Today we bring Coalfield Development's book club to the podcast with special guest, Glenn Taylor. Glenn is the author of the novels A Hanging at Cinder Bottom, The Marrowbone Marble Company and The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, GQ, and Electric Literature, among others.
Glenn was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia, and he now lives with his wife and three sons in Morgantown, where he teaches in the MFA Program at West Virginia University.
For more information about Glenn go to www.glenntaylorbooks.com
Today we bring Coalfield Development's book club to the podcast with special guest, Glenn Taylor. Glenn is the author of the novels A Hanging at Cinder Bottom, The Marrowbone Marble Company and The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, GQ, and Electric Literature, among others.
Glenn was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia, and he now lives with his wife and three sons in Morgantown, where he teaches in the MFA Program at West Virginia University.
For more information about Glenn go to www.glenntaylorbooks.com
This is Change in the Coalfields, a podcast by Coalfield Development, all about change in Appalachia, what change has happened, what change is happening and what change still needs to happen. My name is Brandon Dennison. I'm your host and I am really excited this week to have author, Glenn Taylor with us. Glenn was born and raised in West Virginia. He is the author of The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The book we're going to focus on, mainly for this discussion is The Marrowbone Marble Company or locals might call that the Marbone Marble Company because it really connects with themes of change and development and opportunity and challenge and struggle and justice right here in southern West Virginia. It's the Marrowbone, Marbone holler is based right on the Mingo, Wayne County line and so many of us are familiar with it. And this week is unique as well, because at Coalfield Development, our staff we have a monthly book club, we pick one book every month, and we work through it together. And it's a opportunity to deepen our knowledge and our understanding of our community, our history or economics and to become a closer, more close knit community and simply to learn together and to think together. And so this week, my entire Coalfield book club is joining me for the podcast, they'll have a chance to ask Glenn questions. And Glenn, thank you so much for being here. We call this our core leadership team. So as you know Coalfield, we're involved in a couple of different areas. But so this is sort of all the different leaders from the different areas of the organization come together once a month, you know, we take care of some business, we do some planning, and then we like to have a book club component most weeks I've been really excited this month because our book of the month is, most of your readers would probably call this the Marrowbone Marble Company, but we know better we know as the Marbone Marble Company.
Glenn Taylor:Yeah, that's right
Brandon Dennison:With the local perspective. So I'm going to get the conversation started with you. And then we're just going to open it up for the team, really have plenty of time for folks on the team to ask their own questions.
Glenn Taylor:Sure. That sounds good. And you know, it's funny you say that about the pronunciation because that's something I've always I've always felt fake if I'm doing an event. I don't say Marbone, because I'm not from there. My dad's from Matewan. So he says it that way. But you know, I'm a city boy from Huntington. So I always said Marrowbone. And same when I wrote the next book, A Hanging at Cinder Bottom, you know, everybody I talked to when researching that book, of course, they all say MacDowell but I never did feel comfortable saying MacDowell again because I grew up saying McDowell, you know, so these little pronunciation things we could talk about all day.
Brandon Dennison:It is funny how it plays out. And actually that's where I wanted to start. So just tell us about yourself and where you grew up. And I'd be curious to know how you became a writer and at what point you you started honing that craft?
Glenn Taylor:Sure I'll be happy to so yeah, like I said, I grew up in Huntington on the south side kind of over by the arch. If you all know the arch obviously, I grew up across Four Pole Creek, real nice neighborhood came up easy, you know, Willow Glen road over there, born on Wilshire Boulevard on the other side of town, just up the hill from Meadow School, but then moved over and spent most of my childhood right on Four Pole Creek. Like I said, my dad, he grew up in Matewan and then he and my mom, who's from Fairmont, they met up here at WVU, and then settled in Huntington. So myself and my two sisters all grew up in Huntington. I ended up going to Ohio University, and I knew I wanted to try and be a writer. I had done a lot of drawing as a kid kind of switched to writing somewhere along the way. So from there, moved to Austin, Texas, got married in 1999, moved to Austin, Texas to get my MFA down at, not at University of Texas, but down at Texas State. So we were there three years and then after that, I got my first job teaching at a big community college in Northwest suburban Chicago called Harper College. So we were there nine years, had three kids there. And while I was there, I wrote The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, which looking back, I don't know how I taught four sections of English 101, had kids, and wrote novels because I sure as hell don't have that energy now.
Brandon Dennison:Used it all up.
