TRANSCRIPT WSJE Farmington, New Mexico
WRITE ON FOUR CORNERS podcast December 6, 2023
Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal author Catherine Young
DelSharee Gladden is the author of 30 published novels.
This episode features Catherine Young talking about her memoir Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored By Coal.
DelSheree: Catherine, go ahead and introduce yourself.
Catherine: Well, as you said my name is Catherine Young, and I’m coming to you from the hills of Southwest Wisconsin near the Mississippi River where I farm and work as an ecologist in my home. I write about place, and I write about land. I am originally from the largest coal mining valley in the world in northeastern Pennsylvania. That’s why I’m here to talk about the book I created, the memoir Black Diamonds which is published by Torrey House Press and was released this fall.
DelSheree: Thank you for mentioning Torrey House Press. That’s how I got connected with you. Typically, this show was for writers from the Southwest and people writing about the Southwest and publishers from the Southwest. So Torrey House is based in Utah. I had the opportunity to read Scott Graham’s newest book, and that put me in touch with them. They were so kind to send me a box of books to start interviewing more authors.
I have really enjoyed reading Black Diamonds and getting to know more about the area and the history because this was a new topic for me. I really didn’t know much about the history of coal mining. I was pretty shocked by a lot of it, to be honest.
Catherine: In what way or why were you shocked?
DelSheree: The complete lack of awareness of safety and the damage. A lot of the aspects of that was causing to the people and the environment, and the town – and how much was not known. We really didn’t have a lot of protections in place at that time.
You are telling the story through your experience and the people that you know. You really get to see the effects on those people. I didn’t realize how much of an impact [coal mining] had, in so many ways, but in particular, the way it affected the people in those mining areas. This has been eye opening!
Catherine: It’s so true that where I grew up is a hidden place.
We thought of ourselves as really essential to the United States and North America – which we were because we were the place where the Industrial Revolution began.
The book looks at my childhood through the eyes of the child.
It also gives the visceral experience, the embodied experience of living with coal and living on that landscape.
At the same time, there’s a second narrative woven in. And that’s about a famous painting called The Lackawanna Valley. That painting is in the National Gallery of art in Washington DC. The painter, George Inness, began the painting in 1855. He was commissioned by a railroad that was beginning – the Delaware, Lackawanna, & Western Railroad.
In the 1850s there was this realization by the Scranton family that they could use their iron and make rails for railroads, and they could use the coal and power the steam locomotives. This is in a very steep and narrow valley, so it’s not a place that people would pass through unless they took a train there.
Part of the reason I wrote this is because I feel the history would be lost unless I tell these stories, having lived it. I’m on the young end of people who saw the demise of coal in that valley. I feel a great need to tell the stories.
One way to tell stories about land, about place, is through the people. I’m so grateful to you for saying how that affected the people.
DelSheree: I’m someone who, in my own writing, and in books that I look for, character is really important to me and telling stories through people is something that I look for and enjoy as a reader and as a writer. That was a really wonderful part of this book.
I did learn a lot about the history and progress of coal in that area, and its demise. That part was fascinating as well.
The people in the stories really brought a lot of that information to life for me. They were the ones living through it and seeing those changes.
I have to say, you have a really good way of capturing a moment with your description and to make a lasting impression. I kept getting caught in those as I was reading
You do a really great job about describing the emotions and the visual aspects of some of your memories! It was really wonderful, and I wanted to tell you that.
Catherine: Thank you so much.
I really do have a visual memory. That’s part of the reason the book involves a painting. I was on a landscape with so much anthracite coal, hard coal, that it lined the roadways. It lined the railroad beds of the six railroads that came into the valley and took the coal away. And even crushed coal lined the alleyways in our city of Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The other thing that happened was that the mines, some of them, caught fire underneath us. The waste piles of coal which were five to ten stories tall caught on fire.
A lot of my childhood memory is of smoke and flames. There were houses that collapsed into the mines. There were houses that were condemned because they were just too poisonous to be in because of the burning mines underneath, or the proximity to the waste piles of coal, the culum dumps.
And I want to give this picture that there were these conical mountains, and they were pink-rust ash all day long. If you happen to be near them at night you would see these ghostly blue flames covering them. They were something we didn’t want to get next to. They were down in the valley. And though I lived in a gorge about a mile away, we were affected by the smoke all of the time. We were affected by the emergencies all the time.
That was a lot of my childhood. But I was a very imaginative child, and I loved to read, and I loved to make stories up.
One of the things that caught me when I was a little girl, was the famous painting The Lackawanna Valley by George Inness.
