HEAR LYN'S STORIES
("Sifting Sand" starts at the twenty minute mark.)
Haints are nothing new to Afrilachian storyteller Lyn Ford. Raised in Appalachian Pennsylvania, she grew up hearing about all kinds of ghosts and spirits.
"My dad was the best spooky storyteller ever," she said. Round about bedtime, he'd spin out some tale about a haunting or other creepy affair, ending it with a deep, sinister laugh. "And then my daddy," Lyn added, "would kiss us goodnight and expect us to go to sleep."
Though it was hard to imagine at the time, these bedtime tales became the foundation of Lyn's career. As a storyteller, she pulls from the catalog of stories she heard growing up plus Appalachian, African American, Native American, and European traditions.
This time of year, those stories tend to get a little dark, she said. "The tales don't need gore or horribly detailed murders and deaths, just the storyteller's voice and one's own unique imagination."
Lyn demonstrates the power of her voice when she tells her favorite scary story, one she learned from her father, "Sifting Sand." The plot is simple — an unseeable force rises up from a field and follows farmhand Jack Sprat into a cabin — but Lyn's expert delivery makes it both spine-chilling and funny all at once.
You can hear it at the twenty minute mark in the below interview she did with BYU Radio. If you have a little more time, you'll find two additional stories in this clip plus Lyn's insights on storytelling.
She's also published a written version of "Sifting Sand" alongside many stories in her book "Beyond the Briar Patch: Affrilachian Folktales, Food and Folklore."
("Sifting Sand" starts at the twenty minute mark.)
Twelve-year-old Ann Gotlib was last seen on June 1, 1983, biking away from a Louisville, Kentucky mall. Her friend Tanya said the girl was headed home, but she never made it. Though Ann's beat up bicycle was spotted outside a department store and authorities searched for decades, she was never found.
Author Ellen Birkett Morris was eighteen at the time, living in Louisville, and while she didn't know Ann, the way the girl seemed to evaporate rattled her. Even now, more than thirty years later, the story lingers in Morris' mind.
"When I was eighteen, thirteen-year-old Dana Lampton disappeared from the strip mall across from her family’s apartment," opens the author's new short story collection Lost Girls. This fictionalized version of Ann's reality is narrated by a young woman similar to the then teenaged Morris. "My mind should have been on other things—guys, college, getting past ID checker at the door of the club—but Dana’s disappearance captured my attention. We lived in the same neighborhood, and the nearness of the crime creeped me out."
Grim and illuminating in turns, this very short story, less than 670 words, establishes a tone for Morris' work. Largely set in Eastern Kentucky, her collection shows girls and women of all ages getting lost in every imaginable way and, sometimes, being found.
A childless woman stumbles into a breastfeeding group and lies so she can stay. When her son dies, a mother finds solace in video games and a teenage boy. A young woman discovers the power of naked selfies before "selfies" is even a word. And, in the below story, after witnessing her older sister hooking up, a girl makes a tragic mistake.
It's all part of a collection meant to reflect the range of women's experiences says Morris. "What we get in the stories are the secret lives, the hidden dreams and fears, and the unnamed passions of these women and girls."
It's an intense mission for seventeen short stories, and we'd love to hear your thoughts. Does "Helter Skelter" hit the mark?
Be sure to leave a comment below.
My sister Amber told me not to stare at the sun or I’d go blind. She also told me that Beatle’s song “Helter Skelter” drove some guy crazy and he formed a cult and murdered people. I didn’t listen to the radio for a while after that. I still look at the sun though. I can’t help it. It’s up there, daring me to look. My father hardly ever sees the sun. He works nights at the Ford plant and sleeps during the day. Sometimes early in the morning I feel him kiss my forehead.
Once I woke up to find him kneeling by the bed just looking at me and Amber. She slept beside me, on her side of the bed, which was two inches bigger than my side. She put blue painter’s tape down the middle of the bed. When I crossed it, Amber pinched me. When she was out riding her bike, I measured it. I never learned to ride a bike, though Dad swears he taught me. I’m not the athletic type, which is good because if I was, I wouldn’t have anyone to play ball with anyway.
