Overwhelmed by the headlines, by Donald Trump, a pandemic and winter coming, West Virginia artist Sassa Wilkes couldn't get herself to her easel. Then, RBG died and Sassa found she wished to get to know the legal legend by painting her portrait. She kept on going with 99 more portraits of badass women.
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READINGS | “One Cup At a Time: A National Coffee Day Memoir”
Coffee has punctuated my life as exclamation points, commas, periods, and missed periods. Coffee has born witness to the great events and the tiny ones, the happy and the sad. The momentous and the mundane.
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CHARACTERS: A Portrait of the Artist in Her Garden
Sassa Wilkes paints every day. Now, she is painting in a different fashion, using the Earth as a palette. A portrait of a West Virginia artist growing things in a big way for the first time, thanks to Covid-19.
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MARIE MANILLA | Part 2: “Madness”
"Bev screamed: “It’s Joey!” The sweet boy so many girls loved. Did he even drive a white car? I think we all knew it wasn’t Joey asphyxiated inside that vehicle, but it could have been him. It could have, and it felt good to whip ourselves into a frenzy—yet another asylum-able offense."
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MARIE MANILLA | Part 1: Driving By Her Own Headlights
Huntington WV native Marie Manilla is an award-winning fiction and non-fiction author. In a "5 Questions" interview, she talks about the highs and lows of writing; the 'snotty literati,' who use labels to belittle writers; and the novel she scrapped after hearing pre-publication reactions by African American and transgender sensitivity readers.
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VIDEO READINGS| “Terracotta Tile,” a prompted tale by Connie Kinsey
"He was rage and she was ennui. She picked up her glass and took a sip. The wine tasted bitter. She couldn’t remember when he had last been happy. He stood in front of her. Silent, but radiating a need to speak. “What?” she said softly.
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POETICS| An Almost Heaven & James Brown Upbringing
I was raised on Almost Heaven and Hee Haw/Taught to love God and the UMWA/I was an odd little Black girl/Growing up in the coalfields of West Virginia ...
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The Glickster’s Pix:
A Sea of GoldAs WestVirginiaVille grows its roster of things we cover as a Mountain State feature magazine, we also need to cover growing things. Enter our new occasional column: '"Glickster's Pix."
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A video visit to Covid-19 testing in an African-American community
We need far more testing to size up Covid-19, and also why it disproportionally affects low-income and minority communities. Here's a video drop-in on a recent drive-up testing site in Huntington WV.