Glenn Taylor:Yeah. But I think to you know, to better answer your question, what happened was probably in graduate school, like a lot of people, I was just writing these loosely autobiographical stories of young people drinking too much and misbehaving and I didn't have much direction but then somewhere along the way, probably home on a visit, you know, to Huntington from Texas. I started listening more to my dad and I started stealing books from his bookshelf, frankly books like Thunder in the Mountains by Lon Savage, The Battle Blair mountain. So I started reading a lot more of the history that frankly, I wasn't that interested in as a kid. I mean, I was interested in the stuff that affected my family personally. So for instance, my dad, when I was a kid would always get out his old Sony tape recorder and try and record his mother, my grandma Lena, who was a Chambers growing up in Matewan, he would try and interview her. He'd say, 'Lena, tell me about that day in May of 1920.' And she'd say, 'Shut it off Maury.' You know, she never would talk about it because she was 12 years old on the day of the shootout in Matewan. And her cousin actually was Ed Chambers, who was killed of course on the Welch County Courthouse steps with with Sid Hatfield and her uncle was Rhys Chambers who shot and killed two Baldwin felts agents that day. So the history had always been there, but I was, you know, I didn't find my interest in until I was, uh, you know, much older and left the state. So what I started doing was reading those and that kind of swirled in my mind, those books that I was stealing from my dad and my family history in Matewan with whatever the hell I was thinking at that time and Trenchmouth Taggart came out of that. And from there, I was kind of off to the races, I will say that Marrowbone out of the out of the books, you know, is the one that I have the most regrets about, in that I kind of hit it big and fast with Trenchmouth, came out with small press with WVU press. But in 2008, you know, all of a sudden it was it was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Voices book. And then it was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. And so I was off to the races then and Echo, the division of HarperCollins, you know, bought Trenchmouth and reissued it with that great cover with the snake on it. And then they also bought preemptively The Marrowbone Marble Company. And I wish I had taken longer to write my second novel because it was under contract, and I had to have the manuscript in and then have a book tour. And that was kind of how I did it. I don't know what my initial thought was, well, I do my initial thought for writing Marrowbone was that I was teaching these English 101 classes. And increasingly, I had more and more students in each class who were coming back from, if not one tour duty then multiple tours of duty, because this, you know, this, I started teaching there in 2002. And I taught there all the way until 2009. So you can imagine, and I had this one particular student, Colin, who was so sharp, and you know, would write all these, all of our papers were persuasive papers, English 101. And I did these units so we'd do class, race, gender, and sexuality and freedom of speech would be our basic. He was writing all these great papers. And so one day in my office, I asked him, if you don't mind me asking, you know, you know, what made you join the military. And he said, 'Well, I graduated in June of 2001, graduated high school in June of 2001. And I enlisted on September 13, 2001.' And so that got me thinking I was reading so much about World War II at that time, again, through my, through my dad's influences a big World War II person. And so I was reading about all these young men who had done the same thing, but back in 1941, you know, after Pearl Harbor, and so then I just kind of created this character, loyal Ledford and was off to the races with that one. However, I don't think I had quite earned my stripes yet I was writing about things with the war on poverty and the civil rights movement, and in World War II that I was a little young to be writing on and not quite as evolved and sophisticated as I am now. So there are some mistakes I made in that book that I wish I hadn't. I wish I'd been a little older. I wish I'd taken a little more time to write it. But in the end, I'm glad it spoke to some people. You know, one day I was in Huntington visiting, and my parents were like, 'Hey, this guy, Brandon Dennison, named your book is his favorite book and the Herald dispatch.' And that was, that was awesome. So I thank you for that moment. Sorry. I went on and on there for a while, but.
Brandon Dennison:No, no, that was great. That was great. I did not realize your dad is from from Matewan. And we have a project in Matewan, I got to talk to you about that. I'm going to save that for after this conversation. You mentioned just hearing stories from your dad. I mean, I feel like one of the best things about Appalachia is the storytelling. It's just sort of seems to be a part of our, as you think about your childhood and growing up and wanting to be a writer, is that a sort of quintessential Appalachian thing?
