A Conversation with Isaac Yuen

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We are thrilled to be publishing this captivating debut essay collection by Isaac Yuen ­– a celebration, through wordplay and earthplay, of our planet’s riotous wonders. Utter, Earth features odes to sloths, tributes to trilobites, and ringing endorsements for lichen. For animal lovers and readers of Brian Doyle, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Amy Leach, each essay of this one-of-a-kind collection combines joyous language, whimsical tangents, and scientific findings to remind us of and reconnect us with those to whom we are inextricably bound. Caitlin Solano recently spoke with the author for this Q&A for Booktimist.

How did some of your essays that were previously published end up coming together as a book?

I think there is a common voice running through the essays in the collection. The narrator who’s mulling over which creatures to invite to their next party is the one who’s trying to justify why sometimes it’s good to give up on dreams is also the one figuring out how to write stories with animal verbiage.

There’s an odd, rambling, flighty mind at work behind it all—a mind that is me but also not me—attempting to chart some type of internal cartography (or a menagerie, as they might put it) through a tangle of creature contacts and connections.

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A conversation with Terese Svoboda

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Out February 1, 2024, this fantastic new novel chronicles the sisters Roxy and Coco, two glamorous harpies—mythical bird women—attempting to outrun extinction and fix the planet by preventing child abuse, one child at a time. Action figure–worthy, for readers of Neil Gaiman and Karen Russell, this modern take on these fabled women touches on mental illness, racism, animal rights, and the rights of children. Justin Hargett recently caught up briefly with the author.

WVUP: The novel’s protagonists, Roxy and Coco, are a pair of harpies—mythical bird-women—and sisters, living in the modern world and taking revenge on child abusers. What drew you to that particular Greek and Roman myth?

TS: The origins of my obsession are over twenty years old, given that I published a poem titled “Harpies” in Treason, my fourth book of poetry, in 2002, and have a short story in draft from about the same time. The epigraph of both quote the Aeneid that mentions harpies befouling the food of Phineus, a Greek soothsayer, because he abused his children. Always looking for female muses, I was curious about these powerful creatures who were always said to be ugly and frightening and concluded that such denigration was the result of Greek patriarchy, men frightened of vengeful women.Read More »

A conversation with Vic Sizemore

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Told through alternating perspectives, Vic Sizemore’s God of River Mud chronicles the lives of Berna Minor, her husband, their four children, and Berna’s secret lover. As the decades and stories unfold, traditional evangelical Bible culture and the values of rural Appalachia clash against innate desires, LGBTQ identity, and gender orientation. Sympathies develop—sometimes unexpectedly—as the characters begin to reconcile their faith and their love. Sandra Scofield, author of Beyond Deserving, called the book “Utterly unique, authentic, and engrossing.” In this Q&A below, Sizemore talks with Holly Mitchell of Vesto PR.

This is your first novel, though you’ve published an essay collection (Goodbye, My Tribe: An Evangelical Exodus) and a short story collection (I Love You I’m Leaving) before. What drew you to the novel form?

I am happy with the story collection, and the essay collection came out of a need to make sense of what still looks to me like the total moral collapse of an already teetering conservative white evangelicalism in the runup to the 2016 election. However, I’ve always considered myself a novelist first and foremost.

The first full-length book I ever wrote, some twenty-five years ago, was a novel. I had no idea what I was doing and, not surprisingly, it was awful. I managed to salvage a couple of workable short stories from it, maybe ten or fifteen percent of the total wordcount. That’s not the only one. I have a few other novels in various stages of completion tucked away in files and on shelves. I still hope that maybe one or two of them will eventually grow into something worthwhile.

When I submitted God of River Mud to WVU Press I labeled it a novel-in-stories. Every chapter had appeared in a literary journal as a standalone story, but the characters were all related to one another. As we worked through revisions, as the stories grew more dependent on one another and less able to stand alone, the book morphed into a straight-up novel.

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2023 in Review

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A note from interim director Than Saffel

Dear friends of West Virginia University Press,

What a year it has been! We began 2023 with a staff of five, an impressive list of achievements, and an exciting slate of upcoming releases. At the top of my mind as art director were the production of Tolkien Studies Volume 19 and the design challenges of working with the expectation-shattering work the press has become known for—plus the covers, interiors, ads, catalogs and production challenges that I knew were just beyond the horizon.

As events unfolded throughout the spring, summer, and fall, we lost three critical members of our award-winning team. Our funding prospects and staffing became increasingly uncertain. To many, the press’s demise seemed imminent. In that somewhat fraught environment, I offered to step in as interim, hoping that foolish overconfidence and institutional memory would help us to sort through the seeming mountain of challenges facing us.

Taking over and continuing the work of an absolutely top-shelf team of editorial professionals has been a humbling experience, but also one for which I’m grateful. The groundwork laid by Derek Krissoff, Sarah Munroe, and Sara Georgi over the past 8 years, building on that of previous teams, has placed us in the enviable position of having well-crafted and documented processes and partnerships, and remarkable work to publish. I’m also grateful to be working with operations manager Natalie Homer, whose intelligence and patience are an incredible asset to the press.

