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A Celebration Of W.Va. Books And An Anthology Focuses On Sense Of Place

Recently, NPR published a list of 50 books for 50 states to celebrate summer reading. The one they identified for West Virginia was “Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry From West Virginia” edited by Doug Van Gundy and Laura Long.

It’s summertime. We go swimming, we travel, we see our friends, and many of us also love to read.

Twenty years ago, West Virginia poet laureate Irene McKinney edited an anthology of West Virginia fiction writers and poets called “Backcountry.” A few years ago, Van Gundy and Long — working with WVU Press — began a project to compile an anthology of West Virginia writing since Backcountry’s publication — that’s how “Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia” was born.

This anthology features a collection of 63 fiction writers and poets talking about the unique sense of place they find in the Mountain State.

News Director Eric Douglas spoke with Van Gundy and Long about the process for creating the book. But before we get into that conversation, we asked to hear from you.

What are your favorite West Virginia books that you would recommend? The type of book that makes you think of the Mountain State.

We asked you on Facebook, and here’s what you told us:

Over a two-and-half-day period, we received 34 responses, ages 30 to 84. Most of you were from West Virginia: 85.71 percent from the Mountain State, and 14.29 percent of you from out-of-state.

Most of you recommended “Rocket Boys” by Homer Hickam, while “The West Virginia Encyclopedia” took second place.

All together, we received 19 book recommendations. You described these books as reminding you of your childhood, “beautifully written,” “chock full of information” about West Virginia, “inspirational,” “more than stereotypes,” “complicated,” “authentic,” “empathetic,” “historical,” and as one of you proclaimed, “it’s a great story!”

Here’s a list of all your book recommendations, in no particular order:

Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam
West Virginia Hollow Tales by John E. Jordan Jr.
When I Was Young in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant
In the Country Dark by Mike Mallow
Gauley Mountain by Louise McNeill
Shrapnel by Marie Manilla
Far Appalachia by Noah Adams
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
The Dark and Bloody River by Allan W. Eckert
The West Virginia Encyclopedia
The Miner’s Daughter by Gretchen Moran Laskas
Dismal Mountain by John W. Billheimer
So Much to Be Angry About by Shaun Slifer
Foote: A Mystery Novel by Tom Bredehoft
Another Appalachia: Growing Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place by Neema Avashia
Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina
The Unquiet Earth by Denise Giardina
At home in the heart of Appalachia by John O’Brien
The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant

This interview with Van Gundy and Long has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Which one of you came up with this idea? Or was this one of those projects that started over a couple beers during a conference somewhere.

Van Gundy: Abby Freeland, who was then the Acquisitions Editor at WVU Press, approached me. She was visiting the West Virginia Wesleyan low residency MFA program. And she said, “What do you think of this anthology, “Backcountry,” which was edited by Irene McKinney about 20 years ago?” And I said, “Oh, it’s essential.” And she said, “What do you think about updating it?” I said, “Oh, that would be great. You guys should do that.” She said, “What do you think about you doing it?” And [I said], “Oh, okay. Sure.”

We thought that Laura would be a great collaborator on this. And as Laura writes poetry and fiction, I’m primarily a poet, we thought it’d be great to have a couple of perspectives. And Laura and I are old friends and have worked together off and on for a long time. And we thought we could probably get along well enough to pull together an anthology. And it ended up being just a joy.

But the bones of the thing came together at an Appalachian studies conference in Huntington, where we all ducked out to have dinner together. And we sort of hammered out what we wanted for the book. And Laura brought her ideas, and I brought my ideas, and Abby brought her ideas. And by the end of dinner, we sort of had a mandate and direction.

Douglas: How did you solicit the writers? How did you edit down the content – that sort of thing?

Van Gundy: We each came up with suggestions for the list. We wanted authors that had books out from national presses, generally. And then we each brought lists. And when we went around and asked some of the people who were on our lists if they would like to be included, we always asked them, “Who do you think should be in this book?” So that way we were able to find writers that I didn’t know of, that I’ve since become a fan of. But just through the web of connectivity of West Virginia writers, we just kept getting more and more suggestions as we went on.