Glenn Taylor:Definitely. And you know, as you get older and you move around, you realize that every place is special, and every place has its own methods of storytelling, but there is something about it. In fact, I was looking through this morning in case you all wanted me to read anything out loud, which I'm happy to and I was like what part should I read and I came across this little section where they're building out at the cut, you know, and they're building these buildings and someone smashes their thumb with a hammer. And then there's this little, you know, kind of ornery remark and this would speak to just what Brandon's asking about because I, I'd be writing you know, I'd get stuck and I think well what can this character say here and then I would just kind of call up from these phrases that come from Appalachian storytelling and one of them one time, you know, it was when we were living in Texas, actually, I was helping a friend put a roof on his deck, and I smashed my hand, my thumb nail with this hammer. And I told my friend what my dad said, you know, which is when that happens. Someone told him this when he was young, they say, 'Well, major pecker still growing.' And you're kind of like, what do you know? What in the hell does that mean? What does that have to do with anything, but then I started thinking about that, you know, that kind of passing down the phrases. And I think what it means is one, it shows the complexity of the storytelling, even in one phrase, so one, it shows you're still young, in years, you haven't, you know, you haven't yet reached the wisdom of how to not hit your thumb with a hammer when you're building and to its something to make you laugh, and take your focus off the pain. And so that I think, is the true essence and beauty of the storytelling from West Virginia and from Appalachia. It is, smile while you cry basically it's, you know, a way to laugh through hardship. And I personally did not experience a lot of hardship growing up, but obviously, I know a lot of people who did, they've always been the best storytellers. So you know, to speak real generally.
Brandon Dennison:You could read a passage, and then I think after that if folks have questions that that would be cool, Glenn, if you could read for us.
Glenn Taylor:Yeah, I'd be happy to. I couldn't decide this morning when I was looking. And so I thought do I do so much zoom for teaching, and you all don't have to get in the participants bar and do the little hand icon on your screen or anything, but maybe I could ask what people want to hear. Because in looking this morning, it's been so long, frankly, you know, since I've read from this book that it was shocking. One thing I can show you, even though you won't be able to see it very well is this starts the second part of the book, a house on the sand. And then what was fun was that my grandmother, my mom's mom, my mee maw, she drew that she she likes to draw, she liked to draw. She's passed on now, of course, but so that was fun to get my grandmother to do a little drawing for the book. And it was just a map of Marrowbone, circa late 1960s. So we've essentially skipped I can't remember how many years but quite a few years at this point in the book 10 years to be exact, from June of 53 to June of 63. So here we go. June 1963. The Slug bellied over wet dirt, striped trail left behind its feelers had the look of tiny wet matchsticks four skinny tentacles reaching out to the morning air reading the sunlight above sniffing the ground below. The feelers meant left and right they retracted and extended the slug came to the edge of drop off. It hesitated then carried forth vertical now called below by smell. Other snails had set their compasses the same and three were in stride with this one, intent on drowning. 19 of their brethren already laid dead at the bottom. They floated and sank, U shaped, still and brown and bloated. Mrs. Wells bent to the trap and dug her fingers under its rim. She pulled it from the dirt, leaving a circle impression behind three inches deep. Ledford had hand blown these for her extra deep ashtrays. Six of them sunken along the vegetable gardens perimeter they were slug death chambers. Every morning she emptied them into a slop bucket."23," she said aloud counting the number of dead in her Thursday morning round up, she knocked the glass trap against the side of her gallon bucket. An inch of beer swirled at the bottom and the little wet bodies dropped like turds. "Plunk, plunk, plunk," Mrs. Wells like to call out as they landed. At the gardens far end, Mary stepped lightly along a row of cabbage seedlings no bigger than Clover from her cupped palm. She dropped black pepper dust onto the soil that would keep the cats from pissing in the Rose they'd initially welcomed the unkept felines who proved their worthiness with gifts of dead mice. They'd sit at the front door with a limp tail between two teeth hanging like a drowned Nightcrawler, but lately, they take into the vegetable garden as their personal toilet, and this would not do. Mary sneezed from the pepper's rising dust cloud. "Bless you," Mrs. Wells called to her. She nearly had to shout across the garden, which had grown this season to the size of a baseball field. Mary was barefoot she wore sundress stained by blackberry juice and a gardening belt and made from a potato sack. Rachel had made it for her. 'How many dead?' she hollered to Miss Wells. "23 two more than yesterday." Mary tossed the last of her pepper at 17. She had already graduated high school and was enrolled at Marshall for fall. She would study political science just as Harold had done before her, sorry just as Harold had done before her, she wriggled her toes in the dirt and watched him. He was 30 yards off tending to the chickens in his undershirt. He opened door on the back of the coop and checked the nesting boxes. The broody hens squealed at him. Harold liked the chickens especially when they require he'd rub his knuckles against the back of their necks and watch the sheen move across the brown feathers like gasoline on a puddle, when the time came, he could snap one of those next, as easy as he could pet it. And I can just stop there. So we can have a little more time for people to ask things. But it just gives you kind of a sense of envisioning, you know, how I how I kind of had to envision this place as I'm technically writing this thing in northwest suburban Chicago about as far away from what I just read as you can get.
Brandon Dennison:No, and I think all of us in hearing that you can. There's family members that we've had, or grannies or grandpa's, that just popped to mind there. So that's wonderful. So let's go my screen is working right now, actually. So if you have a question, you can just do the the hand raise and just open it up for questions that the team might have for Glenn.
