LUNCH WITH BOOKS: Labor Heritage Week - A Conversation with Denise Giardina

August 31, 2021
12:00pm - 1:00pm

For Reuther-Pollack Labor Heritage Week 2021, we will discuss Storming Heaven (a novel of Blair Mountain) and other works with the legendary West Virginia writer, Denise Giardina.  There is another quote that adds insight into Denise Giardina's background and career. She said, "It's important to know that people fought back. When I found out that people fought back, I thought maybe I should, too."

Denise Giardina´s novels have won the American Book Award, the Lillian Smith Award for fiction, and the Boston Book Review fiction prize. Her roots run deep in the coal mines of Appalachia and stories about coal miners, companies and unions are at the center of two of her books. Her words may be fiction, but they describe the true experiences of underground coal mining in West Virginia. Denise Giardina's pride in her Appalachian background informs her writing and helps drive her fight to protect the mountains and people she loves.

This program is presented in partnership with the WALS Foundation as part of the fifth annual Reuther-Pollack Labor Heritage Week. This event features WV Poet Laureate Marc Harshman and veteran labor attorney Patrick Cassidy in a conversation with Denise. To learn more about the 2021 Reuther-Pollack Labor History Symposium,  "Remember Blair Mountain," visit the WALS website event page. 

This hybrid LWB program will be presented in person in the Library's auditorium and broadcast online simultaneously. 

This program will be available to watch live on Facebook Live, on YouTube, and on the OCPL website's LWB Livestream page.  Log into your Facebook or YouTube account during the program to leave questions for our presenters in the comments box. They will answer them during the live broadcast. 

PRESENTER BIO: Denise Giardina was born in 1951 and grew up in a West Virginia coal mining camp called Black Wolf. Many family members worked underground, though her mother was a nurse and her father a bookkeeper for a coal company. They moved to Charleston when the mining camp closed. She graduated from West Virginia Wesleyan College in 1973, later earning a Master's in Divinity from the Virginia Theological Seminary. Though she is currently a deacon in the Episcopal Church, and teaches at West Virginia State University, Giardina has spent much of her career writing.

After a first novel about Henry V of England Giardina decided to return to her roots, saying, "Growing up [in Appalachia] is what made me a writer – staying here is what keeps me the kind of writer I want to be." With W. Virginia as her backdrop, Giardina crafted two novels directly related to coal. Her 1987 book, Storming Heaven, took its inspiration from the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain. It is a fictionalized account of the coal miners´ bloody and ugly fight to unionize, and the mining companies who tried to stop them. In 1992, Giardina published The Unquiet Earth, exploring the history of coal mining beginning in the 1930s.

Giardina tells her stories using multiple narrators who speak in local dialect and offer different points of view. The Unquiet Earth reveals the blatant disregard of the miners and their families, by the coal companies; black Lung disease and unsafe working conditions play a part in the book.

As well as being a writer, Giardina has been an activist for environmental justice since the 1970s. She made a bid to be governor of West Virginia in 2000 as a third-party candidate, using her campaign to raise awareness about the devastating and toxic effects of mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR). MTR blows off the tops of ancient mountains, exposing layers of coal. It makes mining easier, yet destroys forests and plant life, and pollutes streams. Toxic runoff from the mining process leach into communities (where people have lived for generations), forcing them to leave their homes. West Virginia´s progressive, Mountain Party, affiliated with the Green Party, sprang from Giardina's gubernatorial run.

FEATURED BOOK: Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina (Norton, 1987)
[ Reserve a copy from the Library  |  Reserve copy through WVDeli/Libby  |   Download audiobook through Hoopla ]

Annadel, West Virginia, was a small town rich in coal, farms, and close-knit families, all destroyed when the coal company came in. It stole everything it hadn't bothered to buy-land deeds, private homes, and ultimately, the souls of its men and women. Four people tell this powerful, deeply moving tale: Activist Mayor C. J. Marcum. Fierce, loveless union man Rondal Lloyd. Gutsy nurse Carrie Bishop, who loved Rondal. And lonely Sicilian immigrant Rosa Angelelli, who lost four sons to the deadly mines. They all bear witness to nearly forgotten events of history, culminating in the final, tragic Battle of Blair Mountain-when the United States Army greeted ten thousand unemployed pro-union miners with airplanes, bombs, and poison gas. It was the first crucial battle of a war that has yet to be won.

REVIEWS:
"Brilliant, diamond-hard fiction, heartwrenching, tough and tender."
— Los Angeles Times Book Review

"If we are very lucky, every few years there arrives a novel that is so moving, so instantly successful . . . that it towers high over much else that is being published. Storming Heaven is that novel."
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

> View all Denise Giardina books available at the Library
> View all Denise Giardina ebooks available through WVDeli/Libby
> View all Denise Giardina audiobooks available through Hoopla

Lunch With Books starts at noon in the Library auditorium.
LWB Livestream starts at noon on Facebook and YouTube.

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"Lunch With Books" is the library’s flagship program for adult patrons. These lunchtime programs feature authors, poets, musicians, historians, and more every Tuesday at noon. Bring lunch (to your computer), feed your brain!