Remembering a great West Virginia writer

 It's no secret that my favorite West Virginia writer is Breece Pancake from my hometown of Milton. If you know anything about him, you probably know that he took his own life in Charlottesville, Virginia on Palm Sunday in  1979.

By the time of his death, he had published some stories in The Atlantic and literary magazines. His book of short stories, appropriately titled The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake was put together posthumously and published in 1983 after massive efforts by his mother Helen Pancake, my friend and co-worker at the time, and author/teacher John Casey.

Although the last few decades hardly qualify as the Golden Age of short stories, Breece's book has never been out of print and has been translated into several languages. I was pleasantly surprised when a friend sent me this link to a recent post about him from The Paris Review by fellow West Virginia writer, by way of Buckhannon, Jayne Ann Phillips.

Here's a sample, but there's way more:

Breece D’J Pancake’s dozen stories, completed in the last four or five years of his life, include some of the best short stories written anywhere, at any time. Forty years of the author’s absence cast no shadow. The shadings, the broad arcs of interior, antediluvian time, are inside the sentences. The ancient hills and valleys of southern West Virginia remain Breece Pancake’s home place; the specificity and nuance of his words embody the vanished farms, the dams and filled valleys, the strip-mined or exploded mountains. His stories are startling and immediate: these lives informed by loss and wrenching cruelty retain the luminous dignity that marks the endurance of all that is most human.

Palm Sunday

This is a heavy day for me for several reasons. First is the nature of the day itself, which commemorates Jesus' arrival in Jerusalem in the days leading up to his crucifixion and death. The day was triumphant, with blessings and shouts of hosanna...but we know what happens five days later.

Then there's the date itself. Ten years ago today, 29 coal miners were killed in Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine. Subsequent investigations, like this one written by my then co-worker Beth Spence, found a deliberate pattern at the company of evading mine safety regulations. The company no longer exists and its CEO spent a year in federal prison, although that's cold comfort to the friends and families of those who died.

I was literally on the far side of the world attending a karate seminar in Okinawa when I got the word. It felt so strange to be that far away at such a time, not that I could have done anything about it.

Finally, the holy day if not the date marks another sad loss for West Virginia and the world. It was on Palm Sunday in 1979, (April 8th to be exact, Easter being a movable feast) that Breece Pancake, in my opinion the state's greatest writer killed himself in Charlottesville.

He was from my home town of Milton and we had some family connections. At the time, I was working at the town library with his mother Helen. I remember going to work to pretend to clean the library that Sunday and finding main librarian Toney Reese there, visibly upset.

I'd work with Helen every Tuesday night and every other Saturday for the next six years and we grew very close over that time. It was sad but still a privilege watching his book of short stories come together and take off. It hasn't landed yet.

If nothing else, this day is a reminder of how quickly and drastically things can change...although we probably didn't need to be reminded of that today.

Breece Pancake's last day

Breece Pancake, 1952-1979. For my money West Virginia's greatest writer

Forty years ago on this date, I showed up at the Milton Library to perform my duties as a janitor, a job for which I showed no great talent and little diligence. It was Palm Sunday.

I was surprised to see Toney Reese, the main librarian and one of the greatest people I've ever known, show up. She was visibly upset.

When I asked, she told me that Breece Pancake, son of my co-worker Helen, had died of a gunshot wound in an apparent suicide. They had been close.

I was stunned. I knew that the ripple effects of that day would last for years, but I had no idea just how strong they would be.

I can't say I knew him. We'd met a time or two. He was about my brother's age. Both of our fathers were WWII combat veterans who had a little trouble with their homecomings. I knew Helen as a kid when she worked at the local Island Creek store.

Like many people from Milton who were paying attention, I was excited and maybe a little  jealous to learn that he'd  had a couple short stories published by The Atlantic.

At the time and for several years to come, Helen and I worked together at the library each Tuesday evening and every other Saturday. I had no idea what to say or do when I saw her again.

