Unleash you inner bookworm with this interactive Literary Map of North Carolina. Right off, I browsed the mountain section, and discovered that O. Henry's real name wasn't Oliver Henry; both were just pseudonyms. He was actually born William Sydney Porter in Greensboro, which coincidentally is where I went to college. See, following the lives of literary figures can be fun!
Okay, this is total geekery, and the map could be improved with full profiles of the authors. (Hear that UNCG, we want affairs, addictions, personal foibles, and suicides!) Anyone who has a penchant for Appalachian lit, though, should find this a user friendly tool.

Everyone has a dream job. For most people, it involves paparazzi flashes, fantastic wealth, or maybe gunplay. Not for my friend Nora and me. Five days a week, we share an extra-large cube that we affectionately call the doublewide. In it, we toss out Southernisms (a new favorite -- madder than a bobcat caught in a piss fire) and stream twangy tunes on Bluegrass Country. It's a hoot as cubes go, but we'd rather be fighting forest fires from horseback.
[caption id="attachment_542" align="alignleft" width="199"] For 23 years, Bytner worked on the Blue Ridge Parkway.[/caption]
Park ranger -- that's our dream job. Whenever Nora and I are ready to buck the man, we plot our escape to the National Park Service where we will dawn wide brimmed hats, nurse baby possums to health, and hook-up sewer hoses on elderly tourists' RVs.
If we've learned nothing else from the new book "A Park Rangers Life: Thirty-two Years Protecting Our National Parks," the job isn't all glamour. Author and retired ranger, Bruce W. Bytnar recently told the Staunton News Leader that "Park rangers are responsible for everything that happens in a national park."
That includes the mundane -- answering inane questions, shoveling poop from escaped cows, and monitoring dogs for leashes -- but also the bizarre:
"I remember one incident when a ranger was conducting an evening campfire program showing slides to an audience of over one hundred visitors. Suddenly they were interrupted by a man covered with blood, who ran in front of the group, lighted by the projector, screaming for help. Most people initially thought it was part of the program. When the ranger followed the man out to his vehicle, she found a second man who had been shot."
Nora and I aren't deterred. If you work with us, don't look in the doublewide the next time we miss an all-staff meeting. We'll be in the Great Smoky Mountains scouting injured bears or maybe shoveling a composting toilet. Either way, we're we'll be wearing the hats.

[caption id="attachment_1612" align="alignleft" width="62"] Frank X Walker[/caption]
In Kentucky, they've coined the term Affrilachian. It originated with Frank “X” Walker, a local poet who looked at Appalachian culture and saw African Americans under-represented. Other artists have rallied around him, forming a collective of sorts.
Sometimes their work is contemporary, as illustrated by Crystal Good's recital of the poem "Dem Boyz" in the clip below. Sometimes it is nostalgic, as in Walker's poem, "Canning Memories," which recalls...

Grandmothers who still clicked

their tongues, who called up the sound

of a tractor at daybreak

the perfume of fresh turned earth

and the secret location of the best

blackberry patch

like they were remembering

old lovers

These artists recognize something special about the black experience in our region, but what is it? What makes being black in Appalachia different from being black in say, Atlanta, St. Louis or Denver?
Tell me what you think. Add a comment below.

 

 

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[caption id="attachment_7611" align="alignleft" width="180"] Photo Credit: G. P. Cooper[/caption]
Kentuckians beware! The Terrible Crickenburger Twins of Cabell County and the Disturbing Goat Man of Milton have sprung to life. Pinckney Benedict, author of the classic short story collection Town Smokes and co-founder of Tinker Mountain Writers' Workshop, has birthed something new and wonderfully strange about your state.
Kentucky Samuraiis a graphic novel, the first few pages of which are featured in the latest edition of Appalachian Heritage.
It seems to center around one Cumberland Samurai, a young discontent who tears down I-64 in his 1967 Shelby Cobra GT500 and who has apparently beheaded a chieftain at the legendary battle at Kingdom Come State Park.
It is a gory, nonsensical, cultural mismatch, a fantastic slice of revisionist history that so far, doesn't make a lick of sense. I love it!
Sadly, I don't know where to find the rest. According to George Brosi, Editor of Appalachian Heritage, it may not yet have a publisher. If you catch sight of the full graphic novel, by all means drop a line.

The folks at Appalshop are getting high falutin in February. To celebrate 40 years of Appalachian film, they're packing up their reels and heading to New York City. The Kentucky based film and culture center will have a three day showcase, February 19-21, at MoMA's Documentary Fortnight 2010.
On the bill are The Ralph Stanley story (always a crowd pleaser) and Stranger with a Camera, a documentary that follows the 1967 murder of Canadian filmmaker Hugh O'Conner. While shooting footage of coal miners at a rental house in Jeremiah, Kentucky, O'Conner was shot by the property's owner. I've not seen the full documentary but wonder if it will leave New York audiences second guessing their mountain vacation plans.
Whatever the case, Appalachian expats in NYC should swing by. Don't forget your bibs and fiddle.

My sighting was in third grade. Somewhere east of Sunrise Avenue, an egg shaped object hovered in the sky. It was overcast. I stood in the middle of road holding my breath, watching the egg drift left then right, slower than the clouds themselves. It was an impossible white, a white that should have burned my eyes. It didn't.
I trusted the egg. I thought that it had come for me, to scan me, gauge me, see if I offered what its occupants sought. I waited until I felt the assessment was complete, ten maybe fifteen minutes, long enough that I should have missed the bus.
I walked away, in the road still (not a car had driven by) and disappointed. I wanted to be worthy and lifted off, to represent my town, my people, my planet, whatever they needed. Instead, I got on the Blue Bird bus beside bleary-eyed children and rode to Round Hill Elementary.
People have said that it was my imagination or the sun. I don't rule anything out, but it seemed real. Whatever the case, I'm not alone. Apparently our region is a hotbed for unexplained phenomena. The book Appalachian Case Studies: UFO Sightings, Alien Encounters, and Unexplained Phenomenaand its sequel document everything from mysterious lights to the West Virginia mothman.
Steve Hammons, former journalist and the books'author, speculates that "maybe the people here are just more observant of such oddities, or more willing to report such experiences to authorities. Regardless of the reasons for the increased activity in Appalachia, it remains a fact that citizens of [West Virginia] have recorded an astounding number of UFO sightings over the last fifty years."

In April 1979, Breece D'J Pancake broke into a neighboring home in Charlottesville, Virginia. He sat alone in the dark until the owners returned; then he bolted to his own place and unloaded a shotgun into his mouth. He was a powerful drinker; apparently depressive; and, though he may not have known it, he changed Appalachian literature.
I was just there, in Charlottesville. A friend's baby is at University of Virginia, receiving treatment for a brain injury. I took her away from feeding tubes and CAT scans for a night. Driving through town, I wondered which house was his, which restaurants he frequented, and whether he crossed at this corner or that.
It's easy to idolize Pancake. He died at age 26 and had already published six acclaimed stories, most in The Atlantic. They were vivid, moody portraits of his home state, West Virginia. In "Hollow," Pancake wrote...
"In the brush by the trail, a bobcat crouched, waiting for the man to clump by, its muscles tight in the snow and mist. Claws unsheathed, it moved only slightly with the sounds of his steps until he was far up the trail, stopping only to sniff the blood-spit the man had left behind."
His writing was as enigmatic as his death, deceptively simple, meticulous, a testament to patience and editing. He pressed each story as hard as a diamond, and readers responded. The Atlantic was flooded with letters when he appeared. Joyce Carol Oates compared him to Hemingway. He defined modern Appalachian writing, and what's more, I think he haunts it.
I hear him constantly. In written words (Rick Bragg, Pinckney Benedict, and Josh Weil come to mind) but also in the wild. I would not be surprised if Pancake appeared at my family's collapsing mountain homestead; ten feet from a doe who huffed, ready to charge me; or even in the raucous Charlottesville bar where my friend found solace in karaoke tracks.
It's plain silly, but I want him with me when I lay things on the page. He would let the images trickle at their own pace and distill them into a few faithful words. He treated mountain people and places so much better than he did himself.