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This week, in author Willie Carver, Jr.’s new book, he reconsiders a negative childhood experience with a neighborhood girl who might have just been looking for a friend. Also, a southwestern Virginia community rang the alarm after more and more of its children were diagnosed with cancer. A local journalist is trying to unravel the cause. And, the city of Asheville has a new crusading reporter. He’s a puppet.
Foxfire began in 1967 as a student-run magazine in North Georgia. It was a way for high school students to collect and share the wisdom and lore from their community members. They named it “Foxfire” after a fungus in the region that glows in the dark.
Over 50 years, it’s grown into a book series, a magazine, a museum, and an oral history archive. One of those oral histories is from 1975 and captures the kind of knowledge that Foxfire collected.
An Appalachian Woman’s Place Often Went Beyond The Home
Photo Lilly Knoepp. Appalachian storyteller Elizabeth Ellis is featured in the Foxfire project with Blue Ridge Public Radio,
A lot of the women in older archival Foxfire interviews said that they “didn’t work” but so many Appalachian women were midwives, mothers, and business owners.
Foxfire’s latest collection features 21 women in the book called “The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Women,” edited by then Foxfire education director and museum curator Kami Ahrens. Mason Adams had more.
Oral History Tradition Continues Today
In 2020, Blue Ridge Public Radio partnered with Ahrens to record oral histories and aired them on the radio. BPR’s Lilly Knoepp shared a few.
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Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn, Sean Watkins, The Steel Woods, and Dr. Kathy Bullock and her class at the John C. Campbell Folk School.
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.
On this West Virginia Week, the state signs a memorandum of understanding about nuclear energy, the Public Service Commission disputes need for a transmission line, and 9/11 is remembered.
This week, in author Willie Carver, Jr.’s new book, he reconsiders a negative childhood experience with a neighborhood girl who might have just been looking for a friend. Also, a southwestern Virginia community rang the alarm after more and more of its children were diagnosed with cancer. A local journalist is trying to unravel the cause. And, the city of Asheville has a new crusading reporter. He’s a puppet.
Twenty-five years ago, on Sept. 11, 2001, at 8:46 a.m., a hijacked plane hit one of the twin towers at the World Trade Center in New York City, ending for this nation a certain innocence, and the belief that such an attack would never happen on American soil. Maria Young caught up an economics professor from WVU who was on site when the planes hit – and gave an exclusive interview to then-West Virginia Public Broadcasting News Director Beth Vorhees.
They love West Virginia. They want to make their future here, but jobs, housing and opportunity can make that choice harder than it sounds. In the first of two Us & Them episodes, Trey Kay talks with young West Virginians trying to decide whether they can put down their own roots in a place they call home.
