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Local News & Events in Jefferson County WV

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Latest Stories

Shepherd University Breaks Ground For Multi-Purpose Facility

County Commission Plans To Finance New HQ With $16 Million Bond

AmeriCorps Funding Cuts Hit Jefferson County

County Commission Seeks Impact Fees To Help Cover Costs of New Offices

West Virginia Humanities Council Suspends All Grants

Birdhill Subdivison Stormwater Management Plan Reviewed by WV DEP

WVU Medicine Will Invest In Berkeley and Jefferson Counties

Sidewinder Files Lawsuit Against Jefferson County Planning Commission

Mobile Food Pantry Serves Growing Need In WV’s Eastern Panhandle

Data Center Microgrid Bill Passes WV House & Senate, To Governor For Signature

Senate Passes Data Center Bill After Changing Tax Distribution Formula

Data Center Tax: Local Share Set By Senate Committee

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Appalachia

2023 Appalachian Chamber Music Festival Notes Places That Inspire

July 28, 2023 Tagged With: Appalachia, Appalachian Chamber Music Festival, Barns of Rose Hill, Contemporary American Theater Festival, In Print Aug 2023, music, Shepherdstown Opera House

chamber muscians

This year’s Appalachian Chamber Music Festival will feature sixteen musicians in twelve performances taking place between August 17 and 27.  Read the Full Story >>

Book Review: Pancake Revisited

January 4, 2021 Tagged With: Appalachia

A few years ago, I took a day off from work, packed some clothes, and drove from my former home in the DC area to Milton, West Virginia. I had not visited Milton (pop. 2400) before nor its surrounding areas, but I felt that some of the sights during my six-hour road trip were familiar.  Read the Full Story >>

Down and Out in Appalachia

September 1, 2020 Tagged With: Appalachia, book review

Book cover for short story collection titled Fuckface by Leah Hampton.

When it comes to judging a book, titles can be just as deceitful as covers. With a title like F*ckface, one might expect Leah Hampton’s short story collection to be a brash set of tales rooted in hardscrabble Appalachia.  Read the Full Story >>

Ron Rash’s Appalachia

August 1, 2020 Tagged With: Appalachia, book review

book cover for Ron Rash's short story collection called in the valley.

Ron Rash (1953) started out as a poet and short story writer in the ‘90s before he published his first novel, One Foot in Eden (2002) and the novel that catapulted him to national literary prominence, Serena (2008), later adapted into film. In his newest work, In the Valley, Rash returns to the short story form as well as to the characters of Serena in the novella that gives name to this collection. Read the Full Story >>

Poisoned Land

July 1, 2020 Tagged With: Appalachia, book review, Fracking, groundwater, natural gas, water pollution

Book cover for novel called Lady Chevy by John Woods

The cover of John Woods’ debut novel Lady Chevy portrays a mountain landscape against an orange-hued backdrop. The colors may depict an oddly-tinted sunset or, more likely, the fiery, sulfurous sky of a land ravaged by the fracking industry, where flares emerging from giant towers light the horizon and tainted aquifers, flammable tap water, and earthquakes have become a normal occurrence. Read the Full Story >>

Appalachian Noir – ‘Coal Black,’ by Chris McGinley (Shotgun Honey, 2019)

March 9, 2020 Tagged With: Appalachia, Appalachian noir, book review, Chris McGinley

Coal Black

In one of the most searing dialogues of Chris McGinley’s debut short story collection Coal Black, an eastern Kentucky drug dealer known as Hellbender asks a sheriff who’s been pursuing him: “Why do you think people around here are so addicted to drugs?” He answers his own question: “It’s because of depression. There is a streak of fatalism in Coal Black that is not just informed by the trappings of the crime fiction genre, but by the socioeconomic devastation of its rural Kentucky setting. The survivalist outlook of the characters in these stories is its inevitable consequence. Read the Full Story >>

Appalachian Magical Realism

January 12, 2020 Tagged With: Appalachia, book review, historical fiction, magical realism

