by Dr. Nancy Caronia, WVU Department of English
 |
L to R: AD of Undergraduate Writing Sarah Morris,
Luis Neer, University of Pittsburgh Professor Lina Insana,
Taylor Miller, and Denise Giardina at the WVRHC. |
First-year English majors from ENGL 199 watched as Denise
Giardina turned the pages of a spiral-bound notebook that contained the first
draft of what would become the author’s novel Storming Heaven. Giardina pitched forward in her chair in the West
Virginia & Regional History Center (WVRHC) to get a closer look at what she
had written. “There were no computers. And typewriters were a mess to work
with. I had no choice,” she said regarding the notebooks filled with her longhand
script. Then she smiled: “My handwriting was pretty good back then.”
 |
| Melville Davisson Post, hunched over, fourth from left. |
Earlier in the semester, ENGL 199 had visited the WVRHC to
learn about the center and to look through archives related to both WVU’s
campus read
Hidden Figures and the
Department of English’s history. During that initial trip, students saw W.E.B.
DuBois’s signature on the first page of a ledger, learned more about one of the
young men, Melville Davisson Post, in the photo of the young Shakespearean
players hanging in Colson 130, and read through and handled the notebooks of
Giardina. Some pulled out their phones and snapped pictures of a page or two of
Giardina’s work while others flipped the pages to examine her writing process.
The students who gathered to meet Giardina on October 12, 2017 knew of her archives, but some had also read her novels in high school. They
each had questions about her writing process, but they also wanted to know what
it meant to her to grow up in a coal camp and to continue to live in West Virginia
in 2017. What they couldn’t have been prepared for was the writer who sat
and talked quietly about how long ago it had seemed since she wrote Storming Heaven. With each turn of the
page, she remembered more and more of what it was like to create that novel and
her other works.
When Giardina suggested her novels weren’t the same, or as
important, as history textbooks, associate coordinator of undergraduate writing
Sarah Morris discussed how central the author’s novels had been to Morris’s
understanding of West Virginia, coal mining, and her family when she was a
teenager. Morris stated that Giardina’s novels gave her a visceral experience
of coalmines that brought empathy and a sense of belonging, something a
textbook couldn’t do. The students nodded their heads in agreement.
Later that evening, Giardina gave a talk--“The Socialist
Revolution in West Virginia: What Happened?”--for WVU’s Slavic Studies Series:
Revolutionary World, 1917 and Beyond. At this event in the Milano Room of WVU's Downtown Library, Giardina noted, “West
Virginia has never been in sync with the times in which it lives.” She
suggested that “we are in a unique place,” but that in southern West Virginia,
autonomy was compromised through the sale of land. When 80% of the land is
owned by corporations or special interests, she suggested, “West Virginians
lose a lot.” Earlier in the week, Onondagan Chief Oren Lyons spoke at the Peace
Tree Celebration and he suggested the same thing when discussing the game of
lacrosse. He stated that the team “loses a lot,” which seemed to allude to
other kinds of losses regarding indigenous people. But then he stated: “no
matter how much they lose, they are never defeated.” Giardina seemed to echo
Lyons’ statement when she said: “I’d rather be a loser in West Virginia and I’m
still here and I hope you are still here as well…. It’s not about liberal
versus conservative. It’s about progressive views versus corporate views.
Massive multinational corporations have no controls on them, but we must not
devalue ourselves because we cannot control everything.”
 |
At the WVRHC. L to R, back row: University of Pittsburgh Professor Lina Insana,
AD of Undergraduate Writing Sarah Morris, Luis Peer, Sarah Mitchell, Taylor Miller, Amelia Jones,
Samantha Barney, Marigene Robertson; front row: TAP Nancy Caronia and Denise Giardina. |
WVU’s first year English majors have been planting seeds as to how they will belong and where they will best contribute their voices and
actions. I look forward to the day when
one or more of these students choose to explore Giardina’s archives for their
capstone project.
Special thanks to John Cuthbert and Lori Hostuttler with WVRHC for paving the way to visit Giardina’s
archives, Lisa DiBartolomeo and the
World Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics Department for hosting Giardina's talk, Lina Insana, the chair of the Department of Italian and French
at University of Pittsburgh, for coming down to Morgantown to chat with myself
and Denise Giardina about Italian Americans in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the ENGL 199 students for their good cheer and curiosity, and Denise Giardina for her generosity of time and spirit.
