The author Ann Pancake hasn’t lived in her home state, West Virginia, for years, but her stories are overwhelmingly set in hilly Appalachia, where she says her unconscious was formed. Ms. Pancake, who is a presenter at this year’s Geography of Hope Conference—a biennial gathering organized by Point Reyes Books that explores the relationship between people and the land, and, next weekend, women and the land in particular—said she feels a moral imperative to write about her home state. It’s one of the poorest in the nation, and its history is fraught with natural resources extraction. She says activism is important, but that it’s not enough to save the land; people also need to start “re-imagining our relationship with the natural world” and recognizing the land as sacred—a theme she explores in a collection of short stories published last month, “Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley.” Last Friday, she spoke with the Light about her new story collection, her contrasting relationships with the West Coast and West Virginia and the exploitation of her home state’s landscape.
Point Reyes Light: What was your childhood like in West Virginia, and how did you eventually end up in Seattle?
Ann Pancake: I have five younger brothers and sisters and we lived in a rural area, so I had a lot of time outside, which was great. My dad was a mental health social worker and my mom was a high school art teacher. When I was young I thought there was gonna be nothing in West Virginia to write about, so the first job I had is, I went to Japan. I spent about four or five years of my 20s teaching in Japan and in American Samoa. And I did that largely because I wanted writing material. But being over there and getting perspective on West Virginia helped me understand how much there was to write about in West Virginia.
PRL: The stories in your new collection are set in West Virginia. Did you write the book in Seattle, or did you go back to West Virginia to write?
AP: Almost all the book was written in Seattle. I go to West Virginia about twice a year, and some of the material might have been written when I lived in Charleston. I’ve wanted to write about other places, like when I went overseas. But for me, when I hear stories, they are almost always set in West Virginia. When I try to write about someplace else, it usually feels pretty forced or inauthentic, so I keep returning to that landscape. The language, too: I like the language back there. The language is really important to me.
PRL: Do you think there’s a reason writing about other places feels inauthentic?
AP: I think my soul and my body are really connected to West Virginia. When I write fiction, it’s not coming out of my head; it’s coming out of a different place. That place seems to be more tied to West Virginia. I think my unconscious was deeply formed in West Virginia, so it’s still there in some ways. And that’s where my best fiction writing comes from.
PRL: Sometimes it can be helpful to have distance, too.
AP: Yeah. Getting a distance and perspective has definitely helped me. If I’d stayed there forever, I don’t think I would have had enough perspective. Homesickness also fuels the poignancy in the stories. On the other hand, there are some ways that I feel like I’ve been away too long. It’s hard for me to hear the language. I never hear the language in Seattle, of course.
PRL: Is your relationship to land in the West different than your relationship to the land in West Virginia?
AP: There is a lot of clear-cutting in the Pacific Northwest, but the land is not destroyed to the extent that it is in parts of West Virginia. There’s also much more protected land here. West Virginia land feels like family to me; I have a much deeper connection to it, but it’s much more fraught. But that increases the complexity and the depth of my connection to it. I have a lot of hurt about the land in West Virginia, in addition to a lot of love. The land out here, I have love for it, too, but it’s less like a family love; probably because I didn’t grow up here, it feels a little more removed and detached. It’s harder for me to feel my way into it. At the same time, I love the land out here; there are places I know that people aren’t going to ruin. They might indirectly through climate change, but it doesn’t seem as fragile here.
PRL: You could write about West Virginia without touching on issues like mountaintop removal or fracking. What compels you to weave those into your stories?
AP: Until I was 8 I was in Summersville, and it was being strip-mined. My dad was against strip-mining, so I was being shown strip-mining, and being told what it was with a negative take from my dad. I’ve always been aware of environmental issues in West Virginia from the time I was really small; I feel a moral responsibility to write about those things. My family on both sides has been there six or seven generations. I think as a person from Appalachia, I feel a responsibility to speak for it and speak about it. Since I’ve been educated outside, there are things I see that I wouldn’t if I’d stayed inside. I want to bring that perspective to bear on it.
PRL: It reminds me of one of the stories in the collection, “Sugar’s Up.” The main character is a liberal guy whose family has lived in this place for generations, but he feels the town is being taken over by Republican messaging. When you go back, do you feel like an outsider, too?
AP: I feel both an insider and an outsider. I get frustrated with the politics there. When I was young, they weren’t as strident or as polarized. There was social conservatism, but most people were Democrats. West Virginia is representative of the entire country in they way they’ve been polarized and indoctrinated by the Republican party. These ridiculous Tea Party politics.
