commonplaceheart

collection of others' thoughts and poems that resonate

[commonplaceheart]

[commonplaceheart]

"Despite the ultimate surrender, one of the many bits of Blair Mountain history that continues to stick out is the diversity of the miner's army. In 1921, coal company towns were segregated, and Brown v. Board of Education was decades away. However, Wilma Steele, a board member of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, says Matewan was one of the only towns in the United States where Black and white children, most commonly Polish, Hungarian and Italian immigrants, went to school together. Other miners were white Appalachian hill folk. Most of all were kept apart in order to prevent organization and unionization. It didn't work. Keeney recalls one incident during the Mine Wars, Black and white miners held cafeteria workers at gunpoint until they were all served food in the same room, and refused to be separated for meals.

'We don't want to exaggerate it and act like they were holding hands around the campfire, but at the same time they all understood that if they did not work together they couldn't be effective,' Keeney says. 'The only way to shut down the mines was to make sure everybody participated.'"

-Abby Lee Hood, "What Made the Battle of Blair Mountain the Largest Labor Uprising in American History," in Smithsonian Magazine

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[commonplaceheart]

"A commission appointed by West Virginia Gov. William E. Glasscock to investigate the mine-situation in 1912 filed the following recommendations regarding mine guards:

'We find the system employed was vicious, strife-promoting and un-American. No man worthy of the name likes to be guarded by another armed with blackjacks, revolvers and Winchesters while earning his daily bread. It is repugnant to the spirit of the laboring man and we believe the opinion of the American people. We are therefore unanimously of the opinion that the mine guard system as presently constituted should be abolished.'

Despite the report, the mine guard system continued in West Virginia and was not completely abolished until 1934 when the coal operators in a labor contract with the then legal United Mine Workers of America, agreed to do away with the mine guard system."

-"Guns, Thugs and Heroes" in the July, 1979 edition of The Roanoker

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[commonplaceheart]

"It wasn't that surprising, if you thought about it. My ma had told me that back then no matter the channel you turned to, the message stayed basically the same: the coasts' erosion was a hoax. That They were selling fear, and true patriots would never buy it. That the status quo was God. When the real storms hit-- the category sevens, mind-- the floods they brought killed millions. Maybe the pundits had thought they'd have longer to milk it."

-Zachary Olson, "What Washes Up in Arizona", in The Off-Season: An Anthology of Coastal New Weird

[commonplaceheart]

Why am I like this? Ronan prayed when he arrived at church, knees aching on the kneeler. Show me a sign of what I'm supposed to do with myself.

God had not yet answered, but Ronan respected the reticence. Fathers were not always there. They had other things to do.

-Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren (The Dreamer Trilogy, Number 3)

[commonplaceheart]

"Slowly he peeled off his clothes, layer by layer, exposing himself to the freezing air. It was, he felt, an unmaking of his own doing, a breaking down that he had chosen for himself. He closed his eyes. He could still see the ocean behind his eyelids. The black waves going on forever. An ocean of endless depths and possibilities.

As the first of the bombs he had set in the processing plant turned the sky orange, he stepped forward and felt the waves close around his ankles."

-J.P. Oakes, "All the Truth the Ocean Holds", in The Off-Season: An Anthology of Coastal New Weird

[commonplaceheart]

"A lifetime of lifetimes. Of deaths. Felix was born and killed a thousand times over. His body was snared, was hooked, was clubbed, was asphyxiated. His body that was never his body, that was always another, made and remade, made and remade. He was lifted from his home, from his waters, from his freedom, and he died over and over, in foreign flesh, in unfamiliar skin. And it didn't stop there. His corpse was desecrated a thousand times. He was dissected and flensed and macerated and pulled. He was reduced to his essences, his most essential oils. And then it happened again, and again. He swam away, he plunged deeper. But there was no way out. Walls of poison blocked him in at every turn, at every depth. And he was snares again, killed again, decimated again, reborn again. Again. Again. An endless loop of horror playing out inside his skull."

-J.P. Oakes, "All the Truth the Ocean Holds," in The Off-Season: An Anthology of Coastal New Weird

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[commonplaceheart]

"'There's a point,' Yanagihara once said of Jude, at which 'it becomes too late to help some people.'

These are difficult words to read for those of us who have passed through suicidal ideation and emerged, if not happy to be alive, then relieved to not be dead. It is indeed a tourist's imagination that would glance out from its hotel window onto the squalor below and conclude that death is the opposite of paradise, as if the locals did not live their little lives on the expansive middle ground between the two."

-Andrea Long Chu, "Hanya's Boys"

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[crazythoughtsdiary]

from ‘a primer for the small weird loves’ by richard siken

[commonplaceheart]

"To me, the major difference between a YA novel and an adult novel is the size of the protagonists past and future. The more a protagonist is carrying forward from the past, the more adult the story tends to feel."

-Maggie Stiefvater, "Maggie Stiefvater's Superpower" by Shanti Escalante

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[commonplaceheart]

"And it really is because magic, especially the way I use it as myth, makes true things truer. It makes you able to take the context of a feeling. Someone is having a situation and [you] make it feel universal for someone else. ... That's what I love about magic. At the end of the day, if I'm not writing about something true, if the magic is just static, I feel like that story comes away false."

-Maggie Stiefvater, "The WD Interview: Maggie Stiefvater" by Moriah Richard

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[commonplaceheart]

"One if the big challenges is that Ronan's ability, of course, is a massive one, right? He can take things out of his dreams and bring them into the real world! So, what is he doing with himself? This entire series could be a medical thriller. Maybe he's dreaming the cure to cancer. And he's being hunted all over the world by pharmaceutical companies. Choosing to narrow the focus of the world, look at the metaphor, I think is crucial for magic because it can be about anything. And you have to say, 'No, we're looking at this.' And in my case, it was art. We're looking at the metaphorical for art. ... So, yeah, it was difficult to turn my attention away from some characters, but necessary for the story, the theme."

-Maggie Stiefvater, "The WD Interview: Maggie Stiefvater" by Moriah Richard

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[commonplaceheart]

[commonplaceheart]

Daedalus in Oxyana

WILLIAM BREWER <br> Was an emperor of element within the mountain’s hull,/ chewing out the corridors of coal,/ crafting my labyrinth as dema

[commonplaceheart]

"I wrote about [West Virginia] because trying to understand it as a landscape, a place, an idea, and a state of mind has long been an obsession of mine, and that's because it's my home."

-William Brewer, "To Feel Woken Up: An Interview with William Brewer" by Cate Lycurgus

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[commonplaceheart]

"The violent and sometimes ironically ignorant backlash against Fall's story sheds light on a troublingly regressive, entitled, and puritanical trend in the relationship between artists and their audiences... Readers appear to feel a need to cast their objections to fiction in moral terms, positioning themselves as protectors of the downtrodden."

-Gretchen Felken-Martin, "What's the Harm in Reading?"

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[commonplaceheart]

"But what does 'harm' mean in the context of a short story posted on a magazine's website? That art can upset, disgust, and even trigger is a given, but a reader's pain is no more an author's responsibility than the tragic Slender Man stabbing was the fault of Erik Knudsen, the fictional entity's creator. Artists can no more control how people feel when engaging with their work than they can prevent its egregious misinterpretation, two things which often go hand in hand."

-Gretchen Felker-Martin, "What's the Harm in Reading?"

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