Ann Pancake’s Appalachia

The first time I came across Ann Pancake’s fiction was a live reading. I didn’t go to hear her. I’d never even heard of her or her books. But once Ann started reading one of the stories from Given Ground, her prize-winning debut collection, I was stunned. I might have actually gaped. Every aspect of good writing was on full display—distinctive characters negotiated great challenges with full and flawed humanity. But what got me to literally skinch to the front of my seat was her language. Remarkably fresh and vivid, Pancake’s stories ride on the power of a human voice. I couldn’t believe how embodied her images were, how authentically her characters talked. I didn’t think she could sustain such edgy writing. But she did and does.

Years later, I was asked to give a library talk about a novel that included Appalachian coal issues. I reviewed the assigned title but concluded that “If you want to read a great book about West Virginia and coal country more generally, read Ann Pancake’s Strange As This Weather Has Been.” To me, Ann’s book sets the standard for what a novel can do.

Around 2016, I emailed Ann. I wanted to discuss the Appalachian themes and locations in her latest collection, Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, and the complicated political narrative about West Virginia that has asserted itself, madly, in recent years. Our phone conversation ranged as though we were old friends. I refined the transcript for a book I was writing. But political conversations during the Trump administration and since caused me to ask her if she’d be willing to have the interview published. We both refined it by email once again.

Ann grew up, was educated, and worked as an activist in West Virginia, and long after she moved to the West Coast, she continued to write about her homeland. Now, back in Morgantown, she is working to articulate new possibilities for a region and world that must swiftly reimagine its place in nature. In our conversation—which has been edited for clarity and concision—Pancake and I discussed her intuitive writing process, the deep-rooted and much-abused myths of Appalachia, and the difference between documenting reality and creating it anew.

---

Do you keep to a schedule?

I get right to work when I get up, and I put in about two hours of work five days a week as long as my teaching responsibilities are not too heavy that week. Inevitably, I eventually get depleted, and I have to not-write for a week or so. But for the most part, I try to write almost daily. 

If I’m depleted, I read fiction or poetry that replenishes me and makes me want to write again. Or I go for a hike. Being out in the woods is the best remedy for when I feel depleted.

When I talk about my research in the creative process with people who don’t consider themselves artists, they are most interested in the A-ha experience. But I’m really interested in the stage in the process that precedes the breakthrough or insight.

Well, I think a lot of the preparation or immersion for me may be more unconscious. The A-ha moment comes first. The hard work part is later, when I’m revising so that what the A-ha moment generated is comprehensible to an audience without losing all of the original raw energy. It’s really important to create the mind space, when I first start in the morning, to shift from an intellectual approach. I don’t write from ideas. I write from sound, image, or character.

Can you say more about starting from sound?

It’s a kind of percussive beat, a rhythm.

Do you listen to music while you write, to stimulate that sense of rhythm?

No. I prefer it to be quiet. External music interferes with the internal music I’m hearing. It makes it hard for me to tap into the intuitive thinking and feeling that creates the art.

Your imagery is so embodied. For example, in the novella that begins your latest book, Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, the main character’s feeling is described this way: “Shame geysered through Janie again, as deep and shuddery as grief. And then, it was grief.” Does the perception arise first and then you find the language, or vice versa?

Well, I start with the character and how that character is feeling. I try to feel in my body how that character would have an experience, and then I write the image or description for it.  

You used the term “intuitive.” I’d like to hear how that feels to you or how you work that way.

It feels to me like I’m tapping into a part of my mind that isn’t intellectual and isn’t conscious, and I think that part of the mind is linked into a more universal kind of mind. I don’t mean the collective unconscious, the way Jung uses it, but more sort of a higher consciousness—probably “higher” is the wrong word because it’s a consciousness that pervades all the natural things in the world.

So we participate in a way of knowing that’s not distinctively our own, personally, but our own as a species.

Yeah, that’s well put.

You mentioned how taking a hike or being in the woods helps you tune into that more. How did you discover that way of knowing?