Long: We also divided the work up so that I did the fiction and Doug did the poetry. When we wrote to people, we asked them to send work that they felt connected to a sense of place, of West Virginia. So the authors themselves chose work that gave them a strong sense of place. And I think that’s a real strength of the book, that self-selection by the writers, of the things that they felt were very much West Virginia-centered or had that feeling for them in whatever way. So they each sent us more than one work. And then we chose among the pieces that each writer sent to us, so the book would balance out well. And what we felt was the strongest.

Van Gundy: I remember going back and forth for quite a while on how to sequence this thing, because the work is so various and so broad, such a broad reach and such a chorus of voices and perspectives. We finally settled on alphabetical. It just seemed the most egalitarian.

Douglas: Any big discoveries? Anybody that you didn’t know about or anybody that surprised you?

Long: There were a number of poets that I didn’t know their work. So I was surprised by many of the poets. I was just rereading it this morning and remember being surprised again, actually, because the poet’s are just amazing. And not many of them are that well known because people don’t read poetry that much. I can’t name just one.

Douglas: You said in your introduction to the book, and you both alluded to it, that you were looking for stories with a connection to West Virginia, or that sense of place of West Virginia.

Van Gundy: I remember a conversation that Laura and I had, where we said we wanted the book to represent the state of the state of fiction and poetry in West Virginia. And we wanted to be sure that it was not monolithic. We wanted to be sure that it represented as many various voices that are present in our literature as possible. One of the things that I love so much about my West Virginia, is that there’s room for everyone. I think there is, at its core, a kind of inclusivity that if you’re willing to put something into the community, if you’re willing to belong, then you’re welcome. And I think that this book reflects that.

Douglas: Laura, do you want to add anything?

Long: Speaking of poets that I didn’t really know before, Norman Jordan, who was associated with the Black Arts Movement of the 60s and 70s, was a writer that I didn’t know, even though he wrote five books of poetry. And his poem is about the Hawks Nest tunnel. And so the writers that are not at all stereotypical are deeply embedded and entwined with a sense of place.

So, the place does connect people who, in other scenarios, might not seem connected. Rajia Hasib, who’s an amazing writer in Charleston, whose work connects with others in these surprising ways. That’s another person that I didn’t know before [who] I’ve gotten to know because of the book. And, with people like Rajia Hasib, who was so happy to be part of the book, you realize how connected people feel, even when she came to West Virginia from Egypt. And we realize how many people are happy to make a home in West Virginia, as well as people who are born and raised here. People feel connections because they’re born here, but they also feel connections because they make a life here with their family. So I feel that the book does connect people in ways that West Virginia itself connects people.

Van Gundy: As you’re saying that, Laura, it makes me think that whether or not we’re born here, we have family histories here. Every one of us, and every one of the voices in this book, is a West Virginian and by choice, you know, we choose again and again to stay where we choose. We choose to write about the place, and so we are all West Virginians by choice.

And that’s something that unites us.

WVU Press Tells Appalachian Stories, Helps To Share Region’s Diversity

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently labeled WVU Press as a “new publishing heavyweight.” But the small university press hasn’t lost its focus on West Virginian and Appalachian stories.

Eric Douglas spoke with director Derek Krissoff to find out what makes the press tick.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Tell me what WVU Press is.

Krissoff: That’s the question that I’m always hoping that people will ask. And the most important thing to stress about WVU Press, and I think about university presses in general, is that we’re book publishers. We’re fundamentally a book publisher in the same way that Random House or HarperCollins is a book publisher. We acquire and edit and design and produce and market and sell books. We sell them in the marketplace. You see them at bookstores and see them reviewed, hopefully, in newspapers and on public radio, and so forth.

The difference between what we do at WVU Press and what a large commercial for-profit publisher does is that we are not for profit. We’re part of WVU. So we’re part of the state of West Virginia. And we have mission reasons for what we do alongside the commercial reasons. Obviously, we want to see our books succeed. We want to have resources from the sale of books that we can invest in publishing more and better books. We want to see the books get attention alongside the books from HarperCollins. But we also want to reflect positively on WVU as a research institution. We are the largest publisher in the state of West Virginia. And that’s something that we take seriously. And we want to publish books that project outward the strength of WVU as an institution, but also the strength of West Virginia as a place.

Douglas: Granted you certainly want to sell books, but you have a different lens through which you look at books.

Krissoff: One of the pieces of confusion that people sometimes have about university presses is they think we only publish faculty at our own university. And that’s not true. We publish faculty from all around the world, although we certainly do publish WVU faculty. And we also publish people who aren’t faculty at all.