Gina Milum:I'm Gina Milum. I live about a half a mile from the flagship property of West Edge, which we'd love to have you come down and see what's going on down there. I just got back from vacation and took your book with me. And so I was on Maui for two weeks. And your book brought me I mean, my my grandmother had worked at Owens, Illinois. It was your description of Huntington, and of course, I'm older than most people on this call. So you know, the places and the things that you were describing a lot of those I remember, especially from the from the 60s, but my question is from March 1968. And it starts with Wimpy in the outhouse, a and you name a book that Wimpy is reading. And it's it's Letters from the Earth, which is a Mark Twain book and it is my favorite Twain writing. Tell me why you chose that book, and how you felt that fitted, it fits in to the rest of the narrative that you're telling?
Glenn Taylor:I first of all have to say, Gina that that is one of the most specific particular and best questions I have ever, ever received. By far. I wish I could answer it really well. And I'm so glad you picked up on it. And I believe at that time, I was trying to read more Mark Twain, I had picked up Letters from the Earth used at a bookstore while writing this book. And to be totally frank and honest with you, I think that's probably one of those moments, where you're writing a novel, you're probably about three fourths of the way through you figure and you don't have any idea what the hell you're doing anymore. And so you're like, 'Ah, well, I'll have, you know, Wimpy in the outhouse. Having a bowel movement and reading Mark Twain,' and then you just go from there. And so this is what I, you know, it's funny, and it sounds ridiculous, but it probably is a fairly honest answer to your great question, because it's what I tell my fiction writing students so much, I tell them, you're gonna get stuck. When you get stuck, go take a walk, look around, listen. And something will come if you don't feel like going and walking around and listening, have strategically a bunch of books and artifacts for lack of a better term, totemic items that you've picked up along the way, pocket knives, feathers, whatever you keep, and have those all around and pick these things up and read from them or look at them closely and start to write. And I really think if I try and stretch my memory, that that's what I was doing. In that March 1968 section, he sat inside the outhouse reading a beat up copy of Letters from the Earth, morning sun shone through the cut half moon on the door, and illuminated the open book, something moved there cast a shadow on his page across the word, microbe. So literally, I would have been reading Letters from the Earth myself, we will leave out the part if I was actually on the toilet or not while I was reading it, and then this is how I come up with starts to sections like that. And I probably have some vague idea of where I'm going in that chapter, which is to you know, have the red bird appear again, and something crazy has gone on with the red bird. And that all comes from this, you know, Cardinal that was always dive bombing my parents window and dive bombing the sideview mirror on their car. So these would actually be things from my real waking life that I just throw in to the novel, almost not haphazardly, but because the word microbe stood out to me like why would Mark Twain had been writing about microbes, and here I am writing about cicadas and dust on the air. And so it's almost like trying to channel him and trying to connect with him, you know, all these years later in some way through writing. And so I'm always telling my students just put a line down it doesn't matter if you don't know where you're going and just just keep going. So I probably was doing that thing right there. Not a very satisfying nor sophisticated answer, but the truth nonetheless.
Carla Ferguson:My name is Carla. I am the Asset Manager for Coldfield and I live, we bought a house here on the West End of Huntington. I'm about two blocks from the arch. And I'm whenever you said that, that made me feel really funny because my house is 100 years old. So I know you have probably been by my house many times.
Glenn Taylor:Uh huh, I probably have.
Carla Ferguson:I want to I have a question though. In the book, you talk about Ludford for having a dream to create the marbles. So I'm wondering, have you, is that something that you put into the book for this area? In southern Appalachia, there seems to be a lot of that intuition, or the I guess you would call superstition of the dreams and having visions and that sort of thing. Have you, did you add that to the book to portray Appalachia as people as being more intuitive? Or did you add it to the book, did you experience something? Did you have somebody in the family, I had an aunt who used to tell me that she could purchase warts, if you had a wart, she would buy it for a penny, she'd give you a penny and you would go away. There's these all these kind of really strange witchy things that are happening. Why did you add that in there?