I hang out with Lucy from down the street. She has glasses and feathered hair. We walk down to the library and buy candy at the convenience store. Amber rides her bike and sometimes rides in cars with boys. She made me swear not to tell dad. Every now and then, she’d throw me a bag of candy and say “for our little secret.” I don’t believe in secrets. Sooner or later, everything comes out. Like the truth about our Mama. Dad said she was killed in an accident. But I saw in the newspaper that her car broke down on the highway and that she stepped out into traffic. Right into it. I wonder if the sun got in her eyes and she just couldn’t see where she was going. Those things happen.
Strange things happen all the time. Like when I saw a girl who looked just like Amber smoking in front of Mike’s Pub. Mike’s is where the old guys sit and drink beer in the afternoon. I pass by there sometimes and glance in. It’s dark inside, with clouds of cigarette smoke. The television over the bar always has a game on. Old guys are hunched over on stools.
Dad quit going to Mike’s after mom died. All he does now is work and sleep. He wakes up in time for dinner, which Amber made from a box. Spaghetti from a box. Chicken casserole from a box. Macaroni and cheese from a box. When she was in a real bad mood, she’d “forgot” to drain the grease off the hamburger before adding it to the noodles. I ate dinner Lucy’s on the days Amber made meatloaf. Her meatloaf was nasty. Now we have takeout.
Mama was a good cook. She’d feed me bits of carrot or jelly beans from a jar as she cooked. She’d dance around the kitchen while the food cooked. She always drained the grease.
She hung wind chimes over the kitchen sink even though there is no wind in the kitchen. She’d run her fingers across the chimes to hear the notes. It was my favorite sound. Now, my favorite sound is the theme song to the Flintstone’s, where you get to meet them and know all about them. I’m pretty sure Amber’s favorite sound was a Beatle’s song, even though they drove that man crazy. Crazy like Jim, who came back from Vietnam with a tattoo of a heart on his palm. He goes up to people on the street and screams, “Look at the sacred, bleeding heart of Jesus.” I looked, but I didn’t see any blood.
Sometimes there were spots of blood on our bed sheets when I didn’t cut myself. I showed Amber and she said told me to shut up. She was so touchy. She hated for me to touch her stuff. I’d play her records and put on her white blouse with the gold threads running through it and look through her drawers. In her underwear drawer, I found the map to her secret place in the office park across from the Ford Plant. The office park is full of plain white buildings, but in the middle of the parking lot there is a waterfall. If you walk past it and follow the path up the hill, there is small circle of fir trees. Inside the tree, there is a place with logs to sit on. I went there once during the daytime – the ground was covered with beer bottles, and something that looked like the finger of a glove was lying in the dirt. The place looked kind of nasty if you ask me, which no one ever does.
I woke up in the middle of the night one night, and Amber was gone. I was pretty sure she went to her secret place. I thought about moving the blue painter’s tape or spending the rest of the night trying on everything in her closet, but I decided to go and find her instead. I got dressed and put my house key around my neck. I got out my bike and headed for the secret place. Man, was it quiet at night. I passed dark houses and thought of Lucy snuggled under her comforter in her quiet, pink bedroom. I thought of Dad working the line at Ford, the air humming with noise. Then I thought about Amber hidden in the pine trees and wondered what it would feel like to do anything you wanted.
As I got to the office park, a pink light was spreading the sky. I leaned my bike against a boulder and started up the path. I could hear sounds above me. Breathing, trees shaking, grunts and gasps of air. I ran the rest of the way and into the space between the trees. Some guy had Amber against the tree. Her jeans and panties were around her ankles. Her eyes got really wide when she saw me.
“I’ll go get help,” I yelled and started running down the path. “Jake, get off me,” Amber yelled. Then “Sarah, come back.” I ran through the office park and toward the road that separated the park from the Ford Plant. Shift change. Cars were leaving the plant parking lot, their drivers eager for a cup of coffee, a drink, or a warm bed. I timed it just right and made it through the traffic and across the street. I looked back to see Amber running after me. She wore her Rolling Stones t-shirt, the one with the tongue on it. She didn’t see the car. She was looking at the horizon and the pink morning sun on a bed of clouds.
I love the Rolling Stones, who as far as I know have never driven anyone crazy. I like their song about clouds. I imagine Amber on her cloud, other angels come to visit. I bet when she gets tired of them she says, “Hey you get offa my cloud.” I hate their song “Paint it Black.” It reminds me of the darkness and all the things I’ve ever lost. Stuff that rolled under my bed or just disappeared. When it comes on the radio, I go out in the front yard and look up to the sky. I find the sun and take a good long look until everything goes red and I have to close my eyes.
