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  • Home
  • About
  • Stories
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    • Nature
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    • Poetics
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    • Q-and-A
    • Readings
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  • Multimedia Production
  • First/Person,  Music,  Stories

    FIRST/PERSON: Finding Yo-Yo Ma playing cello in the West Virginia hills

    October 29, 2022 /

    Who was that man bowing a cello against a tree in the New River Gorge? Why, it's none other than one of the world's best known and loved instrumental maestros. And he has something to say as well as to play.

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  • Books,  First/Person,  Readings,  Stories

    READINGS: “THE OUTHOUSE: When you have to go, you have to go”

    October 29, 2022 /

    Over there sits a narrow, tiny, upright building of loosely-fitted, weathered boards painted Theravada Buddhist orange. It has a peaked roof covered with black shingles. It is a monk’s outhouse in the Appalachian hills. I know who built it. He’s a friend of mine.

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  • First/Person,  Stories

    FIRST/PERSON: Prostitute Pasta & Way-Out Family Restaurants

    October 29, 2022 /

    'I am dreaming of a plate full of fluffy, cheesy scrambled eggs, streaked with a couple of red skid marks of Tabasco and a side plate of triangles of buttered toast. Preferably, wheat. But I will take white, if it is all Minney has got ...'

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  • First/Person,  Stories

    FIRST/PERSON: Why I Have Four First Names

    August 9, 2022 /

    "They were both the most cussed, stubborn people you’d ever meet, my Dad and Mom, when they come together over something that stood them apart. “Both would not give up their position on the proper naming of you,” said K. “So, they agreed to disagree. And gave you all four names.”

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  • First/Person,  Stories

    FIRST/PERSON: ‘A Wild Woman Love Story’

    August 9, 2022 /

    Once upon a time, a round-faced girl with curly hair and identity issues was told by someone (that genuinely loved her) that she was not "model pretty" like her sister but that she could be "mother pretty" ...

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  • Essay,  Stories

    FIRST/PERSON: A Turtle Rescue Out on Pluto Road

    July 1, 2022 /

    "The first time I tried to save a turtle on the move it peed — or pooped, I’m not sure which — in my truck. I had stopped when I saw a box turtle in the middle of Pluto Road one afternoon maybe ten years ago. I hit my brakes right there in traffic ....

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  • First/Person,  Stories

    FIRST/PERSON: A few highly personal words on choice

    July 1, 2022 /

    "Three pregnancies. No choice in any of them. I have never chosen to get pregnant. I was foolish, I was sucker-punched, I was surprised. I was naïve, I was savvy. I wasn’t ready, I was ready. Such a basic right that everyone deserves. CHOICE."

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  • Essay,  Stories

    MEMOIR: Why ginseng hunters & trappers bearing bloody hides wanted in my house

    July 1, 2022 /

    One morning, I stumbled down to the kitchen when I heard a noise. There standing was an unkempt man holding bloody hides and smoking a cigarette. "Excuse me?"

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  • First/Person,  NewsoftheDay,  Stories

    FIRST/PERSON: Traveling West Virginia’s backroads in the Byrdmobile

    June 8, 2022 /

    "I once worked for a man who had been an Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan — and I’m proud of it. Not because he was a Klan member more than three-quarters of a century ago, but because of what he became afterward ..."

    Read More
  • Essay,  NewsoftheDay,  Stories

    How the Russian army helped to nationalize my country of Ukraine

    May 26, 2022 /

    A Ukrainian exchange student who studied in Charleston WV, reflects upon the devastation he finds all around him and his family in Mariupol after the Russian invasion of his homeland.

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  • Essay,  NewsoftheDay,  Stories

    The heart-rending and oligarchic view from ‘Coal Country’

    May 13, 2022 /

    The incendiary, heartbreaking "Coal Country," a play drawn from interviews with survivors and family members of the deadly 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in West Virginia, made a splash Off-Broadway. Here's a reaction to its staging for the first time in the Mountain State, 35 miles from where the tragedy fueled by corporate malfeasance that killed 29 miners occurred.

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  • Essay,  NewsoftheDay,  Stories

    FIRST/PERSON: On the streets in “the capital of pain”

    May 3, 2022 /

    There are mayapples unfurling on the banks of the Kanawha River in the darkness of West Virginia's capital city. There are humans sleeping there, too, on this cold and rainy April night, and we are among them.

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  • Essay,  Stories

    FIRST/PERSON: Choice words on Ukraine, Putin, Navalny & Zelensky

    May 3, 2022 /

    J. Michael Willard worked for Sen. Robert C. Byrd and Jay Rockefeller then went on to international career that landed him for years in Ukraine, where he raised a family. Excerpts from his thoughts on Putin's brutal invasion of the country where two daughters still live.

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  • Essay,  Photos/Video,  Picture/Show,  Stories

    Buddhist daily life in backwoods West Virginia

    March 13, 2022 /

    A picture show and video of an unexpected place in the West Virginia woods. In the face of often overwhelming challenges of daily life, and horrors like the current attempted mugging of Ukraine, places that strengthen the spirit such as the Bhavana Society Buddhist forest monastery deep in West Virginia's hills are vital.

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  • Essay,  Stories

    Thich Nhat Hanh in the West Virginia Hills

    January 25, 2022 /

    The great Vietnamese Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh, who died this week, once led a retreat in the West Virginia hills in 1993. I was there with some friends, finding myself at one point serenading the beloved monk. Thirty year later, the retreat continues to resonate in the lives of those of us who went.

    Read More
  • Essay,  NewsoftheDay,  Stories

    10 Illuminated Thoughts About Life on Manchin Island

    December 23, 2021 /

    The stakes are high in WV senator Joe Manchin's Build Back Better gamesmanship. What happens now that he blew up negotiations — and now it looks like they're coming back together?

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  • Essay,  Readings,  Stories

    The sink as a refuge of sanctuary & solidarity

    December 10, 2021 /

    'I am at one with a long line of the faithful, monks of Ireland, or Tibet, or France, silently preparing or cleaning up from the day’s meals, mindfully caring for community, or in readiness to offer hospitality.

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  • Essay,  Readings,  Stories

    Teach your children well — but not what to think

    December 10, 2021 /

    'Your children are not your property. They belong to the future. You cannot make them duplicates of your opinions, values and habits. And if you did, life would soon break them, teaching them that the ideas and understandings of the last generation do not serve the next.'

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  • Essay,  Stories

    MEMOIR: ‘Memory of a Waitress’

    November 4, 2021 /

    One night in West Texas, taking refuge from a motorcycle ride through buckets of rain, fleeing a broken heart, an empty diner ahead. A beaten-down waitress finally appears ...

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  • Characters,  Essay,  Stories

    REVIEW: Channeling Dorothy Parker in West Virginia

    October 1, 2021 /

    Dorothy Parker was a figure out of a Dorothy Parker story. Fleshing out the life of the critic, poet, short-story writer and screenwriter after seeing her depicted in a fine new production of "You Might As Well Live" in St. Albans, W.Va.

    Read More
12

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