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Reading of Lee Maynard and Pops Walker, West Virginia Writers Conference, 2011 .AVI File, 419mb

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West Virginia Writers Podcast, 2009, Part 1 .MP3 File, 18.30mb West Virginia Writers Podcast, 2009, Part 2 .MP3 File, 18.38mb

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From Crum
"A couple of years went by. Ralph had picked up another dog by that time, but there would never be a dog like the shepherd. In fact, Ralph became known as a man who collected dogs, who would steal dogs. He kept them all at his house, under his house, outside his house, inside his house. Some people said he had thirty or fourty of them at one time. They slept on his bed. He fed them, all of them, in his kitchen. He broke the windows out of a spare bedroom on the corner of the house and put some old crates underneath on the outside. That way, the dogs could climb up on the crates and come and go through the bedroom windows anytime they wanted. On a chilling, damp, mid-winter day when a layer of low clouds closed off the top of the river valley, when the thin plumes of smoke rose from the chimneys, when Crum was quiet, Ralph gathered all the dogs inside the house and locked the doors. He sat in the middle of the living room floor - there was no furniture in the living room; more room for dogs that way - and gathered the dogs around him. Probably thirty dogs in one room. Then he lit the fuse on a stick of dynamite and stuck the thing in his mouth." (Pg. 29)
"A flicker of motion at the back of the truck sent a giant slab of bacon sailing through the air. It struck Nip squarely in the chest and Nip and the bacon flew backwards and disappeared into the brush. What a hell of a mess. One guy lying bleeding in the middle of the road, another knocked ass over false teeth into the brush with a slab of bacon wrapped around his ribs, one on the truck sailing meat out into the countryside, and there I was, alone, thinking about how the hell I would ever pick all of it up." (Pg. 48)
"The icy heart of the Appalachian winter seemed to beat on forever. The freezing, bone-crushing mists that passed for winter rains hung over Crum and for days on end the sun would not shine, unable to cut through the layers of insulation that hung above the valley and prevented spring from moving through the hills. The browns stayed brown and the mud stayed mud, except when it was ice, and the cold never let you forget that you were only minutes away from the edge of wilderness." (Pg. 119)
From Screaming with the Cannibals
"So I got the hell out of there. One morning, I just walked away, back down the wagon road that twisted under the branches of the hickory trees and crossed the tiny mountain rivulets that fed into Turkey Creek. I was doing the thing I did best. I was leaving I got out of the far mountains and the twisted ridges that rolled away in all directions with their heads just above the mists that packed the hollers in the early mornings. I got out of the rutted graveyard and the busted Baptist church and the corn field where the corn never grew above four feet high and off Black Hawk Ridge and down through the long and darkened holler that cupped Turkey Creek in the lower reaches of the ancient earth and I kept going until I came to dark country I had never seen before and people who looked like family but I knew were strangers and then I kept going some more down along the creek to where it fed into Twelve Pole Creek that ran past Doane and Wilsondale. I went off away from the creek and high onto some far ridges, across the hunched shoulders of Bull Mountain and off the other side and down among the thick weed growth until I slid over a sandy bank and there was the river, shallow, thick and brown, moving sluggishly in the heat beneath the glistening flight of dragonflies through a wilted, lacy overhang of willows. I kept my head down and walked through the town as fast as I could. It was the summer of 1954. I had graduated from Crum High School. I had been back to Black Hawk Ridge to pay my last respects. I had a cardboard suitcase with a few worn clothes in it, a sheath knife, a tattered copy of The Mysterious Island and thirteen dollars and thirty-seven cents And I had places to go." (Pg. 11-12)
From The Pale Light of Sunset
"We have come back and we live again deep within the ancient soul of Appalachia, Black Hawk Ridge. Along the ridge and down through the hollers and up the creeks and branches and beside the rutted dirt roads relatives are strung in a web of history that traps us, where, over generations, the very soul of our family seeps into the bark of trees and rides on shafts of light that streak through the forest. But we are related. And we survive. And that is the way of things." (Pg. 30)
"The woman stands behind the piano player and starts to sing, her voice breathing through the room like velvet paint. The softly sculpted sounds flow their images into the room, into my mind, mix and curl with the sounds of the rain outside, crystalline, disciplined sounds carefully thought out, carefully released. I have never heard that kind of singing, not right there in front of me, not where I can see the rise and fall of her breasts and count the tiny wrnkles at the corners of her eyes. Cool words, combining to make me warm." (pg. 111)
"We search all of our lives, some of us, for that one great thing that makes us. But maybe that isn't how it really works. I remember Willi saying . . . 'Be careful where you set your sights. If you reach your ultimate goal too early in life, what is there after that?' Maybe life isn't finding that one thing. Maybe it's already here. (Damn, I think, here we go again. More psycho-babble bullshit.) It's the search. It's the journey. Maybe it's here, in this jungle, on this beach. Sitting here in this cafe that will not be here another year. Maybe this is what defines me, has defined me. It is not one great thing. It's. . . a slowly gathering wave of experience until, one day, riding its crest, you can see the horizon. I can see the wave coming." (pg. 177)