 Can you hear me? Yes? Go ahead and get started. What a great, great turnout. I'm so happy you're all here. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Alden Library. I'm Janet Holm, and I'm excited to usher in Alden's first ever summer series of Authors at Alden. This summer, we are focusing on authors that have a connection to the region, either by research focus, locality, or both. Right now, I'm going to introduce to you our guest for today. I think Sharon probably doesn't need any introduction from what I've seen so far, but I'll go ahead and do this. Sharon Hatfield is the author of Never Seen the Moon, The Trials of Edith Maxwell, University of Illinois Press 2005, and co-editor of an American-Vane Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature, Ohio University Press 2005. Hatfield is a native of Ewing, Virginia, where she grew up reading Nancy Drew Mysteries. She holds a master's degree in journalism from Ohio University and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in Maryland. Hatfield received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council that allowed her to research Never Seen the Moon, which subsequently won the Weatherford and Chaffin Awards for nonfiction. She has taught creative writing workshops in Kentucky and Tennessee and currently works as a freelance book editor. Hatfield and her husband, Jack Wright, have made their home in Athens County since the 1980s. Both serve on an advisory committee for the Janko Foundation Fund of the Foundation for Appalachian, Ohio, and Nelsonville. Hatfield has a long-time interest in local history and is a member of the Athens County Historical Society. She is currently immersed in the fascinating world of 19th century spiritualist, Jonathan Coons, which she has begun studying, or which he has been studying for the past six years. Our interviewer today is alumna, Kelly Riesbeck. She received her bachelor's degree in journalism from Ohio University Script School of Journalism in 1991, yay again. Since returning to Athens in 2000, she has worked as a freelance science writer, a PR liaison for the Kennedy Museum of Art and writer, public information officer for the College of Fine Arts. She's also the executive director of the Southeast Ohio History Center, formerly known as the Athens County Historical Society and Museum. She has been a host for WOUB Public Media's radio show, Conversations from Studio B for 10 Years, where she covers research and creative activity at Ohio. She has been the assistant director of Ohio's Advancement Communication and Marketing since 2011 and recently was named the managing editor of Ohio Women in an imprint of Ohio University's alumni magazine, Ohio Today. And managing editor of Ohio Today's website, OhioToday.org. So without further ado, I will turn this over to Kelly. Thank you, Janet. Hi, Sharon. Hi. It's been a while since we've talked for a little bit longer than a couple minutes, but I'm really glad to be here today. I was fortunate enough to have read this book. You gave this to me a long time ago, and you even wrote in it, and I wanted to bring it so that I can show everybody that this famous author actually did write a little inscription for me. So I'm very thrilled to have read this. I just finished it a couple of weekends ago, and I was really sad to put it down. It's a page-turner. Well, thanks. Yeah, we're gonna talk about that a little bit. Thanks, everybody, for coming today. It's super hot out, so it's really great that it's all nice and cool in here. Hi, everyone, and friends. We're gonna take this conversation through a journey of who Sharon is as a person, also as she has developed as a writer, and also how she has been writing for different publications, and also for her two books that she's written, Never Seein' the Moon, The Trials of Edith Maxwell, and also her current project with the working title, The Enchanted Ground. So without further ado, let's get started with our questions. So I wanted to talk a little bit about your career as a writer. You've been a writer for, I don't know, what would you say? How many years would you say? If you said, okay, that was really the beginning of me being a writer. Well, as a little kid, I was always into writing stories and little poems, or getting up and reciting little nursery rhymes or things like that. But I think my first paid piece of writing was like for a children's magazine. If you wrote in a little item, they would send you $10. So that was my first paid gig, yeah. That was enough to be a good beginning, man, because it kept you going. Yeah, and then by the time I was in high school, I was a serious student of poetry. I thought I was going to be a poet. Oh, really? Okay. But I kind of went through that phase and then I got to college and I was trying to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I was very curious about science. I thought about being a scientist at some point, a biological scientist. So I did get an undergraduate degree in biology just in case, as well as in English. But of course I chose writing and I never had the idea that I was going to live in a garret and white tables and sacrifice for my art. I had very middle-class expectations that I was going to get paid to write. And so I told people, as I was getting ready to graduate college, well, I might just be a reporter. And they said, well, you couldn't be a reporter. You're too bashful. You couldn't do that. And they weren't trying to be mean about it. They were just being sincere. And I actually took one journalism class in college that we did not have a journalism program, but I took the class and the teacher told me that I would be a good society editor. In fact, he offered me a job as a society editor. And I said, no. And he said, well, you know, I understand you're talking about being a reporter, but I just don't believe that you could go up on a mountaintop and cover a plane crash. I just don't think you could do that. And I agreed with, I said, well, you're right. I probably couldn't. Very interesting. This person was somebody that was at a newspaper that you were, okay, would you go unnamed or? Yes. Okay. But anyway, I did get into journalism because he wants to live with mom and dad the rest of your life. So I did get into that. So my first paid job was in Norton, Virginia, working for a paper there, The Coalfield Progress. And that paper was covering the Edith Maxwell case as well during the time, right? Back in the day, they did cover it, yes, in 1935. As did many others, and we'll get into that later. But so we learned a little bit about what tugged to you make you want to be a writer. I mean, you had a backup plan of being a scientist, but being a writer was really in your