Wendy Welch is Juggling

LUCY BURDETTE: Though we've never met in person, Wendy Welch and I have a lot of interesting connections--cats, writing, love of bookstores, to name a few. And, John and I went with her husband Jack last year for a wonderful 2-week trip in Scotland. You've met her before too--talking about foster care and her bookstore and cat adoptions. A couple of years ago, she asked if I would read a draft of the mystery she was writing and I agreed. I gave her some notes and didn't hear much more about it. But today she's visiting to tell us about that project and the wealth of others that have fallen onto her lap. (Move over cats!) Welcome Wendy!

WENDY WELCH: Call it whistling in the dark, first world problems, humble bragging. I dunno, but here’s what happened---

In 2019 I contracted a book of edited essays for McFarland Press, turning over the manuscript in February 2020. Remember February, when the world was normal but there was some kinda problem for international airport travelers and cruise ship passengers?

COVID 19 delayed the summer release of From the Front Lines of the Appalachian Addiction Crisis: Healthcare Providers Discuss Opioids, Meth and Recovery until fall while McFarland editors set up home offices. Which means the edits are coming back now, and I'm contacting healthcare professionals during a pandemic, asking them to provide edits. That feels… ehm, wrong?

Corresponding with the amazing Susan Kilby at McFarland about the changing face of healthcare and social resistance as we worked on Front Lines, I typed casually, "Wouldn't it be fun to do a book on silly COVID conspiracies?"

A day later she came back to me and said, "Yes, my editorial acquisitions team thinks it would."

From casual comment to contract in one simple e-mail; I zoomed with a friend grad school John Bodner, who specializes in conspiracy theory study.

"Let's do this fun book about conspiracies," I said.

He gave me an odd look. "Which part is fun: people burning 5G masts, white supremacy, or threats to shoot contact tracers?"

Ooops. Three days later, knee-deep in murk behind the dark side of the looking glass, I realized how seriously I had overestimated my emotional capacity. Untying Gordian knots of bad juju flying internationally is hard. Add in the real time swiftness of misinformation actively contributing to rioting, deaths, and economic fear, and this book takes on significant meaning I don’t feel up to.

The conspiracy book was fluke-turned-mission. Who in their right mind suggests a book idea with a July deadline to an editor when she has another book due in August?

It was an accident….

Thinking that From the Front Lines was near completion and looking for another anthology activity just as COVID took over our futures, I had contacted Ohio University/Swallow Press about compiling coronavirus first-person experience narratives from doctors and nurses. The acceptance appeared one hour and five minutes after I sent the query--on the day between making the casual remark to Susan at McFarland that I didn’t realize was a proposal, and Susan’s "McFarland wants to do this" e-mail.

Just before the two-book accident, I worked with my friend Lisa Dailey to e-publish a fun fiction read called Bad Boy in the Bookstore. It launched as a duo of "here's something fun to read while you're stuck at home" and a pay-it-forward; the $5 fee goes to a food fund for essential and laid-off workers.

Launching Bad Boy didn't take a lot of work on my part, as Lisa did the heavy lifting of logistics, but what should have been a culminating triumph to my first-ever fiction manuscript, started three years ago, shrank to something nearing guilt. “What good is a light read during dark times?” I said to my husband Jack the other day.

He gave me a stern look. “I see you fight every day with those concepts you are trying to explain so people can stop fighting with each other. And at night you escape into crocheting and medieval novels.” (I’m a sucker for Philippa Gregory.) “Why are you downplaying escaping? It’s a necessary part of survival.”

That’s why I married him, folks.

It is an intense time for all of us; pressure is pressure no matter from where it is applied; we are each fighting fierce battles. Be good to yourselves, and be safe in mind, body and spirit.

What brain relaxation are you using during COVID times to give yourself a break: books, crafts, exercise? Tell us about it.

Wendy Welch is the author of four books, an avid crocheter, and an avowed Appalachian for life. She and her husband (Scottish folksinger Jack Beck) adopt FELV cats and ensure their final years are golden. She is the world's worst gardener, having once killed mint.

Don't forget to check out BAD BOY IN THE BOOKSTORE...and then pass it on...

