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****William Trent Pancoast’s THE ROAD TO MATEWAN is #118 in the never-ending series called INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific excerpt from
a fiction genre and how that fiction writer wrote that specific excerpt. All INSIDE
THE EMOTION OF FICTION links are at the end of this piece.
Has this been published?
And it is totally fine if the answer is no.
If yes, what publisher and what publication date? Yes. Blazing Flowers Press in 2017.
It was in that local history that I first
read of the Matewan Massacre. I began immediately imagining her childhood along
the Tug River and the history of the Tug Valley, Matewan, and the Battle of
Blair Mountain.
Spreading this history is my intent.
Appalachia, its coalfields, and especially the Tug Valley, are an American
tragedy.
Where did you do most of
your writing for this fiction work? And
please describe in detail. I
like to write in the middle of activity, so kitchen table, desk, sometimes in a
basement.
What were your writing
habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to
music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? The Road to Matewan was written on yellow legal tablets. Over a 45
year period I did four major rewrites, the first of which lopped off the first
two hundred pages.
What is the summary of
this specific fiction work? The
Road to Matewan begins in 1898 on a
pristine Appalachian hillside and ends in 1937 on the same spot, now ravaged by
the coal companies. The novel is the story of one man's resistance to
industrialization.
Can you give the reader
just enough information for them to understand what is going on in the excerpt?
The excerpt is the first
three pages of The Road To Matewan, set in 1898 about ten miles from Matewan,
West Virginia, in the southern coalfields of West Virginia. The mountaineers
were reduced to serfs as their land was steadily stolen by land and mine
companies.
Please include just one
excerpt and include page numbers as reference.
This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. Chapter One 1898, first three pages of novel.
Thomas Greene knelt in the garden spot, the soft music of the artesian well in
the still dawn a constant soothing, and pulled two clumps of cheat grass from
around the base of the bean plants. The bean pods were young and full, a good
combination, and today would be the day Gertrude and the kids did the first
batch of half runners. Good that the crop had come early as she was due next
week with their sixth child. Beneath the second clump, a piece of iron lay red
and crumbling in the manure-rich soil. Thomas plucked it up and held it to the
light of the awakening world, the mists holding fast across the river on the
Kentucky side, the steepest mountains in the Tug Valley. It was a tine from a
cultivator, he guessed, and he pondered the difficulties of living here in this
wilderness without the proper tools, a forge-hardened plow blade like he now
had, crosscut saws that could cut logs all day, and guns that always fired. His
grandfather, or his father as a child, might have left this piece here. The
first ray of the day’s sunlight slipped through the topmost leaves of a
chestnut tree, and the iron oxide crumbled in flakes as he massaged the reddish
piece with his thumb. When all the loose was gone from the iron, Thomas spit on
it and continued the massage. The gray and black of iron soon showed itself and
Thomas laid the six inch long piece carefully beside a bean plant where he knew
one of the kids would find it later. Robert, his oldest son, would make a knife
from the piece if he found it. A tremendous explosion reverberated from over
the ridge, the valley channeling the noise and vibration, and Thomas stood. He
looked over the western ridge to the mine below where a steam engine belched
into action, and he could hear the scraping and clawing of a steel shovel
against the heart of the mountain.
Why is this excerpt so
emotional for you as a writer to write?
And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this
specific excerpt? Chapter one shows
Thomas Greene's love for the land and the economic forces that will eventually
dislodge him and his family from their hillside farm.
Were there any deletions
from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a
photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. The first draft of The Road To Matewan was
finished in 1975. Numerous drafts occurred over a 45 year period until the
novel was published in 2017. The first chapter was completely new in the last
rewrite, so there was not a lot of emotion, but rather the feeling that I had
finally gotten the first chapter right.
Other works you have
published? The novels Crashing
and Wildcat. Short stories will be published in winter of 2019. Crashing, a novel, published in 1983
and 2016. Wildcat, a novel about the auto industry, set in 1970 and
published in 2010.
My stories are to be published in early 2020, and are titled Vietnam.
Fucking Vietnam. Also I wrote a history of the United Auto Workers told
from the vantage point of a single local union in Ohio. All my work, I have
realized in retrospect, is literary AND historical.
Anything you would like
to add? I have been a writer of
fiction since age twelve. The five books listed above are what I managed to
produce while teaching English, or for the bulk of that time, working as a
machinist and journeyman die maker to earn enough to support my children. I
also was privileged to serve as a local union newspaper (monthly) for 25 years.
Writing in small town Ohio is not seen as a worthwhile venture by most people;
time is stolen to be a writer in Ohio.
Everything about my writing has always been uphill. Most of my
books have been published or republished since I retired from General Motors in
2007 as a die maker.
I had only one creative writing course--in 1969 with James Riess
at Miami University. He gave me the knowledge that I could produce writing that
had meaning. It always had to mean something important socially and politically
for me to bother writing it. My writing was to my specifications and no one
else's
William Trent Pancoast 1949— “Blue collar writer” is how the Wall
Street Journal referred to William Trent Pancoast in 1986. By that time, his
working-class-flavored short stories and essays had appeared in many Midwestern
and international magazines and newspapers. Pancoast spent the next twenty
years as the editor of a monthly union newspaper—the Union Forum—and as a die
maker, while continuing to publish his fiction, essays, and editorials in the
Union Forum, Solidarity magazine, US News and World Report, and numerous
literary magazines. The term “blue collar writer” suits Pancoast just fine. As
he told the WSJ, “The reason I write about work is that that’s just about damn
near all I’ve ever done.” In addition to his jobs of die maker, machinist,
railroad section hand and brakeman, and construction laborer, Pancoast has been
a high school English teacher and adjunct professor of English. The author
supplements his blue collar writing credentials with a B.A. in English from the
Ohio State University. Pancoast is retired from the auto industry after thirty
years as a die maker and union newspaper editor and lives in Ontario, Ohio.
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