There were people a few years older than me that the painting came to the valley one time, and they saw it. No one has a record of this – but I believe I saw the real painting then, when I was a child, and then I looked for it in textbooks in school.
If you could see this scene, it’s so lovely.
You see a tree, you see a boy reclining on the ground.
You see tree stumps, and you see he is watching cows.
But then you see a steam locomotive from the 1850s crossing a river. When that steam locomotive crosses the river and that is the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
That’s why the painting is so important.The reason why the painting was made was because of a railroad that wanted to advertise itself whether they had the equipment or not.
Behind this locomotive you see the beginnings of a city, and in the background you see these mountains.
As a little girl I saw these beautiful colors that looked like farmland – like something I wanted to be in.
I knew it was my home place, and I was always trying to figure out where the boy sat, and where Inness made the painting. Was it on my side of the valley? Was it close to my house?
I wanted to enter that scene. I didn’t want to be in the scene of all the smoke, the burning, the waste coal everywhere. I wanted to be with these beautiful pastels.
That is a lot of the story – my journey with the Inness painting.
I wanted to know more about the Inness painting. That’s the adult voice in the story.
And then there’s the child’s voice of walking everywhere, because my mother didn’t drive. I walked everywhere with her – miles and miles every day.
We might walk to a garment factory. We might pick up rags to make rag rugs. Or we might go visiting someone. Or, we might go to a relative’s house and bake or can tomatoes. Or, we might be standing in a relief line.
All those things were true, and it was a beautiful way to tell the story – as it was – that I was a young child, and I always was walking with my mother.That’s how interacted with our place.
DelSheree: Well, you get so much of the visual aspect of where you were living. Like you said, the coal lining the streets, everything being tied in by the debris, and the little bits and pieces spread around town.
Those small details really set the scene and help to impress in each of your stories how coal was a part of every single moment; how it really couldn’t be escaped.
It was so present in everything that was going on in regular day-to-day life.
Catherine: It was so present along with the trains.
That’s the other important piece in this.
The rails were made there to go across the country. There were six railroads that were developed.
But that means that when my mother and I were walking we were always corralled by tracks. We had to cross gorges, we had to cross bridges – there were always tracks under the bridges. There were trestles over us. There was even a tunnel in my neighborhood where a train went through for a mile and came out the other and from one end of the gorge to the other, where the cemetery was, where my relatives were buried.
The reality was that coal was also always on the move.
We saw the coal cars, a hundred cars at a time leaving the valley. We could hear them in our dreams because the valley had a 10% grade on the railroad – that’s a very, very steep for a railroad – it meant four locomotives pulling the train and four locomotives in the back pushing. And you could hear that all the time.
So we were living the trains and the coal. It was a very intense experience.
The other thing about the coal is that everything was made of coal. [We used it to] heat our houses, and some people cooked on coal stoves. The gas that was used in the stoves was manufactured from anthracite coal. And a lot of other things – the dyes for our clothing and our medicines. It was that era.
And because we were in a valley that was tucked away, we were still living with an “older fashioned way of life.” A lot of the things I lived as a child were very 19th century.
But really, nothing progressed beyond the 1940s. [And I grew up in the 1950s and 60s.]
DelSheree: That’s such an interesting aspect of it. You describe how coal starts declining in your area. And the main [ironworks] company moved to a new location, and things start ramping down.
When that such a huge part of the community’s economy and what’s holding everything together – it really did bring things to a standstill – a lot of that innovation, and money, and jobs, that has major effects on the town.
We’re seeing things here in northern New Mexico where we were mining oil and gas, and most of that is gone at this point. This whole community is trying to figure out what we do now – “What are we if we are not an oil and gas boom and bust town?”
We’re really just at the tail end of all of that. It’s not coming back at this point.
That’s a hard thing for a town for people to adjust to – change identity, and figure out where to go next.
Catherine: That’s a really important thing you just said.
Yes, having lived at that, we didn’t want to admit that we were losing everything. [The city was in] gradual decline. It was really slow. I can say it just started happening around the time I was born, and in the first 10 years of my life, pretty much everything disappeared.
The railroads that were there, were gone. A lot of our downtown buildings burned down mysteriously. The coal wasn’t being so actively mined. It went on and on and on…
But it didn’t stop. It kept happening!
I went back there in the mid-1980s, and I was so shocked that my huge high school that was packed to the gills with 1200 students was now closed. The Masonic Temple which was the Philharmonic Orchestra’s home, and where I had played in youth Symphony, was closed. The huge Gothic library, this beautiful building – that was closed.
All of these structures that were put in place before the year 1900 were finally gone. (Things have changed in a different direction, now, but at that time it was very, very grim.)
