Last Mountain Dancer: Hard-Earned Lessons in Love, Loss, and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life

by Chuck Kinder

Overview

This gonzo-style metamemoir follows Chuck Kinder on a wild tour of the back roads of his home state of West Virginia, where he encounters Mountain State legends like Sid Hatfield, Dagmar, Robert C. Byrd, the Mothman, Chuck Yeager, Soupy Sales, Don Knotts, and Jesco White, the “Dancing Outlaw.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946684516
Publisher:	West Virginia University Press
Publication date:	06/20/2018
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Chuck Kinder is the author of four novels—Snakehunter, The Silver Ghost, Honeymooners, and Last Mountain Dancer—and three collections of poetry—Imagination Motel, All That Yellow, and Hot Jewels. As a professor of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh for more than three decades, Kinder served as the director of the creative writing program and helped foster the careers of Michael Chabon, Earl H. McDaniel, Chuck Rosenthal, Gretchen Moran Laskas, and Keely Bowers. He now lives in Key Largo, Florida, with Diane Cecily, his wife of over forty years.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Planet West Virginia xi

Book 1 Famous Old Daddy

The Girl With No Face 3

Town Boy 11

Scientific Boy 20

Shadow Boy 24

Outlaw Boy 36

The Real Beginning of My Famous Life 45

The Highest Traditions of the American Soldier 52

Belt of Orion 58

Book 2 Famous Little Sister

The Sweet Safety of the Rest of Our Lives 61

That Place Luck Goes When It Is Finished with Us 68

Blind Dog 73

Ugly Baby 79

Body Parts 85

Pulling Up Aces 91

Crippled Flasher 98

A Multitude of Bills 103

Delivering the Body of the Dead Star 107

Stalking the Story 110

My Bad Side 114

Beerjoint Ballerinas 120

Bogeymen in Love 125

Book 3 Famous Feudists

Sweet Suicide 133

Hillbilly History 141

Goddamned Rhododendron 151

That Sweet Anarchy We Call Youth 155

Mountain Law 163

Blind Tourist 172

A Dead-End Town Named Romance 180

Big Iron 186

Book 4 Famous Ancient Indians & Mothmen & Momma

Land of the Sky People 191

Ghost of the Indian Under the Tree 197

Pictures of the Dead 202

The Story of My Mother's Life in Her Own Words 212

Girl on the Red Bike 218

Mystery Midgets and Other Bizarre Beings 224

Body in the Woods 230

Girl by the Road in the Rain 236

Book 5 Famous Dancing Outlaw

Shot Through the Heart 243

The Preacher's Porch 248

Elvis in the Land of Shadow Men 255

The Secret Lives of Elvis 262

Stranger Stew 268

Tell Me About It 277

The King is Back 283

That Bright New Skin We Call Fame 286

Book 6 Famous Family Life

Ghost Rock 297

Road-Kill Café 302

Carrot Boy 308

Total Wreck 311

The Right to Stand with Men 314

Hotel Angel 322

King of Pork 328

Bear in the Woods 333

Book 7 Famous Lost Love

Lost World 343

The Unknown Confederate Dead 351

Sixteen Tons 357

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do 363

The Secret Inner Life of West Virginia 368

Book 8 Famous Mystery Tour

Knocked Up 373

Interiors Impossible to Speak Of 381

Wishbone 387

Point of Honor 393

Missing Angels 399

Mystery Hole 403

Store-Bought Angel 409

Book 9 Famous Last Dance

Ghosts of the Headless Coeds 419

Ghost Mayor 426

Different Creek 431

Ghost Geography 434

Stars and Bars 441

A Part of This World and A Part of Another 448

Acknowledgments 455

About the Author 459

Editorial Reviews

Novelist Kinder pours out sudden, undomesticated, melancholy word songs from his home place, where he’s returned to gather stories for stewing in his imagination and memory.”
-Kirkus Reviews

“Colorful enough to inspire Michael Douglas’ character, Grady Tripp, in the movie Wonder Boys, Kinder starts with the most interesting West Virginian available: himself.”
Alan Moores, Booklist

