You don’t have to break a union you can lay off. A dragline doesn’t strike. It doesn’t take the black lung, doesn’t ask for a raise, doesn’t wear a red bandana around its neck. One machine and a handful of men to run it could move more mountain in a week than a hundred union men could dig in a season—so that’s what they did. The land and the creeks and the timber and the animals. God’s creation itself be damned. There’s money to be made.

More coal came out of these hills than ever when the strip mines started, and the men who had starved through Harlan and bled at Blair Mountain woke up to find they’d won a war that didn’t exist anymore. They weren’t beaten this time. They were made obsolete. That’s worse. It’s also cheaper, and that is exactly why the men who own things have always preferred it.

I’m telling you all of this because it is happening again, right now, in a different coat.

The machine this time doesn’t run on diesel. They call it efficiency—they have always called it efficiency—and the work a person gave a lifetime to learning, a program will do tonight for the price of the electricity it burns. And the people who own the “intelligence” will look you square in the eye (through a screen) and tell you it’s progress, and that you ought to be grateful that your little pieces of creation have been chosen, hand selected by the industrial lords of silicon valley to host such a prestigious undertaking.

I have heard those words this very year. Not out of some coal baron in a high collar. Out of my own neighbors—good people—standing up to cheer on the data center coming to the parkway. It’ll bring jobs, they say. It won’t be that bad.

So I asked my wife about the jobs, since she’s an electrical engineer and knows how these things get built, even if she’s not on this one. There’ll be construction work, she told me—real money, for a couple of years, while they pour the concrete and run the lines. And then it’s done. And the thing that’s left behind—a walled compound you could lose a multiple farms inside of, sitting on more of our ground than I want to think about—will run on fifty, maybe a hundred jobs. That’s the whole of it. For all that land.

And here’s the part that put the chill in me. They’re building their own power grid to feed it, so it won’t even pull off ours. Sit with that a second too. They are coming here to make their own electricity, right here beside us, so that the one and only thing they will ever need from this place and our people is the dirt to set the machine on.

I want to take my neighbors by the arm when I hear it. Because I have read what their great-grandfathers were promised, in this same county, in nearly the same words, by men who left them a highwall and desolate hillsides and got out clean.

And it isn’t only us. I used to think this was an Appalachian story—a coal story, our own peculiar curse to carry. It isn’t. The rancher out west, watching a handful of companies decide what his water and his grass and his cattle are worth—that’s the same story, just told in a drier country. The mill town. The farm town. Every place in this nation where the people who do the work don’t own the thing they make. We are all of us in Harlan County now. Most of us just don’t know the song yet.

Florence Reece only ever asked the one question, and a hundred years hasn’t worn the edge off of it.

Which side are you on?

You know some of how that went. Roof falls. Gas. The slow stone filling a man’s lungs until he drowned years later, standing on his own front porch, miles and seasons away from the mine that killed him. The companies knew it too. A dead miner was cheaper than a safe mine, and there was always another man waiting at the gate, because the company owned the house he slept in and the store he ate out of. Even the money in his pocket wasn’t real money. It was scrip—paper that was good nowhere but the company’s own counter. A token economy, like the kind you might set up at home to earn out your kids allowance.

A man worked the mountain to pay the company, so he could live on the company’s ground, so he could work the mountain. He could spend his whole life down there and die owing. And when he died, if he didn’t have a son stout enough to grasp the pick in his place, the family got put out of the house.

And then these people—my people—did an audacious thing. They had the gall to say out loud that they would rather not die. They decided a day’s work ought to buy a day’s bread, in real coin. They organized.

The companies didn’t just brand that as an inconvenience, but through yellow dog contracts they revoked a man’s first amendment rights. The right to assemble, the right to free speech. The right to disagree with the company outside of your own mind. You cost a greedy man enough money and he’ll kill you for it. Nothing much has changed on that front has it?

So they sent the gun thugs. Baldwin-Felts men, hired rifles, brought in to break the camps and the bodies in them. In Harlan County they shot it out in the road and called the ground Bloody Harlan and meant it. At Blair Mountain, ten thousand miners took up arms, and the men who owned the coal answered with machine guns and with hired planes that dropped bombs on them out of the air—on American working men, in the hills of West Virginia—until the federal government sent in the Army. A vast majority of the miners fighting for a living wage had recently returned as veterans from WWI. They would not raise a rifle against United States soldiers, friends, brothers they had bled with in Europe. They laid their guns down and walked home beaten.