Ummm. I think I discovered it. When I started writing stories with a voice that was distinctively my own, I gradually became aware that it was connected to West Virginia, and probably connected to the speech in West Virginia, but it’s also connected to the land in West Virginia. As I wrote more and realized that most of my work had to be rooted there, and as I lived in a lot of different places in the world and wasn’t able to hear the stories as easily, I realized that they’re probably related to the land in West Virginia.

The researcher David W. Galenson examined the life cycles of artists, revealing two general types, the “Seekers” and the “Finders.” Seekers, epitomized by Paul Cezanne, have a vague but compelling goal or vision that generally exceeds their skill, materials, or methods. Their growth tends to be incremental as they continue to gain more and more from their attempts, but they also feel like they are failing or not reaching their goals. Finders, on the other hand, communicate discoveries they’ve found, and so they can more quickly explore methods or materials to express them. They tend to plan more thoroughly because they have a clearer sense for what they are after. Picasso is Galenson’s type for this, but I think of Miles Davis as well, having many “periods” over the course of their work. Does this speak to your process?

I very much identify as a “Seeker.” My vision far exceeds my capabilities, which is constantly frustrating, and I think my growth has indeed been incremental. I pretty much never start a project with a plan, never have a clear sense of where the project is going. Actually, if I did know where it was going from the beginning, I think I’d get bored as I created it. When I wrote Strange As This Weather Has Been I had to deliberately plan for the first time, but I didn’t even do that until I’d written a good 75 pages of the book. The stories in Given Ground were written entirely through inspiration. They were written over the course of fifteen years, and I only wrote one when I heard it come into my head.

Those stories are shorter than your more recent work, too.

I couldn’t sustain a longer work at that time. But when I did the novel—I didn’t intend to write a novel, didn’t think of myself as a novelist. But as I got into the issue of mountaintop removal, I realized that it’s so complex that I needed more space to deal with it. But I was never very good with plot, so I had to figure that out. And then I returned to short stories. The novella In Such Light was my first one, and I was still trying to figure out how to work again at the scale of the short story.

Oh, so the topic of the novel indicated the form. And then you needed to learn how to write in that form, and that shifted your methods?

Something like that, yeah. With the novel, you can’t work entirely by inspiration, on intuition, unless you have decades to write it or you are a genius, which I’m not. So with the novel, I had to learn how to plot, how to structure, and how to write the book steadily without losing what is alive about it.  

Intuition is hit and miss; you can’t really control it. And so, with the novel, in order to finish it, because it was such a long piece, I needed to figure out how to deliberately generate inspiration. Or deliberately put myself into a more intuitive zone to access the material, which I didn’t do with the short stories because I just waited for them to arrive.

Did you find ways that put you in that zone easier?

Yeah, there are a lot of different techniques, but a big part of it was just writing at the same time every day, and tapping in that way, and part of it was just re-engaging with pieces that I had already written to move me back into that writing zone or that way of listening. And then there was having to learn the difference between being depleted or being bored; when I was just being lazy, or when I genuinely needed to take time away from it and let the well refill; and what activities were the most replenishing, so that I could return in a week or two and continue to work on it intuitively.

And the other thing I had to learn was not to be so precious or not to be so wed to the idea that only the stuff that came hyper-intuitively was the good material in the book; there were sections that I just had to deliberately make it up, and I would think they were weaker than other sections. But when you pull it all together, the reader doesn’t necessarily recognize the difference between the stuff that felt more God-given and the stuff I was making up on my own.

Most artists talk about learning to craft our materials, but some of these lessons are really about how do I shape my life and the choices that are presented to me in order to facilitate the work? Does that make sense to you?

Oh, absolutely. I think my whole adult life has been trying to figure out ways to create a life where I can actually write almost every day. And there are a lot of sacrifices that one makes, or can make. I mean, security, health insurance, retirement. When I’m not writing, I’m not happy. So not-writing is not really an option, and I have to figure out how to make enough money to live on and still be able to write really consistently, or I get depressed.

That’s exactly what I intuited for my own life, but we decided not to have children.

I decided that too. That was a deliberate decision that was very based on wanting to be a writer. I grew up with five little brothers and sisters, and I know what it is to raise kids. I love kids, but I knew what it does to your privacy and your time and your quiet, and all that, so I was really aware of that. I also made decisions about graduate school. I didn’t want to go into debt, so I postponed graduate school and worked for five years before I went.