Glenn Taylor:Man that's another good one. It probably was a swirling combination of things. You know, I can't deny as I said
Carla Ferguson:I had written a list of questions to ask you and earlier, that not everything for me as a writer comes from where I'm from, or the storytellers I grew up around or their superstitions or their strange practices that you allude to, some of it comes from, you know, formal training as a writer and getting, you know, an MFA in fiction writing and finally reading things in classes that I had not because I was young and lazy. So things for instance, like 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which some of you may have read, and, and so certainly some of that influence of the supernatural or the dream world or having visions comes from my reading of other books, like Marquez, and you know, when in school, you call that magical realism that you can call it whatever you want. It's, it's beyond us, and we won't grasp it. But some of us try to write about it at the same time. You have professors, you know, in fiction writing workshops in those graduate programs, who tell you dreams are cheap for the fiction writer don't write about dreams. It's cheap way of moving the plot along. And I kind of had to struggle with that, probably because of exactly what you're saying, Carla, I just grew up around people who believed in dreams and the power of them, and I still do you know, my wife, Margaret was living in London after she graduated college and had a dream about one of them was a you know, that reading, Marrowbone Marble her grandfather one night and woke up in a panic and called her her mom and said, 'I had this terrible dream about Granddaddy. And he had the sores all over him.' And he was, you know, he had just been put in the hospital and he had gotten bed sores. And so she's, you know, somehow she knew that from across an ocean and other other little things probably guided me in that direction. But I would say it was a combination of things I was reading, that were called magical realism. So for instance, I took a class you know, in graduate school called, you know, the magical realists. And we read a lot of, you know, Central and South American writers, we read all kinds of things. Eduardo Galliano was a big influence on me, a writer from Uruguay I don't know if anybody's familiar with him. But he has a book called Waking Words, I think, and it's very dreamlike, and the more I've written, and the further I've gone in this thing, the more I actually go away from those professor's bad advice about not trucking and dreams I truck in them more and more this this, the most recent book I finished is tentatively called The Songs of Betty Beach. And you could say that it's a very unconventional and you could say that the whole thing is one long fever dream, one long hallucinatory trip, one can't tell what's real and what's not. So I think that I probably put that dream in, that you refer to as a combination of all that I've said and then trying to figure out what it must be like for young men like Colin, who I talked about in my English 101 class, or Ledford, who's a made up person who were asked to go and see and do these things, and then have to come home and try and live a regular life. Company had reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Obviously, as we know now, through all we know about PTSD, that you know, the dreams that would come after you, after that kind of experience, I imagined would just be very difficult to And I was going to ask you if you had been
Glenn Taylor:Wow. deal with. And I kind of wanted to have a dream that that produced action and that you know, produced positive, hopeful things. In addition to the bad haunting dreams, I suppose. influenced by him? And you answered my, you answered my question. Let me ask you. One other question, you know, as you are writing down these different instances of you know racial tensions that that happened in Huntington, and around Wayne, you know, in Wayne County, but mostly in Huntington, how historically accurate because now I remember a lot of these, you know, a lot of similar instances, how historically accurate did you try to be in enlisting these things, you know, like the incident at the Keith Alby and those things.
Brandon Dennison:Pretty accurate because I had, you know, friends to think I'm gonna look at my own acknowledgments here. And Gina, was it you that just brought up the Owens, Illinois, I forgot to talk about that part, too. So yeah. So if I look at my own acknowledgments, let me talk about that first, and then I'll talk about some of the racial unrest that was going on. So one of my favorite sources that I consulted was this, it was literally a plastic teeth bound, if you can picture it, you know, when people used to go to Kinkos, and get all their copies made and have those spiral, you know, plastic bindings, it was like that, and it was called the history of the Owens, Illinois, Huntington, West Virginia, West Virginia, plant number two, by the KOWBA Genealogy and Historical Society, my dad got it, I believe, at that time, that Historical Society, I found out was housed in the basement of a church, maybe in the West End, I can't remember which one, he went and picked it up for me, mailed it to me in Chicago. And that thing was amazing as a source of, you know, trying to be historically accurate, like Gina is talking about. So for instance, Mack Wells, you know, I knew, so I'm always using names, real, real last names, combined with other real first names to name people. So the Wells family was a family that we all knew in Huntington. And unfortunately, you all may remember Tim Wells was who we knew best, and there was always a Tim Wells Memorial 5k run because he actually died while quite young, still in high school. Anyway, they were a really great family, also, from they were originally from McDowell, like so many black families who end up in Huntington. But so the Wells family influenced my writing of the book. And I was trying to figure out well post World War II, if somebody like Mack Wells was going to have a