The holidays have come and gone, and this third week of January sees Morgantown and much of central Appalachia swaddled in a fluffy blanket of powder. Cold temperatures and quiet have descended upon the university city as school eases back into session. But our authors have been active! Read More »
Claire Jimenez—teacher, archivist, and award-winning author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins Press, 2019) and the novel What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central, 2023)—caught up with Megan Howell earlier this month.
First, Megan, congratulations on your debut collection. I love the strangeness of these stories, and how you defamiliarize violence that is often normalized by the day-to-day grind of the world: the violence between parents and children, teachers and students, between lovers, and between best friends. I want to begin with the title. So many of these stories deal directly with cruelty, and yet the collection is entitled Softie. How did you come to name this book? When did you realize that you were straddling a tension between vulnerability and brutality?
Thanks! Super grateful to see that Softie is finally out in the world.
Cruelty is definitely a huge theme in the collection. Initially, it was called “Make a Home with Sadness,” but the title’s length and abstractness made me fall out of love with it. I wanted something pithy and cute that also conveyed emotional vulnerability. When I think of the word “softie,” I imagine something malleable and sweet like soft-serve ice cream but also a lot of my characters who, because of their softness, struggle not to be consumed by cynicism.Read More »
Stephanie Foote’s Salvaging the Anthropocene series is one of our most active and provocative, offering scholarly but accessible books about daily intellectual, artistic, social, and aesthetic responses to global environmental degradation.
Introducing the concepts of d-ecocinema and d-ecocinema criticism, Salma Monani’s Indigenous Ecocinema expands the purview of ecocinema studies and not only brings attention to a thriving Indigenous cinema archive but also argues for a methodological approach that ushers Indigenous intellectual voices front and center in how we theorize this archive. Its case-study focus on Canada, particularly the work emanating from the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto—a nationally and internationally recognized hub in Indigenous cinema networks—provides insights into pan-Indigenous and Nation-specific contexts of Indigenous ecocinema.
This absorbing text is the first book-length exploration foregrounding the environmental dimensions of cinema made by Indigenous peoples, including a particularly fascinating discussion on how Indigenous cinema’s ecological entanglements are a crucial and complementary aspect of its agenda of decolonialism.
What inspired you to explore the intersection of Indigenous cinema and ecological issues in this book?
When I was a PhD student examining the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) controversy that had once again erupted in U.S. politics, I was struck by how little attention was being given to Indigenous voices and relatedly, film expressions, in mainstream media. Despite the fact that there were such vibrant and complex ways in which Indigenous communities were sharing their perspectives onscreen, I also noticed there was little ecocritical scholarship on Indigenous cinema. These early engagements with Indigenous cinema speaking to environmental concerns started my journey into Indigenous cinema’s intersections with ecological issues.Read More »
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
Last month we launched a new book series, Connective Tissue, dedicated to the health
humanities with a focus on narrative medicine. The series is edited by writer and scholar Renée K. Nicholson, MFA, former director of the Humanities Center at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia. Connective Tissue seeks to provide a range of books for clinicians, artists, writers, scholars, and others to more fully engage with health humanities, narrative medicine, and art in medicine. As the field of health humanities programs in narrative medicine grows, so does the need for a literature that includes creative works, critical theoretical work, and, importantly, hybrids of the two as it relates to health, illness, medicine, and related subjects. “I’m excited to see how the Connective Tissue Series will create an intentional venue for work that explores the breadth and depth of the health humanities, art in medicine, and narrative medicine,” says Nicholson.Read More »
When Stephanie Foote was the Jackson and Nichols Professor of English at West Virginia University, she was moved to create a book series for environmental humanities scholarship and in 2017, the Salvaging the Anthropocene Series was announced with West Virginia University Press. Its objective – books about daily intellectual, artistic, social, and aesthetic responses to global environmental degradation through transformative practices rather than simply managing despair. Foote called for works on and for a broad range of social actors from artists and designers to knitters and activists.Read More »
Like most, if not all university presses, WVU Press is mission-oriented organization with a reputation for publishing works of enduring cultural value. And often these focus on underserved populations and feature voices that are often overlooked or outright ignored. This Book Is Free and Yours to Keep: Notes from the Appalachian Prison Book Project, edited by Connie Banta, Kristin DeVault-Juelfs, Destinee Harper, Katy Ryan, and Ellen Skirvin, documents the requests for books submitted by imprisoned people for books. Culled from over 70,000 letters received by the Appalachian Prison Book Project (APBP), this epistolary volume captures the variety of requests from individuals incarcerated in Appalachia.Read More »
Congratulations on officially taking the reins of West Virginia University Press! Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I was born in Morgantown, left with my partner Susan in our twenties and early thirties to acquire education and work experience, and returned in 1996 to live on her family farm just outside Morgantown, where we’ve raised our two kids. Like a lot of West Virginians, I’m attached to this place in a way that’s difficult to explain or understand, and seems to transcend reason.
Megan Howell’s book Softie: Stories is about a fantastical range of people; a former child-star haunted by a past she can’t remember, an Afro-French girl with an obsession for earlobes, a loner whose only friend is hiding a terrible, otherworldly secret. What each of these stories shares in common are situations that are sometimes fantastical, sometimes commonplace but always strange. From a Corsican vacation-town in its off-season to hospital rooms and a seedy hotel suite in Chicago, experience the everyday come fully untethered from reality.
The following is one of the short stories from the now-available book.Read More »
What happened to the loggers of America’s northeast when lumber companies moved west and south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did communities continue to create value and meaning in these marginal lands? Jason Newton’s Cutover Capitalism provides a new perspective on the process of industrialization in America through the study of rural workers in a cutover landscape—specifically, the northern forest of eastern North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Justin Hargett caught up with Jason recently to discuss the book.
