David's Blog

I attended a small Appalachian college for a year after finishing high school and was required to take a class in speech. I liked the...

The tiny southern West Virginia coal camp of Helen, where I grew up, was once thriving. Its two coal mines supported a population of more...

Few moments in life are more consequential than giving a child a name, whether it's whispered in a delivery room or awarded with the pomp...

Just over a hundred years ago, in late August 1921, the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War erupted not far from where I grew...

It wasn't long after Thomas Edison perfected the electric light that the more imaginative predicted a world with no dark corners—streets...

I'd been looking for a job my whole last year of college and had gotten interviews--the local PBS station, newspapers, several regional...

Another short excerpt from my memoir A Standing Start. There were (and are) no stop signs or traffic lights in our little coal camp of...

Music writer Greil Marcus coined that phrase for a "strange yet familiar backdrop to our common cultural history," the "playground of...

I wandered into Portland just after the explosion of Mount Saint Helens on May 18, 1980, about fifty miles northeast of that city. The...

Every Friday when I arrive at school, the cafeteria at Harrison elementary is buzzing with a chatter of a hundred third and fourth...

Even though my father, a coal miner, had little extra money when I was a kid, I received a small allowance and I promptly spent it on...

The Appalachian coal fields attract national attention in cycles, usually in one of two ways. In the past West Virginia occasionally...

It was the early 1980s and I was on the West Coast for no reason in particular, bumming around after college while waiting for my adult...

Even at his lowest, in those lean, hard years after the war, my father loved to sing, always had. As a boy bringing in cows from the...

It was 1980, near the end of the era when strangers would pick up a hitchhiker, and I had no problem getting rides. I was on the road,...

My maternal grandfather Dewey lived a short walk from our house in our tiny coal camp when I was a kid and I spent a lot of time with him....

I grew up in southern West Virginia, not far from the region of the Hatfield & McCoy feud. "Devil Anse" Hatfield (center, others unknown)...

As an independent scholar I was gratified to be asked to speak at the 50th Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture on Friday Feb....

Travel through Southern West Virginia from any direction and you'll necessarily pass through the small city of Beckley. From there you...

I had the privilege of working with Maryat Lee through the 1980s and got to experience her unique methods firsthand. -- David "Maryat dug...