Still, I don’t think we could sustain this effort if I didn’t feel there was a genuine desire within the university to allow a rebuild to take place. Thankfully, that support has been shown repeatedly in the form of a willingness to talk, to open funding channels, to assign staff to assist with communications, to take advantage of new opportunities outside the university, and most of all, to address our staffing needs with an immediate commitment to hire new talent to build upon all of this good work. I am pleased to say we’ve received well over 200 applications rich with talent for the positions of managing editor and editorial director (editorial director candidates apply here through January 5!), and the selection process for managing editor will begin in earnest January 2.

We certainly face challenges, but I feel that we do so with open eyes and a huge fund of good will from all sides. Future plans include re-opening submissions, much-needed outreach to bookstores, more consistent advertising, improved marketing support for scholarly books, more support for journals, and a diversified social media presence expanding upon our Essential Reading series pioneered by dear friend of the press and force of nature Neema Avashia. We will also solidify a realistic staffing plan that will sustain the press going forward.

What this all comes down to, every day, is the work. The books that we have committed to publish over the next several seasons are characteristic of the surprising and powerful work that has been a hallmark of this press for many years, and they need to be cared for in a way that I think is rather unique to WVU Press. We continue to hear from authors that they feel heard and supported here in a way that allows them to do their best work.

To that point, I’ve asked authors and editors from our previous few seasons to check in with a quick update from the past year. The entries are below, in alphabetic order by author. I’ve inserted the authors’ comments in their own words, with minor edits. Authors with good news to share, please get in touch!

I can’t express my thanks deeply enough to all of those who have reached out in support of the press during this period of some uncertainty. Starting in fall 2024, we will begin our celebration of the press’s 25th year as a scholarly, peer-reviewed university publisher. WVU Press will continue its work, and we who do the work will continue to strive for excellence in everything we do.

Than Saffel / December 2023

Thomas Bredehoft / Foote: A Mystery Novel

In 2023, Foote: A Mystery Novel had its first birthday. Of course, it had a life long before publication, as I think I started drafting it in 2016, after a fateful hike on the Mon River Trail south of Morgantown. It sat for a while on my computer, and then in the early days of the pandemic in 2020, my wife Rosemary (whose book Mountaineers are Always Free was also published by WVU Press) encouraged me to submit it to the Press. Two years later, it was a book, my first fiction publication.

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Journals Feature: West Virginia History Examines the State and Region in the Neoliberal Era

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Lou Martin is an associate professor of history at Chatham University and author of Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia.

Out now, Volume 17, issue 1, of West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies is the first fully online issue of the journal, available through Project Muse. Kevin Barksdale served as editor, and I am proud to have authored one of the articles in this issue.

Titled “Appalachia in the Neoliberal Era,” the article examines the concept of neoliberalism and argues that the social, economic, and political developments in the region over roughly the past four decades are best understood within the context of the rise of neoliberalism. The article opens with quotes from a 2017 column by Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman that relied heavily on deeply flawed assumptions about West Virginian voters and Appalachian culture. Reading that column when it was published, I concluded that historians in the state and the region needed to write more about the effects of political and economic changes on the ground. While national commentators will likely continue to rely on stereotypes and suppositions about Appalachian culture, historians could make sure that there are empirical studies of the effects of things like free trade, deindustrialization, the decline of unions, and defunding colleges and universities.

In “Appalachia in the Neoliberal Era,” I hope to add another chapter to the historiography of the region. Important histories of the region seemingly portray the policies of mid-century liberalism as well-intentioned but sometimes misguided and almost always underfunded. The years that follow the War on Poverty then feel like the denouement of a story about hopes and dreams never fully realized. What I thought was missing was the rise of neoliberalism, an array of policy positions flowing from a faith in free market capitalism that were part of the undoing of Great Society programs as well as, I argue, the decline of the economic bases of many communities throughout the region.Read More »

Craft at Home in the Mountain Forest: An excerpt from Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth’s Finding the Singing Spruce

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Finding The Singing Spruce: Musical Instrument Makers and Appalachia’s Mountain Forests is the new book in the Sounding Appalachia series by Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth, who teaches folklore studies at the Ohio State University. Aaron Allen, coeditor of Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature, calls the book “a nuanced academic contribution to both human and environmental Appalachian studies” that’s also “a collection of accessible stories about people, places, and instruments.”

