A Letter From Minecountry.com

February 23, 2003

Dear Friends:

 Welcome to Minecountry. Spring is just around the corner and we hope it arrives in a timely and pleasant fashion. Here in Northeast Pennsylvania, we’ve been busy shoveling snow but not so busy that we have not taken the time to work on preserving and promoting our socio-industrial coal heritage.

Please do look at the new articles and reviews in the online Anthracite History Journal and consider subscribing to the print AHJ newsletter, which we began publishing last fall. We also invite you to visit our store, which features a variety of books, music and gifts about coal history and contemporary coal region culture.

Valerie MacDonald, vice president of the Greater Shenandoah Area Historical Society, unveils the Pennsylvania Historical Marker commemorating events that occured in Shenandoah during the Great Strike of 1902. Photo by Christine Goldbeck, Editor

Authors are producing new, significant and powerful work. Do take the time to check out Lucia Daley’s fiction Mine Seed; Richard Clark’s Strange Thunder in Jubilee, a novel about a 1950s coal region town; Ed Dougert’s photo essay The Black Land; and Kiki DeLancey’s stories in Coal Miner’s Holiday (featuring coal towns bordering the Ohio River).

The Anthracite History Journal is back in print and accepting news, poetry, short stories and listing of events. The journal will be published quarterly for now and will grow as subscriptions warrant. Visit the store to subscribe and to order your copy of the inaugural issue.

Visit www.christinegoldbeck.com and www.coalhole.com for information about author workshops and book signings. Members of our speaker’s bureau are available to speak at your school or to your community group. We encourage you to engage the authors for 2003 book signings and events as soon as possible.

Pat Campbell’s new book Who Killed Franklin Gowen is making waves in scholarly and general reading circles and Bill Williams’ The Coal King’s Slaves is a hit with peoples of Welsh heritage and readers who love a good story about early coal mining. People of Polish heritage and readers who, again, like a great story, tell us that Geraldine Glodek’s Nine Bells at the Breaker is one of the best novels they have ever read.

A Tribute to O’Hara and Other Stories featuring stories about coal region life today was reviewed last month by the Standard Speaker newspaper of Hazleton. Eric McKeever’s Tales of the Mine County is still flying off the bookshelves and into living rooms, classrooms and libraries from here to California and back.

Universal Studios of America, the production company that gave us the Emmy-nominated documentary Stories from the Mines early next month will see its documentary about black lung disease Dying Breath premiered by the PBS television station based in Luzerne County. Among those featured in the program is Joe Machulsky, one of the last of our living breaker boys and a man whose civic, social, political and familial lives are legendary in Shenandoah, Schuylkill County. The Winter 2003 print AHJ newsletter features a story about Machulsky.

Meanwhile, yours truly has completed her Bachelor of Arts Degree (at the tender age of 36) at Goddard College in Plainfield, VT and started graduate school (studying digital culture, history and literature). My novel, Reclamation, set in the coal region and written in partial fulfillment of undergraduate degree requirements and a reference book, Novel Journey, about my creative process for writing the novel, have been revised and I shall be seeking an agent and/or publisher as soon as I get a spare moment to start marketing the work.

We’re glad you’re here. Our online AHJ offers hundreds of articles, reviews and links to sites related to coal mining and history. Do visit often and please patronize Our Store. It ensures that minecountry.com remains a viable and free resource for coal history and coal culture.

Christine Goldbeck, Editor
Eric McKeever, Publisher Emeritus
Jim Skinner, Webmaster