The good folks at Roanoke's WDBJ7 invited us to show how Appalachian crafts can brighten up these dreary winter days. We featured incredible work from makers in the mountains of North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia.
All of these products and many more can be found in our Roanoke, Virginia shop. It's inside the Crafteria makers market at 16 West Church Avenue, Southwest.
I know we got the news on a Wednesday because my phone rang during Lilly’s guitar lesson. I never answer the phone while I teach, but this was an unknown number from Cincinnati. I thought maybe it was about a clinical trial for my father’s rare sinus cancer.
Instead it was my six-year-old’s agent, calling to tell me that Graham had been cast in a film he’d auditioned for two months earlier. Anne Hathaway had just signed on to star, opposite Mark Ruffalo, with Todd Haynes directing. My mind just about exploded.
Author Val Nieman is turning Appalachia lit on its head. With her novel To the Bones, she's married horror with satire with an eco-thriller, setting it all around a West Virginia coal mine.
She's been kind enough to share the book's opening with us. In it, Darrick MacBrehon, a government auditor, staggers bloodied and battered from of a mine crack in Redbird, West Virginia. Soon his experience in this pit of bones becomes key to solving a mystery. He pairs with Lourana Taylor, a sweepstakes operator, who is determined to find her missing daughter. According to West Virginia University Press, "Darrick and Lourana push against everyone who tries to block the truth. Along the way, the bonds of love and friendship are tested, and bodies pile up on both sides."
This thriller is available from Amazon and can be found at Appalachian Revival—our shop at 16 West Church Avenue, Roanoke, Virginia. You can also hear Val read from the novel and discuss her writing as she tours the region.
Horrible smell. Dark. Cold.
This is how it feels to be dead.
Darrick raised his head and immediately vomited. The nausea came in waves, at every motion of his battered head, echoed by his back, ribs, legs. If he was dead, and this was the afterlife, then it seriously sucked.
He breathed in through his mouth, but it didn’t help much. The smell. He tried moving his left leg, numb and twisted under him, and was surprised when it responded. The pressure on his knee eased. He rolled over, put his hands down to push himself to all fours, and his fingers slid in something greasy and vile. If this was the afterlife, then it wasn’t one he’d been prepared for, by catechism classes or college philosophy.
Dark. He shook with the cold and the dark.
Then I’m not dead.
He crawled, carefully anchoring his knees into the sloping ground, pausing whenever the nausea roiled his gut. Unsteady rocks shifted under his knees, and he heard a skittering sound.
The last thing he remembered, he had been driving. A two-lane road, the trees so close, an inky tunnel pierced by his headlights.
Maybe the car went off the road.
Maybe you’re buried, his unpleasant thoughts mocked.
There was a faint lessening of the gloom ahead. He kept crawling, sticks rolling under his hand. Something chitinous and leggy moved across his fingers. He pulled his hand away, then put it back down. The thin gray light increased. He could see that, if not much else with his glasses gone. And his shoes were gone, too, the toes of his socks dragging across the damp rocks.
He seemed to hear things breathing nearby. Waiting.
No one’s coming back for you. Ever.
He crawled around a ragged corner and the light became a crack in the sky, a white intensity that squeezed shut his eyes and made the back of his head spasm in pain. He opened his eyes just enough to see a hazy field of rocks and debris. A dump. He picked up a large round object and brought it close to his weak eyes. A pair of empty eyeholes stared back. He flung the skull away, hearing it crack and roll to a stop, and he realized those rocks and sticks were bones and that he was among the dead.
He looked up at the light. It was quite far away. A ragged slit. The opening of a cavern? A mass grave? Had all these dead just stumbled down from the surface like mastodons marching into a tar pit?
Darrick crept forward until the space ended at a wall of crumbling rocks. He crawled back to what seemed to be the center of the space. He patted his pockets. Coat, cell phone, wallet, keys—gone. Medication gone. He began to weep. The easiest thing would be to lay back down and let the process continue, until he became bones as well. Just fall asleep.