Needless to say, she was traumatized. But over the next several years that we worked together, she healed after a fashion. Partly I think this was due to her determination to see that a book of his stories would be published. "The day they put him in the ground," she told me, "I swore I'd see his book published."

The odds were against it. Books of short stories by new and unknown writers don't often catch on, even with living writers to promote them. It was a great experience to see it come together. Every time I saw Helen, she'd share the latest letters from the dozens of people who helped the book come together and show the latest stories that were posthumously published.

It finally came out in 1983 as The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake under the Atlantic Little Brown imprint. The next year a paperback edition came out. Since then, the book has never been out of print and has been translated into several languages.

Helen and I became very close in those years, but I held off reading the book for several months. Finally I sat down one evening and cracked it open. I wound up reading it straight through. The stories were hard as nails through the wrists. I had the same feeling of awe that I'd had after reading other classics, from Aeschylus to Shakespeare.

Many of the stories were set in and around our town, thinly disguised as Rock Camp, with the others scattered around the state. Breece wrote about those lost and left behind, a number which would only grow over the next several decades. And is still growing today.

He saw it coming.

The overall impression reminded me of a line by Bob Dylan:

"everyone of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin' coal
 Pourin' off of every page
Like it was written in my soul
From me to you"

Tangled up in blue indeed.

Of policies, the personal and the political

There is a saying around here that "In West Virginia everything's political except politics and that's personal." I have a feeling that may be true of other places as well.

A political/personal shakeup has helped build momentum for an idea that I've been working with allies for years to promote, i.e. creating a permanent mineral trust fund, better known as a Future Fund.

The planets began to shift when House Speaker Rick Thompson resigned to take another post in state government. Former House Judiciary Chair Tim Miley was elected to take his post. The Future Fund was championed by Senate President Jeff Kessler but didn't gain traction in the House under Thompson's leadership.

(The fact that Kessler ran for governor against Thompson using the Future Fund as a platform plank may have had something to do with the former speaker's lukewarmness to the idea. Miley, by contrast, has no such baggage and is from an area where shale gas drilling has taken off. He seems to get it.)

We're a long way from there yet, but the tea leaves are encouraging. Here's some coverage from the WV News Service. Two other articles have recently run in the Beckley Register Herald. In chronological order, they can be found here and here.

ONE FOR THE ROAD. Here's a good item from WV Public Radio about Breece Pancake, my homey and IMHO WV's best writer.

NOTE. I'm trying to take some time off this week so posts may be irregular. Next stop...Montreal!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The Honored Dead: Breece Pancake

This past weekend, during a work trip that involved flying, I had the chance to re-read the first and last book of someone I consider to be West Virginia's finest writer, Breece Pancake. His book is the posthumously published The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake. The book was published posthumously because he committed suicide at around the age of 27 back in 1979.

I'm prejudiced here. Breece and I are from the same town, which shows up in his book as Rock Camp. He was around the age of my older brother. His dad and my dad had an issue or two in common. And I worked with his mother Helen at the Milton library for several years, including the time from Breece's death until after his book was first published. Helen and I spent just about every Tuesday evening and every other Saturday together for several years and became very close.

We talked constantly about Breece, getting new stories published, how the book was coming together, poring over reviews, taking people on "the 10 cent tour" of Milton and the sites in the book.

I admit that I hesitated a good while before actually reading the book the first time. Then I sat and read it through in a sitting. It was painfully riveting and I felt the same feeling of awe at the end that I did when I read things like Othello or the tragedies of Aeschylus. In the years since, I have felt like the keeper of some private shrine in his honor.

This Saturday the Milton library is hosting an all day symposium on his work. Here's a bit about Breece from the Atlantic, the first major magazine to publish his work. There's only one error in it (no mining in Milton and not much timbering either). I could find no errors in this piece from the Oxford American. In fact, I found something new, a letter from the late great Kurt Vonnegut to Breece's friend and teacher John Casey, himself a winner of the National Book Award.