In Tim Westover’s novel The Winter Sisters, the hills of antebellum northern Georgia are the setting for a clash between science and magic in a story that treads nimbly between fantasy, picaresque, and historical fiction. In 1822, Savannah doctor Aubrey Waycross is invited to Lawrenceville, a remote town that, thanks to Westover’s evocative prose, seems to exist in a perpetual time warp where America is still new and tradition coexists with progress—a community that is as distant from cities as it is from the ripples of the Revolutionary War and the brewing tensions of the Civil War. Read the Full Story >>

The Shadow of the Land

November 18, 2019 Tagged With: Appalachia, book review

Timothy Dodd’s Fissures and Other Stories is a slim tome of 19 short stories that mostly take place in West Virginia, but whose range of themes and characters build a larger world, recognizable and yet intriguing. Read the Full Story >>

Stay and Fight, by Madeline ffitch

September 30, 2019 Tagged With: Appalachia, book review

The idea of going “back to the land” tends to evoke picturesque images of a nurturing earth and a supposed return to an uncorrupted, self-sufficient lifestyle. These beliefs are swiftly shattered for the characters of Madeline ffitch’s outstanding first novel, Stay and Fight (Farrar, Starus and Giroux, 2019). Narrated through the alternating points of view of its four protagonists, the novel introduces us to Helen, who at 31, is tired of “waiting for my life the whole time.” She decides to leave Seattle with her boyfriend Shane and, thanks to an inheritance from Helen’s deceased uncle, they buy 20 acres of land in Appalachian Ohio. Read the Full Story >>

Coal Wars and Rugged Beauty

January 16, 2019 Tagged With: Appalachia, book review, coal

Andrea Fekete’s first novel Waters Run Wild was originally published in 2010. Even though it garnered rave reviews and the author’s work has been widely anthologized, the book suffered the fate of many independent press titles, and has long been out of print. Fortunately, this powerful novel of a family’s struggles during the West Virginia Mine Wars is back in an enhanced edition that introduces new readers to an outstanding voice and allows those who enjoyed its earlier version to reacquaint themselves with its elegant language and compelling characters. Read the Full Story >>

West, By God: Telling Our Story

October 8, 2018 Tagged With: Appalachia, coal, economic development

Growing up, I had heard many negative stereotypes associated with folks from my home state, but when it was suggested that there was a real bias against West Virginians, I was unconvinced.  Read the Full Story >>

Book Review: Country Dark

August 18, 2018 Tagged With: Appalachia, book review, Chris Offutt

If Country Dark as a title is not enough of a harbinger of what’s in store for readers, the novel itself doesn’t take long to introduce us to a gritty rural Kentucky landscape as experienced by Tucker, a young Korean War veteran who’s returning home. Hitchhiking through the countryside and camping in the woods, his brief interlude of peace is interrupted when he sees a woman running along a dirt road. Read the Full Story >>

Appalachia’s Suicide Rates Are Startlingly High. For Veterans, They’re Even Higher.

July 25, 2018 Tagged With: Appalachia, Mental Health, suicide prevention, veterans

“You work for someone [in the military] who’s your boss, and you work with other people. Everyone needs something different,” said “Frank,” a veteran originally from Sistersville (WV) who worked in the Navy’s visual communications team on an aircraft carrier. “Sometimes [worry] can follow you your entire life; you wonder, Have I done something wrong?” Read the Full Story >>

Getting It Right

May 15, 2018 Tagged With: Appalachia, book review

Appalachia comes and goes as a national conversation topic as pundits discover the region every few years and propose solutions to its problems, real and imagined. Rarely do they paint a picture of people with agency or delve into the subject deeply enough to question their own preconceptions. One recent example is mainstream media coverage of the teachers’ work stoppage in West Virginia, as many commentators seemed surprised that it could happen in so-called “Trump country” and denoted their obliviousness to the state’s history of labor struggles. Read the Full Story >>

Welcome to the Seed Library—Harpers Ferry’s Newest Community Resource

March 20, 2018 Tagged With: Appalachia, gardening, Seed Library

Master Gardner Angie Faulkner has a passion for saving seeds, so it isn’t surprising that she was the driving force behind the founding of the Bolivar-Harpers Ferry Seed Library—a community-sustained resource where gardeners can share their successes, skills, and, of course, seeds. Read the Full Story >>

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