Writing Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

W.Va. Fiction Competition Open For Submissions

Submissions for the West Virginia Fiction Competition are open until May 1. The statewide writing contest is held annually by the Shepherd University Center for Appalachian Studies and Communities.

Submissions for the West Virginia Fiction Competition are open until May 1.

The statewide writing contest is held annually by the Shepherd University Center for Appalachian Studies and Communities. It is open to anyone living or attending school in West Virginia.

Once the submission period closes, a group of editors and creative writing teachers will select eight to 10 finalists for this year’s contest.

The final winners will be determined by West Virginia Poet Laureate Marc Harshman, who will also write reviews of all the finalists’ stories.

The prize for the first-place winner is $500. Second and third-place winners will each receive a prize of $100. Additionally, one middle or high school student will receive the Judges’ Choice Prize.

The competition aims to “foster an appreciation of Appalachian people, culture and values,” by honoring writers with “distinctive and promising” skills, according to a Thursday press release from Shepherd.

Winners and finalists could also have an opportunity to publish their work in the “Anthology of Appalachian Writers,” an annual literary publication from Shepherd.

For more information on this year’s West Virginia Fiction Competition, visit Shepherd University’s website.

‘The Moonshine Messiah,’ A Mystery In The Coalfields

Russell Johnson’s first book, “The Moonshine Messiah,” is a mystery set in the coal fields of West Virginia.

Russell Johnson is an attorney in North Carolina, but he was originally from Charleston and his family comes from McDowell County. His first book, “The Moonshine Messiah,” is a mystery set in the coal fields of West Virginia. Bill Lynch spoke to Johnson about his book and the long road to getting published.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Lynch: When did you take an interest in writing?

Johnson: You know, I think I always knew that I wanted to be a writer – double majored in English and history and minored in creative writing and toyed with the MFA route idea.

I was also pretty sure that I didn’t want to be a starving writer. And so I did the law school thing instead, but I promised myself that I was going to write a book by the time I was 30.

And then I think when I was maybe like 33, I actually started putting some words down.

Then it was when my wife and I found out that we were about to have our second child, I told myself, “You know, if I don’t write a book before this baby’s born, life is just gonna get in the way, and I’m never gonna do it.”

And so, that’s when I really got serious. I got out my calendar and I marked off 100 days. I got up at 4:30 every morning and wrote 1,000 words, and by the time I got to the end of it, I had a book, sort of.

But it was awful. It was really bad. But at that point, I knew I could do it, and I caught the bug, you know, I knew I was hooked.

And so I’ve been diligently pursuing it, ever since then.

Lynch: What happened to that original book? Is “The Moonshine Messiah” that that book?

Johnson:No, that one will never be seen.

My writing journey has been, I think, sort of a lot of what seemed like fast starts and then long delays.

That first book was kind of a John Grisham-esque legal thriller. And so when I finished it, I wrote it and rewrote it like three times and finally got to where I thought I was ready to query, you know?

It’s like, well, “I’ll just approach John Grisham ‘s agent, you know? Why not just start right at the top?”

And so I just shot out an email with a query letter and first chapter,, thought, “what the heck?” and just kind of kept going about my day.

Like an hour later, I had an email back from the agent’s assistants saying, “We liked the first chapter. Send us the first 50 pages.”

And so I did that.

Then, it was like an hour later and they said, “We like this. Send the first 100 pages.”

And so I did that.

And then maybe a day later, they said, “Okay, send the whole manuscript. We’re intrigued.”

I was like, “Wow, I’m gonna get John Grisham’s agent. This is easy.”

And of course, they passed on the book.

Now, I’ve spent probably a few years trying to get an agent for that book, rewriting the book. It just never never worked out with that one. And when I finally gave up on it, and decided to try something new is when I wrote “The Moonshine Messiah.”

I sort of knew what I was doing a little bit by then. So I wrote that one in like six months, and it got an agent, almost right away. And so I was like, “Okay, now, I’ve made it. This is we’re going to be cooking here.”

