Author: Booktimist

2023 in Review

BooktimistLeave a comment
A note from interim director Than Saffel

Dear friends of West Virginia University Press,

What a year it has been! We began 2023 with a staff of five, an impressive list of achievements, and an exciting slate of upcoming releases. At the top of my mind as art director were the production of Tolkien Studies Volume 19 and the design challenges of working with the expectation-shattering work the press has become known for—plus the covers, interiors, ads, catalogs and production challenges that I knew were just beyond the horizon.

As events unfolded throughout the spring, summer, and fall, we lost three critical members of our award-winning team. Our funding prospects and staffing became increasingly uncertain. To many, the press’s demise seemed imminent. In that somewhat fraught environment, I offered to step in as interim, hoping that foolish overconfidence and institutional memory would help us to sort through the seeming mountain of challenges facing us.

Taking over and continuing the work of an absolutely top-shelf team of editorial professionals has been a humbling experience, but also one for which I’m grateful. The groundwork laid by Derek Krissoff, Sarah Munroe, and Sara Georgi over the past 8 years, building on that of previous teams, has placed us in the enviable position of having well-crafted and documented processes and partnerships, and remarkable work to publish. I’m also grateful to be working with operations manager Natalie Homer, whose intelligence and patience are an incredible asset to the press.

Still, I don’t think we could sustain this effort if I didn’t feel there was a genuine desire within the university to allow a rebuild to take place. Thankfully, that support has been shown repeatedly in the form of a willingness to talk, to open funding channels, to assign staff to assist with communications, to take advantage of new opportunities outside the university, and most of all, to address our staffing needs with an immediate commitment to hire new talent to build upon all of this good work. I am pleased to say we’ve received well over 200 applications rich with talent for the positions of managing editor and editorial director (editorial director candidates apply here through January 5!), and the selection process for managing editor will begin in earnest January 2.

We certainly face challenges, but I feel that we do so with open eyes and a huge fund of good will from all sides. Future plans include re-opening submissions, much-needed outreach to bookstores, more consistent advertising, improved marketing support for scholarly books, more support for journals, and a diversified social media presence expanding upon our Essential Reading series pioneered by dear friend of the press and force of nature Neema Avashia. We will also solidify a realistic staffing plan that will sustain the press going forward.

What this all comes down to, every day, is the work. The books that we have committed to publish over the next several seasons are characteristic of the surprising and powerful work that has been a hallmark of this press for many years, and they need to be cared for in a way that I think is rather unique to WVU Press. We continue to hear from authors that they feel heard and supported here in a way that allows them to do their best work.

To that point, I’ve asked authors and editors from our previous few seasons to check in with a quick update from the past year. The entries are below, in alphabetic order by author. I’ve inserted the authors’ comments in their own words, with minor edits. Authors with good news to share, please get in touch!

I can’t express my thanks deeply enough to all of those who have reached out in support of the press during this period of some uncertainty. Starting in fall 2024, we will begin our celebration of the press’s 25th year as a scholarly, peer-reviewed university publisher. WVU Press will continue its work, and we who do the work will continue to strive for excellence in everything we do.

Than Saffel / December 2023

Thomas Bredehoft / Foote: A Mystery Novel

In 2023, Foote: A Mystery Novel had its first birthday. Of course, it had a life long before publication, as I think I started drafting it in 2016, after a fateful hike on the Mon River Trail south of Morgantown. It sat for a while on my computer, and then in the early days of the pandemic in 2020, my wife Rosemary (whose book Mountaineers are Always Free was also published by WVU Press) encouraged me to submit it to the Press. Two years later, it was a book, my first fiction publication.

Read More »

Journals Feature: West Virginia History Examines the State and Region in the Neoliberal Era

BooktimistLeave a comment

Lou Martin is an associate professor of history at Chatham University and author of Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia.

Out now, Volume 17, issue 1, of West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies is the first fully online issue of the journal, available through Project Muse. Kevin Barksdale served as editor, and I am proud to have authored one of the articles in this issue.

