Normally I wouldn't do this, but the interview also contains some announcements which I haven't yet posted here. The interview also offers a general look at how we got started and how we've grown, which some of you newcomers may find interesting.
Jeff Atkins of Sylva's Quiet Zine conducted the interview and has posted it on his Last Place on Earth website.
1- What was the reason you started TNTDH in the first place?
There were a couple of things behind it. I was raised in Clifton Forge, Va., about 45 minutes north of Roanoke. I grew up hating the area and split shortly after high school. It didn't take me long to realize how cool the region actually is, though. I stayed away about 8 years, and every time I'd come home for a visit, I'd see big changes taking place. In particular, I noticed that farmland along U.S. 220 between Roanoke and Clifton was being increasingly developed for residential subdivisions.
In 2001 I took an internship at High Country News, a western twice-a-month newsmagazine that took a "big-picture" journalistic approach to land used issues in 11 states. I couldn't help but notice a lot of similarities between what I saw happening in the mountains back home and what was going on in towns like Telluride, Colo. There were differences of course, but a lot of factors were pretty similar.
In December I took a job at the Enterprise-Mountaineer in Waynesville, NC. I had the idea to start a low-production-value zine that would do for southern Appalachia what High Country News did for the West. I got a few interviews in before I realized there was no way I could write hard-news stories for work all day, then go home and do the same thing at night. I shelved the concept for a few months before eventually resurrecting it with a lot of changes.
In a nutshell, I intended There's Nothing To Do Here! as an outlet for writing and ideas that I really couldn't do with a mainstream newspaper.
2- How have you seen your zine develop during 2004?
I'm going to take it back just a little before 04, if that's ok. The first issue was done in April '03 by three people, all of whom worked at the Mountaineer. I wrote virtually everything, though I used some pen names, with the hope that readers would see it and feel encouraged to submit some work of their own. Amy Pryor laid everything out on the page, and Eric Pryor (no relation) drew the comic and helped hook us up with an inexpensive print job. We printed 1,000 copies and distro'd around Waynesville, Asheville and Roanoke. I've still got about 100-200 copies of that issue.
Between #1 and #2 I moved to Roanoke to take a job with The Roanoke Times. We tried doing #2 the same way as #1, but ran into a lot of problems, due mainly to the 4-hour distance. So with #3 I took to the tradition cut-and-paste technique, doing everything myself, pretty much. With issue #4 we went from 20 pages to 40 and also received a large increase in submissions from new writers. I started selling ads in issue #5, with my only ad policy being that I only sell ads to independent, locally-owned businesses that I actually patronize.
In May I took a vacation in Knoxville and distro'd some #5s there. Luckily, a woman named Mary Willis picked up a copy and started submitting interviews and news stories. Since then she's started distributing down there for us too. For issue #8, she placed 80 or so copies around the city, which is a pretty good chunk of our 300-copy print run. Since then we've continued to snowball, getting more interest from folks. Our layout has gotten much tighter; for issue #8 everything was printed in size 6 fonts, which is hard on the eyes but easier on my wallet!
3- Since you have lived in both western NC and now in the Roanoke area of VA, how can you compare the two areas as far as arts/music/thought go?
Western NC seems to be more youth-oriented. It seems like the scenes there consist largely of high school and college kids, so they tend to follow music trends a little more closely. Emo is bigger there than it is here. For some reason there's some zeitgeist about Asheville right now. It's attracting street kids and yuppies alike.
Roanoke's scene is interesting; a lot of people grow up or move here and talk constantly about leaving, but never do. As a result there are remnants of scene history dating back all the way to the early 80s. Street punk and metal are huge here; I remember seeing pictures of the Casualties back when I lived in California and thinking, "This must be a joke," but you go to a punk show here and that's how most of the younger kids look. I think that Roanoke is actually larger, population-wise, than Asheville, but it seems harder to keep a small business going here. I'm not sure why.
4- What is your experience with more commercial forms of media, i.e. newspapers and magazines?
