Summer 2002

Kate Long, who produced the series for West Virginia Public Radio, first thought of interviewing West Virginia writers after attending a conference at West Virginia Wesleyan College in the early 1990s. “Writers I’d heard of, like Jayne Anne Phillips and Denise Giardina, were there. But there were also a bunch of dynamite writers I didn’t know — Richard Currey, Irene McKinney, Pinckney Benedict. I started reading their books. The more I read, the more impressed I was.”

She was moved by their literal, as well as their literary, voices — the cadences, accents and figures of speech that identified them as Appalachian. “I knew they could make shivers go up people’s spines. I started dreaming about radio.”

Years of work later, Long has discovered that the sum of the series is more than its parts. “When you hear one writer, it’s about that writer. When you hear 14 or 15 writers from one place, it’s about the culture. It’s important for people anywhere to know that place’s writers and visionaries. It’s especially important in West Virginia. West Virginians hear so many put-downs from the outside. This series contradicts that. Collectively, these writers confirm the idea that West Virginia is a special, deep place filled with original people.”

Each show is part interview and part reading by the author, with just enough expository narrative to make the hour a good story as well as an intimate visit. The programs are complemented by music recorded by West Virginia musicians as they listened to the writers, playing “to the tempo of their voices.”

In the opening show, for instance, the gentle tones of Bob Webb’s dulcimer, guitar and cello flow under the lyrical voice of West Virginia poet laureate Irene McKinney. McKinney’s funny, insightful stories about her working farm upbringing in Barbour County are mixed with stunning poems that peel back the surfaces of ordinary life — a divorced woman who now has two gravesites, a dying father whose “mind is like a flapping line of laundry.”

In another show, children’s writer Sandra Belton describes her early love of the Beckley library, one of the few places where black and white children were treated equally — except for the “missing books,” the ones about black children. Now she writes them, to much national acclaim. Belton’s rich voice is perfectly accented by Tim Courts’s equally warm piano accompaniment.

Richard Currey delivers nearly photographic glimpses of the Vietnam ground war, the West Virginia mine wars, murderers and traveling musicians. The show is full of valuable advice for writers from a physician-turned-fiction-writer whose work has been translated into a dozen languages.

National Book Award winner Mary Lee Settle explores the themes of her five-volume Beulah Land quintet that traces several families from Cromwell’s England to the Kanawha Valley, and reads from her memoir of her grandmother Addie.