[SECTION BREAK]

There’s been a great deal of national commentary about coal country, as a political force and as an overlooked constituency. You’ve engaged directly and powerfully with those issues in your work, presenting them with a great deal of complexity. One aspect I’m interested in is how the current political talk leaves out the nuance of the local, like you describe in the story “The Arsonists,” where they’re burning out people’s houses. [The story revolves around a rural West Virginia town, already ravaged by the coal industry, where arsonists are lighting up buildings; the characters seem powerless to stop either process.]

Of course, the coal industry is one of the state’s largest employers. One amazing line captures the complex coal politics. The residents were recording video to document the burned-out houses. You wrote, “A few people even videotaped it, back when some believed that bearing witness could make a difference.”

That says so much about both the scope of the injustice and the entrenchment of the powers that seem to be aligned against the regular people.

For me, that’s a really important line, so I’m really grateful that you noticed it.

This echoes the story of Lace in Strange as This Weather Has Been who goes from a hometown girl with dreams of getting away from West Virginia to a mother and wife of a coal miner. Later in the novel, she becomes more active in opposing the coal industry, which causes a rift in her marriage, but this line is saying, “Even if you make that really hard intellectual and emotional and social journey to be more active, there is a wall because it won’t make any difference anyway.”

Well, yeah, yeah. I have really complicated thinking around that, but yeah. Yeah.

In terms of the larger conversation about the politics of coal and bringing back those jobs, President Trump declared that he’s listening to people, like coal miners and their families. But having grown up there and having roots there still, you’ve been listening for a lot longer.

Oh, I could talk for several hours about this, but … okay … I think America’s perception of Appalachia is a very old and very entrenched mythology. I don’t think it’s real. There’s an enormous amount of evidence and scholarship on that. And usually, the region serves a purpose, rhetorically or mythologically or ideologically, as it has served a purpose materially, literally because we have provided the coal to power the East Coast since the industrial revolution. So the narrative that blames Appalachia for Donald Trump (who is a product of New York) is just another iteration.

It’s a very sensitive subject for me.

I see West Virginia as a scapegoat. This is not to say that West Virginia doesn’t have racism; it certainly does, and homophobia, and other extremely disturbing qualities. West Virginia also made a very bad decision, twice, about who they elected as president. However, many, many other people and other places are just as racist and homophobic and voted twice for a horrific individual to lead this country.  

It’s pretty common knowledge that West Virginia and Appalachia have long provided the United States with natural resources. It’s less known that West Virginia and Appalachia have just as long provided the United States with discursive resources, by which I mean, narratives about Appalachia have been used to shape issues on the national political scene since the 1800s. For example, in the late 1800s/early 1900s, when there was hysteria in metropolitan areas about immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, the American imagination turned to Appalachia and proclaimed it a reservoir of Anglo-Saxon pure white blood. This wasn’t true, but it was part of the dominant American narrative at that time, a way for America to think about itself, explain itself, even comfort itself.

A different narrative of Appalachia was used by Johnson during the War on Poverty. And now yet another narrative about Appalachia is used to explain why people voted for Trump—even though Trump has followers everywhere. This is really hard, Edward, because I could go on and on.

You should! Go ahead.

I’ll just say one more thing about this and I’ll go back to the videotaping.

I believe that many mythologies of Appalachia help people avoid looking at their class privilege. If Appalachia is responsible for its own misery because its people are dumb, lazy, uneducated, then we—people who are not working-class or poor—don’t have to admit our own complicity in that misery. Class privilege depends on some people not having class privilege. The fact that we “have” is dependent on some people not having, on some people sacrificing, whether they want to sacrifice or not. And some of those people see in Donald Trump…not a savior, I don’t think that’s it. I think they see in Donald Trump revenge, a vehicle for their fear and their rage, and a last-ditch attempt to hold onto the one identity position that still gives them a sense of power: their whiteness.