heart. Some of those publications you worked for, The Coalfield Progress, what are some other papers that you worked for? And then also you've done some freelance editing and work like that, right? Yes, I work a little bit here at The Messenger when I was in graduate school. But a lot of jobs I've had have been more in publishing, scientific publishing, and also some marketing. Okay, good. So you've really had a breadth and depth away from nonfiction, doing sort of the more practical stuff onto all the way to nonfiction. And let's talk a little bit about your teaching career. You've had a little bit of background in teaching, and you've taught a couple of places, and talk about that. Well, I taught writing at Hawking College for 13 years, and taught everything from essay writing to tech writing. Okay, okay. And I'm sure it helped a lot of students along the way there, and you also mentioned your freelance career. Now, let's talk a little bit about your nonfiction writing career. There have been a couple of books. We'll just mention that in American vein, Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature is one of the books that you worked on. But the first big nonfiction book was the Never Seen the Moon Trials of Edith Maxwell. So let's start talking about that a little bit. I'm gonna kinda run this around a little bit. So one thing that struck me when I read this book and about some of the things that you are writing about now was you like to write about the local. It says something that William Carlos Williams coined, and it's something that's this sort of not going far beyond what you know to write about it. Can you talk a little bit about what draws you to write about the local as just as a writer? Well, I love details. I just think the odd factor detail is what still makes different parts of the country different. Like back in the 30s when this story took place, different regions of the country really were different. You didn't have a Walmart on every corner. People had different ways of speaking and looking at life. And so I still try to find those little facts wherever I can find them. And I have a friend, Garni Norman, who's the Poet Laureate of Kentucky, a few years back. And he always talks about the national media being the big eye. It's looking down from afar. And that if you're kind of a local historian or local person, you're the little eye and you're seeing the details. You're down on the ground level. So that's sort of a guiding principle. And would you say that the resource is a local writer and a local reporter who's known in the region the resources they have and the people they know offer quite the advantage over that national reporter? And I think if you really outlined that really well, I think in the book about how the national press was seeing the mountain people in one way and the local people were not very pleased with that characterization. And I think both perspectives are valuable. Because I asked the question there in the preface, who can best tell the story of any area or any region? And certainly the local people can, but also the outsiders. And I think a blend of that is really important in getting at the truth. Of course, in this case, there was a lot of stereotyping of Appalachian people. And when I began doing the research, I used to get really angry. I'd be down in the basement. A library, you're looking at microfilm. And I would just get really upset with some of the things that were said. Well, let's give an example so people can understand. So you can illustrate some of the things that were said about this culture that were just completely misguided. Well, they would talk about how that women couldn't serve on juries in Wise County, Virginia. Because women were not regarded or well thought of there. When, in fact, in about half of the states of the United States in the 30s, women were barred from serving on juries by law. Until it became a federal law that it had to be the same everywhere. Later on, I believe, right? Well, it was state by state. State by state, OK. So not only does the book go into issues of feminism, but the book really does go into four larger issues. So the story on the surface is about this woman who had multiple trials to try her for the murder of her father. But what the story is really about to me was these four larger issues. And you mentioned this in your preference. Feminism, domestic violence, prejudice against people who are different, and the news being delivered as entertainment as opposed to factual record. So I wanted to talk a little bit about each quickly. I learned that the National Women's Party wanted to use the Maxwell case to launch a bid to do what you just said, to give women a federally sanctioned right to serve on juries. And the woman who came down from Maine, the lawyer who came down from Maine, what was her name? Gail Laughlin. Gail Laughlin insisted that everyone should be truly tried by a jury of their peers. So when an all-male jury was seated for Edith's trials over and over again, she really insisted that that wasn't a jury of her peers. And that was one of the things that she wanted to really use the case to forward her agenda. Exactly. And so, I mean, when you found out that that was happening, that's a national-scale type of problem, small on the local level. And that was one of the things that made me realize that this story was more than just a typical murder trial because that was a big issue throughout the country that I'd never heard of the National Woman's Party. I didn't know that Alice Paul was a national hero. In fact, I kind of wish I had written a biography of her as well. Once you got into learning about who she was. But the real irony of the story is that Edith Maxwell was not politicized. She was just a pawn in the game because she really didn't want to be a feminist crusader. She wanted to get married and have kids. And she was afraid that her association with feminism would cause people not to want to marry her. And that is a reflection of the times across the country that was not specific to an Appalachian culture. And I think that's what the news media was trying to paint it as, is something that only in this part of the country could you find somebody who was seeing the world so small according to them. So I thought that was interesting. And again, I didn't know about the National Woman's Party and what their stake in the game was. So that was really interesting. Domestic violence wasn't really talked about a whole lot until this case. And it really started coming out. Maybe you can just give people a really brief explanation about what she would have alleged to have done. OK, Edith Maxwell was a 21-year-old school teacher. She was on her summer