I wrote this book in 2016. So, it was like –six years, went through three agents, and I ended up placing it myself with Shotgun Honey.

Lynch: Talk about putting together the book and coming up with the story.

Johnson: So originally, I was very influenced by Elmore Leonard. He’s my favorite writer, and I love the “Raylan Givens” character.

I started as a short story where I just kind of had the idea of trying to flip the gender and have a female Raylan Givens-type character.

Instead of putting it in Kentucky, I put it in southern West Virginia, because that’s where my parents are from.

I’ve grown up with some kinds of stories of life in the coal town, and they grew up in McDowell County, and War, West Virginia.

So, I placed it there.

Lynch: It’s a “Mountaineer Mystery.” Were you always drawn to that particular genre?

Johnson: You know, I didn’t realize how much I was until I started trying to write and I kept kind of finding myself writing mysteries, even when I hadn’t set out to.

I’ve thought about this some. When I was very young, my family would go on a lot of car trips.While my dad would drive, my mom would read to us and I guess what she had available were Nancy Drew mysteries.

And so maybe that just imprinted something there on me early on.

When I set out to start writing, I really thought I’d do more kind of legal thrillers, which are in the mystery genre, but whatever reason, I just kind of gravitated more towards crime fiction and traditional mysteries.

Lynch: As it’s mentioned, this is a “Mountaineer Mystery,” which does suggest more than one. What else have you got? Did you have a sequel already planned?

Johnson: Yeah, the sequel is already written. It should come out probably in the May or June kind of timeframe, next year, and I’m working on the third book in the series, which I think is probably gonna be the last book in this series –at least, with Mary Beth, the main character for “The Moonshine Messiah.”

Lynch: What was the most difficult process of putting this book together?

Johnson: I would say the waiting is the hardest part.The writing part is fun and revising is fun.

Trying to get published is really really hard. The worst – rejections are fine. I can handle rejection. The worst part is long stretches of silence.

You know, it’s sending things out and waiting to hear. That, to me, is the most difficult part.

Lynch: The book is called “The Moonshine Messiah.” Russell, thank you very much.

Johnson: Thank you.

Mysteries With A Message. A Conversation With Kent Krueger

Award-winning novelist Kent Krueger has written 23 books, including 19 in the popular Cork O’Conner mystery series. On Saturday, Krueger comes to Charleston for the West Virginia Book Festival. He spoke to Bill Lynch about his books, writing and his latest standalone novel, The River We Remember.

Award-winning novelist Kent Krueger has written 23 books, including 19 in the popular Cork O’Conner mystery series.

On Saturday, Krueger comes to Charleston for the West Virginia Book Festival. He spoke to Bill Lynch about his books, writing and his latest standalone novel, The River We Remember.

The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.

Lynch: One of the things that jumped out at me while I was looking at your biography, or actually your bibliography of the things you’ve written, is that you’re a man who can stick with one thing for quite a while. Cork O’Connor at 19 books?

What’s the attraction to following one character for so long?

Krueger: Well, you get to know the guy pretty well. And there’s a whole array of adjunct characters in this series that I have enjoyed exploring as well.

You know, there are definitely advantages to writing a long running very popular mystery series. Every time I come up with a new book, it sells the back list. When I sit down to write a story in a Cork O’Connor series, I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I already have a cast of characters that readers are familiar with. There’s a sense of place that they have come to embrace. There are certain elements that every reader expects in a Cork O’Connor novel. So, it’s a little easier for me to write one of my serious mysteries than the other standalones that I have become well known for.

Lynch: Also, you’re one of those writers who has kind of a regulated system. You get up at a very specific hour, write for a specific time. Was it difficult to find that discipline?

Krueger: No, actually, that’s how I have approached my work for 40 plus years now.