THE YEAR OF INTERVIEWING DANGEROUSLY @wendywelch

LUCY BURDETTE: Though I've never met her in person, today's guest is someone I admire deeply. She absolutely puts her efforts into making a difference in the world. (Make sure you look at her bio after you're finished with the post.) She has a big job, but she also owns and runs a bookstore, runs a cat rescue organization (out of the bookstore), and writes books. Her latest, FALL OR FLY, about foster care and adoption in Appalachia, will be published in January. It's such an important topic and most of us don't know much about it. I wanted you to hear about this from her. Welcome Wendy!

WENDY WELCH: I started writing Fall or Fly: the strangely hopeful story of adoption and foster care in Appalachia, without realizing I was writing it. A local pastor (one of the sweetest, most integrity-filled people around) asked “Could you do for foster parents what you did for cancer patients? And then write a book about it?”

Translation: could we organize storytelling circles at churches wherein foster parents told their personal journey with any eye toward interesting others in foster parenting? Last year, a similar faith-based project with cancer survivors had good effect in screening uptakes.

Unfortunately, foster parents in the public eye are targets for criticism: saints or demons, no middle ground among those who don’t foster but enjoy telling those who do how it should be done. It’s ugly.

No, we couldn’t see people who had already opened their hearts having others fire bullets at them. Instead we created a blog, and I worked to edit and refine participants’ stories for anonymous publication. This was most satisfying; it’s fun to write, exciting to tell other people’s stories as a journalist, but helping others get their writing the way they want it? I LOVED this part. And thought it was the whole thing.

We agreed to launch the blog at an Appalachian Studies event nearby. The presentation was published in the conference handbook, and my phone rang. Gillian Berkowitz, editor-in-chief with Swallow Press at Ohio University, wondered if a book were associated with the project. No? Would we like one to be?

I called Dale.

“Dude, praying for a book deal was cheating.”

I could hear him grinning all the way down the phone line.

Those stories that had delighted me to work with and relieved many foster parents of their feelings of isolation became the basis for Fall or Fly, yet we needed more. Much more. The year of interviewing dangerously began.

Dale and his colleagues introduced me quietly to social workers, foster parents, adult or teen foster kids, senior officials, and sideliners (pastors, school teachers, nurses, a few others). Typing notes in abbreviated misspelled swiftness, I listened to Vesuvius blow. When people in professions bound by silence finally get to talk, they start with anger, move into frustration, melt into ineffectiveness and failure and finally emerge into hopeful moments when things came right. Tempting though it was to write only the later inspirational stories into a larger framework of “Look how great this is!” that would have been wrong—for honesty or accuracy.

Much is going wrong in foster care, and not what the public thinks. Outcomes are easy to criticize, success hard to define, let alone achieve. Even getting it right may look wrong to the armchair outsiders. A friend raising an autistic child hated when her baby had meltdowns in stores because of ill-informed public comment: “That tantrum deserves a spanking!” It was actually sensory overload, not something easily explained to mom-on-the-street, who first required convincing such a thing was real—didn’t happen to HER kid—then that neither spanking nor demon-casting would expel it.

Similar stories abound in foster care: insert gay, sexualized, starved, physically harmed, and yes, autistic, and repeat. Everybody knows how to raise kids. Raising other people’s is so different?

Yes, it is. How does love translate to young’uns who have taught themselves not to need it before their brains are fully developed? When you’re raising kids whose bio parents are substance abusers, how do you show love to those “no-good *&^%$ failures” your children idolize and will reunite with someday, even though they’re hurting the kids you’re trying to help? All but four of the children in Fall or Fly had living parents abusing drugs. When you become addicted, you don’t stop loving your kids; you stop being capable of caring for them.

Those are not subtle differences in the foster care world.Writing Fall or Fly was exhilarating, scary, dark, yet strangely hopeful – hence the title. The chaos and frustration of a system that pulls against itself is exhausting to capture in words; God help those who walk into it every day fighting for the children. And yet, candles only show when it’s dark. The people in there—parents, social workers, admin, interested bystanders—they don’t spend their time cursing the dark (well, not after the first week of interviews). They keep the lights on.

Is it enough light? Are we sliding into significant repercussions across not just Appalachia, but America? This place may be the poster child, but the problem is nationwide.

