Denise Giardina | |
|---|---|
| Born | Bluefield, West Virginia |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Education | Master of Divinity |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Notable work |
|
Denise Giardina is an American novelist. Her bookStorming Heaven was a Discovery Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and received the 1987 W. D. Weatherford Award for the best published work about theAppalachian South.The Unquiet Earth received anAmerican Book Award and theLillian Smith Book Award for fiction. Her 1998 novelSaints and Villains was awarded the Boston Book Review fiction prize and was semifinalist for theInternational Dublin Literary Award. Giardina is an ordainedEpiscopal Church deacon, a community activist, and a former candidate for governor ofWest Virginia.
Giardina was born October 25, 1951, inBluefield, West Virginia, and grew up in the small coal mining camp ofBlack Wolf, located in ruralMcDowell County, West Virginia, and later inKanawha County, where she graduated from high school.[1] Like the rest of the community, her family's survival was dependent upon the prosperity of the mine. Giardina's grandfather and uncles worked underground and her father kept the books for Page Coal and Coke. Her mother was a nurse.[2] When the mine closed, her family moved to the state capital ofCharleston.[3] As a member of a coal-mining family, and growing up with a 1960s social consciousness, Giardina often found herself in political conflict with the people and culture around her.[4]
Giardina received a BA in history fromWest Virginia Wesleyan College in 1973.[2] She pursued graduate work atMarshall University inHuntington, West Virginia, and was preparing to go to law school. At this point, however, Giardina found a new spiritual home in theEpiscopal Church, which she found to be more broad-minded than the fundamentalistMethodism of her childhood. Her pastor, Jim Lewis, provided reading suggestions that helped steer Giardina from law school to seminary:[5] "I thought I was called to be ordained. I realized later I went because I needed that education for writing. [My books] are actually more theological than political."[2] She received aMasters of Divinity from theVirginia Theological Seminary inAlexandria, Virginia, in 1979, was ordained as an Episcopal deacon, and returned to lead a church in the area of West Virginia where she grew up.[2] However, she soon found herself in a conflict with superiors in the church due to her criticism of the coal companies, and left within a year. She moved to Washington, D.C., where she joined a peace campaign and lived communally with some radical Christians in an inner city outpost.[2] This is when she began writing her first novel,Good King Harry. She later moved back to rural West Virginia for a while, then took a job as a congressional aide inCharleston. The novel eventually sold toHarper and Row, and was published in 1984.[4]
As a political activist Giardina participated in and wrote about Appalachian labor-capital conflicts, including theA. T. Massey coal strike of the mid-1980s, and thePittston coal strike of 1989-1990.[1] In the following years she was vocal in her critique of surface mining and other environmental issues, particularlymountaintop removal coal mining. These issues informed her unsuccessful gubernatorial run in 2000.[6] Giardina credits her mother and her upbringing in a conservative fundamentalist church for shaping her political sensibilities. Though she sought a more liberal religious setting later, her early church experience inculcated Giardina with basic values of charity and fairness that reinforced her mother's lessons on justice and tolerance. Her mother herself was not a fundamentalist, though many other family members and most of the surrounding community were, including Giardina's only brother.[5]
In 2004 Giardina was the Writer-In-Residence atHollins University and taught a course in Virginia and West Virginia fiction.[7]
Giardina lives in Charleston and taught atWest Virginia State University until 2015.[7] In 2007 she was reinstated as an ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church.[8]
Herpapers,[9] including notebooks, artifacts, correspondence, manuscripts, and family photos are held in theArchives & Manuscripts atWest Virginia University'sWest Virginia & Regional History Center.
TheMountain Party of West Virginia was born as a result ofCharlotte Pritt's 1992 and 1996 candidacies forGovernor of West Virginia. Giardina became the first statewide nominee of the new party in the2000 general election. She received 10,416 votes, 1.61% of the vote, coming in third behindDemocratBob Wise andRepublican incumbentCecil H. Underwood.[10] Her platform included many of the environmental and miners' rights issues she worked on as an activist.[1]
Giardina says that though her writing focused her emerging political views, it took the controversy overmountain top removal mining to move her to political action.
They have the nerve to say to us they should be allowed to destroy our mountains because they create jobs. The mafia creates jobs. The Colombian drug cartel creates jobs, pimps create jobs, and they're the same kind of jobs that destroy communities and even exploit the people that they employ. King Coal is dead. Long live the people of West Virginia.
— Living on Earth, October 13, 2000
According to Still journal, her "anti-mountaintop removal platform she became a folk hero and is often looked to as one of the primary commentators on the state of contemporary Appalachia".[7]
In all of her books, Giardina is interested in the complexities and ambiguities of the individual destined to answer the call of his or her particular moment.[1] Though largely recognized as an Appalachian writer, she has been defined, and defines herself, as primarily a theological writer.[11] Giardina became interested in the Appallachian tradition of storytelling at an early age, and this oral literary heritage of the mountains informed much of her later work.[4]
Giardina began working on her first novel,Good King Harry, while living inWashington, D.C. She completed the book, told in the first-person voice ofKing Henry V, after returning to West Virginia. Unable to sell it, she took a class with visiting novelistGeorge Garrett, who helped with revisions and also recommended Giardina to agent Jane Gelfman, who sold the novel to Aaron Asher at Harper & Row.Harry was published in 1984.[2] Despite positive reviews, the novel sold poorly. Denise Giardina also wrote guest columns forThe Charleston Gazette and submitted pieces toThe Washington Post.