In 1931, in Harlan, a woman named Florence Reece sat in a house the company men had just tore apart hunting her husband. She pulled a calendar down off the wall and wrote a song on the back of it. Which side are you on? That was not a figure of speech. The sides were standing out in her yard with rifles.

The men bled for it, and they won some of it. Better pay. Safety law, in time—paid for in disasters, one funeral at a stretch. Black lung benefits, bought the same hard way. It was real, and it cost, and it mattered.

I ought to tell you where I came by all this, because I sure didn’t learn it in school. It’s a book by a historian named James Green—The Devil Is Here in These Hills. And here’s the thing that’ll get you about it. Green doesn’t write like a man with an axe to grind. He’s not up on a soapbox telling you the coal companies were evil. He lays the facts down plain, in the actual words of the people who lived it, and then he gets out of the way. And somewhere along in the middle of it you realize the facts don’t need any help from him. It’s worse than anybody ever let on. The truth is its own argument.

And here’s the part I can’t get past. Blair Mountain was the biggest armed uprising this country has seen since the Civil War. And most people couldn’t tell you it ever happened. A lot of that is just where it happened. It was West Virginia. It was us. Nobody’s ever been in a hurry to teach that chapter where the “upstanding gentlemen of the industrial arts” hired airplanes to drop bombs on their own countrymen, so it gets buried—same as most everything else that happens back in these hills.

It was only as I got older that I started to wonder what all these things even were. Because they’re everywhere up here, and they’re too clean-cut to be natural—sheer walls of rock, twenty and thirty feet high, standing up out of the middle of a field where no wall has any business being. They sit on the hilltops all over our land. And then one day I learned what they’re called, and what they mean.

If you’ve never seen one, it’s called a highwall. That’s the proper name for it. It’s what gets left behind when a man takes the top off a hill and doesn’t put it back. Last night I sat down and went through the old mine records for the exact ground my house sits on. L&O Coal, out of Prestonsburg. They took thirty feet off the top of this hill to reach a seam of coal three feet thick. Thirty feet of mountain, for three feet of coal — sit with that a second. And I’ve looked at the tonnage they hauled out of it; by the standards of the business it isn’t much. Not much at all, for a whole hilltop.

And it isn’t only the walls. There are stones scattered through our fields the size of tractor tires. I can shove them around with the skid steer but they can’t be lifted by any machinery we have access too. You don’t find stone like that laying loose on top of the ground, not up here, not naturally. That came up out of the inside of the hill when they tore the top off of it, and whoever did the work just shoved it aside and left it where it stopped rolling.

And here’s the part that gets me, now that I’ve read those records. None of this was ever supposed to still be here. They worked this ground from ‘88 to ‘93, and by then the law already said that when you were finished, you put it back as close to how you found it. They were supposed to grade the walls back down near the hill’s old shape, so there’d be nothing left standing. They were supposed to haul off the big stones, or bury them. They were supposed to lime the ground and seed it, so it would come back as pasture, as farmland—as something a family could live off of. That was the deal they signed to get at the coal in the first place. They took the coal and skipped the rest. Shoved the guts of the mountain into a heap, left the walls standing and the stones laying, and called it good.

Now, I want to be plain about something. I’m not anti-coal. My wife’s an electrical engineer, and I’ll be the first to admit I don’t follow all the ins and outs of solar versus lithium against nuclear versus natural gas. But I do know coal is about the most efficient thing human beings ever learned to burn, and mined honest, the harm it does to the ground is small. Coal isn’t the villain in this story. Greed is. Take the greed out of it and it’s not a bad thing at all—but greed is about the one thing in this world you can count on, and that right there is the whole trouble.

My papaw was not a crying man. The kind of man who walked the plow rows behind a mule in suffocating southern summers so his family could eat, the way men of his make did, and in all the years I had him I saw him cry a handful of times. Always over holy things—the grandkids tearing into Christmas, the name of the Lord in his mouth and once, the time I’ll never shake, over a hillside. He got to talking about the hickories that used to grow here. Said they were once so thick through these hills you couldn’t see the next ridge over for them. Mast every fall. Squirrels in them thick as fleas. Shade all summer long. And then he just quit talking, and when I looked over his face was wet, and he wiped it off with the back of his hand like he was ashamed of it, and we walked on. I was too young then to understand that a man can grieve a hillside the same as he grieves a person. I understand it now.

