As I'm getting up there in years I decided some time ago to start divesting myself of possessions. I'd rather see some of these things go to folks who could appreciate them. Among the items are two books related to Appalachia and of particular interest to anyone who appreciates short plays and writing.

The first book, published in 1928, is titled Kentucky Mountain Fantasies: Three Short Plays for an Appalachian Theater by Percy MacKaye. Still in its original binding and has some nice woodcuts throughout.

The second book is a library discard but in good shape and in its original binding. Carolina Folk-Plays is a collection of short plays by various authors and edited by Frederick Koch. Published 1924. Includes notes on folk theater, b&w photographs and woodcuts.

I would be happy to send these to an interested party but not to someone who just wants to sell them. I could do that myself. So if either or both of these volumes interest you, please pm me and I'll be happy to pass them along at no charge.

How many folks here have read the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Kentucky Cycle" by Robert Schenkkan? I have and though I found it to be a riveting drama (I've not seen the stage production) I can see some merit from a few quarters that TKC reinforces stereotypes about Appalachia, especially in its violence. Anyone else have an opinion?

I just learned about this book a few minutes ago ---> Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/55gxp5kh9780252037955.html

A book signing is scheduled for April 26th in Huntington WV. For more information and details: http://www.ohvec.org/events_calendar/

Edited to add: The author---Shannon Elizabeth Bell---will deliver a lecture this coming Thursday at Marshall University:
http://www.marshallparthenon.com/news/uk-sociologist-to-deliver-appalachian-women-and-the-fight-for-environmental-justice-lecture-1.2863615#.U0PsZlcvn3I

. . . 1) Watches of the Night; and 2) Night Comes to the Cumberlands.

Also: Here's a link to a yearlong series of Lexington Herald-Leader articles about how Harry Caudill "...captured the attention of presidents, but whose despair over the fate of Appalachia later led him to espouse disparaging and widely discredited views about the people of his home region."

http://www.kentucky.com/easternkentucky/

Last edited Thu Apr 10, 2014, 06:35 PM - Edit history (1)

I discovered the series with The Scapegoat (1980) and then read the fifth and final volume The Killing Ground (1982) before going back and reading the first three: Prisons (1956), O Beulah Land (1960), and Know Nothing (1973). If you are interested in trying one without taking on the entire series, I'd recommend choosing based on the period of greatest interest. For a multi-generational multi-volume fictional history of an entire state, I can think of nothing else like it. A brilliant idea, beautifully executed in five volumes, ending in contemporary West Virginia.

E.L. Doctorow's review of The Scapegoat for the New York Times describes the 1912 mine war setting and the use of Mother Jones as a central character.

http://www.coastweekend.com/coastal_life/enter-appalachia-at-northwest-author-series/article_7df4fbb2-d0bf-11e3-8c22-001a4bcf887a.html
Enter Appalachia at Northwest Author Series
Author Karen Spears Zacharias to share about first novel
May 6, 2014

CANNON BEACH — Karen Spears Zacharias, the May speaker at the Cannon Beach Library’s Northwest Author Series, has been a newspaper reporter and columnist, the author of six books, a Gold Star daughter, and she joined a cross-country motorcycle trip with a group of Vietnam veterans in Run for the Wall. At 2 p.m. Saturday, May 10, she will talk about her latest book, “Mother of Rain,” at the library, 131 N. Hemlock St. The public is welcome, and the event is free.

“Mother of Rain” is Zacharias’ first novel after many credits in non-fiction, journalism and memoir. Set in a close-knit east Tennessee community as the Great Depression yields to World War II, the book paints the story of the hard-scrabble life in the Appalachian area. In the idiom of that time and place, the author portrays a sympathetic group: Maizee Hurd, her husband Zebulon, local Melungeon healer Burdy Lutrell and many others. Zacharias spent years living with an aunt and grandmother in this area and is a descendant of some of the early settlers of Hawkins County, Tennessee.

The book has won the Appalachian Studies Association’s Weatherford Award for Fiction, an award that has been given in the past to Barbara Kingsolver, Charles Frazier, Darnell Arnoult and others.

Zacharias’ first book was a memoir of Judge Rufe McComb, followed by “After the Flag Has Been Folded: A Daughter Remembers the Father She Lost to War – and the Mother Who Held Her Family,” published in 2006. Her other books include “Will Jesus Buy Me a Double-Wide?” in 2010, and “A Silence of Mockingbirds: the Memoir of a Murder.” The latter is an investigative account of the 2005 murder of a 3-year old girl in a small Oregon college town thought to be a good place to raise kids. Writing this book with the permission of the child’s father, Zacharias said that as a former educator she felt the weight of responsibility to see signs of abuse and hoped the book would be informative and redemptive.... MORE

The Charleston Gazette
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
W.Va. title selected for National Book Festival
By The Associated Press

CHARLESTON, W.Va. – A book written by a Charleston storyteller has been selected as the West Virginia title for the 2014 National Book Festival in Washington.

Bill Lepp’s “The King of Little Things” is aimed at children and young adults. The book is illustrated by David T. Wenzel.

The book’s selection was by the West Virginia Center for the Book. Lepp is a five-time-champion of the West Virginia Liar’s Contest.

