Ann Pancake

Thursday, March 18, 2010

“The Writer’s Story,” 3:30PM, Garfield Book Company
Reading, 5:30PM, Scandinavian Cultural Center


Ann Pancake’s acclaimed debut novel Strange As This Weather Has Been is based on interviews and real events, focusing on a West Virginia town devastated by mountaintop removal mining. She is the author of the short story collection Given Ground, which received the Katherine Bakeless Nason Fiction Prize.  Other awards include a Whiting Award, an NEA Grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the Glasgow Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Glimmer Train, Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and New Stories from the South. She grew up in West Virginia and currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at PLU.



Strange As This Weather Has Been

In a West Virginia town, people live with the constant threat of a black flood that could wash out their world without notice. The latest coal boom is upon them and mountaintop removal mining is turning the mountains to dust and wastewater. Workers struggle layoffs, families fight to stay together, and children seek to stay together. This is the world of Lace Ricker and the many characters of the novel. As thunderous blasts weaken her home's foundation and poisoned wastewater infiltrates their well, Lace and her daughter, Bant, secretly become more determined to find a way to stop the mines, while Lace's husband pragmatically refuses to fight the union bosses, and her sons tentatively, then calamitously, accept the challenges and adventure of life lived in the shadow of imminent danger. By tracing the devastating impact of coal mining through the eyes of Lace and her four children, Pancake's powerful debut novel evinces a poetic pathos and authentic respect for the land and the people who love it. To understand the human toll such destruction exacts, one must turn to fiction, for novels such as Pancake's reflect deeper, timeless truths.


"Ann Pancake is indisputably a regional writer, but her stories are free from the kitschy sentimentality and high-art self-consciousness that this label has come to imply. Pancake shares [her characters'] fondness for what ordinarily appears unlovable, depicting an ignored pocket of the country with a clear and admiring eye. She has an unusual gift for portraying difficult lives with a plain-spoken accuracy that makes them seem suddenly exceptional."

—New York Times


“Strange As This Weather Has Been brings at last within reach of imagination the almost unimaginable destruction of land and people in the Appalachian coalfields. Its completeness is made possible by the full acceptance of the heartbreak of the subject. Its resolved artistry presses firmly on to the end.”

—Wendell Berry