Harshman reads from "Dark Hills of Home" on Mountain Stage

 

(this Mountain Stage concert aired on April 4, 2023).

KATHY MATEA:  Hello again and welcome to the second hour of Mountain Stage.  I'm Kathy Mattea and I'm so glad you joined us.  We're back here in Charleston, West Virginia and we're celebrating our 39th Anniversary today. .. . . .  Still to come, a very special extended set from Bela Fleck, 'My Bluegrass Home.'    But we're going to open this second hour with a writer and poet .  In fact, he's celebrating his 10th Anniversary as West Virginia's Poet Laureate.  He's written 14 nationally acclaimed children's books and 7 books of poetry .  .  .  (long list of titles and prizes), and his newest book for this, his anniversary year, called Dark Hills of Home, published by Monongahela Books.  He says, "It's hard to explain, but I'm the kind of writer who needs to know where the woods are, and that there are good friends and neighbors nearby."  Please welcome back to the Mountain Stage, Marc Harshman.

MARC HARSHMAN:  Thank you Kathy . . .  I'm so happy to return to be part of another anniversary celebration.  This first poem is from my new book, Dark Hills of Home, and is one that plants us squarely in West Virginia, particularly the southeastern mountains, "Not All that Much."  (reads it, followed by "Cleaning the Cistern.").

Omanson's memoir of a winter alone in the wilderness serialized online at The Milk House

Selections from the first volume of BJ Omanson's memoir, Three Years on the Nowhere Road is currently being serialized online at The Milk House, a collective of rural writing based in Ireland.

Part 1 is introduced by the following paragraph: 

 What follows is a selection from the opening chapters of BJ Omanson’s memoir Three Years on the Nowhere Road in which he recounts the strange and haphazard road that led him to a life of poetry— a life of inadequate means, manual labor, wilderness solitude and— as he was a high-school dropout— nothing whatever to do with writing programs or academia. 

 In November of 1972, married scarcely a year and having lost his job as a tree trimmer with the Rockford Park District in Illinois due to being on the losing side of a labor strike, with winter coming on and no prospect of comparable work before spring, Omanson made a drastic decision. He packed his uncle’s WWII seabag with a change of clothes, a blanket and some books, took five dollars from the household nest egg and announced his intention to hitchhike out to the coast of Washington State, where there was said to be a logging boom in progress and work to be had by anyone who could handle a chainsaw. We pick up his story several days later, on a deserted two-lane road in an Oregon forest, sometime after midnight:

 Continue reading at The Milk House: