Ann Pancake

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Ann Pancake is an American fiction writer and essayist. She has published a novel, short stories and essays describing the people and atmosphere of Appalachia, often from the first-person perspective of those living there. While fictional, her short stories contribute to an understanding of poverty in the 20th century, and well as the historical roots of American and rural poverty. Much of Pancake's writing also focuses on the destruction caused by natural resource extraction, particularly in Appalachia, and the lives of the people affected. [1]

Contents

Pancake believes that people from the Appalachian region of the United States have many qualities that the rest of Americans don't have, but should - such as the art of storytelling. [1]

Life

Though her West-Virginian heritage spans seven generations back, Pancake was born in Richmond, Virginia, where her father was enrolled in seminary at the time. [2] She grew up in Summersville, West Virginia in Nicholas County, later moving to Romney, West Virginia when she was eight years old. [3] [4] She is the sister of filmmaker Chet Pancake and actor Sam Pancake, and a distant relative of the writer Breece D'J Pancake. Her father was a Presbyterian minister, and later in life, a social worker. Her mother was an art teacher, teaching at a high school. [3] At a young age, Pancake heard her father preach a sermon against strip-mining to his middle-class congregation. Due to the bold nature of the sermon, it was picked up and broadcast on the radio. Pancake had never realized that she and her family had accents until she heard her father's voice on the radio. She would later remark that the worst part about living outside of Appalachia is not being able to hear Appalachian people speak. [2]

Growing up, she was always taught that land was a thing to be cherished, and that family land was not to be sold or developed. She spent much of her childhood playing in the creek and woods on her family's property; as a woman she was not permitted to hunt. From a very early age Pancake was curious about social justice. Her parents were readers and college educated, which was uncommon in their community at the time. [2] Pancake also had access to books growing up, and was encouraged to read by her parents. [3]

Pancake has also expressed that, when she was growing up, she wanted to move away from West Virginia. She had a complicated relationship with West Virginia throughout her life - battling her homesickness and attachment to West Virginia but also her desire to explore places outside of the state. She still has this conflicted relationship with the state today. [3]

When she was eighteen, Ann Pancake moved from Romney and attended West Virginia University, graduating summa cum laude with a degree in English. [5] Pancake found West Virginia University to be a "culture shock" as there were a large number of out-of-state students at the time. [3] Due to low employment rates in West Virginia, after graduating, Pancake left the state and started to teach in various countries in Asia and the South Pacific. [3] She taught in Japan for a year, American Samoa for two years, and Thailand for almost a year. [3] Pancake never expected to be a writer, so she pursued a Ph.D. rather than an MFA, which at the time she thought herself not talented enough to complete. She earned her M.A. in English from the University of North Carolina, writing her master's thesis on Samoan writer Albert Wendt, using postcolonial theory. She later earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington, where her driving dissertation question was "how Americans sustain their delusion that we have essentially a classless society given the glaring economic disparity in this country. [3] [5] Pancake says that her literature degree helped her to shape her own writing. [1] When she was writing her dissertation, she would always write fiction whenever and anywhere she could, especially during any breaks she got. [3]

Her time outside of the East Coast and the United States formed her understanding of Appalachia, and helped her see the value in the region she came from. During her time abroad, Pancake found herself so homesick that she kept writing about Appalachia despite being on a completely different continent. [2]

She currently lives in a small town near Morgantown, WV, and teaches Appalachian fiction and environmental criticism. [4] She recently resigned from WVU in protest of the politically oriented gutting of essential courses, staff, and professors there in 2023. [6]

Context, themes, and style

Many of Pancake's characters make their home in rural West Virginia. This includes the Potomac Highlands and areas in the southern part of the state. For example, her story Wappatomaka describes the Trough region of the Highlands, where severe flooding on the Potomac River often occurs.

Poverty can be reflected in violence, and in her stories Pancake addresses both the Vietnam War and domestic abuse. Dirt chronicles a family's reflection of a son taught to burrow shafts in the Vietnam War, and the entrapment and dread that this environment echoes for them at home. In Jolo, a boy's neglect by his family is literally seared into his skin in a trailer fire.

Pancake's characters live in opposition to mainstream American society, often without conscious choice. Others revel in their outsider status and maintain a connection to nature that resists societal pressures. Her title character in the story Jolo is wanted by police investigating a series of arsons. While the boy is a fugitive he agrees to secretly meet with a local girl, Connie, in a remote location on the banks of a river. The river serves as a reminder of Jolo's untamed nature and his preference for the wilderness over village life. At the same time, Connie sees how cut off he is from the rural society both of them were born into. This is a virtue of physical deformities he has suffered, but also because of the comparative economic poverty of his upbringing.

While some critics have chosen to place Pancake firmly in the tradition of Appalachian writing, [7] her stories describe more than regional color, history, and concerns. The subtext of much of her work is the separation of individuals from the rest of society, often in cycles of poverty. Early motherhood, hunger, and alienation from mainstream economies are manifest in stories such as Ghostless and Tall Grass. The sharply divided interests of urban and rural Americans and the powerful determinant of social class is manifest in Bait and "Redneck Boys" where the death toll of rural highways is both the cause of nonchalance and horror. Her work also appears in the collection LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia, edited by Jeff Mann and Julia Watts. [8]

Pancake's work often stresses voice, contrasting perspectives and colloquial speech with unusual sentence structure and unusual use of dialogue and dialogue markers. She also has a specialized vocabulary for describing natural phenomena and colors.

