The Books of the States: West Virginia (5 electoral votes; Guest: Ann Pancake)

When I thought of West Virginia, I immediately thought of my friend Ann Pancake, who I have known since we were both in graduate school out here in Seattle over a decade ago. At some point in school, I remember coming across her story "Ghostless" in a literary magazine and realizing, Oh my, this woman is light years ahead of me. She is serious business. We only cross paths every few years (she's lived in many places before and after that time, though she's back in Seattle for now), but Ann's the sort of person who, once you've made a connection with her, honors that connection with the same graceful engagement that she brings to her writing.

And about that writing. Her short story collection, Given Ground (which includes "Ghostless"), appeared in 2001. And when I saw her read from it then, she talked with a humble sort of awe about the novel she was working on, and how hard it was to do such a thing justice. That novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been, finally saw the light of day last fall, and you can get a sense of the labors that went into its making in this interview. She's highly conscious of representing the West Virginia she knows to readers who only know the stereotypes, but her books are not only committed but lyrical. You might go into Strange As This Weather Has Been knowing that it's "about" the destructive process of mountaintop removal mining (which it is), but as you open it you'll be swept away in the first scenes instead by the intensity of teen lust and beauty.

I grew up an hour's drive from Harpers Ferry, but I know little more about the state than what everybody knows (and what I know from Ann's books and a few of those below), so I'll leave it to her to introduce her state and the books she chose:

West Virginia is a place so often misunderstood and perversely mythologized by the rest of America (at least that part of the rest of America who realize that West Virginia is a state distinct from Virginia) that recently its most well-known "author" turned out to be not only not West Virginian, but not to exist at all. I'm speaking, of course, of JT LeRoy, a virtual "hillbilly savant" created by a middle-class woman originally from Brooklyn, whose writings and telephone persona charmed, duped, and conned a whole swath of urban artists and intelligentsia for over a decade. 

It's really unfortunate that more people don't read books by actual flesh-and-blood West Virginians because while the state is money-poor, it's chock-full of the raw materials of brilliant literature. We have a beautiful and inventive language, a bone-deep sense of place, a long story-telling tradition, and although we may or may not have people more idiosyncratic than other regions, we do for certain, to paraphrase Flannery O'Connor, know how to recognize them. West Virginia also has one of the most fascinating, violent, and tragic histories of any state in the nation, and several of the books I'll mention draw on that history. I've lived in four countries and in five different regions of the U.S., and I still find West Virginia the most interesting place in the world. 