DelSheree: What a shocking thing to come home to.
That had to be a weird feeling.
Catherine: It was hard in some ways, but in other ways it wasn’t very much of a surprise. I left because things were ending.
I left also because of another reason.
In the 1970s there was the beginning of the Environmental Movement. (And actually when I was in fifth grade there was the beginning of the Ecology Movement in 1968.) That all began with someone in Wisconsin, and Earth Day began in Wisconsin, and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison there was an Environmental Studies program.
– I knew, as a child, I wanted to make a change. I didn’t want to live with this kind of situation where we have the boom and bust; where we have extraction. I wanted to find something else.
I heard about Renewable Energy. I heard about other possibilities. So I came to Wisconsin to learn about Environmental Studies and to work with that as best I could.
It turns out, after all these years, the most powerful thing I can do is tell stories.
The hardest story for me to tell, was where I’m from because it was so grim. I didn’t even tell the hardest stories.
On the other hand – maybe you can attest for me DelSheree – this book is not a downer.
DelSheree: Absolutely not! No.
Catherine: Just like anyplace, people and families always try to find celebrations through food. They always try to find the recreation together. And so, even though it was hard, that’s what we did.
And even something as simple as sitting on porches telling stories – which we did a lot – which is how I could become a writer.
We told so many stories! It was our main entertainment for a long time.
DelSheree: It was wonderful to see how that shaped your interests and who you are and what you ended up doing.
t’s so interesting, I think, the idea of how we become who we are over time.
That was another interesting aspect of your book – checking out your bio and seeing where you are at now, and looking at a little bit of your history – and to dive into what brought you to where you are now. It was fun to see that. You use both your child’s voice and memories. And you have sections of the adult you and sharing those perspectives an information.
You get this really neat viewpoint of what this all looked like to you growing up and then how you are seeing it as an adult – and then seeing how that comes together.
I found that a really fun and interesting aspect of reading your book – seeing those little puzzle pieces come together throughout your life.
A lot of really unique stories of things you grew up with an experience that I think a lot of people didn’t, and that those are foreign things to them, but being able to see them with that familiar perspective of you growing up in the middle of this very unique place in a time that was so transitional. Impactful!
Catherine: When I was a child, we did watch television, and in the late 1960s, let’s say, we were watching things like Flower Power, we were watching information about the Vietnam War – but the truth was, anything we saw on television did not match our reality. There was nothing to acknowledge who we were or what we were doing.
And I have to say, one of the reasons why it took me so long to approach this is that sometimes you have to have acknowledgment that it’s real.
One of the things that happened to me was that in my forties, all of a sudden, I had these images come up from my childhood. They were very powerful.
I started writing them down. I didn’t make any comments on them, I didn’t explain them. I just did description.
For me it’s creating portraits.
Just like I love the Inness painting, the child in the book is moving through these portraits, explaining what she sees.
In some memoirs, you put the adult perspective.
One of the things that happened for me is that I never went back. So my reality did not transition with everybody else’s who are the same age. I had a different perspective because I was cut off from it. And I really wanted to honor that.I wanted to honor that child and the that reality she saw.
So I simply put it down. That’s why, in the book, the child’s voice is completely separate from the person telling the story of the painting.
But they do come together.
DelSheree: I really enjoyed that.
I’ve had the chance to read several memoirs last year doing the show. It’s not typically the kind of genre that I had read a lot before taking over as a host. (That’s been a really fun experience getting to dive into new genres.)
But I did notice that this memoir is a little different than how other memoirs approach it.
I really enjoyed that you kept [the voices, the narrators] so separate.
It really felt I was in the story with this younger version of you, getting this really clear, almost innocent perspective of everything going on around you, and seeing what this place looked like; how the people in the area lived and thought and operated – you really just focus in on that without having to stop or drag in anything from today or explain it or link it to this that and the other –
You really get to see the story, the place, the people and watch it come together and create this picture of your experience.
I really enjoyed having those separated like that. I think it worked wonderfully.
Catherine: You are an author, and you know that there are things you try figure out to make it work.
And truly, one of the things that worked for me was using the child and her walking as a way of describing place because ultimately, this book is a memoir of place rather than of its people.
(Its people are in it, and it ends up being about the people too – but it is a memoir of place.)
I did that purposefully because this is the place where the Industrial Revolution began.
What that means, though, that it is also the place that began our journey to where we are now, to climate change. It began our journey of sending rails across what is now the United States; of taking land from other people.
That is what it did. This is the place that powered that.
(You could say its sister was Pittsburgh with the steel mills, but Pittsburgh used some of the coal from our valley to smelt the steel.)
