Live On The Levee Lineup Announced
Charleston’s annual free concert series, Live on the Levee, will begin on May 24 and run through August 10.
Continue Reading Take Me to More NewsThis year marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of a series of novels called The Beulah Quintet. The novels are by the late Mary Lee Settle, a writer who set out to capture moments in West Virginia history when a revolutionary change was at stake. Today’s economic uncertainty here in Appalachia has many people wondering whether we are also living in the midst of a transition.
Producer Catherine Moore was inspired to capture all this in an hour-long radio documentary called Cedar Grove, featured in this week’s episode of Inside Appalachia. “There’s just kind of a feeling in the air, right now, in central Appalachia, that we have reached a moment, or a crossroads, where we’re gonna have to choose a path for our future. So yeah when I discovered that aspect of Mary Lee Settle’s work it really resonated with me, as we face the projected long-term decline of coal.
“So that was a big inspiration for me to make this documentary. I wanted to explore that idea of what these times are like, and I do think that if we’re going to survive here we’re gonna have to look for new ways of being,” Moore said.
Moore said, “[Mary Lee Settle] set each of her books in her Beulah Quintet in what she called “pitch points” or “seed points”, which she thought of as moments right on the edge of a deep and profound societal change. She wanted to see the kinds of choices people were making and how those choices were impacting the future.”