As we sat in his shop escaping the summer heat in 2014, electric bass specialist Roger Morillo and I tacked back and forth from English to Spanish as we talked about the similarities between his home community in the mountains of Táchira State in Andean Venezuela and his more recent home in St. Albans, West Virginia. He drew on his experiences living in mountain environments and attributed the uniqueness of wood craft in the mountains to his impression of the freedom that mountaineers have to create and find meaning from their material environment. “It’s the environment and traditions that we have,” he said, leaning back into his steel folding chair. “Remember, in the past, these people used to get into the woods. They would build their own house, especially with woodworking. Then they’re thinking, ‘I’m going to build my own kitchen cabinet’ and after that say, ‘I’m going to build my own banjo because I want to be happy sitting in the house that I built, on the chair that I already built, playing the instrument that I already built. I made everything by myself.’ ” For Roger, this was an expression of an essential characteristic of every mountaineer all over the world: “They want to be free.”Read More »

Kristen Gentry discusses her new collection, inspiration, influences, and more

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We are pleased to publish Kristen Gentry’s debut short story collection Mama Said this week. The linked stories in Mama Said are set in Louisville, Kentucky, a city with a rich history steeped in tobacco, bourbon, and gambling, indulgences that can quickly become gripping and destructive vices. Set amid the tail end of the crack epidemic and the rise of the opioid crisis, Mama Said evokes Black family life in all its complexity. Maggie Henriksen from Carmichael’s Bookstore said about the book, “The characters contain a depth not often seen in a collection of stories, and readers are sure to be thinking about their lives and relationships long after finishing the last (tear-jerking!) page.” In this Q&A below, Gentry talks with Holly Mitchell of Vesto PR.

 What drew you to short fiction?

I gained an appreciation for short fiction in undergrad creative writing classes where I was introduced to stories by ZZ Packer, Junot Diaz, Jamaica Kincaid. That appreciation grew during my graduate study at Indiana University. I love the way characters in a short story can be sharply drawn and feel known, but the form and its economy (of language, plot, setting) create just enough mystery to leave readers wondering about the characters, the motivation for and effect of their choices, and the world they inhabit long after the story ends.

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Portrait of Sol Gittleman with the cover of his book An Accidental Triumph

“Americans have become addicted to rankings.” An excerpt from Sol Gittleman’s new book

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Our distribution partner Vesto Books published their first book earlier this month: Sol Gittleman’s An Accidental Triumph: The Improbable History of American Higher Education. An Accidental Triumph tells the engaging story of how American higher education evolved from a patchwork of seminaries in the early nineteenth century into the world’s leader in research by the middle of the twentieth. Gittleman – professor emeritus at Tufts University who served as the provost from 1981-2002 – writes with authority, frankness, and unfailing wry good humor.

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A conversation with Erik Reece

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We are pleased to publish Erik Reece’s latest book Clear Creek: Toward a Natural Philosophy this week. This wide-ranging and boundary-defying work calls us out of our frenzied, digitized world to a slower, more contemplative way of being. Joe Wilkins called Clear Creek, “A wise, rambling book that is equal parts memoir, natural history, and philosophical investigation. . . . Readers of Barry Lopez and Wendell Berry will find much to admire here.” In this Q&A below, Reece talks with Caitlin Solano of Vesto PR.

The book takes place over the course of a year. Did your journals and notebooks come together naturally, or did you have to revise certain aspects?

The journaling down by the creek occurred pretty organically. But though the book takes the form of “a year in the life,” I actually spent ten years writing it! Not continuously, but rather when some observation or idea came to me. So there was time for some pretty extensive revision, editing, shaping.

You’ve written about your religious upbringing and thoughts on Christianity before in your book, An American Gospel. What was different about your approach for writing about it this time?

In American Gospel, I was settling scores, in a way, with family ghosts. Which I don’t really recommend. But I was also working through some mental anguish that I’d carried around for a long time. There’s really none of that in Clear Creek. Though I’m always, in some sense, writing about religion (I guess I’m a God-drunk agnostic, as someone said about Spinoza), I now very much think of Clear Creek as an unroofed church, where I’m a congregation of one.Read More »

An empty road lined with green leafy trees and bushes with a clear blue sky

Midsummer roundup: Reviews, media attention, and author events

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We get to June, and the child in me still feels like we should all get a few months of summer vacation. We get to July and it seems like everyone else is out on vacation. But even while the pace of some things has slowed as the temperature rises, the literary interviews, reviews, and events carry on.

First up, congratulations are in order for Rachel King: Bratwurst Haven is the literary fiction winner of the 2023 Colorado Book Award! The Colorado Sun shows support through an interview with King and publication of a story from the collection, “Strangers.”

Congratulations also goes to Tom Bredehoft, whose debut Foote: A Mystery Novel is a finalist for the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America in the category of Best First PI Novel. Winners will be announced on September 1.

And another congratulations to Neema Avashia, whose Another Appalachia came in at #9 on libro.fm’s audiobook nonfiction bestseller list for May. Neema also contributes to an Esquire article that explores the notion of writing as a hobby or as a career, and she features as one of GoMag‘s 100 Women We Love.

July is Disability Pride month, and the American Booksellers Association recommends The Wounds That Bind Us, the new memoir by Kelley Shinn (“that’s two Ns and no shins”) as a worthwhile read year-round. The book is hailed as “empowering” by the Southern Review of Books. You can find Kelley at bookstores around North Carolina this summer, including at Downtown Books in Manteo on July 25, in a Zoom book discussion on July 28 hosted by Jacar Press and the Regulator in Durham, and at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill on August 31 with Belle Boggs.

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