Titled “Appalachia in the Neoliberal Era,” the article examines the concept of neoliberalism and argues that the social, economic, and political developments in the region over roughly the past four decades are best understood within the context of the rise of neoliberalism. The article opens with quotes from a 2017 column by Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman that relied heavily on deeply flawed assumptions about West Virginian voters and Appalachian culture. Reading that column when it was published, I concluded that historians in the state and the region needed to write more about the effects of political and economic changes on the ground. While national commentators will likely continue to rely on stereotypes and suppositions about Appalachian culture, historians could make sure that there are empirical studies of the effects of things like free trade, deindustrialization, the decline of unions, and defunding colleges and universities.

In “Appalachia in the Neoliberal Era,” I hope to add another chapter to the historiography of the region. Important histories of the region seemingly portray the policies of mid-century liberalism as well-intentioned but sometimes misguided and almost always underfunded. The years that follow the War on Poverty then feel like the denouement of a story about hopes and dreams never fully realized. What I thought was missing was the rise of neoliberalism, an array of policy positions flowing from a faith in free market capitalism that were part of the undoing of Great Society programs as well as, I argue, the decline of the economic bases of many communities throughout the region.Read More »

Craft at Home in the Mountain Forest: An excerpt from Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth’s Finding the Singing Spruce

BooktimistLeave a comment

Finding The Singing Spruce: Musical Instrument Makers and Appalachia’s Mountain Forests is the new book in the Sounding Appalachia series by Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth, who teaches folklore studies at the Ohio State University. Aaron Allen, coeditor of Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature, calls the book “a nuanced academic contribution to both human and environmental Appalachian studies” that’s also “a collection of accessible stories about people, places, and instruments.”

As we sat in his shop escaping the summer heat in 2014, electric bass specialist Roger Morillo and I tacked back and forth from English to Spanish as we talked about the similarities between his home community in the mountains of Táchira State in Andean Venezuela and his more recent home in St. Albans, West Virginia. He drew on his experiences living in mountain environments and attributed the uniqueness of wood craft in the mountains to his impression of the freedom that mountaineers have to create and find meaning from their material environment. “It’s the environment and traditions that we have,” he said, leaning back into his steel folding chair. “Remember, in the past, these people used to get into the woods. They would build their own house, especially with woodworking. Then they’re thinking, ‘I’m going to build my own kitchen cabinet’ and after that say, ‘I’m going to build my own banjo because I want to be happy sitting in the house that I built, on the chair that I already built, playing the instrument that I already built. I made everything by myself.’ ” For Roger, this was an expression of an essential characteristic of every mountaineer all over the world: “They want to be free.”Read More »

Kristen Gentry discusses her new collection, inspiration, influences, and more

BooktimistLeave a comment

We are pleased to publish Kristen Gentry’s debut short story collection Mama Said this week. The linked stories in Mama Said are set in Louisville, Kentucky, a city with a rich history steeped in tobacco, bourbon, and gambling, indulgences that can quickly become gripping and destructive vices. Set amid the tail end of the crack epidemic and the rise of the opioid crisis, Mama Said evokes Black family life in all its complexity. Maggie Henriksen from Carmichael’s Bookstore said about the book, “The characters contain a depth not often seen in a collection of stories, and readers are sure to be thinking about their lives and relationships long after finishing the last (tear-jerking!) page.” In this Q&A below, Gentry talks with Holly Mitchell of Vesto PR.

 What drew you to short fiction?

I gained an appreciation for short fiction in undergrad creative writing classes where I was introduced to stories by ZZ Packer, Junot Diaz, Jamaica Kincaid. That appreciation grew during my graduate study at Indiana University. I love the way characters in a short story can be sharply drawn and feel known, but the form and its economy (of language, plot, setting) create just enough mystery to leave readers wondering about the characters, the motivation for and effect of their choices, and the world they inhabit long after the story ends.

