- The JUNE 2021 ISSUE of WESTVIRGINIAVILLE.com
- EDITORS/NOTE: Elephant Ankles, a Dad’s love, Natural Sonatas, CROWN Act-ing & More
- COVER STORY: ELEPHANT ANKLES: Life with Long COVID
- IN/PROGRESS: “The Air My Flowers Breathe: A Love Story”
- PICTURE/SHOW: Kyle Vass on taking his best shot
- MUSIC/VIDEO: ‘Sonata for Piano & West Virginia No. 1’
- RE/PRINT: Bringing the CROWN Act to a town near you
- FREE SUBSCRIBE AT: WestVirginiaVille.substack.com
By Douglas John Imbrogno | Editor | WestVirginiaVille.com
Welcome to the June 2021 issue of WestVirginiaVille. This edition covers lots of ground. It helps to have good people as guides, leading the way.
Back in October 2020, WestVirginiaVille Minister of Paragraphs Connie Kinsey wrote about how she and her Mom had gotten COVID. In this issue’s cover story, she reports she and her mother appear now to be living with Long COVID. Doctors are still wrapping their heads around this extended version of the infection, which can affect every corner of a person’s body and life. (PS: If you have vaccine hold-outs among your family and friends, send them this story as they roll the dice on the most precious thing they possess — their health.)
READ ON | COVER STORY: ELEPHANT ANKLES: Life with Long COVID
My cigar-vice buddy, retired West Virginia Presbyterian minister Doug Minnerly, is polishing the draft of a memoir on raising his son, Nathan, whom he and Susan Marrash-Minnerly adopted from a Romanian orphanage in 1999. Nathan, who has autism, has grown into a strapping young man. We’re sharing the intro to that manuscript as part of a new series, ‘IN/PROGRESS.’ The series is a shout-out to longer, ambitious pieces of works-in-progress, in an age overrun by social media posts that disappear moments later in the flood of quips, memes, and spleens vented. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
READ ON | IN/PROGRESS: “The Air My Flowers Breathe: A Love Story”
We’re pleased to be able to add to our PICTURE/SHOW series a round of recent photo-journalism and feature shots by Kyle Vass. He is among the reassuring, current crop of younger kick-ass-and-take-names accountability journalists in the Mountain State, covering key issues in the life-and-times of West Virginia, its social issues, and maddening politics.
READ ON | PHOTO/SHOW: Kyle Vass on taking his best shot
When those dispiriting politics get me down, I tend to look up. Into the deep blue skies. Into wind-rustled branches of the state’s endless trees, where birds sing out territorial claims before flitting to some new copse. In a new addition to WestVirginiaVille’s MUSIC/VIDEO series, take a few minutes from feeling harried by the news or dispatches in our hectic heads. “Sonata for Piano & West Virginia No. 1,” a piece by my new musical confabulation, The SCRIBBLERS, presents another way of looking at West Virginia in the next five minutes.
READ ON | MUSIC/VIDEO: “Sonata for Piano & West Virginia No. 1”
If you’ve not yet tuned into Crystal Good’s “Black By God: The West Virginian,” do so henceforth. We’re glad to share a piece by her, courtesy of Scalawag, on efforts to pass CROWN legislation in West Virginia. The acronym stands for “Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair.” In a state where Black policy is not the top priority for majority-white Republican lawmakers, those legislators did what they do best — hindering progress — and bottled up the bill in the 2021 Legislature. The effort proceeds locally, spearheaded by five indefatigable women. Consider this an opening salvo in joint coverage. WestVirginiaVille’s AMP Multimedia crew is at work on a documentary on passing CROWN legislation, which we hope to jointly publish among the three sites this summer.
READ ON | RE/PRINT: Bringing the CROWN Act to a town near you
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RELATED
EDITORS/NOTE: The Art of Speaking Up: may5.2021: The May 2021 issue of WestVirginiaVille.com features a lot of folks speaking up, singing out, and asking, if not demanding to be heard. Here’s an overview of the issue’s content.
EDITORS/NOTE: A ‘ninety-something’ issue: april17.2021: It was only after I got this issue’s “5 QUESTIONS” answers back from a 90-something Buddhist monk in the West Virginia outback I realized I was running an inadvertent theme issue with the April 2021 edition of WestVirginiaVille.