break in July of 1935. And she came home late one night. She'd been out to a bar. And even though it was, well, prohibition had just ended. But she wasn't really, because she was a school teacher, she wasn't supposed to be out drinking or out even at a bar. She and her father, 52-year-old Trig Maxwell, had an altercation. He was waiting for her when she got back home. He ended up having head injuries. He was found outside with his body in the kitchen and his head on the porch. And he died of head injuries that evening. And both Edith and her mother were arrested and charged with murder. And the initial thought was the murder weapon was her. Was her shoe. Her heel shoe, yes. And so that's a story that, of course, any paper would love to cover. And they did love to cover it. Yes, they did. Somehow in Washington, DC, the Hearst newspapers found out about this. And there's a lot of speculation. What did somebody there in the county call them in? And so who was it? Right, right. Well, like you said before, all of these little details just lead to other little surprises along the way when you were doing the research of this book. And I just think that would have been a joy in addition to making you angry. I'm sure it brought you a lot of joy when you were doing that type of research that every writer has to do when they write a nonfiction, especially covering a story with this breadth and depth that it had over the whole nation at that time. So it was a little bit about domestic violence. And that was something that people across America, but not even specifically in the region, people didn't really talk about some of the battles that were played inside the privacy of your home. Yes, intrigue was alleged to be an abuser. Her father was alleged to be a very heavy drinker and that he would be a very mild-mannered person when he was sober, that he'd become this other person when he was drinking. And that's supposedly, according to her, she was attacked by him that night in a drunken rage. And there definitely was a sense that you just didn't talk about these kinds of things out in public and the fact that it was brought out there. Maybe it did make people more aware that these things were going on even way back when in the mid-30s. So that's one thing that I thought was interesting. We touched a little bit about the different people. Reference in your book is the use of the novel, Trail of the Lonesome Pine, that the media used to sort of wash over this whole story. Let's tell our audience a little bit about the Trail of the Lonesome Pine if they don't already know. Trail of the Lonesome Pine was a novel written by John Fox Jr. It is also set in Wise County, Virginia. It was published around 1908 and then three motion pictures have been made of the Trail of the Lonesome Pine. You may have actually seen the color version. There were two black and white movies made of it in the 20s and then the 36th version was in Technicolor. It's one of the first color movies. And the premise of this is that local girl meets an engineer from the city. She falls in love and he has to send her away to become cultured. It's to send her away to get city-fied so she will be good enough for him. And then she has feuding relatives and so forth. Right. So that whole story premise was sort of placed upon this entire story of Edith Maxwell and because of the popularity of that novel, really people ate it up in all of the newspapers and there was lots of wars to get people to buy their newspaper and their version of the story during which this whole time story was more entertainment than news based on your book and what you found out was as much more yellow journalism type of thing. So one of the things that I did note was this journalist author Medford. He had a high regard for Edith because he said that she was cultured. She went to college, she got out allegedly and went and had a college degree but that the rest of them he wrote that mountain people were slatternly women and gangly men who rise each day to take up the doll business of living. So it's the type of picture was being printed and conveyed to their audience. That's a great quote you chose. It really shows you the positive stereotyping that was going on with Edith and she could do no wrong and she was above everybody else in the community according to the tabloids. Right. And so that juxtaposition of this negative and positive stereotyping really led to a lot of pretrial publicity that was very unfavorable to her on the local level. Correct, right. So it didn't really help her at all. Do you think that perceptions have changed all that much since the Maxwell trial? It's a loaded question, I'll admit it, but I thought I had to ask it. Well, I think the media is better, certainly better than they were in the 30s. We don't call women, girls in the paper or we don't call developmentally challenged people morons. I mean, we have improved in our language at least, but there are still some pockets. I was reading about the Pactin murders and I believe it was the Daily Beast and... That's gonna be an interesting story. It was really, really kind of getting into that, to me, that yellow journalism area of... Stereotyping. Describing the people there. It'll be interesting to see how the media covered that for sure. As it unfolds. So how does the way Appalachians are perceived in society today affect or inform your writing? Do you keep in mind the way that the perception is of Appalachian people when you write or do you just write? Does it influence your writing and your choices? I don't think so, not a whole lot. I mean, this one book, that's the book I wrote about representation and I'm ready to move on. Okay, okay. So the way Jonathan Keynes was represented, he also lived in Appalachia, but it was totally different. So it's not been a huge factor in this new project. Okay, good. So we talked a little bit about the news as entertainment and we talked slightly about how the coverage helped or hurt Maxwell's case and ultimately influenced so-called blind justice, but as you just described, elevating her as a cultured person because she went to college did not help her in terms of the perception of her locally, but it did help her from some newspapers' perspectives elevate her as somebody who was better than the rest of the people she was living among. So that was part of the whole story in your book and you just play it out so nicely. I really encourage everybody to read this. It is literally a page turner and I really enjoy reading it. I also, when I read it, I could hear your voice and your song of your voice in my head and that made it even more pleasurable, so. It was a great read. Thank you. So let's talk a little bit about writing craft. We were gonna talk about this earlier, but I feel like we can, now that we've established this incredible amount of research and I think you, this was published in 2005 and as Janet mentioned, it did win the W.D. Weatherford Award for Nonfiction and Appalachian Studies in 2005 and then the next year it won the Thomas and Louie D. Chaffin Celebration of Appalachia Writing Award and so that's a huge back-to-back awards for something that was so informative to the culture. So, 10 years? How long did you work? Try 12. 