The National Book Festival is scheduled for Aug. 30. - See more at: http://www.wvgazette.com/article/20140520/GZ01/140529960/1101#sthash.yW4578DH.dpuf

The Ohio University Press
The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature
Pub. 2003
By Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt

Contemporaries were shocked when author Mary Noailles Murfree revealed she was a woman, but modern readers may be more surprised by her cogent discussion of community responses to unwanted development. Effie Waller Smith, an African American woman writing of her love for the Appalachian mountains, wove discussions of women's rights, racial tension, and cultural difference into her Appalachian poetry. Grace MacGowan Cooke participated in avant-garde writers' colonies with the era's literary lights and applied their progressive ideals to her fiction about the Appalachia of her youth. Emma Bell Miles, witness to poverty, industrialization, and violence against women, wrote poignant and insightful critiques of her Appalachian home.

In The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature Elizabeth Engelhardt finds in all four women's writings the origins of what we recognize today as ecological feminism—a wide-reaching philosophy that values the connections between humans and nonhumans and works for social and environmental justice.

People and the land in Appalachia were also the subject of women authors with radically different approaches to mountains and their residents. Authors with progressive ideas about women's rights did not always respect the Appalachian places they were writing about or apply their ideas to all of the women in those places—but they did create hundreds of short stories, novels, letters, diaries, photographs, sketches, and poems about the mountains.

While The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature ascribes much that is noble to the beginnings of the ecological feminism movement as it developed in Appalachia, it is also unyielding in its assessment of the literatures of the voyeur, tourist, and social crusader who supported status quo systems of oppression in Appalachia.

For more information about this book, see http://www.ohioswallow.com/book/The+Tangled+Roots+of+Feminism,+Environmentalism,+and+Appalachian+Literature

I will have to check that out sometime! I'm not sure how I missed this thread - I see there are several interesting reads to look into. Thanks!

If you're like me and don't mind used.

http://www.amazon.com/Feminism-Environmentalism-Appalachian-Literature-Ethnicity/dp/0821415093

A new copy of this book is expensive but there are inexpensive used copies available at Amazon.

Whistlin' and Crowin' Women of Appalachia: Literacy Practices Since College
by Associate Professor Katherine Kelleher Sohn
(Studies in Writing & Rhetoric) Hardcover – March 2, 2006

Foreward
Even some enlightened academicians automatically—and incorrectly—connect illiteracy to Appalachia, contends Katherine Kelleher Sohn. After overhearing two education professionals refer to the southern accent of a waiter and then launch into a few redneck jokes, Sohn wondered why rural, working-class white people are not considered part of the multicultural community. Whistlin’ and Crowin’ Women of Appalachia: Literacy Practices since College examines the power of women to rise above cultural constraints, complete their college degrees, assume positions of responsibility, and ultimately come to voice.

Sohn, a born southerner and assimilated Appalachian who moved from the city more than thirty years ago, argues that an underclass of rural whites is being left out of multicultural conversations. She shares how her own search for identity in the academic world (after enrolling in a doctoral program at age fifty) parallels the journeys of eight nontraditional, working-class women. Through interviews and case studies, Sohn illustrates how academic literacy empowers women in their homes, jobs, and communities, effectively disproving the Appalachian adage: “Whistlin’ women and crowin’ hens, always come to no good ends.”

Sohn situates the women’s stories within the context of theory, self confidence, and place. She weaves the women’s words with her own, relating voice to language, identity, and power. As the women move from silence to voice throughout and after college—by maintaining their dialect, discovering the power of expressivist writing, gaining economic and social power, and remaining in their communities—they discover their identity as strong women of Appalachia.

Sohn focuses on the power of place, which figures predominantly in the identity of these women, and colorfully describes the region. These Appalachian women who move from silence to voice are the purveyors of literacy and the keepers of community, says Sohn. Serving as the foundation of Appalachian culture in spite of a patriarchal society, the women shape the region even as it shapes them....

A note here: My computer has been undergoing some serious repairs these past few days and probably won't be totally fixed until sometime this weekend. So there are certain things I can't do right now and one of those is connect to the link for Paganelli's site (provided in the article) or the video made of the first poem in her book. I'll leave that to y'all. Paganelli's book, "Blush Less," is available for presale on FinishingLinepress.com.

The Arkansas Traveler
Poet Illuminates the Spirit of Appalachia
Posted: Monday, November 10, 2014

A 22-year-old UA student, Julia Paganelli, is debuting her poetry chapbook, “Blush Less,” Jan. 9, with presale ending Nov. 28. This book covers the perspectives and trials of Appalachian women, guiding readers towards the hard truth of the wicked and fascinating aspects of everyday life...

...Paganelli describes "Blush Less" as a coming-of-age narrative for women. She gained inspiration and insight for her chapbook in her four years of living and working in a county in Appalachia...

...“Poetry allows people to explain painful truths with grace, something that a lot of other genres don’t allow,” Paganelli said.

She said her book describes how domestic violence plays a role in the lives of Appalachian women....

MORE at http://www.uatrav.com/the_companion/article_f41fbb38-6935-11e4-9b73-0b65acf029c5.html

You can visit Julia's site at http://www.juliapaganelli.com/#!blushless/cjg9