Selected WRiting
Students of the Strikes
Dissent | September 2023
“On Monday, August 21, hundreds of students at West Virginia University, the state’s flagship land-grant institution, walked out of their classrooms to protest the massive gutting of their university by its administration. Students wore red T-shirts and red bandanas around their necks, carried homemade signs with messages like “Stop the Gee-llotine” (a reference to WVU President E. Gordon Gee), played protest songs on fiddles and guitars, chanted “STOP THE CUTS!” and shouted impassioned speeches into megaphones. At issue was the administration’s proposal to fire 16 percent of the faculty and cut 9 percent of its undergraduate majors and twenty graduate programs in response to a projected $45 million shortfall over the next two years. For those familiar with West Virginia’s long history of labor struggle, the students’ action might conjure up images of the Pittston Coal Strike, the Ravenswood Aluminum Lockout, or even the Battle of Blair Mountain, but their most direct and important reference was the West Virginia educators’ strikes in 2018 and 2019.”
West Virginia’s Winter Wonderland
Garden & Gun | December 2022/January 2023
“On a snowy day in 1980, Chip Chase literally skied his way into a new life. He and a friend, Winslow Ayer, at the time two back-to-the-lander free spirits in their late twenties, were on a backcountry ski trip in the Allegheny Mountains of Tucker County, West Virginia, in search of a cabin on Cabin Mountain. Not having much luck (spoiler alert: there is no cabin on Cabin Mountain) and a little bit lost, they skied down the slope of the county’s highest peak, Weiss Knob, and came to a dead stop in front of an abandoned ski lodge.
‘I said, I know exactly what this is—an old downhill ski area,’ Chase, who’s now sixty-nine, tells me from his front porch near the base of that same mountain. ‘We saw the old towline, and there were even poles with pulleys and whatnot.’ As they made their way back up the mountain, they took in a panoramic view of Canaan Valley, a unique ecosystem of forests, rivers, and wetlands in the highest mountain valley east of the Rockies, just south of the former timber and coal towns of Davis and Thomas. Shortly after, Ayer and Chase and Laurie Little (who’s now Chase’s wife) sought out the property’s owner, whose family had operated a downhill ski area there in the 1950s and ’60s and still maintain a cattle farm on the land. They set up a work-trade agreement, and what is now White Grass Ski Touring Center—a rare, and in my opinion the best, Nordic ski outfit below the Mason-Dixon Line—was born.
Something Deeply Rooted: The Invisible Landscape of Breece D’J Pancake’s Milton, West Virginia
Oxford American | Fall 2021
“I purposely forget where Breece’s grave is so I have to find it each time,” my friend Rick Wilson tells me as we climb the hill of the Milton Cemetery one crisp October morning in 2019. In the moment, I don’t understand why or how he could forget, and wonder if maybe he hasn’t been here as much as he says he has. The cemetery, bounded by a chain-link fence and overlooking a trailer park on one side, a row of two-story houses on the other, is small and unremarkable. It would be hard to misplace a grave here. I walk ahead and find it—or perhaps he lets me find it—at the crest of the hill on the left side, toward the back—a large rectangular tombstone spelling out pancake. On the ground is an unassuming plaque, next to his mother’s and father’s. It reads:
BREECE D’J PANCAKE
JUNE 29, 1952 APRIL 8, 1979
“Making a Living By The Sweat of her brow”: Hazel Dickens and a life of work
Smithsonian Folklife | March 2021
“Informed by archival interviews, writings, correspondence, and performances by Hazel Dickens, and inspired by Jessica Wilkerson’s 2019 NPR article “A Lifetime Of Labor: Maybelle Carter At Work,” West Virginia state folklorist Emily Hilliard considers musician Hazel Dickens’s experiences as a woman engaged in a lifetime of both waged work and care work. This lived experience, as well as Hazel’s approach to music as work, was the foundation which directly informed her identity formation, inspired her songwriting, and fueled her advocacy for working people across the globe.”
A Soup Recipe: Questions and Interpretive Instructions for a Present Process and a future Meal
Ecotone Magazine | 2020 & An Ecotone Almanac | 2021
By Emily Hilliard and Rebecca Wright
”In several springtimes past, we taught together and ran the communal kitchen at a literature program in the woods of New England. Every night, with a group of college students, we cooked for sixty students and teachers. This interpretive recipe is based on that experience: teaching students cooking skills that they could apply not just to that night’s meal, but to all future meals. The hope was that cooking might become for them what it is for us: a mindful and sensory process for the cook that engenders a future offering for a collective; the power to make something that was not there before, and to share it.”
Review of dust-to-Digital’s Blind Alfred Reed: Appalachian Visionary
Journal of American Folklore | Spring 2020
“In 2006, during his Seeger Session Tour, Bruce Springsteen added an old song from the early days of the recording industry to his live sets. He kept only one original verse, adding his own to comment on the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and to critique President Bush (or “president bystander” as he calls him at one show) for his subsequent inaction. In 2013, British reggae band UB40 released a regrettable version of the same song on their new album, also taking lyrical liberties, in this instance to reflect concerns over the global financial crisis. That song, “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live,” was composed in the Jazz Age by Southern West Virginia farmer and musician Blind Alfred Reed (1880–1956). It’s impossible to know how Reed—a deeply religious, lifelong Republican whose songs were heavily critical of capitalism—would feel about these subsequent versions, but he would undoubtedly be surprised by the song’s longevity. He recorded “How Can a Poor Man?” in New York on December 4, 1929, one week after the stock market crash. He would never record again.”