Douglas: How many books do you publish in a year?

Krissoff: We publish between 15 and 20 books a year. And we also have a small scholarly journals program. The number of books is actually going down a little bit. That’s deliberate, because we want to invest a little bit more in every book that we publish. For a while, we were up close to 25. Now we’re 20 or even a little bit less. But sales have gone up as we’ve gone down on title output, because I think we have been able to really focus the resources that we have on the books that seem most likely to reward that.

Douglas: You’re talking about representing West Virginia, and Appalachian literature, in general. But, there’s a misconception that Appalachian literature is coal mining memoirs, and grandma and pop all up in the hills. But that’s not all that you publish.

Krissoff: I’m glad that you noticed that. And that’s a deliberate effort on our part to reflect the full diversity of the state and the region. And I think Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Life of Church Ladies is an example. She is a Black author in Pittsburgh, so just up the road from Morgantown, so that felt like a regional acquisition for us. And certainly, having the opportunity to amplify the voice of a Black writer in our part of the world was attractive.

But from that success we’ve been able to invest the resources in something like Bill Turner’s book, The Harlan Renaissance, which is just out, which is sort of based on his experience growing up in primarily Black coal camps in Eastern Kentucky in the middle part of the 20th century. Not a typical Appalachian story, but an important Appalachian story.

And then our lead title for spring is a book called Another Appalachia by a woman named Neema Avashia. She grew up in West Virginia and is a writer and educator. She’s queer and she’s Indian American. Her parents immigrated to West Virginia from India, and she proudly claims the identity of an Appalachian. She’s got stuff in her book about Tudor’s Biscuits. I mean she’s into it. But she doesn’t reflect the sort of prevailing notions about what Appalachia is or about who Appalachians are. And that seems like an important thing we can do to help amplify those voices, and to maybe change perceptions about what Appalachia is culturally, politically and all the rest.

Douglas: So let’s talk about Deesha Philyaw. I interviewed her over the summer for The Secret Life Church Ladies. That book kind of blew up on you.

Krissoff: The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, which has only been out a little over a year, is far and away the most successful book commercially that we’ve ever published. And really a university press success story, I think, across our industry. That book was a finalist for the National Book Award, which is the biggest book award given in the United States. It won the PEN Faulkner Award and won The Story Prize and is being adapted for HBO. These are things that in many cases no university press book has ever done before. Obviously, we try to keep the spotlight on the books and the authors, but if there is kind of a narrative about the publishing house, too, then that’s great. And we can use that opportunity to raise awareness of what publishers do and what university presses do.

Douglas: What makes your ears perk up when you get a submission? What are you looking for the next book?

Krissoff: That’s a great question and it’s a tricky one to answer. Certainly, we are motivated by a commitment to social justice, by a commitment to reflecting the diversity of the region. So if there’s an opportunity to work with an author whose voice will be amplifying, who wouldn’t have that opportunity with a big house in New York, where they might not see the audience for the book, or kind of get what the author was trying to do, then that is immediately appealing, and a lot of our recent successes have come from working with members of those communities to tell their stories effectively.

But I think there are also stories about Appalachia that wouldn’t get told otherwise. An example along these lines would be something like our collection of responses to Hillbilly Elegy that we published a couple of years ago called Appalachian Reckoning. Before Deesha’s book, that was the most successful book commercially that we published. And this is one where the idea sort of came from in-house. Hillbilly Elegy was doing so well and dominating so much of the story about our region. And we thought, there are other stories here, too. What can we do to draw those voices into a single volume, and sort of present some sort of counterweight to balance out the story of Hillbilly Elegy? Get people talking about Appalachia in different ways than JD Vance was. That’s a case where instead of hanging back and seeing what came over the transom, we sort of went out and found people to do this book. And that was really successful, and I think helped position us as a press that was dedicated to the many different voices from this region.

New Book Looks At Secret Lives Of Church Ladies

“The Secret Lives of Church Ladies” is a collection of short stories that takes a look at the sexuality of Black women in the church. Written by Deesha Philyaw, the book was recently published by West Virginia University Press.

“The Secret Lives of Church Ladies” has been taking the literary world by storm, winning the PEN/Faulkner Award, the $20,000 Story Prize, and the L.A. Times Award for First Fiction.

