The Writing Life

By Norman Julian

(These essays first appeared in The Dominion Post)

"These dark holes light the nation." - Wanda Campbell.

An old-timer is telling me about his days as a strapping young miner.

"I liked digging coal" he says. "In one day, over two shifts I dug and loaded 33 tons, a record in the mine."

He explains he went in the mine at age 15 and pushed for the overtime to help his father feed a family of 12. Coal pays some bills, makes other come due.

"It wasn't safe in that mine," he goes on. "Almost every day I'd see sand drift down or pieces of slate or coal fall. I thought I would die down there if I didn't find a way out."

He did, too, to a glass factory, but his dad, whom he called Pop, didn't and died from a cave-in. Coal had paid the bills, but it was a demanding paymaster.

The man talking was my dad, not given to exaggeration.

As a boy, I saw my grandfather come home from the mine, his face coal dust-dotted, his red-wire eyes tired and stoic. That is the true face of coal.

Why am I telling you this?

To establish a little credibility to connect with the book, Coal, A Poetry Anthology, edited by Marshall professor Chris Green and available from Blair Mountain Press at Ashland, Ky. (on the web at blairmtp.com).

Almost exactly a year ago (Jan. 2), an explosion at Sago resulted in the deaths of 12 miners. On Dec. 18, a roof fall killed John David Elliott near Maidsville.

Deaths such as those take the heart out of a family. For the rest of us, can we hope they provide a boost in consciousness, hopefully not temporary, about the cost of coal and what we can do to make mining it safer?

But back to the book. Denise Giardina, who grew up in a southern West Virginia coal camp that is no longer there, wrote the preface to the poems culled from the works of scores of Appalachian poets.

"Coal is a hard, filthy, ugly rock," she writes. "Its only use is utilitarian, and whatever benefits it provides of light and warmth it takes away in destruction and death."

In her novels (Storming Heaven and The Unquiet Earth) and in her essays, Denise leaves no doubt that in her view "coal destroys."

The industry points of view, too, have been presented by the WVU Press, which in its early years specialized in presenting the owners' concerns.

Most of the poems in this new book deal with the personal and the poignant.

In an e-mail to me, the editor, Chris Green, says, "the book is meant to honor" those who paid the price. Men like Randal McCloy and his now deceased workmates at Sago, men like maybe your husband, father or grandfather.

Louise McNeil, daughter of a miner and a former state poet laureate, writes of the 1907 mine tragedy at Monongah. Other local poets I recognize are Mary Lucille DeBerry, Lloyd Davis, Mark DeFoe, Cheryl Denise, Sharon Gardner, James Harms, P. J. Laska, Irene McKinney (current state poet laureate), Phyllis Wilson Moore and Barbara Smith,

Sections include miners and work, disasters and mining, families and community, life after the mines, environmental degradation and resistance.

The editor is about "bringing people into conversation about who they are, where they live, and what they care about."

Inevitably, in West Virginia, that in one way or another is coal.

The scenarios that attend the mining of the mineral are still unfolding. Coal still pays some bills for operating the state. This book, though, is about the personal bills that come due.

牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋牋 -- Norman Julian, first published in the Morgantown Dominion-Post

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If you were writing your autobiography and it wouldn't be published until after your death, what would you say?

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      Would you throw punches you wouldn't dare fling while you are alive?

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      Would you pull other punches to spare someone pain?

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      Would you write exactly as it was in the service of truth?

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      Telling the truth is the main rule of writing and all the others are but corallaries.

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      The great West Virginia novelist Davis Grubb (1919-1980) told truth in his novel Ancient Lights, published in 1982.

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      Grubb is known for his masterpiece The Voices of Glory (Glory being Moundsville), where he was born. His Night of the Hunter was made into a movie starring Robert Mitchum and is now a cult classic. Fools' Parade starring Jimmy Stewart also made it to the silver screen.

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      It was my good fortune to visit with Grubb the year he died. He was living in the Waldo Hotel in Clarksburg, a town we both for a while called home.

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      When I knocked on his door, he didn't know me from the Roman poet Virgil. He had never met either of us, but he probably knew of Virgil. Anyway, he gave me some time.

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      He knew then, but I didn't, that he was dying of lung cancer.

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      Davis smoked Marsh Wheeling stogies, long black cigars. When one would burn down to a stub, he'd light another.

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      Grubb saw by his own bright lights and wasn't afraid to let it shine in his books or in his personal appearances. He once said that "I was a sore thumb on the hand" of the town. Davis was not shy about writing the truth and sometimes paid the price.



     As a keynote speaker at a support gathering for the Clarksburg-Harrison Library, he slammed strip mining, a widespread occupation in the county at that time. Some in the audience had ties to that industry.

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      Willing to pay the price while alive, he surely didn't hestitate when he knew what he wrote would be read after he entered final transition.

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      That day in the hotel, he told me that all of Ancient Lights was written, either in 16 notebooks or in his head. All that remained was the arduous task of assembling it into the final structure of the novel.

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      That book occupied him in the twilight of his life. The lung cancer that killed him was hastened because he chain-smoked till the end.

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      The book's main character, Sweeley Leech, an Appalachian sage and eccentric, argues that the greatest truths are couched in laughter.

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      Leech, like Grubb, survived many personal crises. How prophetic of our own time he was when he proclaimed, "Any kind of love is all right, as long as it is sincere."

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      He proclaims that the command, "Little children, love one another" is not loud enough to be heard over the stamping feet of "Onward, Christian soldiers." Grubb was both an ancient and a modern.

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      The book is a catch-all for Grubb's last words on many subjects.

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      And if it has the ring of truth, that is because Grubb had nothing to fear from it.

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      Grubb probably read what Mark Twain once said about one of his stories: "Part of this story is true."

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      I can see him, as he read it, laughing through a halo of Marsh Wheeling stogie smoke.

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