"The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life" by Lee Maynard

Lee Maynard’s latest book is his best yet. Described as “autobiographical fiction” by West Virginia University Press, it is a road trip that is part interior journey and part physical exploration of the landscape – West Virginia’s hills and hollers, the Sea of Cortez, the desert of New Mexico, and the arctic tundra. Opening with Maynard’s birth in 1936 in the parlor of his grandmother’s home, very short chapters polished like gems cover most of his lifetime between 1941 and 2005.

I immediately connected with the childhood chapters, feeling a kinship in the way that I do with so many Appalachian writers – and those from West Virginia in particular. The best writers have a way of making us think about our own lives through their stories, and the early chapters of The Pale Light of Sunset had me thinking about my own growing up on Jacks Mountain in central Pennsylvania. Maynard’s chapters are short in length, but long on thought – for both the writer and the reader.

Fellow West Virginia writers give The Pale Light of Sunset high praise. Ann Pancake describes the chapters “Arrow in the Light” and “A Death in the Mountains” as “miniature masterpieces” that “chilled my skin in awe.” Richard Currey describes the stories as “infused with a wanderer’s soul” and calls the book a “narrative of the mind and spirit for our own time.” Meredith Sue Willis describes the book as a “fictional memoir – a kind of heightened and imagined life” and says “Lee Maynard writes better than anyone else I know about how a boy is infused with the rules of American manhood.”

I had the good luck of hearing Lee Maynard read in 2003 at the Quiet Storm in Pittsburgh, as he and friend Chuck Kinder set out on their “Outlaw Writers Tour” along with the alt-country band The Deliberate Strangers. Both had new books out: Maynard’s Screaming with the Cannibals and Kinder’s The Last Mountain Dancer.

Maynard had already achieved notoriety with his first book, Crum, which was pretty much banned in his home state of West Virginia. In fact, Tamarack slapped “Adult Content” stickers on two of my favorite books which I bought there after finding them shelved low and in a very dark corner: Chuck Kinder’s Mountain Dancer and Keith Maillard’s Gloria. When I met Keith Maillard a few years back and asked him to sign that copy, he was startled by the neon green adult content sticker slapped on the cover, and gasped “What’s this?” I explained about where I’d bought it and told him not to worry because he was in very good company on that bottom corner bookshelf. When I asked Chuck if he was offended by Tamarack’s actions, he said he’d be offended if they hadn’t put a sticker on his book.

But back to Lee Maynard’s new book. The foreword “I’m still here, Lowenstein, you son of a bitch” intrigued me and by the end of the first chapter “The Parlor” which was barely three pages long, he’d totally hooked me. At times I wanted to savor a particular chapter by putting the book aside and losing myself in thoughts about it, but the momentum of the story propelled me to the next chapter and I could not put the book down for long. I connected most with the early childhood chapters and the later chapters. The rowdy and bawdy young manhood years were interesting and surreal with film noir shadings, and they worked well to make the later chapters all the more poignant. By the end – all the rivers crossed, all the running away from and toward something, all the small details as simple and significant as a treasured button – all those short chapters covering a lifetime of decades add up to one hell of a story.

One of my favorite chapters, “1948: My Mother’s Coat” is about grasping the sense of loss. After running away for the day, Maynard returns home in the evening to find his mother gone: “I charge through the small rooms, breathing the scent of her, knowing that she has been here, waiting for me. There is no fire in the stove and the house is chilled. She is gone. Without her, the house has no meaning.” Another favorite chapter late in the book, “2003: Where I’m From,” is about the images that come to mind as the essence of the West Virginia landscape.

On the page following the dedication, there is a wonderful quote by Lee’s good friend Chuck Kinder: “All Stories are true, if they are well written. The question is what they are telling the truth about.” The stories in The Pale Light of Sunset are truths that I will carry with me for a very long time.

Additional Links:

You can see and hear Lee Maynard talk about The Pale Light of Sunset in this WVU Press podcast.

Cat Pleska interviews Lee Maynard at West Virginia Writers, Inc. which is also available as a podcast.

Ann Pancake: Strange As This Weather Has Been

I seem to have an affinity for Appalachian writers, particularly writers from West Virginia. No doubt one of my earliest and best writing teachers, Chuck Kinder, had an influence. The Mountain State has produced a literary legacy of fine writers, and many of them are involved in an anthology project I’ve put together of stories and photographs linked by a railroad motif. Ann Pancake's Pushcart Prize winning story, Dog Song, is part of that project. Her short story collection, Given Ground, won the 2000 Katharine Bakeless Nason Fiction Prize, and her 2007 novel Strange As This Weather Has Been won the Weatherford Award and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Ann during the spring of 2008 when she was visiting her family in Romney, WV. We sat on the wide front porch of the farmhouse that has been in Ann’s family for several generations, discussing literature and language and land. Strange As This Weather Has Been is a novel about the effect of mountaintop removal coal mining on families in southern Appalachia as well as the impact on the environment. Pancake has a strong writing voice, telling the story through multiple points of view with language distinctive in syntax and regional phrasing. She began writing the book after helping her sister, filmmaker Catherine Pancake, interview families whose land and drinking water were being destroyed by mountaintop removal mining methods.

Despite reading about and seeing photographs of mountaintop removal mining, I was still not quite prepared for witnessing it firsthand as I did last October on Kayford Mountain just south of Charleston, WV. Instead of tunneling underground and hauling out the coal, mountaintop removal mining is an extreme form of strip mining which blasts the entire top off the mountain. The coal is then extracted and the rest of the dirt, rocks, and trees that had been the mountaintop are dumped over the side into the valley below. The coal is processed at the mining site where huge slurry impoundments are contained behind earthen dams. These are essentially toxic lakes of sludge and chemicals which leach into the ground water. The families in the shadow of these mountaintop mines suffer by having their land destroyed, their drinking water contaminated, and their health compromised. There are dozens of such mines operating in West Virginia and Kentucky, which can readily be seen by using Google Earth maps and zooming in with the satellite view.

Perhaps I am so moved by the West Virginia writers because I come from a similar place in the mountains of central Pennsylvania. My grandfathers and uncles were coal miners at one time, before the mines there were exhausted. I try to imagine how enraged I would feel if this type of destruction were to occur on my own beloved Jacks Mountain. The coal in the region where I grew up has been mined out, but the mountains still stand. Now when I drive east from Pittsburgh to visit my family back home, I see wind turbines on the crests of those mountain ridges, just as I saw wind turbines in southwestern PA that day last spring when I drove south to West Virginia to interview Ann.

Our regional identities are shaped by the land around us, and so are our stories. Ann Pancake is one of the writers telling the stories of Appalachia and making an effort to protect her home state from the corporate and political interests that would destroy that heritage by hauling the mountains out of West Virginia, coal car by coal car, one train after another.

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Photo credits:

Top Photo of Ann Pancake, copyright © 2008 Dory Adams

Photo of Kayford Mountain, copyright © 2008 Dory Adams