Philyaw spoke with Eric Douglas about the book.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Describe for me, in your words, “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.”

Philyaw: It was definitely a passion project, it was definitely a work of my heart. These women have been living in my imagination and in my curiosity, since I was a girl. This book is the fruition of nostalgia and history and memory and wonder and hope for myself and other black women, to get free of the things that hold us back.

Douglas: So I have to ask, were you sitting in the back pew with one of your friends going “I wonder about her,” making up those stories, as all teenage kids do?

Philyaw: Not so much with a friend, but in my own mind. I was very curious about those women and their desires and their sex lives. Because I was trying to figure out what that meant for me, like, what are my options here? I was trying to make sense of what I was being taught and what I was being shown, which was sometimes contradictory. I was influenced by women in the church and women outside of the church. And there were all these binaries, which is so black and white. My body was changing. And I was trying to figure out, how do you navigate these longings that I now know are very human.

Hear Deesha Philyaw read an excerpt from the book

Douglas: I understand you wrote about a black experience, but I think it’s much more universal than that.

Philyaw: That’s one of the things that I hope people can take away from the book. I’m certainly not the first one to observe this, because Toni Morrison observed it, August Wilson observed that. They wrote exclusively about black life, but they both were clear and their work shows that you can tell universal stories through specific black characters and scenarios. Those themes about getting free, disrupting binaries, that’s something that all of us can relate to.

Douglas: The opening quote in the book is from Ansel Elkins in “The Autobiography of Eve.” It says “Let it be known, I did not fall from grace, I leapt to freedom.” That, to me. speaks to the whole concept of the book. There is a lot of sex in the book, but that’s not really what the book is about. It’s about personal freedom and understanding themselves.

Philyaw: That’s right. The narrative we’ve been given about Eve, is that it was a fall. I love that line, that verse, from Ansel, that it’s a reframing and reclaiming the Eve narrative by Eve herself. From her perspective, it was a leap. And it was a leap to freedom specifically. And so what happens if we reclaim these narratives? How do we tell our own stories instead of embodying the stories that have been told about us, which have been lies and distortions, and important things left out. When I say that I want black women to feel seen and heard in these stories, that’s what I mean. I hope that these narratives are a better reflection of them than what we have often seen about ourselves, and in particular, our sexuality.

Douglas: I wonder if in the context of the Me Too movement and some of these other things that this book didn’t land at the perfect time.

Philyaw: I think that so many of us are hungry to be reassured and so if you have been hurt by the church, if your agency around your body has been taken away, and whether that’s from assault to having a mother that wants you to wear a girdle, like in one of the stories, I think the book offers that affirmation and that encouragement that, yes, this happened, it didn’t just happen to you, there are lots of us, because this is cultural.

So the conditions were absolutely right for a book like this. These are things that we whisper just amongst ourselves, or maybe, you know, we only keep it to ourselves. And so this moment, where we’re gonna say those parts out loud, I think the culture was really, really ripe for that.

Douglas: In one of the interviews that you did, you talked about some concern that somebody would ask you to make it less black. But I guess ultimately, that request never came through.

Philyaw: My reason for being concerned was because I heard from other writers, this idea of writing to a white audience and trying to make sure that white people could access the stories. Again, I listened to Toni Morrison and August Wilson, who said, white people can access stories about black people without us having to translate culture, you know. I mean, what do any of us do when we encounter a word or a phrase or something? We look it up. As a friend of mine, another writer from Jacksonville, says she writes so that the people who she’s writing about can understand these words. It’s not about translating for anyone. I knew that there would be that pressure in the industry as a whole. And I’d heard that from individual writers. And so I assumed that I would be confronted with that as well. But thankfully, I wasn’t.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies was recently published by West Virginia University Press.

This story is part of a series of interviews with authors from, or writing about, Appalachia.

New Book Examines Appalachian Author’s Work

Denise Giardina is a highly regarded Appalachian author whose works include “Storming Heaven” and “The Unquiet Earth.” Both of those books are set in West Virginia, in the coalfields. They revolve around the miners’ struggle with mine owners and unions, including the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921.

In his new book about Giardina’s work, called “Heeding The Call: A Study of Denise Giardina’s Novels,” author William Jolliff explores the deep theological message in Giardina’s works and how he believes her work should be regarded on a national level. Giardina only read the book after it was completed.