Her next novel,Storming Heaven, was published in 1987. In her previous work Giardina feared being pigeonholed as a "regional" writer, but this time she returned to her roots, setting the novel in the coalfields along the West Virginia–Kentucky border during theWest Virginia Mine Wars.[4] It covers the period 1890–1921, when coal miners fought to be unionized. The climax of the novel is based on the 1921Battle of Blair Mountain, when U.S. Army troops marched on a small group of miners resisting to create a fledgling union. The mining camp Giardina spent her childhood in was less than 100 miles from Blair Mountain and served as the model for the town of Winco in the novel.
Giardina's 1992 novel,The Unquiet Earth, also explores life in the coalfields of West Virginia from the 1930s into the 1980s. Both books follow characters either fighting or accommodating King Cole, are written from the first-person perspective of several narrators, inregional dialect, enabling readers to clearly understand the characters' views of theUnited Mine Workers of America and the hope that they invest in the union. Some of the characters inThe Unquiet Earth are descendants of those inStorming Heaven, and one, Jackie, is an alter-ego of Giardina herself. Giardina incorporates a diversity of portraits, not only of coal miners, but also of coal operators, politicians (local and national), andVISTA workers into the two stories. The novel also chronicles the coal mine operators' continual lack of concern for human life. This includes critical issues such asCoalworker's pneumoconiosis and culminates in a catastrophic flood at the novel's end —the author's fictionalization of the 1972Buffalo Creek Disaster. Giardina also captures such aspects of life inAppalachia as religion and racism.
The decision to use dialect was costly for Giardina, leading her to scrap nearly 500 pages of the original 3rd-person manuscript ofStorming Heaven. But she had realized that "the people had to tell their own stories".[2] This novel also had trouble finding a publisher, but it did put Giardina on the "critical map" as it was very well-received. Both coal-country novels were inspired in part byWuthering Heights, with its rugged landscape and tales of women "who have this passion for a difficult man." Both books contain union organizers more committed to their cause than their lovers. Bonhoeffer, her next main character inSaints and Villains, also fits that pattern: "I guess in none of my books are the personal relationships real easy."[2] Giardina also drew on local histories, childhood memories and even people she met inEastern Kentucky, where she lived in a "hovel" while writingThe Unquiet Earth and also volunteering for a citizens' group fightingstrip mining. She moved toDurham, North Carolina, while still working on the novel, got a bookstore job, and studied with novelist Laurel Goldman atDuke University. The class helped Giardina recognize the value of what she had been doing intuitively and gave her the confidence to teach writing.[2]
Another parallel between her characters and herself was the idea of needing to leave home in order to gain perspective on it. Having spent some time away while writing about West Virginia, Giardina moved back to Charleston, and took a job teaching atWest Virginia State University. Both feeling more at home and experiencing more financial security, she began to work on her next novel, 1999'sSaints and Villains. The book is a fictionalized retelling of the life ofDietrich Bonhoeffer, a GermanLutheran pastor who opposed fascism, became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler and was hanged by the Nazis for his theological principles.
The novel dwells upon moral decisions, most notably the acceptability of sin if the sin will prevent a greater evil. Giardina immersed herself in Bonhoeffer's life, attracted to the story because of the ambiguities of the situation. Grappling with the moral and theological struggles in the book also brought Giardina back to her church, in a journey to "live in God" that culminated with her being re-ordained in 2007. The novel is her first narrated in the third-person. In a mirror image of her experience withStorming Heaven, she began it in the first-person, and junked the first 50 pages in order to start over. She also decided to shift from past to present tense for the book's final scenes, adding suspense to the question of whether the imprisoned Bonhoeffer would be freed by the advancing Allies.[2]
The title comes from a quote from Bonhoeffer: "Today there are once more saints and villains". She used lines fromMozart's Mass in C Minor to frame Bonhoeffer's saga and Germany's slide intoNazism and war, and the music's liner notes helped her build the character ofSS officer Alois Bauer, a music lover who is a composite of Bonhoeffer's real interrogators. Some of the novels characters are real historical figures, others invented by Giardina. Some dates and events were moved around for the story's purposes.
Saints and Villains was awarded the Boston Book Review fiction prize and was semifinalist for theInternational Dublin Literary Award.
InFallam's Secret, published in 2003, Giardina explores Appalachianmagical realism within a time-travel murder-mystery.[12] In 2009, Giardina publishedEmily's Ghost, a fictionalized biography of poet and novelistEmily Bronte. Both novels received warm, though not rave reviews. However, the fact that major national reviewer attended to her work was an achievement her previous, only-later more appreciated work, failed to accomplish.[12][13][14][15]
In 2015, Giardina announced she was working on a memoir and a new novel, and noted that she had begun writing plays, though none had yet achieved production.[7] Her Appalachian novels have been taught in university courses.[7][11]
As a contributor:
In March 2020,George Fox University professor[19] William Jolliff's bookHeeding the Call: A Study of Denise Giardina'sNovels was published by West Virginia University Press.[11] In the book, Jolliff dedicates a chapter to each of the writer and activist's novels, examining them from three perspectives: Regional, political, and theological.[11] He analyzes her use of history and writing technique, as well as delving into the themes of significance in each of her works.[11] He concludes that though her writing is largely informed by her own religious beliefs, Giardina never provides theological answers to the issues raised in her very political fiction; rather, she pushes both characters and readers to confront and wrangle with ever more complex and challenging moral and philosophical questions.[11]
