway for the West Virginia Literary Hall of Recognition, which seeks to honor lesser-known writers in the Mountain state. Bill Lynch spoke with grant writer Kandi Workman and Marshall University English professor Cat Pleska, who are overseeing the project.
Lynch: Let’s talk about this literary Hall of Recognition. Why this?
Workman: So, do you know how sometimes like grant funding, like if a grant is out there that can like stimulate a project, instead of being the other way around, you don’t always have the project in mind. It’s like, if a funding comes available, it’s like, hey, what if?
I had the opportunity last summer to apply for a $10,000 grant from Waymakers Collective because of where I’m with that group of folks.
And I had talked to Kat and a couple of other people at the West Virginia Writers Conference last year, and there was this idea floating around about a West Virginia Hall of Fame. When time came down to like, Hey, you have this opportunity to apply for this grant, I realized that, that I did not have the capacity to pursue something like a West Virginia Hall of Fame. That feels like that takes a more robust effort from a larger group of people to pursue something that needs to be merit based or prestige based.
And I don’t feel like I’m at the capacity, wasn’t at the capacity, to offer much to that at that time, but what I know a Waymakers Collective and what they value, and the folks that they’re trying to reach and bring into the fold of visibility and recognition and honor, and everybody is like equals and I thought, “well, I could do this trial project of a recognition project. How can we bring more visibility to writers?”
And then beyond that, what this is going to look like and what it has looked like is Cat and I was able to get a humanities grant to support Cat’s position, to help do a little bit of research about gathering up a diverse group of folks that we could reach out to for like for a round one –not a round one, like, step one/phase one of how do we even start to identify the diverse writers and authors in West Virginia?
And that came with a little bit of resistance because of the methodologies for that, which is, “who do you feel has not received the recognition they deserve?” When you… when it’s so broad, in that sense, that leaves a lot of questions. And that process wasn’t the most comfortable for everybody, but I had hoped that that would get us to at least a good number of folks that we could use to go into phase two, which was doing a participatory action.
Lynch: The nominations: Kind of maybe describe how that works.
Workman: The nominations: we did not put those on social media. So, that was a lot of one-to-one outreach. So, we sat together and culminated a list of potential folks or organizations that we could reach out to throughout West Virginia that included teachers of all different levels, bookstore owners, folks, all different kinds of backgrounds, and asked them if they wanted to nominate somebody based on the loose criteria that we had put out. So, we were able to get 24 nominees.
Pleska: I want to add that when we did the research, for who to send the original material asking for nominations, when I made the message to send that out, I said, “unrecognized or under-recognized literary individuals.” And I was keenly aware that of all the people, hundreds of people that I’ve sent it to, so many of them here in West Virginia, could very well be on that ballot. Because this is not a place that’s been easy to make known, you know, our literary figures and our literary artists.
Workman: It depends on the nominator’s interpretation of how they feel that person has been witnessed in their work.
Pleska: Kandi, You can explain the Waymakers grant, about that part.
Workman: We are calling it a voting guide, but a voting guide that has all the nominees within it. But what will happen from that and what the Waymakers Grant was written for was to support eight portraits to be produced of the nominees by the artist Sassa Wilkes and that these portraits will hang in the mezzanine of the up-and-coming Black Box Theater at the West Edge Factory.
Lynch: So, you’ve described what happens with the voting and the number of people who will be inducted and what happens once they’re inducted, which is the portraits, what comes after that?
Workman: That’s left up in the air, I would love for it to grow to be something that’s very community owned. And by that I mean like writers and authors owned.
Pleska: I’m just saying I’d like to add that this is in the former Corbin Limited building on Vernon Street and what was, you know, is Westmoreland, now part of Huntington. Corbin Limited was a garment factory that employed mostly women from 1957 to 2003.
So, it had a huge economic impact. It got up to a couple of thousand workers, of which 85 percent were women.
So, it is about, you know, not only working-class people, but women working class people, and it also was about diversity, but it’s a fabulous space.
Lynch: Voting. How did people vote and how long do they have to vote?
Workman: Well, as of now, folks have until the end of this month to vote. There’s a voting guide. So, if you go to the voting guide, there’s two sections that have links on that. But if you go to the Facebook page for the Literary Hall of Recognition, every post that’s made on there has the link
On this West Virginia Morning, voting is underway for the West Virginia Literary Hall of Recognition, which seeks to honor lesser-known writers in the Mountain State. Bill Lynch spoke with grant writer Kandi Workman and Marshall University English professor Cat Pleska, who are overseeing the project.
On this West Virginia Morning, voting is underway for the West Virginia Literary Hall of Recognition, which seeks to honor lesser-known writers in the Mountain State. Bill Lynch spoke with grant writer Kandi Workman and Marshall University English professor Cat Pleska, who are overseeing the project.
