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.”

Appalachia, Man: Can you dig it? May 1, 2008

APPALACHIA, MAN: CAN YOU DIG IT?

 

 

Turn a furrow and find

arrowheads, iridescent beetles,

pop bottles, decapitated dolls,

carbide lamps.

 

Dig deeper.

 

Beneath Wal-Mart’s parking lot

find the wisp of a tobacco field.

At the DQ, catch the milky ghost

of a farmer’s wife.

 

Look beyond Cracker Barrel,

the car dealership,

the call center,

the prison.

 

Find hard-faced boys

with anthracite eyes,

who were too wise too soon,

schooled in hell’s shafts,

seams and slack.

 

Dig deeper.

 

Don’t discard the shards.

 

Can you dig it?

 

 

“Appalachia Man: Can You Dig It?” A! Magazine for the Arts, vol. 15, no. 4. (April 2008).

 

http://artsmagazine.info/

“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).