DelSheree: It’s interesting to see those connections and looking at the story through the child character, she has no idea of the bigger picture of what’s going on. She’s excited about the cookies…
(I loved the scene with the cookies. I’m just getting ready to do that with my daughter…)
But it does give you the sense of isolation, reading it as an adult and being aware of everything else going on.
That was interesting because my mind’s making the connection as I read. (Like, oh my gosh) the protections that are in place now, everything that’s come from this burst of industry and trying to manage that now – young you in the book is just so unaware of all of it in that grander scheme.
But yet, she’s seeing those day-to-day impacts that in that younger mind she is realizing that it doesn’t seem so great. But she doesn’t have the experience and the knowledge at that point to draw those conclusions, and so you leave it for the reader to make those connections and think through that.
I found that very effective. It did make me stop and think and take a break so that I could ponder and then dive back into it.
I was going to ask you if that was intentional. I love that it was, that you were planning it that way and wanted to keep it separate.
I think that was extremely effective in making this a very thought-provoking book.
Catherine: I have to say, there are several things going on.
One is that I love museums. I was a museum professional for a while.
And actually, I see this book as a museum.
If you look at the table of contents, you see that there are these seven pieces about the Inness painting, and in between there are these pieces from the perspective of the child – you are actually going in different [museum] galleries. (That’s how I see it!)
I love that you talked about the cookies, by the way.
I have a question for you because you’ve written so many books. Do you use food in your books?
DelSheree: In some of them, it’s a pretty big focus – especially in some of my more recent writing. I would probably have to sit and think about why that is.
I think for me, growing up, food was a big part of family events and people getting together, and seeing people I didn’t see very often. Some of the better memories.
Catherine: And so food is one of those things it helps us ground families.
But I have another reason for using it.
One of the things we haven’t said that the book has ethnicity in it.
I grew up in the most concentrated place of languages [of its time] in the 19th century.
There were so many industries. There were the garment mills, and the silk mill, in the factory that made all the records you know, like Capital Records. There was a lace factory. Not only was it railroads and coal and people running a city, it was all these factories.
I wanted to point out the different ethnicities in my family. It was a place where, if you walk down the street, you would hear different languages. There were different kinds of foods people were preparing.
I think that was one of the most interesting aspects in this narrow place that was hidden away. We had all of the people from Europe who needed to escape for various reasons over perhaps, a hundred years. They came there because they could find jobs easily, and it wasn’t that far from New York City.
Another thing I wanted to say is about Torrey House Press.
I am an author who is writing about the East. Torrey House is a Western-focused publisher. And where we come together is in environmental and social justice.
I love their books, and the writing is lyrical. I love what Torrey House Press does, and I feel so honored by being a Voice for the Land.
They could see the reason why this is so important to have this book across the country is because it tells the story of how everything started when we talk about climate change.
And I feel like I want to have discussions everywhere I can.
I would love to see this book used way because it’s an easy read, and yet people will always be contrasting their own lives with it and learning about their own lives.
DelSheree: I think that’s very true.
There was a lot as I was reading that struck me of the similarities to this area. Obviously, northern New Mexico looks very different from the Lackawanna Valley. But seeing coal and oil and gas shut down here – that change that our county is trying to figure out right now – but also with the people.
New Mexico is not the most populous state. We are pretty small as far as population, but we have a wide range. That presents great opportunities, but also challenges, and that filters into the policies and programs in politics of this area.
I think that even though you’re writing about a very specific location in a very specific time, there’s a lot people will see reading this that resonates of wherever they’re at. The challenges they are facing.
It’s very relatable – even though it’s very specific!
That’s an interesting thing because it’s hard to do.
Catherine: I have to imagine that in our country that when we have a shakeup, when we have some instability economically, we begin to wonder who we are. We identify our communities by our tasks. We always have to wonder who we are going to be if extractive industry shuts down.
It is so interesting to think about the United States. There’s a lot of that in our country.
DelSheree: It really is. We’ve got so much over so much space. So many diverse peoples. So many industries. It’s really a unique area to try to bring it all together.
Catherine: It’s very hard to bring it all together!
DelSheree: I knew we would run out of time and there would be a million more things to talk to you about.
Where can people find you, and where can people find the book?
Catherine: My website is: http://www.catherineyoungwriter.com/
You’ll find my email address: [email protected]
You can ask to be on my newsletter mailing list, you can sample my podcasts free, and read things for free.
Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal is available wherever books are sold. It’s lovely if you can buy it from Torrey House Press and support them. I really admire the people who work there, who care for the authors and the land they work for.
DelSheree: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today I’m glad I got to read your book. I hope people take some time to check it out.