Also, in this show, Eastern Cemetery is one of Louisville’s oldest burial grounds. It housed the first crematorium in the state. Now, the property along Baxter Avenue lies largely forgotten, just like more than 100,000 people buried there. WFPL’s Breya Jones reports community members are working to ensure the past can’t be reburied.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Concord University and Shepherd University.
Eric Douglas is our news director. Caroline MacGregor is our assistant news director and producer.
Teresa Wills is our host.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
Three years ago, a Kentucky writer named Robert Gipe debuted his first novel, Trampoline, about a young girl growing up in Appalachia. Authors and literary fans across the region hailed it as one of the most important books to come out of our region in recent years. But the topics Gipe writes about aren’t easy— a parent’s drug addiction and the environmental wreckage left behind by strip mining.
Now, the main character, Dawn Jewell, is back in Gipe’s second novel, a sequel called Weedeater, which is also the name of one of the main characters.
Listen to the conversation or read below for a transcript of the interview with the author.
So in your new book, one of the things that readers of your first book Trampoline will notice is that you have a new narrator Weedeater. He cuts lawns and does other odd jobs. And in this book we switch between Dawn Jewel, the character of your first book and Weedeater’s point of view. So why’d you decide to bring in a new character for this one?
Credit Robert Gipe
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Illustration from Weedeater
I’m not really sure why I put him in there to tell you the truth, but he just ended up in there. It was based on somebody I knew. I knew how to draw him. I usually don’t know exactly how to draw them over and over. But he was visually very clear. I was kind of interested in a character who was all about heart and not about understanding exactly what was going on, but was willing to kind of make sense of the world without always having a clear handle on what was going on. You know, I thought that was kind of interesting. I was also interested in a potentially threatening male character who was actually trying to be a decent person. I thought that would be an interesting kind of counter stereotype.
I don’t want to give too much away, but his character plays some pivotal roles in the plot and the movement of what happens in this book. It’s almost as if he’s there to play these crucial roles in what happens to a lot of the characters.
Yeah. He’s a man of action, that’s for sure.
Like Trampoline, this is an illustrated novel. About every page there’s a cartoon that you’ve drawn, and usually it’s Dawn’s point of view or Weedeater’s point of view. Something in their head that they don’t say out loud, kind of to get the internal monologue out there. And I really love this one picture you have early on in the book. It’s of Dawn saying, “I don’t think any of us would know what straightened out would look like.” What does she mean by that?
I think that they’re in such a mess, and it’s supposed to be both localized and the product of where we are as a country, and just the way of the world. I was thinking about this on the way into work — about maybe writing a scene. I saw somebody had a Trump flag that said, “Make America Great Again.” And I always see somebody saying, “Can you put a year on that? What’s the date of that greatness that we don’t have now, but once had?” Because I don’t think a lot of Americans would consider it that great a time. I’m always kind of interested in the specificity of that particular part of Trump’s approach. And so I think Dawn is kind of speaking to that, right? It’s like she’s just not sure when the good old days were when things were on the right track.
Credit Robert Gipe
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Illustration from Weedeater
And for those that haven’t read Weedeater, this book is the sequel to your first book Trampoline, and a few years have passed. And in that first book Dawn was still a teenager, the opioid epidemic was just kind of starting to emerge. I think you said it was like around 1999 or 2000 when you were imagining that first book took place. And now, fast forward a few years, you can really see in the second book the opioid epidemic has caused widespread havoc on her community, on her family. Talk a little bit about what’s happened to Dawn in the past few years between the first and second book.
Dawn has kind of drifted into marriage and motherhood, and she’s not quite convinced either one is for her. If the first book is about how she’s trying to find herself, buffeted between two strong females, each of which has their own things on their mind that aren’t her. It’s her mother, who’s got substance abuse issues and her grandmother, who’s an environmental activist.
And in this book she’s much more kind of on her own and has the independence that maybe she thought she needed in the first book, and it’s very complicated to be kind of out there figuring it out by yourself. And like many people, she’s kind of got a family and she’s not sure she was ready for it. And so she’s navigating through all that and still having to take care of her mother.
Credit Robert Gipe
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Illustration from Weedeater
Why do you think it’s important for us to read these kinds of books? To really get inside someone’s life? This is some real stuff that’s happening. It’s kind of dark and it’s not a rosy life for Dawn. Why do you think it’s important for people to empathize with what’s going on for someone like her?
I think people that don’t live in constant crisis, you know, they deal with crisis as something that, you know, the day before you had a good night’s sleep and you resolve the crisis and then you know, your life is less crisis filled the next day. I think that one of the things that helped me understand people’s decision making process here is that it’s just perpetual crisis.