Working-class and poor white people don’t want to look at their race privilege. But a lot of white middle-class, upper-middle-class, and upper-class people sure don’t want to look at their class privilege. If we explain Appalachia through popular mythologies that essentially blame the victim, then only Appalachians are responsible for the devastation in the region. But our region has been devastated, sacrificed, so other people can have stuff, basically. Yeah, we here in Appalachia are also complicit in the destruction. But most of the destruction has always been so people who don’t live here can have what they want to have without living with any of the collateral damage.

So, back to “when some believed that bearing witness could make a difference.” That’s just my personal experience of being an activist in West Virginia for a long time. I mean, the line in the story is a little bit of an exaggeration. Obviously, people have become more educated about mountaintop removal and other forms of environmental devastation in Appalachia. But it seems this has not made a difference at the federal level or the state level.

I hate to say this because people have worked so hard, and we’ve made these tiny gains under Obama, but teeny, teeny tiny. And the reason coal is now going to go under, it doesn’t have to do with activism, per se. Coal is declining for economic reasons, like the explosion of natural gas production.  

So I feel very frustrated about it. But what I want to do in my work, and what I want to encourage other West Virginians to do, is start thinking more about how we create something new instead of just documenting the badness. I mean, we’ve documented the hell out of it. So what I’m focusing on is how do we move past documentation because it has not brought salvation. Now my question is, how do we see, amongst the ruins here in West Virginia, opportunities for re-creation? I see West Virginia as having undergone the kind of destruction that is imminent in a lot of other places in the United States if we stay our present course. So how we resurrect ourselves here can be a model for how other places do that. We’re still in trouble here and we have an extremely damaging state legislature right now, but if you look away from the government, if you look elsewhere, West Virginia has scores of grassroots movements, and all kinds of new businesses carrying us towards a new economy, and so many efforts towards sustainable energy, and all kinds of creative work going into dealing with substance abuse. These are just a few examples. Lots and lots of re-creation is going on here. Will it be too little too late? Will those working for the good outside the conventions of the state government manage to transform this place despite the government? I don’t know. But I have to maintain hope. Even if I don’t see the transformation in my lifetime.

Tell me more about your current project.

I’m writing another novel. It too is set in West Virginia and tackles environmental subjects, but it’s also about recreating different relationships with the land and beings who aren’t human, relationships more reciprocal and respectful than the relationships we’ve had in the West since at least the Enlightenment.

One thing I’m finding challenge is that it’s incredibly difficult to talk about the sacred and the natural world using the kind of vocabulary that is taken seriously in the United States. And in a way that I’m not discredited as either flaky or crazy or New Age. That’s what’s most difficult.

So often, those discussions are framed in cultural or economic terms, or strictly using scientific language.

In the face of climate change and the kinds of extinctions that are going on right now, I believe really firmly that science alone is not going to help us find a way out of this. So thinking about the natural world from different perspectives is absolutely essential. I also find writing this book rewarding because the work I did on mountaintop removal was mostly about documenting destruction, and the emphasis with this is trying to look past destruction.

Let’s go back to what you said before about trying to pivot away from documentation to move toward creation. How do you see that happening or who do you see already doing that?

Well, in Appalachia right now, there is a lot of down-to-the-ground rebuilding going on, as I mentioned a little bit ago.  

Personally, I feel that Strange As This Weather Has Been documented the devastation in the coalfields, but it did not offer much vision beyond that. I think I, and other artists, have a responsibility to create more vision.

I think American culture is a culture that’s pretty cut off from genuine access to imagination. It may not look that way because of the entertainment industry, but much of that, in my opinion, is not genuine imagination. And Western culture doesn’t give much credence to intuitive knowledge, so we are not encouraged to foster our intuition.

However, artists do traffic in intuition, we are more in touch with our unconscious, our dreams, our imagination. We have experience in those realms that many people don’t.  I firmly believe that what’s going on now in our country requires—I hate to use a cliché, but—it requires a complete paradigm shift. And the only way we get to that is imagining forward into it. And so the role of the artist is to do that, to dream forward. And not in a dystopic way; we have a lot of representations of dystopia, so many that I think they could become self-fulfilling prophesies.

We need other ways to think forward. We need to imagine other ways to relate to each other, other ways to have economies, and certainly other ways to have relationships with the natural world because our relationship with the natural world underlies everything else. ▩

---