Shadow Smoke
Document Type
Panel Presentation
Keywords
storytelling, memory, trauma, place
Biography
Sarah Canterbury is a student and writer born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia. She was the 2018 Edmund Taft Award Winner and is the 2019-2020 Rosanne Blake Scholar. Her nonfiction work has been featured in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, GNU Journal, The Blue Mountain Review, and The Storyteller Anthology. Sarah also an academic publication with The James Dickey Review and craft publications in Fiction Southeast and The Writing Lab Newsletter.
Major
English
Advisor for this project
Rachael Peckham
Abstract
“Shadow Smoke” imagines those traces of stories that aren’t really ours, but can be, and should be. It recreates and pictures what life was once like for my great great grandparents Nathan and Sophia Worley, who grew up in the midst of the Civil War and moved to West Virginia, a state still writing its own identity. As a research driven creative nonfiction piece, “Shadow Smoke” is focusing on the process of finding, but more so understanding, how to engage with the remnants of the Appalachian region’s and my family’s oral traditions. It is written as an uncovering process about a history of strength, about a world in a continuous process of damage and healing, and about reconstructing a character I don’t really know by piecing together the space around her and imagining what it must have been like to live that life. Prompted through research but driven through story, “Shadow Smoke” lives narratively in the hills of Bolt, West Virginia with the stories and people still there, but also expands the modern discussion of historical storytelling and impacts of trauma theory within speculative nonfiction. It gives autonomy to the past and personally reflects on how the “shadows of your strength still dance around your memory,” and why storying this region is so significant for the Appalachian region and beyond.
Shadow Smoke
“Shadow Smoke” imagines those traces of stories that aren’t really ours, but can be, and should be. It recreates and pictures what life was once like for my great great grandparents Nathan and Sophia Worley, who grew up in the midst of the Civil War and moved to West Virginia, a state still writing its own identity. As a research driven creative nonfiction piece, “Shadow Smoke” is focusing on the process of finding, but more so understanding, how to engage with the remnants of the Appalachian region’s and my family’s oral traditions. It is written as an uncovering process about a history of strength, about a world in a continuous process of damage and healing, and about reconstructing a character I don’t really know by piecing together the space around her and imagining what it must have been like to live that life. Prompted through research but driven through story, “Shadow Smoke” lives narratively in the hills of Bolt, West Virginia with the stories and people still there, but also expands the modern discussion of historical storytelling and impacts of trauma theory within speculative nonfiction. It gives autonomy to the past and personally reflects on how the “shadows of your strength still dance around your memory,” and why storying this region is so significant for the Appalachian region and beyond.