Read More »

Portrait of Sol Gittleman with the cover of his book An Accidental Triumph

“Americans have become addicted to rankings.” An excerpt from Sol Gittleman’s new book

BooktimistLeave a comment

Our distribution partner Vesto Books published their first book earlier this month: Sol Gittleman’s An Accidental Triumph: The Improbable History of American Higher Education. An Accidental Triumph tells the engaging story of how American higher education evolved from a patchwork of seminaries in the early nineteenth century into the world’s leader in research by the middle of the twentieth. Gittleman – professor emeritus at Tufts University who served as the provost from 1981-2002 – writes with authority, frankness, and unfailing wry good humor.

Read More »

Learning to dig: A creative writer on her start as a journalist

BooktimistLeave a comment

nieman_blog_photo

Valerie Nieman is a professor of English at North Carolina A&T State University. A former journalist and farmer in West Virginia, she is the author of three novels, as well as collections of poetry and short fiction. She is a graduate of West Virginia University, and she received an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. To the Bones, her latest novel, is now available.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time digging: century-old crockery pulled up from dumps behind fallen-in houses, jack-in-the-pulpit and native azalea dug out of the woods and toted home, stones pried out of hillsides. (That last led to a broken ankle, when I stepped in the hole I’d created earlier.) My bedroom was adorned with trilobites, the skulls of wild creatures, slab-sided patent medicine bottles.

Read More »

LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia: A conversation between editors

BooktimistLeave a comment
Julia Watts
Jeff Mann

In the newly published LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia, editors Jeff Mann and Julia Watts have collected works “that give Appalachian queer voices—members of a double minority—an opportunity to be heard at a time when many people in power would prefer to silence or ignore them.” This collection, the first of its kind, gathers original and previously published fiction and poetry from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer authors from Appalachia. In this conversation, Mann and Watts take a closer look at what growing up queer in Appalachia was like for them and how their identities influenced their reading and writing.

Read More »

Appalachia North: A conversation with Matthew Ferrence

BooktimistLeave a comment

Matthew Ferrence is department chair and associate professor of English at Allegheny College, and the author of the memoir Appalachia North (WVU Press, 2019) and All-American Redneck: Variations on an Icon, from James Fenimore Cooper to the Dixie Chicks. He talked with Margo Orlando Littell, author of the Appalachian novel Each Vagabond by Name, about his memoir. The following is an edited selection of the conversation.

Read More »

In memoriam: The 1968 Farmington Mine Disaster

BooktimistLeave a comment
Photo by Bob Campione

Bonnie Stewart, an award-winning journalist and former professor of journalism at West Virginia University, is the editorial adviser for Daily Titan, California State University, Fullerton’s student newspaper. While at WVU, she spent five years researching and writing No.9: The 1968 Farmington Coal Mine Disaster, an investigative book about the mining disaster that killed seventy-eight men at a Consolidation Coal Company mine on November 20, 1968. In 2014, the miners’ families sued the coal company, which subpoenaed Stewart for unpublished interviews. Claiming reporter’s privilege under the First Amendment, she fought the subpoena in federal court and won.

Fifty years have passed since seventy-eight coal miners died underground in the Consolidation Coal No. 9 mine in Farmington, West Virginia. Some good came from that tragedy. The deaths moved Congress to pass the 1969 Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, which is credited with saving untold numbers of miners. Although that has given the families of the seventy-eight dead some comfort, it has not erased what happened that cold November day in 1968 or why it happened.

Read More »

Notes on the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop, a vital part of the state’s literary landscape

Booktimist1 Comment

Natalie Sypolt is an assistant professor at Pierpont Community & Technical College. She coordinates the high school workshop for the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop at West Virginia University and has served as a literary editor for the Anthology of Appalachian Writers. Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Appalachian Heritage, Kenyon Review Online, and Willow Springs. She is the winner of the Glimmer Train new writers contest, the Betty Gabehart Prize, the West Virginia Fiction Award, and the Still fiction contest. West Virginia University Press will publish The Sound of Holding Your Breath, her first book, this November. Learn more at nataliesypolt.com.

The summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college, I attended the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop for the first time. I was shy, pretty awkward, and more than a little scared of the workshop leader I’d been placed with—West Virginia writer Pinckney Benedict. Now, looking back at my 19-year-old self, I’m still surprised that I actually did it. I can’t help but feel proud.

Read More »