Do you think this is the book about somebody who’s hopeless? Is there hope for Dawn Jewel?
I think if she didn’t have hope somewhere in there, she’d have been gone by the middle of the first book. You know, I think that her hope is in many ways, although it doesn’t always get articulated, in some ways she has the most irrational of hopes, and the most kind of strong of senses of hope, that she’s just kind of soldiering on. And I think the thing is, is that in the end they can’t hope alone, you gotta have somebody to hope with, somebody who’s got to reinforce that. And so I think that’s all operative and in the books, they’re kind of meditations on this American idea of the individual hero who can handle everything, and then this more realistic idea that we have to have a team, we have to have a support community. I think to answer your question, she must have hope or she’d have already been incinerated by this life of hers.
And I don’t want to give away too much what happens in this book, but it’s not all bleak. And there’s another scene which I love, it’s the scene where everybody goes to Dollywood and you get the sense that for just a few hours or a part of a day, everybody in the bulk suspends all the problems and tension that they’ve got going on in their lives.
Dollywood is a big deal. I mean, it’s a big deal everywhere. It’s a big deal. There are all kinds of stories about coal miners coming home, putting their spare change in a jar into and then when summertime comes around and you take that money and that’s your Dollywood money and people going in groups and coal companies and giving away tickets to all their workers. And so it’s difficult to underestimate the importance of Dollywood in the community. So in Weedeater, Hubert as is his style, ends up with a bunch of money that he has to get rid of fast. And so he decides to take everybody that wants to go in Canard County to Dollywood. And so of course the day gets sullied for Dawn, but there is a moment of happiness.
I won’t ask you to give away what’s in your third book, but I have this feeling there might be another narrator in store for us in that third book.
Yeah, well people can probably figure out where it’s going when and if they read the second book, but it’s set like in 2016, 2017, the time of the year is the hillbilly national holiday, which is Halloween. So it’s a Halloween book. And yeah, it’s funny, a lot of them are starting to talk. Dawn’s daughter is starting to talk, Hubert is starting to talk. I’ve been hearing from him a lot here lately. It’s more complicated. What I’m working on right now is there is a murder, there is a body, and they’re trying to get rid of it at the same time they’re turning some of their houses into Airbnb’s. And you’ve got travel writers coming in, and they still have mayhem to cover up. So that’s kind of the launch point for it.
A grapevine clipping from the home of Pearl S. Buck, a world renowned author with West Virginia roots, just arrived in Michigan and soon will be planted at a high school literary garden.
It began as an idea last summer. Jennifer McQuillan teaches literature at West Bloomfield High School in Michigan, and she wanted to give her students something that would get them off their phones- and become better connected to the writing in decades old books.
“There are gardens that are devoted to Emily Dickinson or to Shakespeare, but there’s not been a garden in a secondary school setting that brings together important plants from American authors like this anywhere, to our knowledge,” said McQuillan.
Since last August, the garden has grown. Thirty-four plants have been sent from the homesteads of American authors, including Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway and Alice Walker.
McQuillan says she wasn’t quite sure if the students would connect the garden with the literature she was teaching them.
“The turning point came around December, when we were reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Buds and Bird Voices”. And he writes about a lilac bush out of his window. And we had that lilac bush growing in the literary garden. And that was the moment when the kids went, ‘oh my gosh, we have something really special here.’”
Fast forward to this summer. McQuillan’s garden will soon include a clipping from a 120-year-old grapevine that drapes across the front entrance to the birthplace of writer Pearl S. Buck
Kirk Judd, a board member for the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Foundation, says Buck wrote about the grapevine. “She remembers being 9 years old, sitting on the upper level porch, reading her Charles Dickens, and eating grapes from the grapevine.”
Grapevine at Stulting House, Pearl S. Buck’s grandparents’ home where she was born,
Judd says that even though she spent most of her childhood abroad, Pearl S. Buck always thought of West Virginia as home.
Born at her grandparents’ home in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck was the first American woman awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, and her bestselling novel The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize.
She passed away in 1973. But the grapevine that she remembered so vividly from her West Virginia birthplace is very much still alive.
Jennifer McQuillan says it’s the first plant they’ve received from West Virginia. She teaches Pearl Buck’s writing in both her American and World Literature classes. McQuillan says she’s really happy to add Buck to the literary garden- both as an American and a world author who wrote extensively about China, her other home away from West Virginia.
“Because she’s sought both as a native author and as an author who is making her mark in another country as well. So I think that’s a really compelling story and I’m really excited to share that story with my students this fall.”
McQuillan will be working with her students to connect Buck’s writing to the grapevine they’ll be planting this summer, with the help of master gardeners in Michigan. She hopes both the grapevine, and a love for literature, will take root and grow.