job at Owens, Illinois, what was it going to be, and it was going to be janitor, that was clear from looking at this, you know, this historical artifact, then I would read other things about, you know, glass, the glass factories back then. And my dad actually knew a person in Mingo County who had a single furnace, you know, single batch glass factory really small. So that helped. But as far as the stuff you're talking about, beyond these, you know, reporting civil rights, part two, or the civil rights movement a photographic history, I look, I use a lot of magnifying glass on photographs. Yeah, I still keep it beside me. So I'm always getting out the old magnifying glass on the old black and white photographs and looking for details. I was always kind of haunted by the words of another Huntingtonian C. Michael Gray. I don't know if anybody knows Michael Gray, but he was a lawyer. He's back in Huntington now. But he was teaching at OU when I was at Ohio University in college, and one time, my dad, who was friends with Michael Gray hooked me up to get a ride back to Athens, from Huntington. And Michael had been a student at, he taught law at Ohio University. And he had grown up in Huntington, black, and he had then gone to West Virginia State, which, of course of that time in Charleston, you know, still is an HBCU, but was very much so at that point was also a very prominent HBCU at that point. And he told me that he left you know that he dropped out of school, his freshman or sophomore year, I can't remember. And at that time, I was a wayward, misbehaving type. And I said, 'Oh, were you partying too much?' And he said,'No, I dropped down to join the civil rights movement.' And he actually was in that march from Selma to Montgomery, and he really enlightened me that day on the realities of what it was like, and so that had stuck with me all those years. He also enlightened me on how he got to Vietnam, because he was drafted. Of course, once he left college to join the civil rights movement, he gets drafted. And he told me that he couldn't figure out why he felt so comfortable once he was, you know, overseas and they looked around one day and you realize so many brothers that's what he told me so many brothers and you know, I was like, oh, and that's when I first became enlightened to the the idea that who was really being drafted for our for our foreign wars. And so it was a combination of talking to people like Michael Gray, and having my mind opened up and then reading about the Selma to Montgomery march and then more specifically going to the archives. I can't remember where it was now at Marshall. But finding this thesis, which was called an appeal for racial justice, the Civic Interests Progressives Confrontation with Huntington, West Virginia and Marshall University in 1963, to 1965. So that was a master's thesis by Bruce A. Thompson that you could just, you know, we can all get anybody's thesis if we want to. And I did not know about the CIP Civic Interest Progressives. And that's when I got really schooled because all that stuff really happened. If you can picture down on the plaza there. I grew up going to Bailey's cafeteria, but I had never heard of the other restaurant, what's it called light pantry, so not light pantry, but all of that was real. And the Civic Interest Progressives would do, not what they called a sit in, but what they called a share in, where the white students in the CIP would go in and get a table, you know, go through the line, get their table at Bally's. And then their black friends who were in the CIP would come in and sit down with them and they would share the food. So technically, you know, they were finding these ways around segregation. I really found that through that and through that case, that Herb Henderson some of you are probably familiar with Herb Henderson and Herb Henderson Center and all the good work they do. And my dad knew Herb Henderson, Miss Henderson was my guidance counselor, you know, at Huntington High and so all these people I knew, the Hendersons had a cross burned in their yard, I found out from my dad when they first moved to the south side. And that would have been in like the 70s. So my world was just kind of blown open through a combination of research and books and then just found research from my dad, from Michael Gray, from others. And then a little funny side note, I got scared, you know about this book club because I was worried about all those real last names I used, you know, I didn't want to offend anybody who might be kin to some of the, because I knew all kinds of Maynard's and loved Maynard's you know, and just like Taylors and Dennison's, you know, there's, there's good ones and there's bad ones. And I'm here, I'm using real names. But the one real name that I used that I that was a real first and last name. And I don't know if anybody picked up on this, and the lawyer at HarperCollins, you know, kind of had a talking to with me about this was Roba Quisenberry. Now that name was just too good not to use. I mean, what kind of you know, what a wacky name. And so Roba Quisenberry owned that restaurant, and he was the Bull Connor of West Virginia, and he did pour bleach on the floors. And he did take a cattle prod to, you know, black patrons. And so I decided I was going to use his real name, you know, because why not? Somebody did all that stuff. He might as well come after him. And so I asked Michael Gray I was like, 'You're a lawyer, this Harper Collins lawyer is saying I shouldn't use real names. Do you think there's any question berries out there? They're gonna come after me?' And he said, 'Glenn, if there's any Quisenberry's left alive, they can't find their way to the outhouse much less the library.' I was just like, oh, yeah, so I've always been waiting to come across like a nice, well, meaning Quisenberry somewhere and be like, I'm sorry, you know, but your ancestor, you know, was a racist. So I hope that answers your question about research. Nick has a good question. I want to ask it in his own words, and then it gets this. I have a follow up Nick on that as well.