Can’t fall asleep. He could remember the infirmary nurse singing in a language he didn’t understand. “You have a concussion, little mausi. If you sleep, you may die. I will tell you the story of the brave knight but you must stay awake for the whole story.” All the night and the next day, the nurse had kept him from sleep.
I’m not dying here.
A gleam of something in the charnel caught his attention. He lifted it, but a chain held it to the skeleton. It was a locket, a heart-shaped locket. He let it slide back.
He had been driving. Late. Low on gas. The lights along the exit ramp ended and the trees closed in. For mile after mile.
He put his hands back into the muck and rot, and in a methodical way began to search for a way out. He crawled away from the locket until he came to a wall of sticky earth. Digging only brought down more dirt. He crawled back, turned left. The ground tilted downward—that was where he’d come from. A current of dank air rose from an even deeper place.
He made his way back. This time, he saw the flash of light on a lens. His glasses, one stem broken off. He settled them on his nose and felt infinitely reassured, for a moment, to be able to see—until he counted four skulls, and saw insects working in the flesh of a recent body. It was the one with the necklace. This time he yanked at the necklace once, twice, three times until it came free, the body settling back on a wave of carrion smell. He slid it in his pants pocket, proof of something, to someone—maybe to himself when he woke up to find no necklace, no bones, nothing but the rags of a dream.
Turn right.
This time, his progress ended at a rocky wall. He began to lever himself up, toward that ragged sky both close and distant, but when he grabbed hold of a rock, it pulled out and sent him sprawling backward. He needed something to anchor, something to climb with.
Darrick searched among the bones and found a femur. And another. He smashed them between stones until the knobby knee-ends broke off into splintered points. He jabbed them into the rotten rock and began to climb.
It's no secret—Appalachia has extraordinary craftspeople. From our earliest days, when isolation forced us to make goods locally, to today, when quilts and wood carvings sell as high art, our region has been home to amazing makers.
I've been lucky to meet a lot of them since I started this site nearly ten years ago, and all that time, I imagined opening a shop that featured their work.
That's why I'm thrilled to introduce Appalachian Revival, a new home for Appalachian-made goods. Nestled in the heart of downtown Roanoke, this little store is selling everything from jewelry to candles to thumb pianos.
Below are a just few of the terrific products you'll find. If you're near Roanoke, we'd love to see you. We're part of the makers market at Crafteria: Handmade Food & Goods, 16 W. Church Avenue, Southwest.
And if you're an Appalachian craftsperson, we'd love to hear about your work. Please drop a line and share a bit about what you're making.
The town of Alderson, West Virginia, is split by a smooth brown river that straddles the county line and winds between Muddy Creek and Flat Mountain to create the Greenbrier Valley. On an unseasonably warm afternoon in the middle of November 2015, I drove over the bridge and into the Monroe County half of town. Take the first left over the railroad tracks,the directions said, then something about the third house down on the right. I hadn’t read the message very carefully—this was, after all, my hometown, a community of around a thousand people, the place where my parents met, the place where I spent nearly every day of my life until I was seventeen. I knew this town inside and out, I thought, but then again I hadn’t lived here for twelve years.
I drove past the filigreed façades of empty buildings, relics from the timber boom a hundred years ago, and up over the railroad tracks, but there were no houses here, just an abandoned hardware store and laundromat. I got out of my car and peeked around the back of the four-story brick building; nothing there but a cluster of skinny black cats. I felt the foolishness of this moment settle sickly in my stomach. Lost in Alderson—a completely improbable situation. What am I doing here anyhow? I watched one of the black cats bat at its reflection in a gasoline-rainbowed puddle. It was a question I’d been asking myself more often than I liked since moving back to West Virginia.
Lisa Elmaleh traded her Brooklyn apartment in 2012 for a wood cabin with no running water — but a “quite lovely” outhouse — on the outskirts of Paw Paw, West Virginia. Urban anonymity was soon replaced by small-town intimacy as she pursued her project of photographing traditional string musicians in Appalachia using, appropriately enough, traditional photographic processes.
She had decided to move there the very day she had done tintypes of Sam Herrmann and her husband, Joe, a couple dedicated to keeping old-time music alive. Paw Paw may not have Brooklyn’s hipster cachet, but it also “has everything that Brooklyn doesn’t” she added.