I think if you’re an artist, I don’t care what your medium is, if you’re going to accomplish anything with your art, you have to approach it in a disciplined way. That particular process for me, getting up at six o’clock every morning, seven days a week and writing for several hours began many, many years ago when my wife entered law school, and I suddenly became the sole support of the family. I was the guy who had to, you know, keep a roof over our head and food on the table, but I wanted desperately to be a writer.

We were living two blocks from this iconic cafe in St. Paul, a place called the St. Clair Broiler that opened its doors at six o’clock every morning, seven days a week.

So, I pitched this idea to my wife. I said, ‘Diane, if you’re willing to get the kids up and dressed and fed and off to school, first thing, so I can go write, I swear to you, when I come home, at the end of the day, I’m going to be the best husband, the best father you can possibly imagine.

She bought it.

So, there I was at six o’clock every morning at the Broiler door, waiting for the coffee shop to open, waiting there with my pen and notebook in hand because this was long before they had laptops.

They would sit me in the booth – booth number four. Always, they saved it for me. And I would write from 6 a.m. till 7:15 a.m., and then I would pay for my coffee, catch a bus out front that would take me to work. And I followed that routine for years and years and years, until I sold my first novel which allowed me to jump ship and become a writer full-time.

Lynch: You still write by longhand or do you use a laptop these days?

Krueger: I wrote my first 10, probably 10, novels longhand. And if you write longhand, there is a step that involves transcribing the longhand, that very messy longhand stuff, into a word processing program of some kind.

I was behind deadline. I thought, you know, if I could skip that transcription step, maybe I could actually meet deadline, which was a scary proposition for me because writing longhand was a part of the magic. It was like the idea came from my head and passed through my heart, down my arm, through the pen and onto the page. And I was actually very concerned that if I monkeyed with the magic, maybe it wouldn’t happen. But I went ahead and gave it a try.

It worked.

Lynch: You have a new standalone kind of book out – The River We Remember?

Krueger: Yeah, it is set in the summer of 1958, in southern Minnesota in an area I call Black Earth County.

It opens on Memorial Day 1958. One the county’s leading citizens, a man named Jimmy Quinn, is found floating in the Alabaster River, which flows through town – dead from a shotgun blast and nearly naked.

It really is a true mystery and the question at the heart of this story is, “who killed Jimmy Quinn and why?”

But it’s really about a whole lot more. Would you like to hear that part of it?

Lynch: I would. I’d be delighted.

Krueger: In the early 1940s, my father graduated from high school, enlisted in the military service and marched off to fight in World War II in Europe.

He was just a kid, you know. He was 18 years old. He came back several years later, a man deeply wounded in body and in spirit by what the war had done to him.

I recognize now that he was probably suffering from PTSD, but you know, nobody talked about that back then.

You know, when I was a kid, I pestered my father for war stories, “Kill any Germans?”

He absolutely refused to talk about the war.

He was very like the fathers of my friends, guys who, like my dad, had fought in World War II or the Korean War. They all went away kids, you know, some not even old enough to shave yet, and they came back men deeply wounded by the horrors that they had seen and the horrors they’d been part of.

All my life, I’ve wondered how could anybody heal, and that’s really what The River We Remember is about. It’s about how to heal.

Lynch: Kent, thanks a lot.

Krueger: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

——

Krueger will appear Saturday, Oct. 21 at the West Virginia Book Festival in Charleston.

Appalachian Tarot Cards And Ron Rash, Inside Appalachia

This week on Inside Appalachia, a Pittsburgh artist channels the Steel City’s mythology and struggles — into tarot cards. Western North Carolina author Ron Rash shares his thoughts on writing about Appalachians. And we hear about efforts in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to return a young bald eagle to the wild.

This week, a Pittsburgh artist channels the Steel City’s mythology and struggles — into tarot cards.

Western North Carolina author Ron Rash shares his thoughts on writing about Appalachians.

And we hear about efforts in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to return a young bald eagle to the wild.

These stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.

