Source: http://www.heraldmailmedia.com/life/books/a-chat-with-author-ann-pancake/article_b1023d42-4264-11e3-bd65-001a4bcf6878.html
Areas that were once lush with forests and wildlife now resemble barren moonscapes. And massive machines, some several stories high, push rock and dirt into valleys, forever burying waterways and causing devastation to ecosystems.
Mountaintop coal mining, often described as strip mining on steroids, has steadily crushed the heart of Appalachia.
It exposes entire coal seams by blowing off a mountain’s summit and is cheaper than traditional mining, coal companies say. Rather than burrowing under or digging through the soil, trees and rock that cover the top of those coal seams, all you need to hit black gold are some explosives.
And those explosives don’t sound lightly. Some three million pounds of explosives can be detonated each day in West Virginia for coal mining, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, shearing up to 800 feet of elevation from each mountain peak — shaking buildings from the ground up and causing a black rain of sand, soil and coal dust.
A native of Romney, W.Va., author Ann Pancake is more than aware of the destructive, controversial reality of mountaintop mining and the lives it affects — poor Appalachian residents rich in heritage and culture.
She has seen first hand the scars that cover the West Virginia summit ridges and the ghost towns where residents were forced out and their homes plowed under.
That’s why it’s not surprising that she chose these mining practices as the subject of her first novel, “Strange As This Weather Has Been.”
Pancake said the idea for the book came about while helping her sister, filmmaker Catherine Pancake, make an award-winning documentary about mountaintop removal called “Black Diamonds.”
“The experience of interviewing multiple people who were suffering from the fallout from the mining inspired me to write fiction that could help readers understand their lives,” she noted.
Pancake describes the book as “the story of a family in southern West Virginia who live below a mountaintop removal mine. It is set in the year 2000. Related businesses:
The characters range from a 10-year-old boy obsessed with machines, Pancake said, “to a teenage girl forced to choose between attachment to land and a viable future to a disabled miner struggling to reconcile his gut knowledge that the mountains are sacred with the dogmatism of a narrow Christianity.”
Published in 2007, “Strange As This Weather Has Been” has garnered literary recognition, including the 2007 Weatherford Prize and one of Kirkus Review’s Top Ten Fiction Books of 2007. It also was a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book Award and the 2008 Washington State Book Award.
Pancake will provide insight to her novel when she appears at Shepherd University on Tuesday, Nov. 5, as part of the Common Reading Program.
The 7 p.m. lecture and book signing, free and open to the public, will be held in the Frank Center Theater.
Pancake, who currently resides in Washington state, said she has always had a passion for writing and storytelling, even as a child.
“I started telling myself stories in my head before I knew how to read,” she shared.
By the age of 8, she knew she wanted to be a writer.
“I can remember my mother ordering me from Highlights Magazine a sort of workbook that offered ideas for stories and I remember writing about a picture in that book of a family stranded on a roof during a flood,” she said.
Pancake later received her Bachelor of Arts in English from West Virginia University, her master’s in English from the University of North Carolina and a PhD in English literature from the University of Washington.
She currently teaches in the low-residency Master of Fine Arts program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash.
While “Strange As This Weather Has Been” is Pancake’s first novel, she has had a collection of short stories published called “Given Ground.” The book won the 2000 Bakeless Award.
Her fiction and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Orion, The Georgia Review, Poets and Writers and New Stories from the South, the Year’s Best.
“Most of my fiction is set in West Virginia,” Pancake said, “and it’s largely language-driven and character-driven. I’ve been called a lyrical writer and a writer whose work is deeply grounded in place.”
Pancake has been influenced, she said, by writers like Breece Pancake (a distant relative) and Jayne Anne Phillips, as well as Southern writers such as William Faulkner.
While she has become somewhat of a master of the short story, Pancake said writing a novel “required far more patience, an ability to conceptualize a much larger scope and, in my case, a lot more effort with plot. Plot is not one of my strong suits. I also had to learn how to return to the same material every day without losing passion.”
But the passion she continued to find while writing “Strange As This Weather Has Been,” critics say, has resulted in an ambitious and compassionate novel laced with powerful characters —strong and stubborn —and powerful images, such as children playing in toxic junk washed down from deluged dumping grounds.
Pancake said she hopes that readers finish the book “with a better understanding of how mountaintop removal damages the day-to-day lives of people where mining operations have expanded literally into their backyards.” She also hopes readers develop a compassion for those people.
Place of business: 608 Cottonwood Dr.,
Carson City, NV, 89701
Contact: 800-530-6950
When the book first came out, she noted, there was not widespread awareness of the devastation that was occurring in parts of the country.
“At this point, six years after the book’s publication, many more people are educated about mountaintop removal,” Pancake said. “Of course, my novel played only a small role in that. Many Appalachian residents, activists, journalists, filmmakers, artists and other concerned people have raised dramatically the awareness of the general public.”
Despite the challenges of writing a novel, Pancake said she would love to add another to her resume “but I don’t have one in the works. I’m currently finishing another collection of short stories.”
Creativity seems to run in the Pancake family. In addition to her filmmaker sister, Catherine, her brother, Sam Pancake, is an actor who has appeared on television and the big screen.
According to the school, Shepherd University is the first institution in West Virginia to adopt “Strange As This Weather Has Been” as its common reading.
The goals of the Common Reading Program are to provide a shared intellectual experience, create a sense of community, encourage reading, promote critical engagement of ideas, set academic expectations, create dialogue between students, faculty, staff and the community, promote interaction between the university and the community and introduce students to community resources.
