Lawless Planet, of the Wondery podcast network, is an investigative podcast that “reveals the scams, murders and cover-ups on the frontline of the climate crisis.”
Recently they produced a fantastic episode about the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster, featuring interviews with Dr. Martin Cherniack and myself.
A major highlight: the producers enlisted an actor to voice the testimony of the tunnel victim George Robinson, which brings the story to life in a way I’ve never heard before.
As part of the Central Appalachian Network’s Big Ideas Festival, I’ll be running a *free* workshop on “Writing & Publishing Your Big Idea.” You can sign up here. There’s lots of other awesome workshops, roundtables, and keynotes too, check em out (Building a Community History Museum!? Quilting & Community Land Trusts?! Dom Flemons on Appalachian Music Appreciation?!). Here’s my workshop description:
Do you have a brilliant book inside you, waiting to be born? A manuscript you’re proud of but don’t know how to sell? A general curiosity about how the publishing industry works? Join me for a crash course on what it takes to write and publish a book, all the way from idea to proposal to manuscript delivery. I’ll speak from the perspective of a writer in the trenches myself, and also as an acquisitions editor who finds and secures new book projects for a publishing house, West Virginia University Press. While there will be a slight emphasis on nonfiction, most of the content of this workshop will be just as relevant for writers of fiction and poetry. The goal here is to demystify the writing and publishing processes so that your Big Idea can find its way onto the page and into the hands of readers.
I am now acquiring books for West Virginia University Press as an editor-at-large. Please feel free to contact me if you have manuscripts or book ideas to share!
I am interested in adventurous and dazzling literary fiction, essays, creative nonfiction, history, scholarship, photography, and other documentary works — most especially, though not exclusively, those that illuminate, evoke, or have some point of connection to the Appalachian region, whatever that might mean to you. Special affinities include labor history, the natural world, music, the meaning of place, indigenous history, and the documentary arts.
In October, I had the honor of addressing attendees of Camp Solidarity, a union training event hosted by the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, West Virginia. Over the course of the weekend, a series of workshops offered strategies, tactics, and history lessons to local and state level union members and leaders. I spoke to the group about the history of the West Virginia Mine Wars and how this story fits into the broader arc of U.S. labor history, including the present. It was a real joy to be a part of the conversation.
On March 17 at 2:30pm, I’ll be doing a brief reading from my book-in-progress at the Appalachian Studies Conference in Athens, OH. The panel is called “Songs of Blood”:
In this performance, four of West Virginia’s finest writers—Glenn Taylor, Jessie Van Eerden, Torli Bush, and Catherine Venable Moore–read from their newest works. How does a regional literature thrive? This fiction, nonfiction, and poetry respond resoundingly: through art that grapples with textures not found in monolithic narratives about our region. Through writers who aren’t afraid to look at the beautiful and the brutal, the failures and the possibilities, the loves and the fears of this fraught place we call home.
I’m excited to share that all 9,000+ pages of transcripts of the Battle of Blair Mountain Treason Trials are now available for download from West Virginia University Libraries. Several years ago, I worked with my friend Tyler Cannon to scan each and every page–a huge effort made possible by funding from MacDowell / the Calderwood Fund for Project Grants to Journalism Fellows. We donated the scans to WVU, which has now made them publicly available in a blog post as downloadable PDFs. This is an incredible resource for those of us interested in American labor history in the Progressive Era, and until now it has been locked away on reels of microfilm in the library’s vaults, only available to those researchers with the time and resources to come to Morgantown and read them on a special machine. The accounts of events given in these pages by eyewitnesses and others have greatly informed the story I am telling in my forthcoming nonfiction history of the West Virginia Mine Wars, providing detail, texture, and humanity to an otherwise hidden history.
This year, a series of radio stories I edited for West Virginia Public Broadcasting, “Coal & the Way Forward,” won first place in the “Series, Division A” category of the Public Media Journalists Association awards.
From the conflicts of the Mine Wars-era, to the new fight to survive amid shifts in energy needs and deepening calls for environmental reform, West Virginians have long been searching for a way to make a life alongside–and beyond–coal…But who is presenting a clear path forward here in Appalachia? That’s what we’re asking in our new series, “Coal and the Way Forward.”
One of my favorite pieces in the series, by producer Roxy Todd, examines how coal mining regions in other parts of the world have handled their transition away from coal, and how Appalachia stacks up. Listen here.
For most of December, I spent afternoons wandering through a maze of galleries at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams, MA. Thanks to the Assets for Artists program, I spent a month in residency at the Studios at MASS MoCA, which gave me time and space for a deep dive into my research on Mary “Mother” Jones, a labor organizer and the spirit presiding over my book-in-progress, Disunion: West Virginia Coal Miners and America’s Other Civil War.
Pictured above is one of my favorite pieces at MASS MoCA: The Optics Division/Metabolic Studio’s Hoosic: The Beyond Place, an image of the museum taken with a camera made from a shipping container and developed with the assistance of the Hoosic River.
My book-in-progress, Disunion: West Virginia Coal Miners and America’s Other Civil War, was selected for a 2021 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, given yearly to eight writers completing books of “deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction.” Whiting curated a chapbook with excerpts and descriptions of each of the winners’ projects, which include a history of policing in Oakland, CA; a collection of interwoven diaries from Nazi-occupied Netherlands; a biography of the mother of modern Black nationalism; and an argument for the decriminalization of sex work.
A selection of first-person testimonies from On Dark and Bloody Ground was included in the “Readings” column of Harper’s, where the magazine reprints “excerpts from the best and most bizarre new books.”