WRITE ON FOUR CORNERS podcast December 6, 2023
Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal author Catherine Young
DelSharee Gladden is the author of 30 published novels.
This episode features Catherine Young talking about her memoir Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored By Coal.
DelSheree: Catherine, go ahead and introduce yourself.
Catherine: Well, as you said my name is Catherine Young, and I’m coming to you from the hills of Southwest Wisconsin near the Mississippi River where I farm and work as an ecologist in my home. I write about place, and I write about land. I am originally from the largest coal mining valley in the world in northeastern Pennsylvania. That’s why I’m here to talk about the book I created, the memoir Black Diamonds which is published by Torrey House Press and was released this fall.
DelSheree: Thank you for mentioning Torrey House Press. That’s how I got connected with you. Typically, this show was for writers from the Southwest and people writing about the Southwest and publishers from the Southwest. So Torrey House is based in Utah. I had the opportunity to read Scott Graham’s newest book, and that put me in touch with them. They were so kind to send me a box of books to start interviewing more authors.
I have really enjoyed reading Black Diamonds and getting to know more about the area and the history because this was a new topic for me. I really didn’t know much about the history of coal mining. I was pretty shocked by a lot of it, to be honest.
Catherine: In what way or why were you shocked?
DelSheree: The complete lack of awareness of safety and the damage. A lot of the aspects of that was causing to the people and the environment, and the town – and how much was not known. We really didn’t have a lot of protections in place at that time.
You are telling the story through your experience and the people that you know. You really get to see the effects on those people. I didn’t realize how much of an impact [coal mining] had, in so many ways, but in particular, the way it affected the people in those mining areas. This has been eye opening!
Catherine: It’s so true that where I grew up is a hidden place.
We thought of ourselves as really essential to the United States and North America – which we were because we were the place where the Industrial Revolution began.
The book looks at my childhood through the eyes of the child.
It also gives the visceral experience, the embodied experience of living with coal and living on that landscape.
At the same time, there’s a second narrative woven in. And that’s about a famous painting called The Lackawanna Valley. That painting is in the National Gallery of art in Washington DC. The painter, George Inness, began the painting in 1855. He was commissioned by a railroad that was beginning – the Delaware, Lackawanna, & Western Railroad.
In the 1850s there was this realization by the Scranton family that they could use their iron and make rails for railroads, and they could use the coal and power the steam locomotives. This is in a very steep and narrow valley, so it’s not a place that people would pass through unless they took a train there.
Part of the reason I wrote this is because I feel the history would be lost unless I tell these stories, having lived it. I’m on the young end of people who saw the demise of coal in that valley. I feel a great need to tell the stories.
One way to tell stories about land, about place, is through the people. I’m so grateful to you for saying how that affected the people.
DelSheree: I’m someone who, in my own writing, and in books that I look for, character is really important to me and telling stories through people is something that I look for and enjoy as a reader and as a writer. That was a really wonderful part of this book.
I did learn a lot about the history and progress of coal in that area, and its demise. That part was fascinating as well.
The people in the stories really brought a lot of that information to life for me. They were the ones living through it and seeing those changes.
I have to say, you have a really good way of capturing a moment with your description and to make a lasting impression. I kept getting caught in those as I was reading
You do a really great job about describing the emotions and the visual aspects of some of your memories! It was really wonderful, and I wanted to tell you that.
Catherine: Thank you so much.
I really do have a visual memory. That’s part of the reason the book involves a painting. I was on a landscape with so much anthracite coal, hard coal, that it lined the roadways. It lined the railroad beds of the six railroads that came into the valley and took the coal away. And even crushed coal lined the alleyways in our city of Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The other thing that happened was that the mines, some of them, caught fire underneath us. The waste piles of coal which were five to ten stories tall caught on fire.
A lot of my childhood memory is of smoke and flames. There were houses that collapsed into the mines. There were houses that were condemned because they were just too poisonous to be in because of the burning mines underneath, or the proximity to the waste piles of coal, the culum dumps.
And I want to give this picture that there were these conical mountains, and they were pink-rust ash all day long. If you happen to be near them at night you would see these ghostly blue flames covering them. They were something we didn’t want to get next to. They were down in the valley. And though I lived in a gorge about a mile away, we were affected by the smoke all of the time. We were affected by the emergencies all the time.
That was a lot of my childhood. But I was a very imaginative child, and I loved to read, and I loved to make stories up.
One of the things that caught me when I was a little girl, was the famous painting The Lackawanna Valley by George Inness.
There were people a few years older than me that the painting came to the valley one time, and they saw it. No one has a record of this – but I believe I saw the real painting then, when I was a child, and then I looked for it in textbooks in school.
