The gift of books...
LEGENDS - $19
- Profiles in West Virginia University Basketball.
CHEAT - $19
- An adventure novel of the mountains.
SNAKE HILL - $19
- Essays on homesteading in the Mountain State.
POEMS FROM A MOUNTAIN GHETTO - $19
- Russell Marano's story of growing up in Glen Elk. POCKETS OF LOVE - $13.
- Poems written by Russell Marano in his long struggle with cancer. Many of them were composed as he lay dying, dictated to his wife at bedside.
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Send to:
TRILLIUM PUBLISHING
454 Kensington Avenue, Star City, WV 26505
For more detailed information on any book:
or phone (304) 599-2294
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(Prices include postage and handling.)
Norman Julian
A columnist at large with The Dominion Post newspaper in Morgantown, West Virginia, he started Trillium Publishing to publish his books and others about West Virginia. In his newspaper work, he filed stories from more than half of the state's counties. His novels and essays reflect those experiences. The West Virginia Press Association and the Keystone Press Association of Pennsylvania named him "best state columnist" in separate years. Some of the work cited in the awards is reprinted in Snake Hill. It is about homesteading in the mountains. Norman built his own home on Chestnut Ridge, situated on the lip of the Cheat River Gorge.
The novel Cheat is based on stories, terrain and people he got to know while covering his beat. That and the as yet unpublished sequel, Flood, won cash prizes in the West Virginia Writers, Inc., contests. Flood was a finalist in the Santa Fe Writers national writing contest.
Out of his work as a sportswriter covering West Virginia University came a history of WVU basketball, Legends. Jerry West, the state's greatest athlete, called it" 'a must buy' for anyone who loves West Virginia University sports."
Russell Marano
A graduate with a degree in philosophy from Northwestern University, he
traveled much of Europe as a vagabond, "thumbing" his way and "living off the
land." He returned in memory and sometimes in person to his home, Clarksburg,
in his book Poems from a Mountain Ghetto. Originally brought out by Back Fork
Books of Webster Springs, the volume is used in folklore classes at Fairmont
State University. He had published more than one thousand works, mostly poems,
when he discovered he had brain cancer. His twilight struggle against the tumor
growing behind his nose led to blindness and also to his remarkable last book,
Pockets of Love.
You can catch Norm's columns online Mondays at www.dominionpost.com
HOME
You can read the opening to LEGENDS here:
You can read the opening to CHEAT here:
You can read the opening to SNAKE HILL here:
You can read the opening to RUSSELL MARANO poems here:
Congested in the Italian and black ghetto, in Appalachia, unable to eat in the tingling dining rooms of the Anglo-Saxon Americans seen through glass windows, were the descendants of African and American Indian warriors, descendants of Phoenicia (discoverers of the Isles of Tin), descendants of Magna Graecia of Milo of Croton, of Protagoras' celestial metaphysicians, Dante's Joachim, Saracen warriors, Norman Douglas' tough and hard-working Black Handers and the gathered genes of countless invasions.
I'm sitting in a darkened room watching a black-and-white highlight film of the 1957-58 West Virginia University Mountaineers, the team that finished the regular season No. 1 in the country. Voice over: Jack Fleming. The Old Field House. Hollering fans, six thousand of them, though the sound on the film is out of a can. Highlight films weren't technically triumphant back then. Sometimes it looks like they're playing in the dark, only silhouettes going through the motions. Jerry West pulls up for a soft, almost delicate jumper. Lloyd Sharrar whirls for a hook shot. Ronnie Retton steals the ball, flips to Joedy Gardner racing in for a layup. Don Vincent, jumper from the corner. Willie Akers follows a missed West shot. Bucky Bolyard cans one. Butch Goode another. That's how it goes in highlight films, No, the players aren't as good as I remember them, viewing them back then from the vantage point of youth. Then there were mere heroes. Only later, some of them, LEGENDS.
Some men need mountains and some men don't. From the top floor of the tallest building in Morgantown, we could see their hulking forms to the east humped like great blue whales, endlessly replacing themselves in the misty distance, but caught as if by a camera in place. It was like looking at them from a low-flying airplane, an experience we were to have in a time not distant...
Once, after an ice storm, I saw them up close and they were of all colors, the sun glistening off the shellacked branches of the trees like the kaleidoscopic webwork of giant celestial spiders...
For the mountains, like the men who are drawn to them, are of many moods, each in subtle, but definite ways different from any other, even as the three of guys were alike but individual...
None of us knew then as we looked at the first high ridge of the Appalachians that the early cold and strange look of them this day foretold the coldest winter on record in West Virginia and that in profound ways it would change us. Thereafter when that winter would be talked about I, at least, would recall it, and the mountains in which we spent part of it, with shivers in my mind.
Have you ever wanted to own a piece of wild land and to become intimate with it, go get to know it through the seasons, to live on it and with it, to recognize its plants and its animals and how they interact? To learn the lay of the land and the exquisite secrets that are part of all landscapes, though each is particular? Have you sought to find a place where you could solve the main problems of existence - how to acquire minimal food, shelter and warmth in winter so you might sustain your life without undue material calamity, freeing your mind for higher pursuits? And, once you have found this special place, have you seen in your mind's eye the way it might be shaped with loving hands to your life's purposes? Have you visualized your homestead, your garden, your orchard? And, having done all the mental work, have you then set yourself to the task of a generation to bring it about. I have, and for me that place is SNAKE HILL.