My uncle Russ told me once, as we stood watching both his dad and my dad’s dad work on a tractor together, how lucky I was to get to spend time with both of them at once. I agreed. At the time I thought I knew how blessed I was, but it didn’t truly register until twenty years later, when I sat on the front porch and listened to both my Papaw’s, George and Willis tell stories back and forth. Luckily I had the presence of mind to take a picture.

Some were shared memories—they’d worked a lot of the same jobs over the years—and some were new to each of them. None of them were new to me. I’d heard each and every one so many times I’d find myself mouthing along. They had a story for every subject and every emotion—joy, grief, fear—and my favorite was how they were always funny, even when they shouldn’t have been. They were good at finding the humor and the silver lining in everything. They had to be. Neither one had lived an easy life; both grew up in the hills and hollers on farms. They taught me everything I know about hard work, about what it means to be a Godly man, a husband, a brother, a friend. And they never once used any of those words. They taught me through their stories.

As I’ve moved out of the writing phase of my novel and into revising, I’ve started to analyze my own voice. Why do I sound like I do? Why do I use the phrases I do? I’ve found that nearly every metaphor I reach for is concrete—I don’t deal in the abstract very often. I tend to circle a point several times, like a vulture working a dying critter. And that’s not just a habit—it’s how I was raised. To my people the land was never just scenery you walked across. The weather and the rock and the timber were alive, and you learned young to treat them that way. So when I write about wrong rock or woods gone too quiet, my hand reaches for the concrete on its own, because to me the ground isn’t a backdrop. It’s in the room with you. It’s watching. And as I write I’ll naturally end a paragraph in what seems like a strange place.

Then I’ll land the line.

Then I’ll start a new paragraph and go on from there. I let some sentences run on and keep going long after they should’ve had a period and I like to use the word “and” more than I probably should. Somewhere in dissecting my own writing I’ve come to realize that this—all of this—is my voice. And I didn’t get that rhythm out of a book either. I got it from old-time preachers who’d stack a sentence up and up and never give you a place to step off, and from George and Willis on the porch doing the same. You lay one “and” on top of another till the words start to roll, and a man leans in despite himself, waiting to see where you mean to take him. Ancestry carried my people back to Ireland and Scotland, and I expect that rolling way of talking came across the water with them and never left.

I’ve read Tolkien and Sanderson and Jordan. I’ve read Tolstoy and Hemingway and Faulkner. From them I learned prose and scaffolding, how to build a world and use symbology and draw analogies and lead a reader to a conclusion. How to use foreshadowing and subterfuge, how to trick a reader into the pleasure of being surprised. Those are the big-picture skills—the ones that can be taught, in workshops and craft books and by keeping your nose shoved in every piece of fiction you can get your hands on for most of your life.

But my voice—my ability to build tension, to write a witty line, to make a reader feel something from nothing but words on a page—I don’t take credit for any of that. And I don’t give the credit to anyone outside my bloodline.

When I was working on my masters in counseling we all had to do a project called a genogram. It’s designed to help clients identify patterns of behavior in their family histories. In my own I kept catching the same thing in every branch—black hair and blue eyes, near every one of us. Cherokee and Shawnee on the one side, Ireland and Scotland on the other, all of it meeting up somewhere back down the line and turning out a houseful of dark heads with bright blue eyes. I think on that sometimes when I read my own pages, because the writing does what the faces do: a heavy dark sentence, and then a sudden bright line cut through it. The contrast was in the blood a long time before it was ever in the pen.

Analogies are the lifeblood of a good story. Every good sermon I’ve ever heard, every good book I’ve ever read, every story I’ve ever heard told on a porch leaned hard on the teller’s ability to illustrate something in a way you’d remember. In Appalachian culture, that something is very nearly always a thing a man can lay a hand to. Phrases I grew up hearing daily—”rough as a cob,” “tough as a pine knot,” “fine as a frog hair split four ways.” Their words were efficient, like everything else about them. They kept the varnish off them. And those plain words were survival, when you get right down to it. Up in the hollers a man didn’t have room for fancy talk. Hiding behind flowery language was just a way of showing where you were soft, and you didn’t show another man where you were soft, not even in your own family. You saw a thing for what it was, you called it by its name, and you handled it whole. My characters move through their world the same way, because I was raised by men who lived that way.

These sayings litter my novel, and beta readers keep telling me how much they love them—how funny they are, how much depth they add. Truth is, I just write like I talk. I tell stories the way I was told them.