12, okay. 12. 12 years in writing and researching. I'm trying to speed that now. Yeah, okay. Well, don't go too fast because this was really good. I don't want to miss anything. So, all right, let's talk a little bit about the writing process and the writing craft and you touched on this a little bit. You asked in your preface what lessons did her story have to teach them and us and so it's been 11 years since this was published in 2005. What was your answer after you finished the book to that question about what lesson did her story have to teach us and what did it teach you as a writer? Well, I think it taught me that both the perspectives were valuable, that nobody has a corner on a story. It's a fact of history. You can't copy right there, it's everybody's story and both perspectives were very valuable even though one was rather distorted at times. What's the value, would you say, you had to say what the value of that distorted view was, was it to just illustrate how wrong directional it was, that it wasn't going in the wrong direction? Well, I guess I think more of the women's party and they were able to say, well, why should it be that women can't serve on juries? Why should it be that women can't go out at night like men can and nobody thinks anything about it? So, they were willing to kind of upset conventional thinking. Okay, yeah. And what was your answer, since you wrote the book, has your answer changed in terms of what lessons did her story teach you? So, it's been 11 years since you wrote the book. You've had a lot of people that you've talked to that read the book, probably a lot of people that are from the region that maybe knew the family or knew them. Has your perception changed about what it taught you now that you're 11 years out and you've said, okay, then they're done that, what have I learned as a writer now that this has been done for about 11 years? I don't think I've really found out a lot of new information that really changed the conclusions. I did, I was contacted later on by a granddaughter of Earl Maxwell, and she was able to- Earl Maxwell was her brother and her chief supporter in all of her trials. I did not know where this woman's whereabouts when I was writing the book. She was able to provide more detail on it, but nothing that really changed the conclusions. Okay, okay. So maybe one of the lessons you learned is that the story will continue, but you're ready to kind of move on. Yeah, because you've been there, done that. Okay. You also write in the preface that, how can I and Appalachian women tell you the story in a way that would honor the culture we both shared without papering over some unpleasant truths? This is a tough question and it's probably gonna be a little unfair, but do you have a definition of what an Appalachian woman is today or is the very question sort of absurd? Well, there's many different ways to define it. Like when we were doing the book about Appalachian literature, me and my co-ed, it's, well, how do we know what to include? What is an Appalachian writer? Yeah. So I would say it's people who write about the region or their stories are set in the region or they're from the area. Do you have sort of a definition of writing craft that you stick with when you start writing? Do you sit down and say, this is my method, this is the way I do things, this is the way that works best for me, this is where I shine, this is where I could use some work? Well, the first, the 80th Maxwell book, I did all the research and then I wrote it. I had these stacks of paper everywhere and I was like, what do I do now? So I don't do that anymore. And so why, can you tell me why you chosen to take it the different way? Is it just because it was just too untenable and it just was too much to really organize all at once? Yeah, I think it's thought more efficient if you write up what you find as you go along. Okay. At least in sentence form, it may not be in chapter form or even paragraph, but I think it's better to write it up as you go along and it helps you reflect on what you just found out. Okay, okay. And can you, we just talked about this a little bit. What do you feel like your greatest strength is as a writer? You, Sharon, what do you think you bring to the page better than most people can? Well, usually I leave it up to other people to say, but going back to the details, it's kind of a blessing and a curse because a lot of times I get sidetracked into other stories and I think, is this going to be a spin-off or is it going to be part of the book? For example, when I was doing Never Seen the Moon and learned that a Hollywood movie had been made out of it, that completely blew my mind and I ended up getting to go to California and do research on the movie and I ended up writing some articles about epilogue and women's portrayal in films. So it can turn into a whole other thing of its own sometimes. So I would say that your strength is just that insatiable curiosity? Yeah, I like that. Okay. I like that. Can we also say that it sometimes ends up being your greatest weakness? Because it definitely gets you sort of off track and I suffer from the same inflection, by the way. So I have the same problems too. I get very curious about things too much. Well, it does affect the pacing of your story. If you're, you know, the reader will tolerate a certain amount of backstory, but some people will just put the book down and say, you know, it's taking too long to get to the action. Get to the action. Would you say that a really good editor helps with that tremendously? Mm-hmm. Okay. Yep. And did you have the editor, do you wanna talk a little bit about the editor for this book? It was published through the University of Illinois, right? Mm-hmm. Okay. I had a really great editor named Judy McCullough but also prior to that, I had gone through the Goucher MFA program and I actually had four writing mentors during the course of the two-year program and all of them had a hand in editing, especially Diana Hume George, who has been here on campus as a visiting professor. She really helped me with it a lot. So all that happened prior to working with Illinois. Oh, okay, okay. So that was the final step. So your greatest strength