From 'suRURALism' to outhouses
Not quite the West Virginia that you might expect. | NOVEMBER 2022
1 | EDITORS/NOTE: Life after the midterms: This new November 2022 issue of WestVirginiaVille.com is quite the thing, featuring a whole bunch of cool and worthy features you’re unlikely to see gathered together anywhere else. But let me get this off my chest first. Go vote, so we don’t have to move to Canada. Take someone with you … | Douglas John Imbrogno, WestVirginiaVille.com editor | November 2022
2 | INDEX: A Guide to Stories in the November 2022 issue: A clickable guide to all the articles, profiles, Q-and-As, videos and whatnot in the November 2022 edition.
3 | THE INTERVIEW: Ann Magnuson on the art of “suRURALism” and coming to ground in West Virginia: You need several categories — performer, musician, actress, artist, provocateur, at the least. — to sum up the swath Ann Magnuson has cut through the cultural scene since leaving her hometown of Charleston WV. But there’s a reason she keeps coming back to West Virginia so often …
4 | Q&A: How “The Coal Trap” led to West Virginia’s “lost decade” in clean energy: How West Virginia got stuck in “The Coal Trap” and missed out for ten years on the clean energy revolution is a story worth a book. Here’s that book — and how the state might spring that trap. A Q-and-A with James M. Van Nostrand.
5 | BEST/SHOT: Lights, Losers, Lovers, Lillies & Leaves: A sampling of some ‘Best/Shot’ photographs, from the multiple spires of West Virginia’s capital (all seen at once), to Autumn leaves, lily pads, and some thoughtful graffiti by Al Peery, Robert Blankenship, Doug Minnerly, and Douglas John Imbrogno.
6 | FIRST/PERSON: Finding Yo-Yo Ma playing cello in the West Virginia hills: Who was that man bowing a cello against a tree in the New River Gorge? Why, it’s none other than one of the world’s best known and loved instrumental maestros. And he has something to say as well as to play.
7 | CHARACTERS | A visit with a ‘cozmic’ polymath prof and his harmonium: Marshall U. prof Bill Price has a Ph.D. in Biomolecular Physics, reads Sanskrit (but says he’s not fluent), and has pages of peer-reviewed publications on his Curriculum Vitae. He also plays the harmonium, had a Naval Academy appointment and began yoga at age 11.
9 | THE OUTHOUSE: When you gotta go, you gotta go: Even if you're a Buddhist monk or nun deep in the West Virginia woods at one of the Western world's significant Theravada Buddhist monasteries, you might need an outhouse. But where's the toilet paper?
8 | POETRY: “Fall” by Jodi Autumn: The trees in their fall-best, gaudy, in their most beautiful gowns of oranges, yellows, and reds, whispered secrets to me in / their slow, slow speech. / They told me that it’s okay that some of me is always dying. / They warned that we don’t know what is to come. / They said to prepare for the worst, / but to do it in style.
9 | FIRST/PERSON: Prostitute Pasta & Way-Out Family Restaurants: ‘I am dreaming of a plate full of fluffy, cheesy scrambled eggs, streaked with a couple of red skid marks of Tabasco and a side plate of triangles of buttered toast. Preferably, wheat. But I will take white, if it is all Minney has got …’’’
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