You ever hear an old-timer tell a story and catch yourself wishing he’d get on with it? That’s the circle. He makes a statement, then wanders off onto some completely unrelated thing, and then another one that seems just as random, and then at the very end he pulls all three back together and lands one of the most astute points you’ve ever heard in your life. That’s the art of it. No words wasted, no time wasted, even when it seems innocuous in the moment. I promise you it’s not. It’s all load-bearing, and it’s all coming back around. I won’t give away spoilers, so I’ll spare you the examples from my book—but trust me. They’re there.

I know that I can’t read you my story out loud. I have to trust you to hear it in your head the way I wrote it. So when I want a pause—I put in a pause. Em dashes are one way, though apparently using them now means a machine wrote your book; news that would’ve surprised Emily Dickinson. They add flavor and texture, because nobody speaks the way they write. We say “um” and “like,” and we cut ourselves off mid thou—sentence, because we changed our mind halfway through about what we meant to say. The story tellers I grew up with used all of it—to build suspense, to keep you leaning in, to set a breath down right before the reveal. It doesn’t always carry straight to the page, but I think that’s what I’m after when I write a one-sentence paragraph.

Papaw George had a habit of pausing so long sometimes you thought he’d forgotten what he was going to say. He never had. The longer he made you wait on the punchline, the better you knew it was going to be.

So if I’ve got one thing left to say to you—as a reader, as a fellow writer—it’s this.

Where was your porch? Were you listening?

Most of those stories I can’t go back and hear anymore. They’re both gone now. There’s a recording of one evening, the two of them trading tales back and forth. I’m not going to share it. But I have it, and on the days the voice starts to slip away from me, I can go back and find it again. The boy who grew up listening is the one writing it all down now, because that’s how the stories survive. They aren’t on this earth anymore, but they’re still here—they live in the stories we tell each other about their stories. Their gift got handed down to another generation. And I hope that long after I’m gone, my children and my grandchildren will think back on me and the stories I told and retold.

I’m from eastern Kentucky and I am in the middle of building my home on land my Papaw reclaimed from a strip mine. I was splitting wood the other evening and sat down to take a break. I stared down between my boots and at all the various dirt patches between the clumps of clover. Hard, rocky, compacted. Pieces of coal still flecked in there, some of them as big as my fist. My dad spends a small fortune on lime every year just to get hay to grow on what’s left of it. We’ve spent years putting right what someone else ruined, and there are still whole acres that need a lot of hard labor to set true. By trade I’m a Clinical Director for two residential substance abuse centers. I’ve spent my career with people living in the wreckage extractive industries leave behind long after the coal trucks stop running and the lawsuits with Purdue Pharma have settled (I’ll probably make a whole post about that soon.) And for the last few years, in whatever hours were left over, I’ve been writing a novel.

It’s called No Crows. It’s Book One of something called the Ridgelands Cycle—an Appalachian fantasy set in a world built on the bones of the nineteenth-century mountains, where folk magic runs in the blood passed down from the Natives and a plutocratic mining company is digging for something that should stay buried.

It’s complete. It’s currently in front of a literary agent. I don’t know yet how that’s going to go. Pouring myself out onto the page was as good, if not better than therapy (sorry Tammy). But now letting other people in, letting them read it. I bet I’ve watched that Brene Brown lecture on vulnerability twenty times this last week.

Here’s the God’s honest truth. I’ve got Book Two waiting on me—I know how it starts, I know where it is headed, I’ve got a good idea of how it’s going to end. I could write the first draft in a month. But I haven’t let myself really start it yet. Some of that is the normal rush of three jobs (four now I guess) and three kids. Most of it, if I’m honest, is that I’m scared to build a whole second book on a foundation I don’t know is solid yet. What if Book One doesn’t sell? What if I write a hundred thousand more words into a world nobody else ever sees? Or worse than that, what if it’s a world nobody ever cares to see? Everyone I love keeps saying “you wrote a 95,000 word book, you’re an author.” But they love me, they’re supposed to say that right? I don’t feel like an author. The words that keep floating around my head are poser…imposter…fraud...

Logically I know that’s not really how this works—plenty of writers have drawers full of books that came before the one that sold, and the writing was never wasted even when it stayed in a drawer. But knowing that and feeling it are two different things, and right now I’m sitting squarely in the chasm between them.

This newsletter is where I’ll write about that gap, and about the parts of this process nobody puts on a query letter—the books that shaped this one, the research that built the world, the actual land underneath all of it, and whatever else seems worth sharing as this goes on. Some of it will be about writing. Some of it will probably just be about home. Some of it, apparently, will be about confessing my catatonic fear of failure and rejection.

If you’re here, thank you for coming along while I figure out what this is.

Zachary