We All Live Downstream: Writings about Mountaintop Removal June 11, 2009

I’m excited to have my work appear in the book anthology We All Live Downstream alongside work by:

• Earl Hamner (creator of the Waltons)
• Ashley Judd
• Robert Kennedy Jr.
• Wendell Berry
• Bobbie Ann Mason
• Ann Pancake
• Jean Ritchie
• Silas House
• Hal Crowther
• Jeff Biggers
• Denise Giardina
• Pamela Duncan
• Many other fine writers and performers.

We All Live Downstream is a multi-genre anthology of noted authors and young writers speaking out against mountaintop removal coal mining. There is the fifth-grader who vows to fight the destruction until he’s “laid in the ground,” the college student who recalls her shock and heartbreak at first seeing a mountaintop removal site, the best-selling novelist who believes that “to destroy mountains is to spit in the face of God.” This startling collection includes writers from 17 states and features material from celebrated artists and activists such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Wendell Berry, Earl Hamner, Ashley Judd, Silas House, Denise Giardina, Erik Reece, Bobbie Ann Mason, Bob Edwards, Penny Loeb, Hal Crowther, Jean Ritchie, Terry Tempest Williams, Jeff Biggers, Ann Pancake, George Ella Lyon, Ben Sollee and many more. Edited by journalist & activist Jason Howard (coauthor of Something’s Rising), this book presents a rallying chorus of dissent against a reckless industry and drives home the point that energy (particularly domestic coal) is everyone’s issue … not only at the source but all the way “downstream.”

Accents Radio Show – a reading of my poem “Anoint Me” May 17, 2009

Listen to the recording of Frank X. Walker’s interview on Accents http://www.katerinaklemer.com/audio/accents_051509.mp3. Also listen for my poem, Anoint Me, to be read. It starts at about 1 min 26 seconds into the recording. This is WRFL Lexington.

Neva’s Poem to be read on WRFL-FM Lexington May 15 May 11, 2009

Listen to Accents every Friday @ 2pm EST on WRFL 88.1 FM Lexington or stream live from wrfl.fm.

This Friday, May 15, they’ll be reading a poem of mine, “Anoint Me.”

Also, the guest that day will be poet Frank X. Walker.

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer is the host.

Let me know what you think!

“Puttin’ Up for Hard Times” Excerpt April 14, 2008

 

In the summer of 1954, Bull Mountain’s winding road was a well-traveled track of dirt and dark dust.  Coal trucks smudged everything in their wake. Every time I took in clothes, I had to exorcise the black demon from them. 

One miserable August afternoon, I unclipped laundry from the line and smacked the heavy air with worn towels and sheets.  I muttered — under my breath, of course.  It wouldn’t do for a child of the UMWA to be caught cursing coal.  My father was worming his way through the earth’s black intestines at that very moment.  

 

“Puttin’ Up for Hard Times.”  Jimson Weed, vol. XXIV, new series vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 2005).