They're moving. The night fishermen across the water, mumbly drunk, to be avoided, and the single night train, baying its lonesomeness, and the corn pollen a green sensation in the back of their throats, not quite smell, not quite taste. [9]

Rather than plot, Pancake's writing is more focused on language, and how the presentation of words affects the reader of a text. [1]

Short stories

Pancake's stories include several published in her short story collection Given Ground , [9] including the following with original publication information in parentheses:

Additional stories include:

Novel: Strange As This Weather Has Been

Ann Pancake's first novel Strange As This Weather Has Been was published by Shoemaker & Hoard/Counterpoint in October 2007. Set in southern West Virginia, the novel has been widely reviewed, and was termed by Wendell Berry "one of the bravest novels I've ever read." [10]

Pancake began writing the novel at a time when mountaintop removal mining was seldom known. She chose to write a piece of fiction, rather than journalistic nonfiction, believing a fiction story would function more effectively in conveying the spiritual relationship that humans have with the earth. Each child in the novel embodies a different part of Pancake's experiences as a child in Appalachia. The novel took Pancake seven years to complete. She remarks that the novel was actually quite a difficult endeavor, since she had previously only ever written short stories. This is why Strange As This Weather Has Been is composed of a number of different characters who narrate their own chapters - each character has their own story, rather than the entire novel wrapping up into one large plotline. [11] Pancake gave a reading of this novel at the Washington State Art Museum where she was a part of the Meet The Artist Fellowship. [12]

Strange as This Weather Has Been won the 2007 Weatherford Prize. [4] It was also on the Kirkus Reviews Top Ten Fiction Books list, a finalist for the 2008 Washington State Book Award for fiction, and a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book award. [4]

Film: Black Diamonds

Ann provided some initial research and interview assistance for the film Black Diamonds: Mountaintop Removal and the Fight for Coalfield Justice (2006). [13] The film was directed by her brother, Chet Pancake. Throughout the filming process, Pancake found herself writing short stories based loosely on the children they encountered. These stories would later become the first draft of Strange As This Weather Has Been. At this time, mountaintop removal was not widely known. [14]

For a discussion of the themes, geography, and production of this film, see Bret McCabe's article Tragic Mountains from the Baltimore City Paper. [15]

Selected works

Short story collections

Novel

Selected awards and fellowships

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Ann Pancake Interview by Holly Hughes, May 13th, 2008". YouTube. Retrieved March 3, 2021.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Gipe, Robert (2011). ""Straddling Two Worlds": An Interview with Ann Pancake". Appalachian Journal. 28: 170–197. JSTOR   41320295 – via JSTOR.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 West, James. "Closer to the Ground: A Conversation with Ann Pancake". Southern Spaces. Retrieved March 25, 2022.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Pancake, Ann. "Letter to West Virginia". Souvenir: A Journal. Retrieved March 28, 2017.
  5. 1 2 "Authors: Ann Pancake". Counterpoint Press. June 28, 2012. Retrieved March 28, 2017.
  6. ↑ Beck, Erin (November 8, 2023). "Meet five professors departing WVU due to budget cuts". Mountain State Spotlight. Retrieved November 17, 2023.
  7. ↑ Judd, Elizabeth. Books in Brief: Given Ground. New York Times, August 12, 2001.
  8. ↑ Watts, Julia; Mann, Jeff (2019). LGBTQ fiction and poetry from Appalachia. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. ISBN   978-1-946684-93-6. OCLC   1088353343.
  9. 1 2 Pancake, Ann. Given Ground. Hanover, NH: Middlebury/University of New England Press. 2001. p. 26
  10. ↑ Frizelle, Christopher. Literature: Ones to Watch, Ann Pancake. The Stranger, Pullout Section. http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=23583.
  11. ↑ "Ann Pancake Interview by Holly Hughes, May 13th, 2008". YouTube. Retrieved March 3, 2021.
  12. ↑ "Ann Pancake". Artist Trust. Retrieved March 6, 2021.
  13. ↑ http://www.blackdiamondsmovie.com/Accessed%5B%5D Online Dec. 20 2006.
  14. ↑ Ann Pancake Interview by Holly Hughes, May 13th, 2008. YouTube . Archived from the original on December 10, 2021.
  15. ↑ McCabe, Bret (March 29, 2006). "Tragic Mountains: Local Filmmaker Catherine Pancake Hopes To Bring the Devastation of Mountaintop Removal Mining To a Theater Near You". Baltimore City Paper. Archived from the original on July 22, 2012. Retrieved March 12, 2017.
  16. ↑ "WVU Today | Appalachian literature expert to join WVU as writer-in-residence". wvutoday.wvu.edu. July 23, 2018. Retrieved March 3, 2021.
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