But the truth is, when I was a kid I felt like an insider and an outsider. I think it was partly growing up middle-class in a place that was mostly working-class and poor. Very few people went to college. I graduated with about 210 kids; I think 10 or 15 of us went to college. But my parents had gone to college. There was that difference, and also I was one of the smart kids, so there was an alienation from that.
PRL: In “Rockhounds,” one of the characters tries to steal the body of a dog to prove the creek water poisoned it, because of fracking. How powerful is activism, and what is the ability of people living in those places to affect change?
AP: West Virginia, and also Kentucky and some of the other Appalachian states, are some of the most recalcitrant states in the nation toward change. It’s very hard to affect change against fossil fuel companies in West Virginia. On the other hand, there have been a number of incredibly brave people—very smart, very wise people—who are native to the areas that are being exploited, who have done a tremendous amount to bring attention to what is going on there and to educate people outside the region about what is going on. Some of those activists have died recently. They weren’t real young, but they were in their late 50 or early 60s. I have to believe that the stress of living in the coalfields and fighting this stuff contributed to their deaths.
I see West Virginia in some ways as harbinger. Our state has been under corporate control pretty much since its inception. The priority has been on the so-called economy and extraction of natural resources. The government has always laid down to the corporations and the decisions that are made about the state. They listen to the corporations instead of what the people need. As you know, we’re the poorest state in the nation. And apparently the least happy; there was a poll recently that said we are the least happy. What’s happened in West Virginia—it’s more widespread in the last 10 or 15 years—is where the country as a whole is going. I see West Virginia as sort of an omen.
But I also have faith that we will get to a tipping point in West Virginia. I see it in the fact that they indicted Don Blankenship. I see it for the Upper Big Branch [Mine] Explosion. They indicted the people who were responsible for the chemical spill in Charleston. They’re under criminal indictment. These are things that didn’t happen before. I see a younger generation of journalists and writers and activists who are aware that West Virginia’s allegiance to the coal industry is obsolete. We’ve lost a lot, but I do see that we’re moving a little bit in another direction.
What I’d like to do more with my writing in the future is imagine more alternatives, alternative futures and visions. That’s part of what I’m trying to do in those stories [in the new collection], “The Following” and “Saub.” In those stories, it is what can be done. But it’s not about activism. It’s about re-imagining our relationship with the natural world. It’s a way of re-sacralizing—making sacred again—the relationship with the natural world. If we are to survive as a species, I think we’re gonna have to. That survival will come from re-recognizing the sacredness of the land, which was part of the human experience for tens of thousands of years, before the Enlightenment and Industrialization. Indigenous cultures have always done that. It’s not new. That’s one way I want to try to write into the future. Those two stories are trying to do that: a different way of relating to the natural world. Relating to beings and species that aren’t humans.
PRL: Something I noticed in those stories is a struggle to articulate that relationship with the land. At the end of “The Following,” you write, “There is no final word.”
AP: It’s ineffable. There isn’t a concrete sentence that can sum it up. That’s one reason why art is so helpful. Part of the story is, how does one nail this down? Ultimately, it’s not nailable. Our culture likes things you can nail down and put it in a concrete sentence.
Right now, I’m working on something that looks to be nonfiction. It’s really rudimentary, but it will be toward that question of, how do we reimagine our relationship with the natural world and other species that aren’t human? It could turn into fiction. But I think there’s a way fiction can be more dismissed when you’re talking about these things; it can be called magical realism. [I’m] talking about a hyperrealism. Maybe nonfiction would be the better form. One takes a bigger risk to be made to look foolish.
PRL: You mentioned the rhythm and the importance of language. Does the language sometimes make the pieces harder to access for a broader audience?
AP: It’s always been a challenge, since I started publishing when I was 26. There’s been an ongoing pressure to not use dialect by more commercial publishers, whom I haven’t published with. I’m not gonna sacrifice that. It’s not true to the people, and I find standard English stifling. I use it, but I wanted to have access to Appalachian English. It’s flexible and inventive and there’s not as many rules to stick with. It’s more musical to me, so it drives the narrative.
If you look at commercial books about Appalachia, they are usually written by people not from Appalachia. I think they tell a story that people not in Appalachia expect to hear.
Geography of Hope: Women and the Land takes place from March 13 to 15 in Point Reyes Station. Tickets are sold out, but a schedule of events, including free docent-led gallery visits and an afternoon film screening, is available at Point Reyes Books and at ptreyesbooks.com/goh.