50 States of Literature: Meandering Through West Virginia

From the hills of West Virginia comes Ann Pancake’s debut Strange as This Weather Has Been, based on real events and interviews from an Appalachian mining town. Lace See and Jimmy Make fall in love in the era of the Buffalo Creek Disaster. Twenty years later, their family is cut up in a flurry of strip-mining and clear-cutting, with black floods a constant menace and the economy collapsing in on itself. As the parents argue over leaving, their daughter Bant explores her sexuality and allegiances while her three brothers struggle to understand what is happening around them. Weather weaves a stream-of-conscious narrative that never feels one-dimensional—the characters, from passionate Lace to gentle, sensitive Dane, are genuine and endearingly flawed. With her book, Pancake pens a love poem to West Virginia, and also a lament for its ravaged hills: “This place so subtly beautiful and overlaid with doom,” Lace says. “Killed again and again, and each time, the place rising back on its haunches, diminished, but once more alive.” Even after getting black lung, her father wants to spend his last days out in his woods, where lush vegetation curls around rusted machinery and poisoned mud sludges against yellowroot and dusty sugar maples. As Uncle Mogey puts it, their mountains are different from those out West: “We live in our mountains. It’s not just the tops, but the sides that hold us.” The See family is faced with an impossible choice—to stay would mean witness the land they love die, and to leave would be to betray the love itself.