At one time it was the biggest mine in the world. There was one mine about six miles from my house. But there was still every other town, every two miles you would come to another coal camp and most of them had their own mines and some of them were really huge. “That mine closed when I was five or six years old. I thought when I was a little kid that you heard the whistle and it was something bad.” You could also hear–they would blow a whistle if there was an accident or something. The miners would walk to it from the houses. When I was real small there was a mine connected with my dad’s company that was like a half mile from our house. “The mines were always a looming presence because they were everywhere, first of all. But the mines also fired her curiosity and made her aware that life could be contradictory and unfair. It was the experiences of her first thirteen years spent in Black Wolf that Giardina drew upon to write her two coal field novels.Īs a child, the enormity of the mines was a source of fear for young Giardina. Her father worked as an accountant for the local coal company and her mother was a nurse. Giardina also reflects on her struggles to feel rooted in an increasingly mobile society and to find support for her interest in activism.ĭenise Giardina was born in 1951 and grew up in Black Wolf, a small coal camp near Bluefield, West Virginia. In the following interview, Giardina locates the roots of her social conscience in her fundamentalist Christian upbringing, her mother’s loving example, and the inequality she encountered growing up in a West Virginia coal mining town. Despite the heavy political content, Giardina’s keen eye for detail, her complex portrayals of her novels’ heroes and her tremendous gift for storytelling ensure that her writing never reads as preachy or polemical. In Storming Heaven (1987), and its sequel, The Unquiet Earth (1992), Giardina traces more than one hundred years in the struggle of West Virginia coal miners to protect their families, land, and unions from hostile coal companies and government indifference. Though she describes her writing as primarily theological rather than political, Appalachian writer Denise Giardina stands out among contemporary American authors for her ruthless depictions of capitalism and the violence it inflicts on people and the environment. Saints and Villains: An Interview with Denise Giardina

The Unquiet Earth by Denise Giardina