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 »

Douglas Milliken on Endless War, creative continuity, and storytelling as discovery

August 30, 2024 BooktimistLeave a comment

When did you start writing this book?

November, 2018. As the foreman of an apple orchard, I had a couple weeks of downtime between the harvest’s end and when winter pruning began, and so was eager to fill that time with as much new writing as I could. My intention was to compose a few short stories, but instead the original vignettes of Enclosure Architect began to take shape. Three-and-a-half notebooks, five drafts, and one year later, I was startled to have something close to a finished manuscript.

What inspired you to write about an artist’s creative life and making art in times of violence?

There’s this line in Open Mike Eagle’s “Raps for When It’s Just You & the Abyss” wherein he kinda tortures himself with the fact that he’s “trying to promote these rap shows when it’s the end of the motherfucking world.” As someone who is often trying to share new work within a public space—whether it’s a new book, a new record, a new multidisciplinary collaboration—there’s always this sick sense of unease before hitting send on an email or posting to social media. Like, how crass am I, drawing attention to my qualified successes while so many horrible things are happening everywhere all at once? It’s a sentiment I’ve heard from so many artists I know. In times of global crisis (which is to say, always), it’s easy to convince ourselves of our own irrelevance.

But a subconscious moment came when I must have inverted that internal embarrassed tic and dug deep into the reality of being an artist in the era of Endless War, created a reason to geek-out about art while also acknowledging the chronic violence and nihilism of daily life in post-capitalist America.

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.

Jake Maynard on Alaska, character, craft, and work — but not herring.

June 1, 2024 BooktimistLeave a comment

A fresh and trippy portrait of the diverse underclass of the commercial fishing industry, Slime Line is a tragicomedy of one college dropout’s attempts to remake himself into a hard-nosed workingman. Kim Kelly called the book “an arresting read that sinks its claws deep into your gut and dares you to blink. . . . a story of hard work, loss, exploitation, and family set against a backdrop of blood, ice, and heavy machinery at an Alaskan fish processing plant peopled by misfits, scoundrels, and ghosts.” Caitlin Solano asked Jake a few questions about his book.

Can you talk about your experience in the commercial fishing industry and how it inspired this book?

I was in college during “the great recession” and really broke. So, one summer, I got a job in a salmon processor in Bristol Bay, a lot like the one in the book: long hours alongside international workers, sleeping in bunkhouses, buying stuff from the overpriced company store, crap pay but lots of overtime, etc. It wasn’t as dramatic as the book, but we really did have deranged newsletters written by the processor’s manager, just like in the novel. It was a bad year for the fishery, and a lot of workers were fired early and sent home with almost no money after devoting a whole summer to the work. The day they fired half of the seasonal workforce, the “Alaska word of the day” in the newsletter was “adventure.”

I ended up loving Alaska, though, and spent more summers doing other seasonal work up there: tourism work, agriculture, whatever I could find. Just random stuff, like weed whacking around radio towers or babysitting cattle or playing in an unspeakably bad folk band. Then, years later, I got into working on a salmon troller in Southeast Alaska kind of by accident. So, while Slime Line isn’t autofiction, I know all the work described in the book pretty well. Except for herring. I never worked with herring.Read More »

Sejal Shah on time, place, memory, gender, genre—and mixtapes

May 17, 2024May 17, 2024 Booktimist1 Comment

Sejal Shah’s debut collection of short stories, How To Make Your Mother Cry continues the rich tradition of innovative feminist work by Claudia Rankine, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Maxine Hong Kingston. These astonishing stories about friendship and love, resilience and survival establish Shah as an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction. Jeremy Wang-Iverson and Justin Hargett asked Sejal a few questions about her work.

The book is dedicated to the memory of five important people in your life – can you tell us a little bit about them and why you want to honor them with this book?

While working on How to Make Your Mother Cry, I mourned the passing of my uncle, Kirit N. Shah, a writer and poet who also loved to dance, and who died of COVID-19 on February 12, 2021. My uncle inspired me and always supported my interest in and love of writing. I am indebted to him for that. Exactly one year later, on February 12, 2022, my friend and former editor (she edited my first book, This Is One Way to Dance: Essays), Valerie Boyd died. As I wrote about in an essay for Literary Hub, she was the mentor I had been looking for. I interviewed Valerie for Creative Nonfiction magazine: reading this interview, “Tracing Literary Lineage,” is an excellent way to learn more about her life, work, and influences.

In one of the essays in This Is One Way to Dance, I noted, “To say their names–this is the way to keep the people you love alive.” Themes in my book include love and friendship, memory and memorials. James Wright Foley, my friend Jim, was a talented fiction writer and my graduate school classmate during the years of 1999-2002. His presence and friendship made any classroom or party better and an unsafe workshop situation more tolerable. I thought about Jim a lot while working on this book and included two of his workshop letters to me in the book itself. Jim died too soon, the first American hostage murdered by ISIS in Syria. Urvashi Vaid, the fourth person to whom I dedicated my book, was a civil rights and gay and lesbian rights activist whose life and work affected my generation and beyond. She also died at a relatively young age, in 2022. I met her many years ago and was inspired by her activism, outspokenness, and advocacy.

