Why Every Appalachian Writer Is an Environmentalist, Book Riot
You might ask, if these disasters are such a huge part of Appalachian history and very current present, then why do you stay? There’s no one way to answer this question. I hear it so often. But ultimately, Appalachia is our home. In Belonging: A Culture of Place, bell hooks describes how important her Kentucky upbringing was to her. Crystal Wilkinson’s culinary memoir Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks delves into her family’s deep love for eastern Kentucky, a place they have lived for generations.
We’ve just begun to fully understand the complete picture of Helene’s destruction. The prospect of rebuilding — again — feels overwhelming. Even with the disasters in our region’s past, we’ve never seen anything like this before. But I’m already seeing Appalachian people roll up their sleeves and get to work. We don’t know what recovery will look like, but we’re going to fight for it, one day at a time.
The Not So Wild and Wonderful History of West Virginia’s Forests
Think of that. Out of the over 16 MILLION acres of original forest in West Virginia only 263 acres are standing today. The next time you go for a walk in the woods keep in mind that that forest is most likely only around 100 years old. West Virginia might be “almost heaven”, but it was grown from the ashes of Eden.
I had mentioned before that our ancestors artificially created the Irish-countryside-like appearance of the state we see today. For the most part that is true. They imported grass seeds to grow pastures, farm animals, and the farming techniques of the old country. Also, over time plants from the prairies of the west migrated into the region. (Yes. Plants can migrate. They just move really slowly.) Carried by migrating animals, the wind, or other means, you see the appearance of prairie plants like iron weed, milkweed, black-eyed Susan, and many others. However, leave an area in West Virginia to its own devices, and as if by instinct, the land will once again become forest. It might take decades, but it will happen.
Teaching the next generation of Palestinians how to make a celebratory stew may seem trivial, inappropriate even, in light of the deliberate starvation and plausible genocide facing Gazans right now. But food is as integral to our identity and rootedness to the land as our centers of cultural knowledge, such as archives, libraries, theaters, and schools, which are also under attack. Israel’s assault is eliminating entire bloodlines, and with them, all of the memories and knowledge they possessed.
Could Following Joan Didion’s Writing Routine Make Me Write Like Joan Didion?, Bustle
What I learned from these books is it’s crazy how many writers — Sartre, Auden, Graham Greene, Ayn Rand of course — were on amphetamines. (Which proved one of my long-held theories: that if I abused Adderall, I would be famous by now.) I dug through these books for schedules by people whose work I admired, schedules that seemed largely drug-free, and schedules that were daily as opposed to the Susan Sontag school of “I do nothing for 2 weeks and then in a guilty panic I stay up 24 hours to meet a deadline.”
Union Buttons are Living Labor History, In These Times
Ultimately, I think what is so powerful is that these are made to be worn by workers themselves. It’s a direct form of worker self-expression.If you have a bottom-up view of the working class movement, this is really the best expression of it …These are things which were actually worn by people on the picket line, by people on the unemployment line, by people in organizing drives, in the mines, in the sweatshops.