West Virginia native Ann Pancake, now a Seattle resident, takes the real stories of Appalachians who deal with mountaintop-removal mining and crafts their struggles into her stunning debut novel.
Question: How did this book begin?
Answer: I grew up in West Virginia, and both sides of my family have been there for six or more generations so I love very much the land and culture there. In the late ’90s I was living back East, teaching at a college in Pennsylvania, and I started hearing more and more about mountaintop removal, which was becoming more widespread. I mentioned it to my sister, who’s a filmmaker, and she said, “Well, why don’t we go down there and see what’s going on?” In March of 2000 we made our first trip to the southern coalfields with a video camera to see the devastation. What we saw changed our lives. Catherine decided to make a film, and I offered to help her with the interviews and research for the film.
Q: What was the story that was the impetus for your novel?
A: In July of 2000 we met a family who lived underneath a mountaintop-removal mine and a gargantuan valley fill, which is the enormous pile of rocks and dirt that are essentially the blasted-apart mountain. They’d been having unusual floods that year, and they were certain the excess runoff was coming from the mine, and they were very worried that there was a slurry impoundment, a huge lake of the wastewater from cleaning the coal, behind or above the valley fill.
We got in a pickup with the father of the family and about five of his kids and their cousins between the ages of 4 and 15. We rode up to the toe of the valley fill with these boys telling me how frightened they were that the slurry impoundment might break, and one said he was going to take a four-wheeler up there to see if there really was an impoundment, but I knew he’d never pull that off, and another one, the 10-year-old, just kept saying, “This is dangerous. This is dangerous.” Afterwards, I couldn’t get that evening out of my mind.
When I got back to Pennsylvania, I found myself writing a short story from the point of view of a fictional 14-year-old who was living in a situation like the kids in the truck that day. I planned for it to be a short story. But after I finished that story, I found myself writing a story from the point of view of another child, and pretty soon I realized that the subject of mountaintop removal was far too big to be contained by a short story. It would have to be a novel. The characters in the novel are not directly based on the people I met that day, but meeting that family, and the experience I had with them, triggered the novel.
Q: What was the next step in the process?
A: I continued to do interviews from 2000-2003, some with my sister for the film, some on my own, and some with other activists. Most of the interviews were in southern West Virginia, but a few were with people from eastern Kentucky. In 2002 I quit my job in Pennsylvania and moved down to southern West Virginia to continue to interview, research and do activism. I met many, many remarkable people, witnessed many heartbreaking, even apocalyptic, situations and landscapes. I was there for 15 months and finished the first full draft of the novel during that time. I left in the fall of 2003 and moved back to Seattle, but I’m still in touch with the people in the coal fields who are fighting mountaintop removal, and I visit about once a year.
Q: Why fiction instead of nonfiction?
A: I believe fiction can affect an audience in important ways nonfiction can’t. I think fiction, at its best, can reach a reader more deeply. With the novel form, I was able to immerse a reader in the world of a variety of characters for 350 pages, hour after hour, and let that reader fully experience the emotional and psychological effects of living with the catastrophe that is mountaintop removal. And the reader doesn’t inhabit just one sensibility, but the sensibilities of six different narrators, each of whom react to the situation differently. In nonfiction, it would have been hard for me to recreate that range of experiences with such depth and complexity.
Further, nonfiction wouldn’t have let me invent the interiors of people the way I could in this novel. I would have had to present a more external view of people. I also believe that fiction demands more imaginatively from the reader than most nonfiction, and because of those demands, I think fiction can leave a deeper imprint on the reader. Finally, ironically, I believe fiction can present larger and broader “truths” than nonfiction can.