Blacksburg-based author Michael Abraham, who knows something about growing up as a fish out of water, as part of a Jewish family based in southwestern Virginia, has just released his second novel set in this area: Providence, VA. Its heroine is a teenaged, Jewish girl from New Jersey who finds culture shock when she moves to southwestern Virginia. But Samantha” Sammy” Reisinger can also play a mean violin, which she converts to fiddle playing in this neck of the woods. Tragedy strikes while she performs at the Old Fiddlers Convention in Galax but Sammy perseveres to become part of the community.
Abraham’s previous books included another novel (Union, WV) and two non-fiction works, The Spine of the Virginias and Harmonic Highways, which include accounts of the people he has met along the way in southwestern Virginia.
“I like to listen, and I think that everybody has got a story,” said Abraham, who felt he was the right person to tell those stories. Since his family sold Christiansburg Printing to Wordsprint, Abraham has had more time to wander back roads on his motorcycle. The inspiration for his two novels came from real life people he met in Virginia and West Virginia.
“If I have a talent for anything it’s a talent for bringing out the stories in [people] and making it interesting to wider audiences,” said Abraham. In general people seem happy to share the details of their lives; he’s detected “a high level of life satisfaction” for those that live here in Central Appalachia. “We don’t have the money that some other places have but most people really love it here.” They’re happy to tell others most of the time about what makes it such a great place to live, according to Abraham. “They do tend to open up to me quite a bit.”
Blacksburg is five miles in every direction from Appalachia jokes Abraham, a place where people can wake up with “birds singing in their yard. They can grow things they can eat in the back yard. The vistas and the mountains are the things we treasure here.”
Providence, VA (Pocahontas Press) was inspired by a woman Abraham met at the Swinging Bridge restaurant in Paint Bank. She told Abraham about her neighbors, who were “survivors.” That notion appealed to Abraham, who generally feels the planet is on an unsustainable course unless inhabitants change their ways. “It’s very difficult for any sane person to deny that the climate is warming. The political football that it’s become is horrifying to me.”
Abraham wanted to look at that “collapse” via a novel, through the outsider’s eyes of Sammy Reisinger, a “rich, Jewish, city kid,” whose father made a bundle working for Goldman Sachs. Sammy inherits a priceless violin and learns how to play it well enough to join a youth symphony. Then she discovers fiddle music and sees “the incredible connection between the fiddler and the audience. She longs for that and decides to go to the Fiddler’s Convention in Galax.”
While she’s in Galax a complete collapse of the power grid – remember the Derecho? – kills everything that’s microprocessor based – even cars, watches, etc. “It sends this little Appalachian community back into life 100 years ago,” notes Abraham. That’s the world Sammy must cope with but she is surrounded by kind, loving people from the hills of southwestern Virginia that are bound to help her make it.
“There are plenty of stresses that people have to endure [during the power outage].” Abraham is fascinated by energy and weaves his feelings on sources for it throughout Providence, VA. Besides Sammy, who becomes a midwife, his novel features characters that are religious fanatics, professors and back-to-the-earth types.
“I try to educate. It’s important for me that the reader finish this book and know something they didn’t know before,” said Abraham. “It’s not sufficient for me to just tell a story.”
(Michael Abraham’s books are available at online booksellers and on his website, bikemike.name.)
By Gene Marrano
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