and your greatest weaknesses are sort of that insatiable curiosity. But again, I just think it really informed the reporting on this book and it was just a joy to read. It really was. I highly recommend it. So let's go on to having, let's talk a little bit about the new project, which I know that you've been working on for how long have you been, from beginning to today, would you say how long have you been working on this book? When I started in the summer of 2010. In 2010, okay. And some of the locations that you've been to, to research this book, tell us where those have been. Well, the story is about Jonathan Coons, who moved here in 1835 from Bedford, Pennsylvania. And that's one place that my husband and I have been to do research there at their historical society. And I'm hoping to possibly go out to Illinois, which is where he lived after he moved away from here in 1858. Okay. And I think locally you've been to the Southeast Ohio History Center as well. Yes, I've had a lot of help there from John. I don't know how I would have navigated all the documents there without his help, but it's been great. No question. And I believe the Coons family, well, let's back up a little bit. It's about spiritualism. The whole book is, well, it's about him, but the overarching theme is spiritualism. Can you tell our audience what that is and when it started and the impact it had as far as you've been able to tell so far on American culture? Spiritualism started in 1848 in New York State. There were two young girls there, the Fox sisters who thought that they could communicate with a peddler's spirit, as peddler had allegedly been murdered in the basement of their rented home and they thought that they could, through rapping noises, yes and no, that they could communicate. And this spawned a very popular movement in the late 1840s, early 50s that continued on through the 19th century and even around World War I. It's quite popular. And spiritualists believe that the soul or consciousness does survive death and that through the seance, one can access those spirits. Okay. The access of spirits, which is really strange that that noise just happened. Just gonna make that notion right there. Spirits meaning people that are not all the way parted because they have something else to do. There's a reason why they're here. The reason why people who were able to contact the spirits were hired essentially to bring those people back at least temporarily to make peace with the living. Is that about what it was? To offer them comfort and advice and to assure them of the immortality of the soul. That they need not grieve so much because it was really just like stepping into another room. Interesting, okay. And it was also a reform movement. There were many reform movements in the 1840s. Women's rights were coming into the fore. There was clothing reform. A lot of women died from their skirts catching on fire and things like that. And so they were looking at clothing reform. They were looking at, of course, temperance was another thing and abolition was huge. I mean, that was tearing our country apart. So all those were reform movements and a lot of spiritualists, you'll find that they're interwoven with these other things. And they were very much trying to reform Christianity. That's what my next question was, reforming what Christianity? So what unpacked that a little bit? What does that mean, reform Christianity? Well, Calvinism was still very prevalent in that day and time. And Calvinists believed in the total depravity of human beings, that they were born, that's their literal creed, that they were born in sin and that only the elect, only those chosen of God would go to heaven. And that you really had little control of your destiny. And so spiritualists didn't really believe in hell. They believed that you could progress through many layers of self-improvement even after you had passed. So this was very comforting to a lot of people. Mm-hmm, okay. And this was in tandem with all these other kinds of reform movements happening throughout the U.S. Okay. So your research process continues or are you done with the research now when it comes to getting all the information that you feel like you need to write the book? We've talked about this privately about how you could just research forever based on our affliction that we share. But would you say that you have enough now to really begin the writing process as it remains a work in progress? I'm nearing the end of the research, but I'm always so interested in hearing about anybody who have any information about it. Maybe somebody here today. Possibly, hopefully, yeah. Okay. So we're talking at least, what, 2010, so six years that you've been researching this. You've gone to Pennsylvania. You've been here. I mean, you hope to go out to Illinois, you said? I forgot to mention Lillydale, New York and Casadaga, Florida. We have been there as well. And those are two main spiritualist communities in the United States today. Oh, okay, so this movement continues today, the spiritualism movement. So some people still practice it a little bit? But it's not really as widespread as it was back then. Right, okay. But it has a lot of spinoffs, of course, New Age, what we called it in the 70s or 80s. There's spinoffs from it, but not too many people are actually spiritualists anymore. Can you characterize the folks that you met in both of those locations? You said New York and in Florida. You know, did they, I mean, when you met with them, did you interview any of them? Did you talk to some of their organizers? Well, I went to see a medium in Lillydale, New York because I wanted to understand the experience. Because I realized that these people who went to the mediums, whether or not it was fake or real, many of them did have a religious experience. And if you think about shamans, a lot of what they did or still do could involve some manner of deception, but yet people find meaning in the experience. So that was one of the reasons I went. Okay. And that experience for you was just as you expected or something different? I'm sure you had a notion of what you thought might happen. Well, I was pretty skeptical about, I know there are some people that really are talented and can tell you things that they might not have any way of knowing, but I was pretty skeptical and I had my expectations were kind of low. But you create the narrative with the person. Okay, so that's how it kind of work. It's more of a dialogue than it is, I'm gonna sit here and not say a word and you medium are gonna tell me everything because you can somehow get inside my head. Right. Okay. And the one in Florida was similar to that experience? Down there I went to a service. I