This week, a US jury handed its verdict to the chief executive who’d been accused of health and safety violations in connection with a deadly coal-mine accident in West Virginia. Donald L. Blankenship, CEO of the Massey Energy Company, was … Continue reading →
I finished a first draft of Carla Rising in April 2010, just as we received news of a deadly mine disaster in Raleigh County, West Virginia. The accident at the Upper Big Branch mine killed 29 men working about 300 … Continue reading →
Sometime after the 2008 election, I decided it was easy for me NOT to click on anything that tried to entice me with text or images of ‘Sarah Palin‘ — the unsuccessful 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, who left politics … Continue reading →
In November 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, I called all the magazine editors for whom I’d ever written, and told them I was going to Berlin. One of the publications that gave me an assignment was The Chronicle … Continue reading →
Today, I’m inspired by this 1969 recording of an interview that a brave and curious 14-year-old, Jerry Levitan, conducted with John Lennon, of the Beatles. It reminds me of the reason I wrote Carla Rising. Levitan asks Lennon why he’s … Continue reading →
A good bit of the action in Carla Rising really happened in the United States, in the 1920s. Some of the resource material came from The West Virginia Mine Wars: An Anthology, by David Corbin. I helped David get Mine Wars into print in 1991.
Here are some things I learned about the Battle of Blair Mountain since the 1990s: Continue reading →
In his West Virginia: A History for Beginners, John Alexander Williams carefully explains to young readers how social scientists gather evidence, make reasonable inferences from that evidence, and then interpret the information they have before them. People come up with … Continue reading →
For more than 20 years before moving to Berlin, I was a freelance writer and publisher in my home state of West Virginia. As I pitched and sold stories to US magazines, I published West Virginia: A History for Beginners … Continue reading →
I enjoyed hearing this NPR report about musicians protesting a proposal by iTunes (and others) to deliver the artists’ music along new media pipelines without paying them. The same day, I hear that Amazon, in its wisdom, is paying writers … Continue reading →
A friend shares this video about “Sorry Day” in Australia. The day is dedicated to Aboriginal people, victims of a European (white) policy of trying to “civilize” them by removing children from their parents, to be brought up in boarding … Continue reading →