Areas that were once lush with forests and wildlife now resemble barren moonscapes. And massive machines, some several stories high, push rock and dirt into valleys, forever burying waterways and causing devastation to ecosystems.
Mountaintop coal mining, often described as strip mining on steroids, has steadily crushed the heart of Appalachia.
It exposes entire coal seams by blowing off a mountain’s summit and is cheaper than traditional mining, coal companies say. Rather than burrowing under or digging through the soil, trees and rock that cover the top of those coal seams, all you need to hit black gold are some explosives.
And those explosives don’t sound lightly. Some three million pounds of explosives can be detonated each day in West Virginia for coal mining, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, shearing up to 800 feet of elevation from each mountain peak — shaking buildings from the ground up and causing a black rain of sand, soil and coal dust.
A native of Romney, W.Va., author Ann Pancake is more than aware of the destructive, controversial reality of mountaintop mining and the lives it affects — poor Appalachian residents rich in heritage and culture.
She has seen first hand the scars that cover the West Virginia summit ridges and the ghost towns where residents were forced out and their homes plowed under.
That’s why it’s not surprising that she chose these mining practices as the subject of her first novel, “Strange As This Weather Has Been.”
Pancake said the idea for the book came about while helping her sister, filmmaker Catherine Pancake, make an award-winning documentary about mountaintop removal called “Black Diamonds.”
“The experience of interviewing multiple people who were suffering from the fallout from the mining inspired me to write fiction that could help readers understand their lives,” she noted.
Pancake describes the book as “the story of a family in southern West Virginia who live below a mountaintop removal mine. It is set in the year 2000. Related businesses:
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The characters range from a 10-year-old boy obsessed with machines, Pancake said, “to a teenage girl forced to choose between attachment to land and a viable future to a disabled miner struggling to reconcile his gut knowledge that the mountains are sacred with the dogmatism of a narrow Christianity.”
Published in 2007, “Strange As This Weather Has Been” has garnered literary recognition, including the 2007 Weatherford Prize and one of Kirkus Review’s Top Ten Fiction Books of 2007. It also was a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book Award and the 2008 Washington State Book Award.
Pancake will provide insight to her novel when she appears at Shepherd University on Tuesday, Nov. 5, as part of the Common Reading Program.
The 7 p.m. lecture and book signing, free and open to the public, will be held in the Frank Center Theater.
Pancake, who currently resides in Washington state, said she has always had a passion for writing and storytelling, even as a child.
“I started telling myself stories in my head before I knew how to read,” she shared.
By the age of 8, she knew she wanted to be a writer.
“I can remember my mother ordering me from Highlights Magazine a sort of workbook that offered ideas for stories and I remember writing about a picture in that book of a family stranded on a roof during a flood,” she said.
Pancake later received her Bachelor of Arts in English from West Virginia University, her master’s in English from the University of North Carolina and a PhD in English literature from the University of Washington.
She currently teaches in the low-residency Master of Fine Arts program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash.
While “Strange As This Weather Has Been” is Pancake’s first novel, she has had a collection of short stories published called “Given Ground.” The book won the 2000 Bakeless Award.
Her fiction and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Orion, The Georgia Review, Poets and Writers and New Stories from the South, the Year’s Best.
“Most of my fiction is set in West Virginia,” Pancake said, “and it’s largely language-driven and character-driven. I’ve been called a lyrical writer and a writer whose work is deeply grounded in place.”
Pancake has been influenced, she said, by writers like Breece Pancake (a distant relative) and Jayne Anne Phillips, as well as Southern writers such as William Faulkner.
While she has become somewhat of a master of the short story, Pancake said writing a novel “required far more patience, an ability to conceptualize a much larger scope and, in my case, a lot more effort with plot. Plot is not one of my strong suits. I also had to learn how to return to the same material every day without losing passion.”
But the passion she continued to find while writing “Strange As This Weather Has Been,” critics say, has resulted in an ambitious and compassionate novel laced with powerful characters —strong and stubborn —and powerful images, such as children playing in toxic junk washed down from deluged dumping grounds.
Pancake said she hopes that readers finish the book “with a better understanding of how mountaintop removal damages the day-to-day lives of people where mining operations have expanded literally into their backyards.” She also hopes readers develop a compassion for those people.
Place of business: 608 Cottonwood Dr.,
Carson City, NV, 89701
Contact: 800-530-6950
When the book first came out, she noted, there was not widespread awareness of the devastation that was occurring in parts of the country.
“At this point, six years after the book’s publication, many more people are educated about mountaintop removal,” Pancake said. “Of course, my novel played only a small role in that. Many Appalachian residents, activists, journalists, filmmakers, artists and other concerned people have raised dramatically the awareness of the general public.”
Despite the challenges of writing a novel, Pancake said she would love to add another to her resume “but I don’t have one in the works. I’m currently finishing another collection of short stories.”
Creativity seems to run in the Pancake family. In addition to her filmmaker sister, Catherine, her brother, Sam Pancake, is an actor who has appeared on television and the big screen.
According to the school, Shepherd University is the first institution in West Virginia to adopt “Strange As This Weather Has Been” as its common reading.
The goals of the Common Reading Program are to provide a shared intellectual experience, create a sense of community, encourage reading, promote critical engagement of ideas, set academic expectations, create dialogue between students, faculty, staff and the community, promote interaction between the university and the community and introduce students to community resources.