didn't. Tell me what that is. I went to a spiritualist temple there in Casadaga. Okay. And it was a wonderful service. Tell me what happened. Well, it was a lot like, I don't know, not a lot. One of the things they did, which was really interesting is they had you do a meditation in church and you would sit and the minister would guide you through a meditation from head to toe and it was all about love and being love and it was really nice. Sounds lovely. And the only part that was really different, well there were a couple parts. If you were there and you wanted healing, you would go to the back and they had these chairs set up in the back of the auditorium and the different healers would come and work with them. And then the only really, really unusual thing about the service itself, the sermon, is they would pick out people in the audience and say, I see your spirit. The spirit is here over your left shoulder and this is so and so and that was really different. Very different indeed. What was the reaction of the people in the service? They attended before, so this was expected or did they have some newcomers in there that were really blown away and just really had a big reaction to the service? I really am not sure whether they were newcomers or were it regulars, but they did feel they could connect with the story in some way. They seemed to. Okay, so that's all part of your research, in addition to, tell us what kind of research you've done at the library, at the Lebring Library at Southeast Ohio History Center and did you do any here and uncover anything here at Alden Library? I've done research here at Alden. Yes, I have found some local history items here in the archives. Also, one of the things we've done at Historical Society is I'm a big believer in looking at deeds. Why is that? Because deeds can tell you a lot about an area and what's going on. When I first started to do Never Seen the Moon, I had read a book called Feud by Altona Waller, which you can guess what feud it was about, right? And she went through and looked at deeds and I decided to do that for this book and then for the one now, John has helped me look through all years worth of deeds for the Coon's family and for his in-laws, the bishops. Now I haven't really, I don't know if I have the time, but I wanted to say a mention about his wife, John's and his wife, Abigail. Okay. One of the real challenges of this book is there's such a small female presence in it because it really was a man's world and women were very seldom mentioned in these papers. They didn't write in to these papers, so it's much harder to get a woman's presence in a story like this. Jonathan Coon's had a rather unusual wife. She was the minister's daughter, but as he said, she was a free thinker, which was a term back then. Okay, and how would you characterize that term today? Let's talk about that in modern terms. What does free thinker mean? What do you think he meant by free thinker? Well, somebody that's progressive, somebody that's willing to entertain different ideas, especially about religion was a big thing. But anyway, she was an herbalist. Abigail was an herbalist. They lived out on Mount Nibbo. And she was also supposedly a medical clairvoyant. Tell me what that is. Well, it's someone who goes into a trance state and diagnoses someone's illness. To us, that kind of sounds like quackery, perhaps. But back then, there was a very little differentiation between the trained doctors and the untrained. And physicians were not regulated up till Civil War. And they had really different ideas about who could help you possibly. And even the trained physicians used a lot of mercury compounds in their healing, as well as the bloodletting. So it was one as clear cut as it would be today. Okay, interesting. I've never heard that term before. So I'm guessing you write some about that. You will be writing some about that in the book. So we can look forward to that, for sure. Well, let's do a little bit of, let me see. There was one little thing we were gonna talk about. We were gonna say, what sort of little fun fact did you uncover? I feel like we've already had like 12 since we started talking about it. But do you have a fun fact, another fun fact about the whole movement or about the, about Mount Nebo, about the Koonzes that you wanna share with us? Well, it's interesting. The number of people in the 19th century who were spiritualists, Harriet Beecher Stowe was. Garrison, the abolitionist editor, he was one. And of course, later on, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he and Houdini had the kind of big face off about spiritualism. There's a great book out now about that called The Witch of Lime Street. And that's from the post-world one era. So there were a lot of famous people connected with it. Interesting. I guess here on the local level, I've just been amazed to see the German influence that we had here in the county. We hear so much about the New England influence, and rightly so, they've recreated, you know, the Harvard on the Hawking here. But there are tremendous amounts of German, numbers of German people who migrated here from Pennsylvania. And like whole neighborhoods would just get up and move here. Interesting. And in fact, in Ohio, we had the Bedford County Association people. There were so many people that had moved over here. They had their own little social club. Bedford County, Pennsylvania. Yes. Okay. Which is where John Coose is from. Okay. So they had their own little, like you just said, conclave neighborhood, whatever. Here. Okay. Interesting. Can I go back really briefly to why you feel like deeds are so informative to your work, especially for both of these books? Well, one thing I found out about the Dotsons and the Maxwells and the Edith Maxwell story, there was a rumor in the tabloids that there was a feud between the two families, which is a big motif in the Appalachian way at the feud. And so by looking at the deeds, I was able to see that these two families, the Maxwells and the Dotsons, they went in together and bought property for Edith's father and mother so they could get married and have a farm, which is about the farthest you could get from them being feudists. So... Interesting. Okay. So it did sort of really inform what was really going on, despite what maybe the tabloids were saying or maybe even what the local people were trying to say that was not correct. What about the deed research that you've done for the Coons family? How instructive was that? Well, it does show their migration into the area and the years that they showed up. Also most interesting has been the story of the Bishop family and their efforts to start a high school in a Homer township. And they