• Black Tickets by Jayne Anne Phillips: Phillips's 1979 short story collection Black Tickets was a revelation to me when I read it in my early 20s, and I've read it every year since. Black Tickets features some of the best stories ever written about the state, then just as convincingly and stunningly gives us Bogota, New York City, El Paso, and beyond. It's as though her growing in the hard, dark beauty of West Virginia has helped Phillips see it elsewhere, and all her work radiates this. The range of styles Phillips uses is even more breathtaking than her range of settings, from tight-lipped minimalism to lush stream-of-consciousness, three-paragraph prose poem gems nested between twenty-page masterpieces. The book was called a work of genius by Tillie Olsen; Nadine Gordimer named Phillips the best short story writer since Welty. The novel Machine Dreams followed in 1984, this one set entirely in West Virginia with the Vietnam War in the background. Machine Dreams is at once the quintessential West Virginia novel and the quintessential American one. Watch for her fourth novel and first in eight years, Lark and Termite, slated for publication in January 09.
• The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake by Breece D'J Pancake: Before his suicide in 1979 at age 26, Pancake produced some of the most tightly crafted and starkly gorgeous American short stories of the second half of the twentieth century. His voice and style so perfectly capture the ineffable essence of West Virginia that it makes my body run cold to my bones and I often have to turn away. While Phillips was compared to Welty, Pancake was compared to Hemingway, but Pancake understood white working-class men in ways Hemingway couldn't. He gives us those men without caricature, but also without romanticization, and always from the deepest realest place in his troubled heart. He has become something of a cult figure among literary short story writers, and he deserves it. (Yes, he is distantly related to me.) Black Tickets and The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake should be required reading for anyone in this country who wants to write fiction.
• Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina: Born in a coal camp in southern West Virginia, novelist Denise Giardina returned to West Virginians our history, a history mostly suppressed in our public education there. Through Storming Heaven and its sequel, The Unquiet Earth, readers relive a century of the long, often bloody, struggle between those who own and exploit natural resources and those who work for them and suffer under their power. While the novels draw directly on events in West Virginia, they speak far beyond our borders, illuminating the history of U.S. labor in general and dramatizing that American unspeakable: class warfare. Giardina does all this with unforgettable characters, can't-put-it-down plots and beautiful dialect-driven prose. On top of that, she walks her talk. She's been fighting stripmining for decades and even ran for the governor of West Virginia in 2000 on a platform featuring a ban on mountaintop removal mining, a radical form of stripmining now destroying the southern part of the state.
• Vivid Companion by Irene McKinney: With poems full of guts and loveliness, McKinney has served as West Virginia's poet laureate since 1994. Her most well-known collection is probably Six O’Clock Mine Report, but I think her latest book, Vivid Companion, is even more extraordinary. McKinney grew up on a West Virginia farm without electricity or running water, and after several years of teaching out West, she lives on that farm again. Centered in this place-knowledge, she writes about the natural world, broadly defined, not as "pastoral" or as "pretty," but with a down-to-the-ground rawness that opens stealthily into the ethereal and profound. In this way, she reminds her reader how close the ground is to the ethereal all along, one of the wisdoms that West Virginia teaches. I don't know any other poet who writes with such complex honesty about being a girl, then a woman, and finally an aging woman in rural America.
• West Virginia: A History by John Alexander Williams: I've already mentioned how fascinating West Virginia's history is, and Williams's book offers the most succinct and riveting account of that history I've come across. Without sensationalizing or sugarcoating, William uses a compelling narrative style to cover the most emblematic events in the state's history. Here you can read about John Brown's raid; about the unusual (some might say underhanded) way West Virginia was created; a demythologized version of the Hatfield/McCoy feud; the bloody mine wars of the early 20th century; and the industrial disasters at 1930's Hawk's Nest and 1970's Buffalo Creek. As with Giardina's books, one can read Williams's work as particular to West Virginia and as commenting on class and labor, race, environmental issues, and industrialization in the nation at large because in West Virginia these issues often stand out more nakedly than they do elsewhere. Williams himself is a native of White Sulphur Springs, WV. 

Five votes are far too few for such literary wealth, so I must mention also Davis Grubb, the man who grew up down the street from the state penitentiary and is best known for his novel Night of the Hunter, a literary work that was also an immediate bestseller and became a classic movie. Mary Lee Settle is the only West Virginian to have been awarded a National Book Award, and the most West Virginian of her many novels make up her Beulah Quintet. Henry Louis Gates's memoir Colored People is essential West Virginia reading, as is anything by poets Maggie Anderson, Louise McNeill, Jeff Mann, and Diane Gilliam Fisher. Check out, too, fiction writers Meredith Sue Willis, Pinckney Benedict--especially his short story collections Town Smokes and The Wrecking Yard--and Chuck Kinder (the inspiration for Michael Chabon's Grady Tripp in Wonder Boys). Kinder's novel Snakehunter is my favorite, and was also an influence on Breece Pancake's work. Then there is that mid-19th century classic Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis, published two years before West Virginia actually became a state. Finally, in the realm of children's books, don't miss the very fine writers Marc Harshman and Cynthia Rylant.   

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

Comments

[Terry on December 02, 2008 at 06:59 AM]

Cynthia Rylant also has some wonderful *adult* books on West Virginia and Appalachia. It is a fascinating state. Although not a West Virginian by birth, Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle offers some very poignant (and accurate) descriptions and insights into southern WV and coal country. Her story is set in the 60s and 70s, but it hasn't changed (except that Morris Harvey College is now the University of Charleston ... my alma mater).

[Aging Lit Major on December 03, 2008 at 05:10 AM]

I knew about Phillips and Breece D'J Pancake. I'm anxious to read the others. They all sound terrific. One more for the list: native Meredith Sue Willis has portrayed WV in several novels and stories.