In This Episode:

Tarot Cards For The Iron City
A Novelist Looks At 70
Abortion Access Over The Border
Fly Like An Eagle

Tarot Cards For The Iron City

Genevieve Barbee-Turner

*Courtesy Photo*

Appalachia is full of haunting stories and folktales. Now, a Pittsburgh artist is channeling some of those stories into a tarot deck.

Genevieve Barbee-Turner makes tarot decks featuring Pittsburgh lore and acknowledging city issues such as harm reduction, homelessness and gentrification.

Host Mason Adams spoke with Barbee-Turner about art and making cards about Appalachia and Pittsburgh.

A Novelist Looks At 70

Ron Rash is an Appalachian poet, novelist and short story writer. A professor of Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University, he’s written more than 20 books, including several that appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List.

His latest is called The Caretaker. It’s set in Korean war-era Appalachia.

Producer Bill Lynch spoke with Rash about the novel, Appalachia and getting older.

Abortion Access Over The Border

Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion, the procedure has been limited in much of Appalachia. It’s restricted in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.

And in Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia — it’s banned outright.

That’s pushed some providers across state lines. Like to a clinic that recently opened in western Maryland. WVPB’s Emily Rice has the story.

Fly Like An Eagle

For generations, bald eagles were rare. Threatened by pollution, pesticides and people’s expansion into their habitat, they were dying out. But then the bald eagle became federally protected, and the pesticide DDT, which made their eggshells more brittle, was banned.

Now, bald eagles are thriving. In 2007, they left the list of endangered and threatened species.

But every now and then, a bald eagle still needs help. WMRA’s Randi B. Hagi has a story about a young bald eagle being returned to the wild.

——

Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by Sierra Ferrel, Chris Stapleton, The Kessinger Brothers, Sturgill Simpson and Paul Loomis.

Bill Lynch is our producer. Zander Aloi is our associate producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens.

You can send us an email: InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.

You can find us on Instagram, Threads and Twitter @InAppalachia. Or here on Facebook.

Sign-up for the Inside Appalachia Newsletter!

Inside Appalachia is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

Despite Concerns, Educators See Artificial Intelligence As A Classroom Tool

Artificial intelligence is raising the possibility that students could cheat when writing papers, but educators and technology companies are ahead of the curve.

Artificial intelligence is raising the possibility that students could cheat when writing papers. But educators and technology companies say they are ahead of the curve.

Since its launch in November, the artificial intelligence-based program ChatGPT has drawn a lot of attention for its ability to quickly generate written passages based on simple prompts. Tell it to write you a 500-word essay on “The Old Man and The Sea,” and within moments, you have a completed assignment that may have taken a student hours to write. With so much attention has come a lot of criticism and concern, especially in the realm of education.

“ChatGPT Is the Wake-Up Call Schools Need to Limit Tech in Classrooms,” reads one headline in Time magazine.

But educators and academic organizations weren’t caught flat-footed by the new technology.

Zack Bennett is a distinguished machine learning scientist for Turnitin, a software that helps to detect plagiarism in students’ work. In early April, the company launched an update of their product to help identify AI generated writing, something that Bennett says can be done due to patterns.

“What it comes down to is that the language models that generate text tend to produce very average or probable words when they’re generating the text, whereas humans don’t really do that,” Bennett said. “They tend to do things in more surprising fashion, they use unexpected words or new ideas appear in their papers. We were able to hone in on that and tune a detector to distinguish between what a student writes versus what an AI generates.”

Even the creators of ChatGPT, OpenAI, admit the program has flaws. It is prone to certain biases from the data it’s trained on and has regularly been observed to make up information to fit a given prompt. Bennett says that as technology changes, everyone needs to adapt with it.

“I think also there’s a role for parents in all this to talk to their children, find out what they know about the tool. Start a conversation about AI literacy, what it means to have these tools available, because there will be temptations to use these in ways that are not optimal,” he said. “It’s important to remember they are tools. You want to use them mindfully, you want to use them to not replace you but augment what it is that you’re doing.”

Annie Chechitelli is the chief product officer for Turnitin. She agrees that ChatGPT and other similar AI writing systems aren’t just a threat to classrooms, but a tool.