After a long winter, settlers in West Virginia hungrily welcomed the appearance of the wild leek or ramp, one of the first edible plants to ripen in the Appalachian forests in spring. The ramp became the focus for a tradition of community feasts — a tradition that lingers in rural Appalachia.
Beginning in April and continuing through May, scores of community ramp dinners and full-scae festivals are hosted throughout the state. Many are small affairs that welcome fewer than a hundred guests. Others feed more than 1,000 in the course of an afternoon.
For fourteen years, Ben Bramley has been on the run from his hometown of Abundance, North Carolina. A self-imposed exile has taken him from Duke University's stone-walled campus to a secluded mountaintop outside Boone, where Ben lives as a hermit, his sole companion a coon cat named Smoky.
In his new novel Ripples, author Evan Williams doesn't leave Ben on that mountain long. A family emergency forces the protagonist back to Abundance, the last place he wants to be and the only place he can face his fears.
In the below excerpt, Ben's reacts to going home. What do you think of this passage? If you've ever left home for a long period, what was it like when you returned?
And if you're near Asheville's Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe, you might swing by for the novel's launch party. It's Wednesday, April 10, 2019 at 6:00pm.
As he exited the SUV, Ben’s soles skidded on fine gravel atop the asphalt lot. Staring at his past, he killed the radio to wrestle with the family crisis, minutes down the road.
The October sun’s last light stretched long shadows across the terrain.
“No progress in fourteen years,” he observed, the landscape idling in neutral.
Abundance School—decrepit when he attended—didn’t have the capacity to look any older. Potato-chip–sized paint flakes peeled from the prominent Federal-style trim encircling the two stories that housed grades one through twelve. The innovation of kindergarten had been blocked. “Budgetary reasons,” they said.
Generations of Bramleys, and Etters—his mom’s side—claimed alumni status from that cyclical institution, where graduating classes bore identical surnames from one year to the next in perpetuity.
Between the school and post office stood Uncle Stan’s gas station with its two-bay garage. Three vintage pumps stood sentinel in front. None accepted credit cards—an in-convenience store.
Beyond the school, the Abundance Growers’ Packing House spilled soft, yellow light onto the highway. A silhouette of flatbed trucks laden with apples awaited their turns to unload. Forklifts buzzed around the perimeter to disappear inside the building, where dozens of worker bees graded and packed fruit. In a few weeks the packing house would lapse into a coma, until resurrected by the influx of next summer’s produce.
And in the center of the crossroads cluster loomed Redeemer Baptist Church, absolute authority oozing out of the mortar joints, which forever locked the clotted-blood-colored bricks in their place of prominence.
A church sign identified Redeemer—a low-rent, changeable-letters kind of sign, the kind often found occupying any roadside strip of crabgrass. Underneath the church’s name, a solemn message: “Visitors Welcome. Members Expected.”
Noticeably lacking were any of the standard warnings—“Turn or Burn,” “If You Died Tonight, Where Would You Go?” Rather, it quoted scripture: “Behold you have sinned against the LORD: and be sure your sin will find you out. Numbers 32:23.”
Ben shuddered at the divine guarantee of exposure, though he daily assured himself that his faith had eroded to nothingness.
Craning his neck, he looked up at the righteous-white steeple, illuminated by a column of light reaching to the heavens. Monday night. No church service. Safe enough to avoid being spotted by the locals. He reminisced, stalling.
“You cannot escape the steeple! The Great Eye sees all!” he bellowed, double-checking for listeners before adding, “Agnostics rule! Baptists drool!”
Though Ben was delighted with his jab, the hollow noise fooled neither himself nor the God from his youth.
Unsettled by his human’s strange behavior, Smoky jumped from his curled position on the front seat to the safety of the farthest corner of the cargo area.
“That’s not true,” Ben recanted. “The Great Eye can’t penetrate closed doors or dark nights where husbands beat wives, or wives screw somebody else’s husbands. It doesn’t stop the teenager breaking into a widow’s home, or the teen’s little brother getting his ass kicked at school.” He hesitated. “No witnesses. Didn’t happen. A lie agreed upon.”
With each word, his fury grew.
“You steeple people, you couldn’t leave Mama alone!”
Feet wide apart, as if preparing for a slugfest, he went silent when his better senses caught up, acknowledging he had been screaming while a frustrated fist beat the innocent air.
“Damn! Less than two minutes here and I’m losing it.”
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