If you could see this scene, it’s so lovely.
You see a tree, you see a boy reclining on the ground.
You see tree stumps, and you see he is watching cows.
But then you see a steam locomotive from the 1850s crossing a river. When that steam locomotive crosses the river and that is the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
That’s why the painting is so important.The reason why the painting was made was because of a railroad that wanted to advertise itself whether they had the equipment or not.
Behind this locomotive you see the beginnings of a city, and in the background you see these mountains.
As a little girl I saw these beautiful colors that looked like farmland – like something I wanted to be in.
I knew it was my home place, and I was always trying to figure out where the boy sat, and where Inness made the painting. Was it on my side of the valley? Was it close to my house?
I wanted to enter that scene. I didn’t want to be in the scene of all the smoke, the burning, the waste coal everywhere. I wanted to be with these beautiful pastels.
That is a lot of the story – my journey with the Inness painting.
I wanted to know more about the Inness painting. That’s the adult voice in the story.
And then there’s the child’s voice of walking everywhere, because my mother didn’t drive. I walked everywhere with her – miles and miles every day.
We might walk to a garment factory. We might pick up rags to make rag rugs. Or we might go visiting someone. Or, we might go to a relative’s house and bake or can tomatoes. Or, we might be standing in a relief line.
All those things were true, and it was a beautiful way to tell the story – as it was – that I was a young child, and I always was walking with my mother.That’s how interacted with our place.
DelSheree: Well, you get so much of the visual aspect of where you were living. Like you said, the coal lining the streets, everything being tied in by the debris, and the little bits and pieces spread around town.
Those small details really set the scene and help to impress in each of your stories how coal was a part of every single moment; how it really couldn’t be escaped.
It was so present in everything that was going on in regular day-to-day life.
Catherine: It was so present along with the trains.
That’s the other important piece in this.
The rails were made there to go across the country. There were six railroads that were developed.
But that means that when my mother and I were walking we were always corralled by tracks. We had to cross gorges, we had to cross bridges – there were always tracks under the bridges. There were trestles over us. There was even a tunnel in my neighborhood where a train went through for a mile and came out the other and from one end of the gorge to the other, where the cemetery was, where my relatives were buried.
The reality was that coal was also always on the move.
We saw the coal cars, a hundred cars at a time leaving the valley. We could hear them in our dreams because the valley had a 10% grade on the railroad – that’s a very, very steep for a railroad – it meant four locomotives pulling the train and four locomotives in the back pushing. And you could hear that all the time.
So we were living the trains and the coal. It was a very intense experience.
The other thing about the coal is that everything was made of coal. [We used it to] heat our houses, and some people cooked on coal stoves. The gas that was used in the stoves was manufactured from anthracite coal. And a lot of other things – the dyes for our clothing and our medicines. It was that era.
And because we were in a valley that was tucked away, we were still living with an “older fashioned way of life.” A lot of the things I lived as a child were very 19th century.
But really, nothing progressed beyond the 1940s. [And I grew up in the 1950s and 60s.]
DelSheree: That’s such an interesting aspect of it. You describe how coal starts declining in your area. And the main [ironworks] company moved to a new location, and things start ramping down.
When that such a huge part of the community’s economy and what’s holding everything together – it really did bring things to a standstill – a lot of that innovation, and money, and jobs, that has major effects on the town.
We’re seeing things here in northern New Mexico where we were mining oil and gas, and most of that is gone at this point. This whole community is trying to figure out what we do now – “What are we if we are not an oil and gas boom and bust town?”
We’re really just at the tail end of all of that. It’s not coming back at this point.
That’s a hard thing for a town for people to adjust to – change identity, and figure out where to go next.
Catherine: That’s a really important thing you just said.
Yes, having lived at that, we didn’t want to admit that we were losing everything. [The city was in] gradual decline. It was really slow. I can say it just started happening around the time I was born, and in the first 10 years of my life, pretty much everything disappeared.
The railroads that were there, were gone. A lot of our downtown buildings burned down mysteriously. The coal wasn’t being so actively mined. It went on and on and on…
But it didn’t stop. It kept happening!
I went back there in the mid-1980s, and I was so shocked that my huge high school that was packed to the gills with 1200 students was now closed. The Masonic Temple which was the Philharmonic Orchestra’s home, and where I had played in youth Symphony, was closed. The huge Gothic library, this beautiful building – that was closed.
All of these structures that were put in place before the year 1900 were finally gone. (Things have changed in a different direction, now, but at that time it was very, very grim.)
DelSheree: What a shocking thing to come home to.
