My Appalachia: Nevermore

February 27, 2026February 28, 2026 Booktimist1 Comment

by William H. Turner

“The Raven”, that famous Gothic narrative poem [i], captured a good bit of the spirit behind my memoir, The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns. As melancholy as it sounds, I, like the narrator in Poe’s poem, now in my 80^th year, often find myself spending many wee hours “downcast,” as I ponder—quite sapped and drained, often grieving over the volumes of my experiences in my otherwise quaint and now almost forgotten hometown, Lynch, in Harlan County, Kentucky. Ravens—which represent grief, loss, death, and the supernatural in folklore and mythology—were plentiful on Black Mountain, Kentucky’s highest peak, which loomed above Lynch not unlike a part of the sky.Read More »

Morgantown, City of Bagels . . . and Books

November 17, 2025November 24, 2025 Booktimist1 Comment

By Mo Daviau

For most of my writing life, I wrote in coffee shops. The steady thrum of people and the clink of cups helped me focus. Then, the events of 2020 brought my productive habit to an abrupt end. Since then, I got married. We bought a house. One of the three bedrooms became my office. I painted the walls magenta, purchased a large computer monitor, stuffed three bookshelves with books, and then closed the door and took to writing on the couch with my laptop.

When we visited Morgantown to celebrate the publication of my novel, Epic and Lovely, my husband and I found the Blue Moose Coffeeshop and made ourselves comfortable. I got an egg sandwich on a bagel, even though the thought passed through my mind: Should I be ordering a bagel in West Virginia? But the menu said it was made at the bakery next door, so I figured I’d give it a try.

Just a few days earlier I’d had a bagel in New York City. I have friends who have bagels shipped across the country from New York, stalwart in the notion that only New York produces worthy bagels. They badmouth the singular bagel culture of Montreal without having tried those harder, smaller, drier versions, and won’t even give my favorite local shop in Portland, Oregon (where I live), Bernstein’s, a chance, even though I think their bagels are quite good.
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Selections from This Book is Free and Yours to Keep: Notes from the Appalachian Prison Book Project

December 1, 2024 BooktimistLeave a comment

December brings us three new books. Softie: Stories by Megan Howell and Indigenous Ecocinema: Decolonizing Media Environments by Salma Monani will each be the focus of an upcoming post.

Today’s featured title, This Book Is Free and Yours to Keep: Notes from the Appalachian Prison Book Project presents a collection of letters and artwork by people in prison that highlights the crucial work done by the Appalachian Prison Book Project (APBP), a nonprofit that provides books to incarcerated people in West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland. Through the words of people directly impacted by the criminal punishment system, the collection provides uncommon insight into reading practices and everyday life in prisons and jails while being an inspiration for prison book projects, prison reform, and abolition.

Simultaneously communicating the vital importance of access to books and education, and conveying the power of community, the letters sent to APBP by incarcerated people spark conversations about racism, poverty, and incarceration and shed light on the movement for accountability for state violence. This Book Is Free and Yours to Keep elucidates the violence and neglect perpetuated by carceral systems and offers a way forward based on solidarity and collaboration.

The book has excerpts from letters along with essays and poetry from APBP book clubs and WVU classes in prison; reflections from volunteers; an introduction by project founder Katy Ryan; an afterword by Steven Lazar, a former student, now exonerated; and a preface composed in solitary confinement by Hugh Williams Jr.

“If we could find a book on the sky for me, I would love it very much.” –writer from Tennessee

“I’m sorry I burdened you with my sadness. I’ll be fine. I’ll go watch my friend the spider outside my window. I call him Big Boy because he’s pretty big. He cheers me up.” –Wayne “Gator” Bates

“Then one day the guard opened my cell tray slot and said Underwood I got a book for you. I jumped up and there it was. I said darn they really did answer my request. To make a long boring letter short, I am now sitting in a cell getting ready to take a test dealing with my G.E.D.” –Underwood

Connecting with Amanda Hayes on Appalachian women and higher education

September 16, 2024 BooktimistLeave a comment

What inspired you to write about women in higher education in Appalachia?

Really, it was just the surprise of discovering how many of them there were. We
don’t really hear about women in college in Appalachia as far back as the 1800s. When I found out that we had a local college at one time, especially one that early, it didn’t even occur to me that women were attending. I want to see them more widely understood and celebrated. And because I couldn’t stop talking about them, my colleague Dr. Nicole Willey said, “I’ve got bad news for you: I think you need to write a book.” Even then, I didn’t realize I would have enough material for one. Turns out, I had more than I could fit in one.

What do you believe fuels the stereotype of Appalachia being a region hostile to education?

I think it ultimately comes back to the ways that corporate interests have tried to control the story of what it means to be Appalachian. When the industrial revolution turned us from an agricultural region to a mining/logging/manufacturing one, industry leaders wanted us to be workers, not readers. Physical labor became valued over intellectual labor (and these became treated as very different things). If anyone is interested in learning more about how this dynamic came about, I recommend Todd Snyder’s The Rhetoric of Appalachian Identity.Read More »

Midsummer Roundup 2024

July 19, 2024July 19, 2024 BooktimistLeave a comment

Somehow we’ve reached late July; the end of summer is approaching. Perhaps that means you’re tuning out the increasingly turbulent news cycle and passing a lazy afternoon in a hammock, or baking seaside and silently praying for even more sun—or perhaps you’re energized and ready to engage! Whatever yearning you feel, we’ve got a book to suggest, and lots of interviews, reviews, opinion pieces, and events rolling in.

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

November 29, 2023December 1, 2023 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

October 30, 2023October 30, 2023 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 »

A conversation with Erik Reece

August 3, 2023August 4, 2023 semunroeLeave a comment

We are pleased to publish Erik Reece’s latest book Clear Creek: Toward a Natural Philosophy this week. This wide-ranging and boundary-defying work calls us out of our frenzied, digitized world to a slower, more contemplative way of being. Joe Wilkins called Clear Creek, “A wise, rambling book that is equal parts memoir, natural history, and philosophical investigation. . . . Readers of Barry Lopez and Wendell Berry will find much to admire here.” In this Q&A below, Reece talks with Caitlin Solano of Vesto PR.

The book takes place over the course of a year. Did your journals and notebooks come together naturally, or did you have to revise certain aspects?

The journaling down by the creek occurred pretty organically. But though the book takes the form of “a year in the life,” I actually spent ten years writing it! Not continuously, but rather when some observation or idea came to me. So there was time for some pretty extensive revision, editing, shaping.

You’ve written about your religious upbringing and thoughts on Christianity before in your book, An American Gospel. What was different about your approach for writing about it this time?

In American Gospel, I was settling scores, in a way, with family ghosts. Which I don’t really recommend. But I was also working through some mental anguish that I’d carried around for a long time. There’s really none of that in Clear Creek. Though I’m always, in some sense, writing about religion (I guess I’m a God-drunk agnostic, as someone said about Spinoza), I now very much think of Clear Creek as an unroofed church, where I’m a congregation of one.Read More »

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Category: Appalachia