Hope is expensive. Exhaustion feeds darkness. Candles shine. Which is stronger?

Wendy and Jack at the bookstore

Wendy Welch directs the Graduate Medical Education Consortium of Southwest Virginia, working at the intersection of health and economic development. With her husband Jack Beck (presenter of Celtic Clanjamphry for NPR) she runs a shop that is the subject of her 2012 memoir Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap. Editor of the volume Public Health in Appalachia, her most recent book is Fall or Fly, telling the story of foster care in Coalfields Appalachia. And she is ringmaster of the all-volunteer cat rescue APPALACHIAN FELINE FRIENDS. She sleeps between these things.

Follow her on Facebook or on the blog she shares with Jack, her husband, who is a larger-than-life Scottish character.

The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap @bookstorewendy

 LUCY BURDETTE: I swear today's guest lives in a cozy mystery. She owns a bookstore in a small town, with a cafe on top, and tons of cats. She's married to a Scotsman and they sing, they crochet, they find homes for strays...I don't know how I came across her blog, but now I read it every day. Welcome Wendy Welch! Errr, wait a minute, I believe there's been a last-second substitution...

Today’s guest blog is brought to you by Hadley Marie Hemingway, staff cat at The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap. Hadley is a special needs kitten, oxygen deprivation at birth having taken a few brain cells away. But she’ll tell you about herself and her home in her own words. Take it away, Hadders…..

Hi – I’m Hadley, and I own a bookstore. It’s called Tales of the Lonesome Pine, but a lot of people know it as The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap ‘cause Mom wrote a book about it. She wrote the book before I came to live there, so it can’t be all that interesting, but still, lotsa people come to the shop. Dad says they come ‘cause of Mom’s book, an’ ‘cause they like to read, but I know they’re really comin’ to see me.

 



That’s me as a baby. Mom and Dad took me an’ my three sisters in on Halloween Night ‘cause they were worried. They said sometimes bad things happen to kittens at Halloween. They run a foster care for cats outta the bookstore. My sisters all found homes, but Mom said I would stay here. She says I’m a few French fries short of a Happy Meal. I don’t really know what that means, ‘cause to me all meals are happy and I never ate a French fry before. I like wet cat food best, but I like spinach, too. When Mom eats it, I steal leaves from her plate. She says nobody else would have me, so I hafta stay here.

That’s Mom’s book in a coupla different languages, but they all look the same to me, ‘cause I can’t read anyway.
Not that I mind. The bookstore is a fun place. They do lotsa special events all year long. You can look in that Book of Faces if you want to see some of the things they do—and more pictures of me. 
Sometimes we get to do stuff at the special events, and Mom says that’s ‘cause I’m special.

There’s other cats here, some of ‘em waitin’ to get droppted like my sisters did. But a few of ‘em live here like I do. Nike is the cat I like best, ‘cause she taught me to use the litter box an’ keep myself clean, an’ she tells great bedtime stories. 

There’s a nice lady here, Aunt Kelley, that smells like bacon. She runs the Second Story Café upstairs. We’re not allowed up there, us cats. All day long, people go up there an’ come down smellin’ like chicken or cream. It’s really tantalizing – an’ it took me a long time to learn that word. Sometimes after all the people have gone, when Aunt Kelley is leaving for the day, she cuddles me an’ slips me little pieces of stuff. That’s how I know heaven is above us; that’s where all the good things comes from.

You should come visit me—an’ the Café an’ bookstore, of course. I like visitors who rub my belly. Come see us! I’ll put the light on for you. I’m good at that. It’s one of my jobs. I’m the only one who can do it, ‘cause I’m special.


If you wanna see a funny video about the bookstore, you can go to You Too and put in LITTLE BOOKSTORE. My friend Owen – he’s another cat that works here – dances in that one.

Owen’s fun, but I know you really wanna read more about me, an’ maybe Nike, so you can do that on Mom’s bog. She owns a bog. If you goggle WENDY WELCH (‘cause that’s my mom’s name, see) an’ LITTLE BOOKSTORE it comes right up. An’ there’s lotsa wantsa rub my belly. You have a good day too!

LUCY again: Either Hadley or Wendy will be stopping by to say hello and answer questions...we know you've got them!