Nick Guertin:No, I was just gonna say, yeah. Thanks, Glen. Yeah, so I'm Nick Guertin, and I'm the head of our real estate and construction team here at Coalfield. And so we've previously read Huey Perry's book here with this group as well, like late last year, we read it and so I noticed your mention of it at the end of the book, it's just interesting, because to me, there's a lot of there's a lot of discussion here about like the the maybe the realization of some of the things that like Perry and the residents in Mingo County, were actually trying to achieve, you know, from like, a grassroots bottom up, you know, locally driven, locally prioritized types of change. And so I'm just curious if if, like, that's if that if you felt like writing this was almost a continuation of those types of efforts that, you know, have actually been chronicled, especially during the war on poverty.
Glenn Taylor:Absolutely. You know, I hope it's an honoring of They'll Cut Off Your Project and Huey, I hope it's a continuation. It's kind of when I when I mentioned earlier that this is the book that feels my most unearned or that I didn't quite have the stuff to write about. I meant it but what I had done, of course, was read They'll Cut Off Your Project and dog eared every page and you know, I'm fascinated by that Dyngus tunnel and, and of course, I know Huey, my dad's good friends with him. They have lunch every Wednesday if you all ever want to go by the West End Cafe and I just love Huey and I love the Perry's and I love how they all you know, came up on the creek, as Huey says and one time I asked Huey, he was playing harmonica one night and he's really good and I was like,'Huey, where'd you learn to play harmonica like that?' And he was like, 'Under the bed sheets real quiet late at night because I grew up old regular Baptist.' You know, so he had to had to hide playing the harmonica and that is just fascinating family and just a hardcore family. You know, some of the kids went to Berea and some didn't, I think because they qualified financially for a while. And then when their dad got a job hauling coal, you know, they were no longer in that range of being able to go to Berea, but would have been Simon went to Berea and as a freshman at Berea, he found out that one of the businesses in downtown Berea that wouldn't serve black folks was owned by the college. So here was a college proclaiming that they were dedicated to the rights of all but yet, they owned a building in which a property was operating, that wouldn't serve black patrons. And so he led a march of students as a freshman through downtown Berea to change that, and it did change. So I have, you know, I almost told Huey, I was like, 'Huey sorry, I plagiarized your whole life story for this for this novel.' You know, because what he did, you know, cannot be overstated. I cannot think of a whole lot of examples of people who would be put in charge of the commission, you know, as a school teacher in Mingo County, and literally just go and have these meetings and listen to the people. What a wild idea to actually have community meetings, listen to the people and then try and enact what they say they need. Like, can you imagine if we just cut through it all, and were able to do that? And so I think Huey, I view him as revolutionary in that way. And so you'll be glad to know when Elizabeth Catte's book came out, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, and she came up to WVU, I was I had blurbed, the book, you know. And so I had the honor of getting to introduce her. This was before it really blew up. And so my parents came up from Huntington, big huge turnout, and I can't remember what building it was, but it was one of those big theaters, you know, and one of the newer buildings at WVU. Huey drove my parents up, of course, they couldn't drive, he insisted on driving in his, I forget what kind of car he has, but it's one of those really nice, you know, like those high end Kias that are basically the same as a Mercedes, but you get to pay$10,000, less on sticker price he drove drove them up in that, and there he was in the audience. And she, of course, writes so much about him in What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. So I was able, during my introduction of her to have Huey stand up and the whole, the whole crowd, you know, gave him an ovation. So I'm so glad that WVU press reissued his book, I think he is, you know, just just wonderful. And so yes, anything you asked about Rick, or I'm sorry, anything you asked about, Nick, I owe to Huey in that regard. And I hope that he, I think he was happy with my kind of skewed portrayal of the corruption that would have been around how the money was spent during the war on poverty.
Brandon Dennison:I think the book, it honors sort of the change makers, and yet I feel like you're struggling also your characters are struggling with, like how much change is really possible in one lifetime? And sort of towards the ending, feeling like they've done some good things, you know, they tried their best, but ultimately, it's sort of all gets turned into a lake anyways. And so I wonder if you could just speak to that. I wonder, did that come out of conversations with Huey? Or with other change makers? Or is that something that you just sort of intuited? Am I even right? Is that is that a tension that you're getting at.