That had to be a weird feeling.
Catherine: It was hard in some ways, but in other ways it wasn’t very much of a surprise. I left because things were ending.
I left also because of another reason.
In the 1970s there was the beginning of the Environmental Movement. (And actually when I was in fifth grade there was the beginning of the Ecology Movement in 1968.) That all began with someone in Wisconsin, and Earth Day began in Wisconsin, and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison there was an Environmental Studies program.
– I knew, as a child, I wanted to make a change. I didn’t want to live with this kind of situation where we have the boom and bust; where we have extraction. I wanted to find something else.
I heard about Renewable Energy. I heard about other possibilities. So I came to Wisconsin to learn about Environmental Studies and to work with that as best I could.
It turns out, after all these years, the most powerful thing I can do is tell stories.
The hardest story for me to tell, was where I’m from because it was so grim. I didn’t even tell the hardest stories.
On the other hand – maybe you can attest for me DelSheree – this book is not a downer.
DelSheree: Absolutely not! No.
Catherine: Just like anyplace, people and families always try to find celebrations through food. They always try to find the recreation together. And so, even though it was hard, that’s what we did.
And even something as simple as sitting on porches telling stories – which we did a lot – which is how I could become a writer.
We told so many stories! It was our main entertainment for a long time.
DelSheree: It was wonderful to see how that shaped your interests and who you are and what you ended up doing.
t’s so interesting, I think, the idea of how we become who we are over time.
That was another interesting aspect of your book – checking out your bio and seeing where you are at now, and looking at a little bit of your history – and to dive into what brought you to where you are now. It was fun to see that. You use both your child’s voice and memories. And you have sections of the adult you and sharing those perspectives an information.
You get this really neat viewpoint of what this all looked like to you growing up and then how you are seeing it as an adult – and then seeing how that comes together.
I found that a really fun and interesting aspect of reading your book – seeing those little puzzle pieces come together throughout your life.
A lot of really unique stories of things you grew up with an experience that I think a lot of people didn’t, and that those are foreign things to them, but being able to see them with that familiar perspective of you growing up in the middle of this very unique place in a time that was so transitional. Impactful!
Catherine: When I was a child, we did watch television, and in the late 1960s, let’s say, we were watching things like Flower Power, we were watching information about the Vietnam War – but the truth was, anything we saw on television did not match our reality. There was nothing to acknowledge who we were or what we were doing.
And I have to say, one of the reasons why it took me so long to approach this is that sometimes you have to have acknowledgment that it’s real.
One of the things that happened to me was that in my forties, all of a sudden, I had these images come up from my childhood. They were very powerful.
I started writing them down. I didn’t make any comments on them, I didn’t explain them. I just did description.
For me it’s creating portraits.
Just like I love the Inness painting, the child in the book is moving through these portraits, explaining what she sees.
In some memoirs, you put the adult perspective.
One of the things that happened for me is that I never went back. So my reality did not transition with everybody else’s who are the same age. I had a different perspective because I was cut off from it. And I really wanted to honor that.I wanted to honor that child and the that reality she saw.
So I simply put it down. That’s why, in the book, the child’s voice is completely separate from the person telling the story of the painting.
But they do come together.
DelSheree: I really enjoyed that.
I’ve had the chance to read several memoirs last year doing the show. It’s not typically the kind of genre that I had read a lot before taking over as a host. (That’s been a really fun experience getting to dive into new genres.)
But I did notice that this memoir is a little different than how other memoirs approach it.
I really enjoyed that you kept [the voices, the narrators] so separate.
It really felt I was in the story with this younger version of you, getting this really clear, almost innocent perspective of everything going on around you, and seeing what this place looked like; how the people in the area lived and thought and operated – you really just focus in on that without having to stop or drag in anything from today or explain it or link it to this that and the other –
You really get to see the story, the place, the people and watch it come together and create this picture of your experience.
I really enjoyed having those separated like that. I think it worked wonderfully.
Catherine: You are an author, and you know that there are things you try figure out to make it work.
And truly, one of the things that worked for me was using the child and her walking as a way of describing place because ultimately, this book is a memoir of place rather than of its people.
(Its people are in it, and it ends up being about the people too – but it is a memoir of place.)
I did that purposefully because this is the place where the Industrial Revolution began.
What that means, though, that it is also the place that began our journey to where we are now, to climate change. It began our journey of sending rails across what is now the United States; of taking land from other people.
That is what it did. This is the place that powered that.
(You could say its sister was Pittsburgh with the steel mills, but Pittsburgh used some of the coal from our valley to smelt the steel.)