Eric Douglas spoke to both Giardina and Jolliff by Zoom to discuss the new book.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: What’s it like to have somebody write an entire book about you and your work?

Giardina: Well, it’s very weird, because usually it doesn’t happen until you’re dead. So, I kept thinking, as I was reading it, and ‘I’m still alive, right?’ But it was also fun because I haven’t read those books myself, in some cases, in 30 years. I used to do public readings and I had certain parts that I liked to read because audiences seemed to respond to those. So, I knew those parts really well. But then there were parts of the books that I’d totally forgotten about.

I guess, if somebody takes enough time, first of all, to read every book you’ve written, and then to write a book about it themselves, they must actually pretty much like it. I mean, when the opposite happens, it’s usually somebody who is dead and famous and some writer decides they’re going to take them down a peg or two. But in this case, I kind of went into it expecting that maybe he kind of likes my books, and he does. Even better, he understands them. I think he really puts a focus on them that needed to be made, which is that I get pigeonholed as a regional writer when in fact, I’m a theological writer.

Douglas: What does that mean to you?

Giardina: That’s the way I think. And everything I write comes from that theological perspective; believing in God, and all that that entails, morally and ethically and spiritually. Yet a lot of people don’t understand that because, for example, my books would never be carried in a self-labeled Christian bookstore. There’s too much sex and there’s too much violence. But yet, they’re deeply spiritual, I think, and deeply theological, because those are the questions that interest me.

Politics interests me. Certainly, the Appalachian region interests me, although not as much as people might realize. But the things that interest me are sin, redemption, forgiveness, love, fear of death, life after death. Those kinds of things are the questions that interest me and that’s what the books are all about. Every single one of them.

Douglas: Mr. Jolliff, you’re an English professor, right? And you actually teach Denise’s books as, I don’t know if it’s a class itself or as part of one of your classes.

Jolliff: I do both. I started teaching “Storming Heaven,” because it was in an introductory kind of class where I’m trying to get students to engage with a culture very different from their own. If you grew up in the Northwest, Appalachian culture is very different. And so, it was a great tool in that regard.

Plus, of course, that faith element. I teach at a faith-affirming institution, so students come in with more or less a willingness to look at some of those deep faith aspects. So, I taught it there. And then I started using “Unquiet Earth,” in my 20th century American Literature survey, upper-level course.

Douglas: Mrs. Giardina, I kept flashing back to high school English classes where teachers were trying to tell us, ‘This is what the author was thinking when they were writing this.’ Did he get it right? That’s always the question every teenager has.

Giardina: In this case, I think he did get I’d say 95 or 96 percent. Maybe just maybe two or three percent that was a little off, that if I sat down with him and talked to him about it, I could say, ‘Yeah, but you know…’ But he really did get a lot of it right. And I felt very good about that.

Douglas: Mr. Jolliff, who do you want to read the book?

Jolliff: I want it to be a help for students. Sort of the picture in my mind for the reader is someone who’s far into literature, maybe an upper-level undergrad or someone who’s maybe starting their graduate studies. I wanted this to be sort of a jumping-off point for what those students might think they should study and what they should write about.

I assumed it would find some kind of reception, whether positive or negative or critical, among people who do Appalachian studies. I mean, she’s just really significant in that area.

I shouldn’t say the most important, but certainly always in my mind was the fact that there are a lot of folks who write about theology in literature or who write about religion in literature, whom I would really like to somehow put in contact with her work. Her handling of those aspects is on par with anybody, and better than most. And while I like the idea that she’s an Appalachian writer, I would like her work to enter into that bigger conversation of where people write about and study contemporary handlings of theology.

Douglas: Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that you want to mention?

Jolliff: Only that I maybe I would say this. I started studying her seriously because I was drawn to particular books. And I started teaching her because she fit very well in certain objectives that I had for my classes. But I can’t state too broadly really, or too richly, how much of a great experience it was to get this far into the mind of one great writer.

“Heeding The Call: A Study of Denise Giardina’s Novels” is available through West Virginia University Press.

Jolliff is currently the chair of the Department of Writing and Literature at George Fox University in Newburg, Oregon. Giardina lives in Charleston, West Virginia and has turned her attention to writing screenplays.

This interview is part of a series of interviews with authors from, or writing about, Appalachia.