Glenn Taylor:You're totally right, but I don't think it came out of conversations with Huey or change makers. I think it comes out of that, that struggle that all of us probably have
Brandon Dennison:When we started talking about inside where we want, I want to be like Staple says, you know, I want to be, I want to rise above and I want to remain eternally optimistic, and I will, you know, I mean, one of my favorite phrases comes from Studs Terkel and it's Hope Dies Last. I don't know if, it actually doesn't originally come from Studs Terkel, but those of you who may know Studs Terkel, one of his books is called Hope Dies Last. And in the intro to that he explains how it actually was originally in Spanish, which I can't remember the translation it would be almost like I can't remember, la esperanza muere el último, or something like that. Sorry, my Spanish minor in college, but I've let it go a little bit but Hope Dies Last is uh, it kind of encompasses I think what Brandon's asking about because I always will feel it and I felt it, you know, this this past year and my oldest son is 17 and ready to go to college and we were in Morgantown, you know, this summer and spring and fall and trying to do a little bit to take to the streets and join protests and kind of raise him up in that way. And I think it's working. But at the same time, as Brandon says, you know, it all just gets flooded out by the Corps of Engineers anyway. Or, you know, which would be maybe a symbolic washing over of all the progress that had been made in this little fantasy commune world I'd created or if you think about it this way, who in the end really prevails whose way prevails in this book, it's really not Staples. It really is, Erm Bacigalupo. You know, it's like bringing the heavy hitters and get retribution through violence on those who have dared to cross us and I don't want to do that in real life and I'm not a violent person in real life. But I also can't deny that in each book that I write, whether it's Trenchmouth Taggart and what happened in Matewan, you know, all the violence there that really affected my grandmother, as I told you all when she was 12, or kind of in this book, you know, all the violence that that kind of it ends with, but I always try and leave. So really, I guess, Brandon, it comes from that constant struggle inside me like as soon as you start learning about Dr. King, you want so badly to believe in non violent action. But yet you grow up someplace where violence is pretty much all around and, you know, at your school and, and racial violence is there. Yeah. And so you can't deny it. And so it's probably just a constant struggle that I'll never escape. And I probably use my books as a way to try and figure it out. storytelling. We're near the wrap up. And it flew by so hopefully, we can have you back.
Glenn Taylor:Sure. I'm looking in the chat. I want to just make sure Jacob was talking about names. And then once he grew up, doodlebug, AC Fox, cold baby and bear dog. Wow. That's awesome. Associated with that, but yeah, characters names. Let me just say real quick, because that's, uh, oh, and then Gina's mother in law was a Maynard. This is great. I could talk about names all day. Let me just say real quick that I tell my students when they get I mentioned earlier, that what I tell my students when they get stuck, just look around at your totemic items, pick up a book, go for a walk, when I tell them when they can't get started, because that's the other big thing. When you can't get started. Start with a name. And if you're interested, I don't know how many of you know Still the journal. It's a Kentucky literary journal. And they asked me one time to write a prompt a writing prompt, and it's called name Silas House and Marian Worthington in that crew run run that magazine. And Silas asked me if I'd write this thing and it talks. Exactly. It kind of uses exactly what Jacob is saying in his that the way I come up with my names is I take a family name, family middle name from back then I take a funny name that I've heard from my dad, if someone from Mingo County, and I just jam them together. So some people use baby books, some people use phone books, some people use online databases, but I think the best ones come from folks that have really lived and breathed that you just can't believe threir, their names. And that's a great way to start writing. So if you're interested, you could look up on Still Journal that there's an exercise called name that really gets at what Jacob, Jacob and others are talking about here. There really are some some great names in West Virginia.
Brandon Dennison:We started off on storytelling, and then you have this great quote about Hope Dies Last, and I think a lot of the value of the storytelling is it keeps the hope alive in a lot of ways. So maybe in one life, some change gets washed away. But by keeping the stories of good people doing good things, keeping that example alive, generation to generation, it adds up, I think and so I this is just a great, great book, and you're such a good author and sort of Appalachian positive voice for and representative for Appalachian. I've just really enjoyed the time, Glenn, and appreciate you being with us.
Glenn Taylor:I appreciate you saying all that. And I hope that I can continue to do that. So I will try. Although as I said mentioned earlier, all my stuff just keeps getting weirder and wackier. And it probably gets a little harder to get published. When you go that route. It seems like writers can get more conventional or less as they age and I'm probably definitely in the latter category. So maybe Gina's question about the dreams and the visions will be my saving grace. I hope I got to answer everybody's question in the chat.
Brandon Dennison:You covered them. Keep Appalachia weird.
Glenn Taylor:That's right. I will I pledge to do so.
Brandon Dennison:Thank you so much, Glenn. Stay in touch with us.
Glenn Taylor:Thanks everybody. I will
Brandon Dennison:Change in the Coalfields is a podcast created by Coalfield Development at the West Edge Factory in Huntington, West Virginia. This episode was hosted by Brandon Denison, and produced and edited by JJN Multimedia. Become a part of our mission to rebuild the Appalachian economy by going to our website coalfield-development.org to make a donation. You can email us anytime at info at coalfield-development.org and subscribe to our newsletter for up to date information on the podcast. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn by searching for Coalfield Development. Check back soon for more episodes.