DelSheree: It’s interesting to see those connections and looking at the story through the child character, she has no idea of the bigger picture of what’s going on. She’s excited about the cookies…
(I loved the scene with the cookies. I’m just getting ready to do that with my daughter…)
But it does give you the sense of isolation, reading it as an adult and being aware of everything else going on.
That was interesting because my mind’s making the connection as I read. (Like, oh my gosh) the protections that are in place now, everything that’s come from this burst of industry and trying to manage that now – young you in the book is just so unaware of all of it in that grander scheme.
But yet, she’s seeing those day-to-day impacts that in that younger mind she is realizing that it doesn’t seem so great. But she doesn’t have the experience and the knowledge at that point to draw those conclusions, and so you leave it for the reader to make those connections and think through that.
I found that very effective. It did make me stop and think and take a break so that I could ponder and then dive back into it.
I was going to ask you if that was intentional. I love that it was, that you were planning it that way and wanted to keep it separate.
I think that was extremely effective in making this a very thought-provoking book.
Catherine: I have to say, there are several things going on.
One is that I love museums. I was a museum professional for a while.
And actually, I see this book as a museum.
If you look at the table of contents, you see that there are these seven pieces about the Inness painting, and in between there are these pieces from the perspective of the child – you are actually going in different [museum] galleries. (That’s how I see it!)
I love that you talked about the cookies, by the way.
I have a question for you because you’ve written so many books. Do you use food in your books?
DelSheree: In some of them, it’s a pretty big focus – especially in some of my more recent writing. I would probably have to sit and think about why that is.
I think for me, growing up, food was a big part of family events and people getting together, and seeing people I didn’t see very often. Some of the better memories.
Catherine: And so food is one of those things it helps us ground families.
But I have another reason for using it.
One of the things we haven’t said that the book has ethnicity in it.
I grew up in the most concentrated place of languages [of its time] in the 19th century.
There were so many industries. There were the garment mills, and the silk mill, in the factory that made all the records you know, like Capital Records. There was a lace factory. Not only was it railroads and coal and people running a city, it was all these factories.
I wanted to point out the different ethnicities in my family. It was a place where, if you walk down the street, you would hear different languages. There were different kinds of foods people were preparing.
I think that was one of the most interesting aspects in this narrow place that was hidden away. We had all of the people from Europe who needed to escape for various reasons over perhaps, a hundred years. They came there because they could find jobs easily, and it wasn’t that far from New York City.
Another thing I wanted to say is about Torrey House Press.
I am an author who is writing about the East. Torrey House is a Western-focused publisher. And where we come together is in environmental and social justice.
I love their books, and the writing is lyrical. I love what Torrey House Press does, and I feel so honored by being a Voice for the Land.
They could see the reason why this is so important to have this book across the country is because it tells the story of how everything started when we talk about climate change.
And I feel like I want to have discussions everywhere I can.
I would love to see this book used way because it’s an easy read, and yet people will always be contrasting their own lives with it and learning about their own lives.
DelSheree: I think that’s very true.
There was a lot as I was reading that struck me of the similarities to this area. Obviously, northern New Mexico looks very different from the Lackawanna Valley. But seeing coal and oil and gas shut down here – that change that our county is trying to figure out right now – but also with the people.
New Mexico is not the most populous state. We are pretty small as far as population, but we have a wide range. That presents great opportunities, but also challenges, and that filters into the policies and programs in politics of this area.
I think that even though you’re writing about a very specific location in a very specific time, there’s a lot people will see reading this that resonates of wherever they’re at. The challenges they are facing.
It’s very relatable – even though it’s very specific!
That’s an interesting thing because it’s hard to do.
Catherine: I have to imagine that in our country that when we have a shakeup, when we have some instability economically, we begin to wonder who we are. We identify our communities by our tasks. We always have to wonder who we are going to be if extractive industry shuts down.
It is so interesting to think about the United States. There’s a lot of that in our country.
DelSheree: It really is. We’ve got so much over so much space. So many diverse peoples. So many industries. It’s really a unique area to try to bring it all together.
Catherine: It’s very hard to bring it all together!
DelSheree: I knew we would run out of time and there would be a million more things to talk to you about.
Where can people find you, and where can people find the book?
Catherine: My website is: http://www.catherineyoungwriter.com/
You’ll find my email address: [email protected]
You can ask to be on my newsletter mailing list, you can sample my podcasts free, and read things for free.
Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal is available wherever books are sold. It’s lovely if you can buy it from Torrey House Press and support them. I really admire the people who work there, who care for the authors and the land they work for.
DelSheree: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today I’m glad I got to read your book. I hope people take some time to check it out.