In the letter, Vonnegut said,

"As for Breece D'J Pancake: I give you my word of honor that he is merely the best writer, the most sincere writer I've ever read. What I suspect is that it hurt too much, was no fun at all to be that good. You and I will never know."

I think Vonnegut was on to something. I always felt that Breece tried to make himself hard enough to say what had to be said without flinching or breaking...and didn't succeed.

As I write this, I can't get some lines from Nietzsche out of my mind: "What matter thyself, Zarathustra? Say thy word and break into pieces!" Except it did matter and the loss was even greater than the word.

Quote of the week (or century)

Here's one of the best quotes about literature I've ever found. It is attributed to Southern author Pat Conroy's mother:

“All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” 

I tend to distinguish between Appalachian and Southern culture and literature, but I do recall a short story by my favorite WV author Breece Pancake which involved a bit of hoggish anthropophagy.

(And, by the way, how is anthropophagy for a cool word? It sounds way classier than man-eating.)

MUST READING. Here is yet more rationality from Coal Tattoo. Some of the links are really worth checking out.

WORK SHARING. Here's an op-ed by yours truly on a new way to deal with cyclical unemployment.

BABOONS AND PEOPLE. For both animals, those with higher social status are healthier.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Windy city indeed

One of my favorite WV authors is Breece Pancake (1952-1979) who wrote short stories about my hometown under the fictional name of Rock Camp.

In the only remotely humorous story in his posthumous collection, "The Salvation of Me," a character dreams of escaping our corner of Appalachia and striking out for the big town of Chicago. He keeps saving up money to make the getaway but winds up blowing it on shooting pool.

Going to Chicago became an inside joke with some friends who knew and loved Pancake's work. It meant blowing this popsicle stand and hitting the big time.

I thought of Breece this week when I actually made it to Chicago for a few days of meetings. Generally, when I go on these things, the only part of the city I see is the inside of a meeting room.

This time I was a bit luckier and got to run a few miles along the lake, which helped me realized that "windy city" isn't just a clever nickname. It would be really easy one way and like jogging the wrong way through a wind tunnel on the way back.

It occurred to me that WV could use a great lake or some such massive body of water. Who knows, maybe with climate change it'll get one.

MORE ON THAT ONE PERCENT THING here and here.

TAXING MILLIONAIRES is something most millionaires support.

A WAR IS WINDING DOWN. How come people who opposed it aren't claiming success?

UPPER BIG BRANCH. Here's the latest fallout from criminal investigations of Massey's mine disaster.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Palm Sunday

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Palm Sunday is probably the most ambiguous holy day in the Christian calendar. It marks the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, where the throngs said "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord."

But it's also less than a week away from Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, the days that mark his agony in the garden, arrest, scourging and crucifixion.

Even for the non-religious, this holy day can speak of the changeability of human affairs, of the human heart, and especially of human crowds. It doesn't take long for cries of "Hosanna!" to turn into shouts of "Crucify!"

This Palm Sunday marks the 30th anniversary of the death of one of West Virginia's finest authors, Breece Pancake of Milton. To be exact, since Palm Sunday is a movable feast, the actual anniversary of his death is April 8th, but I'll stick to the religious calendar.

Pancake began publishing stories in The Atlantic and literary journals in the late 1970s when he was a graduate student at the University of Virginia. His stories, for the most part set in a fictionalized Milton he called Rock Camp, were often dark but strongly compelling.

For reasons nobody will know, Pancake shot himself on Palm Sunday. A convert to Catholicism, he had attended Mass earlier that day. I have the feeling that it was brought on by a sudden rush of panic rather than any kind of premeditation.

A volume of his was posthumously published as The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake in 1983 and is still in print and has been translated into several languages.

For me, the holy day and the sad anniversary will always be associated. If you haven't taken a look at his work, I'd highly recommend it.