I'd like to comment...on two new books by West Virginia authors

Both from Belle Point Press

While sometimes the pleasure of reading is to travel outside myself, to follow the stories of others that are different from me, to experience a bit of their place and culture, there is, too, a pleasure of reading to see with new eyes places and cultures more familiar. And this month, I’ve been reading two West Virginia writers who offer a view that’s close to home. Though both writers offer a view of north central West Virginia, what struck me was both the similarities and the differences in their work.

But, a moment to acknowledge Belle Point Press, who published both books. If you check out their home page, perhaps you’ll be as charmed as I was by their tagline: “Stick Around And Read.” The press also has a substack, which you might want to follow. I will also say that both books had lovely covers, suited to the work that followed.

I know, don’t judge a book by its cover. And still, who doesn’t love good cover art?

William Woolfit’s The Night The Rain Had Nowhere To Go is as gorgeous as it is tough, with language that shifts easily from storytelling, elegy, grief, resilience, acceptance, faith, song, and so on. That we are in the hands of a gifted writer is evident immediately, the range almost overwhelming. But we are also in the the hands of writer determined to tell the truth of a place, one that often gets twisted in the imagination of those outside Appalachia.

While most the poems are about West Virginia, there are others from the eastern part of Tennessee, where Woolfit now lives, and elswhere. All project their places as complex. In the West Virginia poems especially, we have the opposite of poverty-porn, and we see how one does not need to be from a traditionally wealthy place to find a wealth of culture. It springs from unlikely places and sources. We see a place ravaged for its natural resources but still loved for its physical landscape. As the land becomes plundered, so do many of the bodies of the people who live there. It’s as if one is the mirror of the other (and this might be of interest to the narrative medicine community, I think). A poem that makes this landscape-body connection is “In Prenter Hollow” where the narrator quickly takes us from “old mine shafts, cracking aquifier—” to inside a frame house where “in the bathtub veined with cracks,/smears we can’t bleach clean,” to several stanzas down we get the landscape and the body as one:

In the wells and hollow

of my body, spoils accrue,

ores that alter my blood,

Woolfit ends, not with ending punctuation, and a narrator who becomes a red flag—a symbol of mining strikes— and a dash after, followed by blank, that white space only ending with the physical page itself. It resonates because it doesn’t resolve. And isn’t this what coal has done to this place?

So much of Woolfit’s collection is peppered by cataloging aspects of the region: the equipment of mining, or the accounts of people after a chemical spill, or the songs sung or references by the speakers of various poems in the collection. But one that lasted with me long after the reading was how food represents the region. These are specific to this place, things homemade and made from these lands specifically, such as paw-paws. Appealing to taste is a kind of appeal to memory on a deep sensory level. We know a place by its cuisine. Take the poem “Track Six: Buddy Won’t Run You Down The Line,” where we get:

…Two women with paw-paws,

old grease, persimmons, sumac berries, sorghum.

Two women baking transparent pie, vinegar pie

potato pie, rolling crusts, flour on their calico sleeves,

ghost hands where they wiped their aprons…

Or, in another poem, “Track Seven: Fare Thee Well” where “…she feed her Jim dried beef, / tomatoes when he comes home from / the mine choking and coal-smeared.” Here, I have to admire how the food is meant to noursih that which is literally choked by the work (and lest we forget, work that destroys both the land and worker). Similarly, in “Track Eight: Elk River Boys” food plays a role in the tale an older woman tells of her life: “..biscuits / and grape butter, kraut for a weak heart,” and later, “…she cooked pinto beans, dumplings, applesauce.” Food carries stories, and also hopes, as in “Figures Chipped and Molded From Kroll” which starts with mullberries and ends with river plums being made into homemmade wine.

There’s so much that can be said about these poems, but I’d like to juxtapose here the work of Bethany Jarmul, whose chapbook-sized mini memoir, Take Me Home, also uses a similar cataloging approach to help shape place. In the section titled “Big Feelings, Little Self” we are brought into Jarmul’s memories through the associative pull of her nine year-old self wishing:

I’m nine, sitting on my grandparents’ cement porch with a small knife and two buckets, one with green beans, freshly picked from their garden—the other with green beans already de-stringed. While my hands make quick work of the beans, cutting off the ends, pulling out the strings and transferring the beans to the other bucket—I dream of success: owing a garage, especially with two stalls, a refrigerator that makes ice, a dress from J.C. Penny’s at full price, ordering a Coke at a restuarant, Cap’n Crunch cereal, American Girl dolls, Barbie Houses, new tennis shoes, anything not handed down, rising an escalator, six story buildings, light-up billboards, a store I heard about called Macy’s.

While Woolfit takes from both present-day and deep history (including indigenous people forced off the land), Jarmul takes her cues from the early 1990s, when she is born, through to her adult life, near to the present. But the cataloging and the associative power of it feels as fresh in Jarmul as it does in Woolfit. We get much from the list-making, almost like prayers being released.

In Jarmul’s tight frames, we get the region in tighter relief. In the section titled “Torn” we see Jarmul at college—out of state college. Here, the tensions between who she wishes to be and where she’s from, and a guilty feeling about the desire to move on from her family. All of her schoolwork ties into a desire to better West Virginia, but once home, she’s conflicted. “Things that once felt normal to me,” writes Jarmul, “I now see as signs of poverty—cars with rust, a large percentage of obsese people, the way both people and buildings tend to deteriorate instead of flourish.”

The ending paragraph, also a catalog, reconciles many of the competing feelings that strand through this mini-memoir (but you’ll have to get the book and see for yourself). It’s a good payoff that also lingers well after reading.

What I appreciate most about both books is the complex relationships to West Virginia presented by authors, an appreciation that does not always extend to readers who aren’t connected to Appalachia, where stereotypes stand in for reality. These are two West Virginians who tell the tale of the state particularly well—one in the lyric, song-like language of the region, the other with a straightforward, detail-driven prose style. These are not the nostalgia-soaked strains of “Country Roads,” (even as Jarmul’s title borrows from the lyrics) but deeper, more fulfilling accounts of the Mountain State, full of contradiction, but also of a deeper, complicated love of the place.

Odds and Ends

It’s been a busy time, as pre-orders started for my poetry collection, Postscripts. Many, many thanks to the friends and readers who already placed pre-orders. You have no idea how much it means to me. Stay tuned for details on my project with artist Sally Jane Brown, What We Do In The Hollows. We are planning the launch and will have details soon.

I’m also on the go quite a bit these days. On Friday, August 2, 2024, at 5 PM, I’m presenting with my friend Diane Tarantini on Memoir at the Lewisburg Literary Festival. The festival boasts some terrific events all weekend. A special thank you to Eric Fritzius for this opportunity.

I’ll also be at Booktenders in Barboursville, WV on November 1, 2024—World Ballet Day—with details to follow and many thanks to Ashley Skeen.

I’ll also point you to a wonderful podcast, The Lives of Writers, which you can find online and on Spotify (and other places). Great for those car trips to your favor author’s readings.