attempt, her father, Abigail's father, attempted to start a seminary there, but his project never got off the ground and he ended up in court and lawsuits over it, but it's all there in the deed record. Interesting, okay. And I know you'll probably review some of that as well in the book. Let's do a little bit of a reading from the book that we talked about. This is from the working title of this is, what is the time do we have here? I've got 10 till or nine till. Here we go, right on time. The enchanted ground is the working title of your book. Okay, well, this is a scene that takes place at Donathan's home place, which is on Mount Nebo. They didn't call it Mount Nebo then, but it's such a beautiful name. I've been using it. This was in the millfield area up on top, above Chansey. And he has already become a spiritualist and he's starting to open up his house and have seances for the public. And I think the only names in here, the sons are named Nim, it's Nahum, but they called it Nim and Samuel and his wife is named Abigail. On a November day in 1852, Jonathan Coons was digging for treasure. He was spading up the ground under a hickory tree in the woods near his house, just as the spirits had told him to. The adventure had begun the day before when his sons Nim and Samuel, age 15 and 12, were herding some cattle home from a grazing lot about a mile away. While passing by a scattering of stones that circled the hickory, the boys felt something plucking at their arms, grabbing their wrists, trying to pull them off the path and toward the rocks. Spook, they returned home and wasted no time in telling Abigail what had happened. Mrs. Coons guessed that spirits were trying to communicate, so she, Jonathan and likely Nim repaired to the spirit room, that's this little tabernacle beside of their house, to find out the meaning behind the boy's scare. The shade of an Indian chief revealed that he and another entity had accosted Nim and Samuel to call attention to what was actually a burial place. There the chief said, Jonathan would find the ashes of his body together with his weapons. Giving his name as Joana Gianna Muscoe, the invisible explained that his tribe had been at war with another tribe that was allied with the whites. So I'll skip over this one section where Muscoe talks about the battle that took place between two Native American tribes. Despite the ferocity of Muscoe's attacking force, he himself was fatally struck by narrow. To honor his dying request, Muscoe's warriors burned his body on a pile of wood and buried his ashes and personal effects under the hickory tree, placing the stones around it. As proof of his authenticity and as an example to unbelievers, the spirit asked Coons to take two neutral observers to the spot and dig up the relics. The message made sense to Jonathan and may have come as no surprise. He had whittled a rude homestead out of the forests of Mount Nebo on the highest elevations in the county in an area that repeatedly had been a sacred spot to the Shawnee Indians. Maps made much later would depict the Mount Nebo trail threading along the ridgetop, possibly a reference to a time-worn path trod by the Native Americans. By the time Abigail and Jonathan took up farming there, the Indians had long been driven out. Yet here in this western land, their spirits still lurked among the glades in which they had sported. Just a few miles from Mount Nebo, found out the broad expanse of Wolf's Plains where monuments to a much earlier Indian presence remained. Here along the Hawking River, the ancient people had constructed the three square mile complex of circular structures. Settlers had noticed not only conical burial mounds, but an unusual earthen enclosure that reminded them of an old fort. Later scholars, however, would interpret this open-air structure as a ceremonial theater where shamans, often under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, saw entry to the spirit world. Here, perhaps two millennia before Jonathan Abigail, Native Americans had donned wolf skins and lit fires, performing their sacred rites under the light of the moon. In his role as ambassador and guide, the shaman would contact spirits from the other side, sometimes those of animals and sometimes those of the dead. The magnetic pull of the buried man's instructions led Jonathan to the woods where the boys had been affrighted. Little Samuel was not with them, but Jonathan had convinced two neighbors to join him and them on the quest. They had only walked about three quarters of a mile in a southerly direction when they encountered a hickory of some considerable magnitude and had begun digging, quote, near a broken strata of sand rock that projected from the bluff point of an adjacent hill, end quote. With Ames Township residents, Emmanuel Evans and George Kearns looking on, Jonathan scraped aside the husks of last summer's leaves and removed one foot then two feet of dirt. The black forest loan began to yield to red clay and still not a trace of anything unusual had turned up. The neighbors might have wondered if they had been called away from their chores to run a fool's errand. Finally at the three foot level, Jonathan hit something. Just as foretold by the Indian, he pulled from the grave a stone battle axe, arrows and a stone breastplate. These artifacts, Jonathan believed, would make a fine display at his home, yet another proof of the wonders as if any more proof were required. Very nice, thank you. Thank you. I think we're gonna do a couple minutes of Q and A if people wanna stick around for that. Any questions anybody has for Sharon? Raise your hand and we'll bring you the microphone. You said the boys were a-frighted. Can you just say about the use of that word and how you, is that a word that's in your everyday vocabulary? Well I was in a writing workshop up in Chautauqua, New York a couple years ago and I read a little piece, not this one but a different one. And one of the participants in my class said, oh, I notice you're using these 19th century words. And I'm like, oh really? Okay, so now I've made a conscious effort to do that because I think it's wonderful words. The process of just writing that piece there, how much research would you say goes into just, just writing something, I just wanna give people a sense of how much it takes, information it takes to, to get to just one, you know, one or two pages here. It's a big effort. Well, yeah, the book that most of this account came out of, Jack and I went to Columbus to the State Library a few years ago and got a very old, old book that Jonathan Coons and a doctor from Columbus, Dr. Everett, had put together a book of these sayings and messages in 1853. So, you know, he figured a day going to Columbus