“Sparks fly, plans are hatched, threats are made, and a lot of legally questionable activity is engaged in, and Kinder’s fine prose relates it all.”
Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

At the beginning of this bawdy, in your face, hugely entertaining bear of a book, Kinder explains that he intends to tell readers about his home state, West Virginia, land of "legendary mountain dancers, moonshiners, stupendous marijuana farmers, snakehandlers, blood-feudists, mystery midgets, mothmen [and] horny space aliens who drop into my home state as regular as clock-work in order to engage in extra-terrestrial sex with a multitude of juicy West Virginia majorettes...." On sabbatical from his professorship at the University of Pittsburgh, Kinder travels home to mine the state's legendary depravity. Family members, old drinking buddies, new drinking buddies and a host of others flood the narrative. Sparks fly, plans are hatched, threats are made and a lot of legally questionable activity is engaged in, and Kinder's fine prose relates it all. But the sheer density of outlandish behavior and credibility-stretching hijinks can, at times, be exhausting. Through the unending consumption of booze, controlled substances and sex, Kinder seems unable (or unwilling) to let any detail go unmentioned. He thereby loses a bit of perspective on both the foreground subject (Kinder and his life and travails), as well as the background (West Virginia and its place in the annals of strange and nobly benighted Americana). Still, Kinder's unflappable, humble demeanor and heartbreaking humanity hold this sometimes unwieldy book together. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

On sabbatical from his job teaching college writing at the University of Pittsburgh, Kinder (Snakehunter, Silver Ghost, and Honeymooners) travels the back roads of his home state in his truck, trying to live the life of a hard-drinking, fornicating, genuine West Virginian. Married, but having an affair with a much younger mother of two, he struggles to write about his heritage and survive a midlife crisis. Yet his strength lies in his storytelling ability, as when he relates the time he met Sen. Robert Byrd hanging out with the locals or recalls Sid Hatfield, gunned-down folk hero of the unionized coal miners. The text abounds in historical anecdotes, e.g., an account of the secret bomb shelter beneath the Greenbrier Hotel, which reportedly duplicated the whole resort underground. Though the book is funny, outrageous, and irreverent as it probes the mountains and hollows for the oddballs and barflies living there, Kinder tries too hard to be the bad boy, which limits the book's appeal to those interested in West Virginia honky-tonk life. Recommended with some reservations for large public libraries.-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Novelist Kinder (Honeymooners, 2001, etc.) pours out sudden, undomesticated, melancholy word songs from his home place, where he's returned to gather stories for stewing in his imagination and memory. On sabbatical from his teaching job at the University of Pittsburgh-and, not incidentally, from his wife of 20 years-the author holes up in small-town West Virginia to appropriate the stories of "mountaineer characters, both the quick and the dead, among both my family members and strangers." Here in the haunted hills of his youth, along their twisty roads, he will rediscover "a mostly imagined interior landscape populated by mythic beings: legendary mountain dancers, moonshiners, stupendous marijuana farmers, snakehandlers, blood-feudists, mystery midgets, mothmen, horny space aliens," to which can be added Hank Williams and Saint Elvis, lover Holly and lover Mary X, a grace-sent sister, Matewan and Blair Mountain, and enough George Dickel to float a boat. Kinder is also there to take mid-life stock of himself: the stories of his youth have a wicked, poignant bite, but they are much of what shaped him today, with all the lying and cheating and wild behavior. It's not ultimately too surprising that the guy who calls Sid Hatfield "that wisecracking, wiry, killer nihilist magical West Virginian warrior" should later find himself "armed to the teeth, driving my redneck, ritual-feudist kinfolks around in rain that was becoming black and whispery . . . happy as a clam." Scouting out strange and grief-filled stories, then recounting them with peerless "pure High Hillbilly" flair, Kinder is weak on the emotional front; his wife has him squarely in the crosshairs when she says, "You always havetried to live your life like a country song. Full of fucking melodrama and cheap sentimentality." He is impenitent, ready to kick back the piano stool the better to hammer the keys: "Who else did I have to bare my so-called soul to, except perhaps the world at large?" Lucky us, to be out there in the audience. Agent: Faith Hamlin/Sanford J. Greenburger Associates

Kirkus Reviews