Conditions For All Of Us: Emily Comer in Conversation with Emily Hilliard
Southern Cultures | Fall 2019
“On February 22, 2018, West Virginia public school teachers and school service employees, most of them women, walked out of their classrooms in what would become a nine-day statewide strike, fighting for a 5% raise and affordable healthcare coverage. But what the teachers’ statements, speeches, and protest signs indicated was that this was not just a protest for personal compensation, but a struggle for better social conditions for the future of their communities.“
Review of Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics, by Jean R. Freedman
Journal for the Society of American Music | August 2019
“The first time ever I was struck by Peggy Seeger’s music was when I saw a video of her performing “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” the song her husband Ewan MacColl wrote for her in 1957. In the video, Peggy is probably in her late 40s, wearing a pink t-shirt and jeans, her hair cut short in a curly pixie cut. She’s seated alone on a stage, picking arpeggios on a small parlor guitar. Her voice, like her presentation, is unadorned aside from her natural vibratro, ringing out with incredible clarity out into the dark auditorium. It’s stunning. While that performance is what initially piqued my interest in Seeger, Jean R. Freedman’s new biography, Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics, is what indulged and sustained my curiosity. The book, of interest to folk song scholars and fans of Seeger alike, offers an intimate and considered portrait, fully contextualized by Freedman’s background as an academic folklorist and informed by her thirty-year friendship with the folk singer, activist, and member of the legendary Seeger family.”
Honey From the Lion: A Companion Soundscape
Ecotone Magazine | December 2018
“As the holidays approach, so does the time to curl up with beautiful and necessary books like Honey from the Lion, Matthew Neil Null’s debut novel from Lookout Books. The book, about a rebellion at a logging company in the West Virginia Alleghenies, is both lyrical and suspenseful, an elegy to the ecological devastation and human tragedy behind the Gilded Age.
Our solstice gift to you is an annotated soundscape for the book, expertly produced by folklorist, writer, media producer, and Ecotone contributor Emily Hilliard. Listen to the sounds of crows, trains, and fiddles and imagine yourself right into the world of Honey from the Lion.”
Building a Broom By Feel: An Interview with Jim Shaffer
Southern Cultures Things Issue | Fall 2017
"Jim Shaffer’s shop is dusty and smells like a horse stable—a comforting olfactory association that I suddenly realize has less to do with horses than with the rolled and bundled straw I see stacked high along the walls. Though the pole barn that houses Shaffer’s Charleston Broom and Mop Company is just a few miles from the capital city of Charleston, West Virginia, the unincorporated area where it sits along Davis Creek in Loudendale is a wooded, quiet, and close-knit community. Everyone who lives here knows Jim, and many people across the state know him too. At 87, Shaffer has been making brooms for seventy years and is the last handmade commercial broom maker in West Virginia."
One Year in Helvetia, West Virginia
Bitter Southerner | March 2017
Named Bitter Southerner Top Story, 2017
“People come here and they think it’s Disney World,” says Dave Whipp, as we sit at a circular table inside the Hütte Restaurant, in Helvetia, West Virginia.
A deer head hangs on the wood-planked wall, adjacent to faded black-and-white photos of farmers. A vintage globe sits on a table nearby, and a pot-bellied stove in the next room adds wood smoke to the smell of the soups, chicken, and rösti cooking in the kitchen. Helvetia lacks the contrived eternal cheer of the happiest place on Earth, but I know what Dave means.
Helvetia, West Virginia, population 59, can seem, on first visit, not quite real.”
Slaw-Abiding Citizens: A Quest For the West Virginia Hot Dog, with illustrations by Emily Wallace
Gravy | Fall 2016
“We arrived at the small country store at dusk, giddy for our first hot dog. The hand-painted sign outside Buddy B’s in Sissonville, West Virginia, advertised fresh produce, pinto beans and cornbread, and “Best In Town Hot Dogs.” Inside, bulk seeds, bags of peanuts, and jars of penny candy lined the red gingham–papered walls, and a cash register and food counter stood on either side of the door. We gawked like tourists at the hot dog clock and hand-painted hot dog sign, outlined by the triple-underlined text, try our hot dogs they are go-o-o-o-d. As the cashier-cook prepared our dogs, we surreptitiously took pictures.”
“Written and Composed by Nora E. Carpenter”: Song Lyric Scrapbooks, Home Recordings, and Self-Documentation
Southern Cultures Documentary Arts Issue | Spring 2016
“‘The local townsfolk do not like mountain music. They can’t stand to listen to it. They buy Benny Goodman, Guy Lombardo, etc.’ The typewritten missive in my hand, dated September 8, 1937, location Harlan, Kentucky, described, with no small dose of disdain, the musical predilections of residents in the region. It was mid-August in Washington, D.C., and I was hunched over a table in the frigid air-conditioned reading room of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, scouring paper after paper, folder after folder, box after box of documents like this, along with recorded discs, photos, and handwritten address books, etched with the names of fiddlers and ballad singers and their approximate locales. I was searching for a specific name in the margins, a note scrawled on some hotel stationery, a sign.”
Photo by Pat Jarrett
Swiss Village + West Virginia + Mardi Gras Feast = Fasnacht
NPR’s The Salt | February 2015
“On Saturday evening, I found myself in a white-out blizzard, driving up steep and curvy West Virginia back roads. Normally, I would have admitted defeat and turned back. But I kept going, propelled up the mountain by thoughts of the unique Mardi Gras foods and festivities that awaited me in an improbable-seeming Swiss village at top.
Helvetia, population 59, is an incongruous place — an Alpine village nestled in the isolated wilderness of West Virginia. It was settled in 1869 by Swiss craftsmen drawn by the large tracts of cheap land, beautiful mountains and plentiful forests of game. The town is situated along the Buckhannon River in a high mountain valley, and as I was reminded on my drive, is not very easy to get to.”