and eating at the short north and then other parts of it came from letters that I found and so it's just hard to say, really. Right, okay, okay. Anybody else have any other questions? I think we have one over here. Sharon, when you were reading your piece, it was really clear that you write in a very conversational way. I mean, you're speaking and you're writing. That's one of the things I think I loved about reading the book was that I just felt like you were talking to me. At the same time, you were packing in so much information about the way the direction the thing was shaped. Do these sentences kind of flow out or how do you mix the conversation and pack in? You know, what sort of process is going on there? Well, I think it's always a challenge to try to write in things as much as you can and I tend to just write everything out as an exposition the first time or maybe the first three or four times and then go back and try to put in things. Could you tell us a little bit about how the local community rejected or embraced the Coons family? Well, he got a lot of attention here in the county and you know, he got different reactions. Some people were really curious and they went there and participated in séances but the local churches mainly, he thought it was mainly the Methodists. Sorry if there's any Methodists. But they did not like this because they were conflating the idea of spiritualism with devil worship which are completely two different things that spiritualists don't really believe in the devil. I mean, they're not into that at all and so they're talking about communicating with their loved ones and so forth. So there was a quite a negative reaction here in the community and that led them to someone to burning down Jonathan Coons' barn in December of 1852. They burnt his barn and burned up all of his crops and for that year and his tools. So somebody was sending a message. And it is true. Oh, go ahead. What about the death of the daughter church's refusal to participate? Well, Jonathan had a 12 year old daughter who died of what they call an enlarged heart. I tried to look into, is that rheumatic fever or exactly what would cause that? I don't know. But she died in September of 1851 before he became a spiritualist and we were speculating that might've actually driven him in that direction but he wanted some of the ministers here in town to come out there which was quite a ways, six miles on horseback or buggy or whatever it was an effort. He himself was an infidel. He did not belong to a church. And so he tried to, he sent an inlaw of his relative to try to get ministers to come out here from Athens and preach the daughter's funeral and they refused to do so. But I don't think they did it because he had these weird beliefs. I think they just didn't know who he was and there just wasn't enough of a connection there is my opinion. For them to make that journey? Yes, they weren't part of, he wasn't part of their flock. And he took this to mean that they were very sectarian and very narrow minded. And he did not think that he had been well served by the ministers. And one last thing, it is true that people from all over the Eastern United States would come to visit the Coon's family. Seon's room, is that what it was called? Spirit room, yeah. Because they were very well known as people that can reach past into the afterlife and do that comfort and healing piece for their customers, I guess. Well, it's interesting you say customer because they did not accept donations. Okay. I mean they did accept donations, excuse me. But they didn't charge admission to their Seon's. But they also, we should mention the Tippi family. They also had a spirit room. Here in Athens County? It was about two and a half miles from Jonathan. They had been his disciples, they had learned from him how to set up a circle. And they had a spirit room at their house too which was just over the line in Ames Township. Interesting, okay. And they got the same type of people coming from the east to get their needs taken care of. So it was kind of like spiritual tourism. Yeah, right. And they, people would come and board at one place and then they'd go and board at the other place and it kinda, they worked together on it, I think, rather than being rivals. Well, it definitely was an interesting movement. One more question? Yeah, is there anything left of it? Well, supposedly there is a, maybe a foundation of where the cabin was but there is no buildings left. Do you have a question, Jim? Well, this may be a little far afield but when you were talking about spirit rooms, I realized that Carl Jung, he had his own spirit room. He built this tower on the lake in Switzerland and he was born in 1875. And his family, his mother's family, they were all into spiritualism and into seances and this interest went with Jung throughout his life and was, sometimes he referred to it as spookery when he was talking to Freud maybe. But I just wondered, I just wondered if, I think the spiritualism movement is kind of maybe trivialized in a way and that maybe, I would wonder how you would comment on its further development in the psychology of Jung. If you see that that was an important side of evolution from native shamans on through modern psychology, I guess. Well, that's a pretty heavy duty question, Harriet. I've really been influenced by Carl eating a lot in my own thinking about life and the collective unconscious and so forth. So I don't think that the ideas of the spiritualists were in any way in conflict with a lot of his ideas about archetypes and so forth. I wouldn't like to address what you said about trivializing the thing and that's kind of a challenge in writing a book like this. You might have noticed that when I read the part about the spirits communicating with Jonathan, I didn't put allegedly or purportedly or supposedly because that would really just deaden the whole thing but you kind of have to get into their world and just say that think, I'm not necessarily saying this happened that way but it's how they perceive it. And people kind of, they don't know whether to laugh or not laugh and it's just, if you need to laugh, it's okay but I do want to try to avoid trivializing what to some people was a very serious religious matter and to other people was just purely entertainment. I'm hoping Sharon will stick around for a little while for more questions and I just want to thank both Kelly and Sharon for being here today and for all of you for joining us today. Also, just so you know, on July 16th, Robert Geipp will be here and you can find more information about him and his book on the back table and some freebies and there's an opportunity to sign up for announcements. So thank you all.