“We’re seeing some really innovative things teachers are doing to incorporate these tools into student learning through experimentation, and I think is that going to continue,” she said. “We hope it continues as we have more conversations with educators on ways that we can help that or maybe devise new opportunities for tools that help students write. With that said, when we do talk to teachers, their request is just that there’s some simple measure to help them say, ‘Hey, there might be some AI writing here.’”

Educators at every level recognize the potential for abuse that AI writing systems present, but as Chechitelli says, they are also creative enough to realize that they can be harnessed as tools.

Josh Holley is the technology coordinator for Jackson County schools. He is married to an employee of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

Holley said his district has plagiarism detection software in place for teachers to use but hasn’t yet heard of an instance of an AI being used on an assignment.

“I don’t think that the students have really tried to use it because the teachers, right when we first got (the software), were like, ‘Hey, look what this can do.’ And the kids are, like, ‘Oh, okay, better not try this.’” he said. “We wanted to get ahead of the game.”

What Holley has seen are educators starting to integrate the new technology into their classrooms.

“One of my fellow technology integration specialists has really dived into using ChatGPT for creating interactive presentations. You type in the topic that you want to teach about, and it creates its own, sort of like a PowerPoint, that’s what it looks like,” Holley said. “It’s more interactive, and the kids get to do more stuff with it. It just generates all the information for the teacher.”

Despite the promise of AI writing if used correctly, the potential for abuse remains. Applications like Turnitin don’t determine student misconduct. That job is left to someone like Paul Heddings, director of academic integrity at West Virginia University. His office is tasked with investigating and adjudicating allegations of potential academic misconduct for the entire WVU system. Despite its novelty, Heddings says AI is not outside of his office’s expectations.

“That’s not abnormal for academic integrity. Generally, if you think about artificial intelligence as a continuum itself, it’s something that’s been around for a very long time in various places in our lives,” he said. “Academic dishonesty is one of those things that’s ever growing and we have to be evolving with the times.”

Heddings sees academic integrity as a question of fairness for other students, but also as another opportunity to teach.

“Rather than just focusing on bad behavior, I place a lot of weight on trying to position the student for success in the future,” he said. “Many of the plagiarism cases we see are instances where students are not confident writers, or maybe they don’t understand the distinction between patch writing, and paraphrasing, and straight plagiarism. We really have an opportunity to help students learn and grow, because college is a time of profound growth, and it’s not only growth within the classroom.”

The AI writing landscape is growing and changing quickly, as companies including tech giants like Meta and Alphabet come out with their own platforms.

But Heddings and others are confident that the world of education is ready for the change. WVU has already put together an artificial intelligence taskforce, with Heddings as a co-chair.

“Even though it’s easy to become kind of sensationalized about it or be a doomsdayer, I think our faculty have been very well grounded in the understanding that this is something to be aware of from an academic integrity perspective, but also a potential tool for the future,” Heddings said.

“There’s not a cookie cutter approach to artificial intelligence, but we need to give some guidelines to our faculty to help them better understand what tools and resources my office has, and others on campus have, and then how best we can integrate ChatGPT and other models into our curriculum to really harness the power that they have and help prepare our students even better for the future.”

Shepherd University Aims To Help Teachers With National Writing Project

Shepherd University is one of the latest schools to be designated as a member of the National Writing Project.

It helps teachers support their students’ writing education through events including professional development institutes and writing retreats that help educators at all grade levels.

The project is a federally funded program with 170 sites nationwide.

Shepherd University is the third school in West Virginia to be involved with the program, joining both WVU and Marshall. A release says part of the reason the university is adopting the project is to help teachers with literacy education in a more interconnected, post-COVID world.

The university plans to kick off their membership by hosting a professional development institute for teachers in the area June 6-15. There is a $100 registration fee and those attending can earn up to six continuing education credit hours. Local teachers can sign up at the school’s National Writing Project webpage.