And finally, I was moved by the life story of Rana Zoe Mungin, a Black Afro-Latina writer and fellow alumna of Wellesley College and the MFA program at UMass Amherst. Zoe died at age thirty of COVID-19 in 2020 after having been turned away from hospitals and refused treatment twice. She is the youngest of all those to whom I dedicated my book. I was especially angered to learn that Zoe had also found our MFA program to be a toxic environment for writers of color–to know that it had continued to be this way well after my time there. Zoe was a talented fiction writer and I included her in my book, because I wanted, as with the other people to whom I dedicated the book–I wanted their names to be out there once more, for others to know their names, to say their names and to learn their stories. I hope that Zoe’s story continues to be known and that more of her words and fiction writing will eventually be published posthumously.

In your first book, the essay collection This Is One Way to Dance, your writing was described as having “a style that rejects the notion of fixed genres.” Now you have followed that up with short fiction that also defies traditional conventions. What is it that excites you about pushing the boundaries of story and genre?

I think walking alongside boundaries in liminal spaces is where I feel most comfortable. I wrote about this in This Is One Way to Dance–about boundaries and sparks: “At heart, I’m interested in self-definition and invention. I worry the boundaries and borders to see where sparks arise: they look like fireflies. We occupy space. I spin and twirl. I dwell and revel in the spaces between.” I think I’ve always been fascinated by sparks–by the edges of where one can go within a genre.

A Conversation with Isaac Yuen

April 1, 2024 BooktimistLeave a comment

We are thrilled to be publishing this captivating debut essay collection by Isaac Yuen – a celebration, through wordplay and earthplay, of our planet’s riotous wonders. Utter, Earth features odes to sloths, tributes to trilobites, and ringing endorsements for lichen. For animal lovers and readers of Brian Doyle, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Amy Leach, each essay of this one-of-a-kind collection combines joyous language, whimsical tangents, and scientific findings to remind us of and reconnect us with those to whom we are inextricably bound. Caitlin Solano recently spoke with the author for this Q&A for Booktimist.

How did some of your essays that were previously published end up coming together as a book?

I think there is a common voice running through the essays in the collection. The narrator who’s mulling over which creatures to invite to their next party is the one who’s trying to justify why sometimes it’s good to give up on dreams is also the one figuring out how to write stories with animal verbiage.

There’s an odd, rambling, flighty mind at work behind it all—a mind that is me but also not me—attempting to chart some type of internal cartography (or a menagerie, as they might put it) through a tangle of creature contacts and connections.

A conversation with Terese Svoboda

February 1, 2024 BooktimistLeave a comment

Out February 1, 2024, this fantastic new novel chronicles the sisters Roxy and Coco, two glamorous harpies—mythical bird women—attempting to outrun extinction and fix the planet by preventing child abuse, one child at a time. Action figure–worthy, for readers of Neil Gaiman and Karen Russell, this modern take on these fabled women touches on mental illness, racism, animal rights, and the rights of children. Justin Hargett recently caught up briefly with the author.

WVUP: The novel’s protagonists, Roxy and Coco, are a pair of harpies—mythical bird-women—and sisters, living in the modern world and taking revenge on child abusers. What drew you to that particular Greek and Roman myth?

TS: The origins of my obsession are over twenty years old, given that I published a poem titled “Harpies” in Treason, my fourth book of poetry, in 2002, and have a short story in draft from about the same time. The epigraph of both quote the Aeneid that mentions harpies befouling the food of Phineus, a Greek soothsayer, because he abused his children. Always looking for female muses, I was curious about these powerful creatures who were always said to be ugly and frightening and concluded that such denigration was the result of Greek patriarchy, men frightened of vengeful women.Read More »

A conversation with Vic Sizemore

January 13, 2024January 15, 2024 BooktimistLeave a comment

Told through alternating perspectives, Vic Sizemore’s God of River Mud chronicles the lives of Berna Minor, her husband, their four children, and Berna’s secret lover. As the decades and stories unfold, traditional evangelical Bible culture and the values of rural Appalachia clash against innate desires, LGBTQ identity, and gender orientation. Sympathies develop—sometimes unexpectedly—as the characters begin to reconcile their faith and their love. Sandra Scofield, author of Beyond Deserving, called the book “Utterly unique, authentic, and engrossing.” In this Q&A below, Sizemore talks with Holly Mitchell of Vesto PR.

This is your first novel, though you’ve published an essay collection (Goodbye, My Tribe: An Evangelical Exodus) and a short story collection (I Love You I’m Leaving) before. What drew you to the novel form?

I am happy with the story collection, and the essay collection came out of a need to make sense of what still looks to me like the total moral collapse of an already teetering conservative white evangelicalism in the runup to the 2016 election. However, I’ve always considered myself a novelist first and foremost.

The first full-length book I ever wrote, some twenty-five years ago, was a novel. I had no idea what I was doing and, not surprisingly, it was awful. I managed to salvage a couple of workable short stories from it, maybe ten or fifteen percent of the total wordcount. That’s not the only one. I have a few other novels in various stages of completion tucked away in files and on shelves. I still hope that maybe one or two of them will eventually grow into something worthwhile.

When I submitted God of River Mud to WVU Press I labeled it a novel-in-stories. Every chapter had appeared in a literary journal as a standalone story, but the characters were all related to one another. As we worked through revisions, as the stories grew more dependent on one another and less able to stand alone, the book morphed into a straight-up novel.

2023 in Review

December 31, 2023 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.