They provide my day job. I originally thought I'd end up at an alternative weekly or a magazine, but here I am, working a beat for a corporate daily. I think in the alt-weekly and zine worlds, there's a perception that corporate dailies are places where editors are constantly berating writers for even coming close to stepping on the toes of advertisers, but I really haven't seen too much of that. We occasionally get top-down corporate edicts, but they're usually benign. I hear it's worse at Gannett papers like the Citizen-Times, but that's all second-hand.
When you work for a commercial paper, you certainly have an easier time getting access to sources. I think that's due more to name recognition, though. I mean, if you're an elected rep, who are you gonna take more seriously, someone calling from The Roanoke Times or someone from There's Nothing To Do Here!? I think that's just the nature of the beast.
5- How do the two worlds compare?
They’re pretty different. Though there are occasional exceptions, I can't really run a Q&A interview in a daily newspaper. And writing columns is very different. In the first issue of TNTDH, I included a spiel about being single in a small town. I had planned to pitch that to the Mountaineer, but there was a line about my editor telling me to try finding girls in church. My reply was "Christian girls don't put out," which never would have flown in the newspaper, even as an obvious joke. I can put that in the zine, though.
5- What has kept you going at this for so long?
Boredom, mostly. I don't watch much TV, and there's only so much you can read before you start to go crazy. The zine is also a great excuse for going up and talking to random people. Just last night, in fact, I went to see an Asheville band called the Mad Tea Party play in Blacksburg. For one thing, I doubt I would have even gone if it hadn't been for that voice in my head going, "Hey, they're from Asheville. I can interview them for the zine." I went by myself and when I walked in, there was a girl sitting at a table by herself. Having a few extra copies of issue #8 allowed me to go, "Hey, do you mind if I sit here too? By the way, this is my zine. It's free, you can have one" without looking excessively creepy. (I wasn't trying to hit on her, BTW, I just didn't want to sit at a table by myself.) I've also met a lot of cool people through doing this. People have the mistaken assumption that if you self-published this zine, you must be pretty cool yourself.
7- Of all of the stories you have done for your zine and the papers you have worked at, what has been the most interesting or the weirdest as far as you are concerned?
One of my very first stories was in Monterey County, Calif. My editor assigned me to cover a 50something man who'd received a 9-month prison sentence for animal cruelty. It turned out that he'd been evicted from his house and, while moving, the truck driver helping him move called the SPCA. Investigators found - spread between two self-storage areas and the house - 40some live cats and more than 200 dead ones. I tracked his history back for about three houses and it was the same story at each: He'd be convicted for not paying rent and then, when the landlord arrived at the empty house, they'd find it trashed and smelling like a pet store. One guy in Hollister was donating his building to the fire department to burn, since there was no way he could ever fully renovate it. When I spoke to the man in prison, he said he'd started collecting cats when he was homeless in San Jose, and he said he'd held on to all those cat carcasses because he was going to bury them. Even though I wrote this story back in spring 2001, it continues to fascinate me, and I've started on a TNTDH project to try and document various feral cat colonies around the region. They're everywhere: Behind fast food joints in the dumpsters, scattered throughout neighborhoods. But because cats are pretty sly, most of us don't ever notice their existence. It's an invisible world, right under our noses.
I'm also interested in why and how an influx of new people can change a community. This is happening all over Western North Carolina, and in southwest Virginia as well. Often the growth is centered around a tourist attraction, like the Great Smoky Mountains. Tourists come to visit, then end up coming back to retire or to buy a second home. Near Maggie Valley, for example, the construction business has boomed from all the new people moving in, many of them from Florida or the northeastern U.S. When this happens in an area like southern Appalachia, which has remained unchanged for decades or even hundreds of years, you get this conflict that arises between the newcomers and longtimers. I don't know if you've heard any locals refer to people from Florida as BIFers (coined from a tendency to start sentences, "Back in Florida, we did it such and such way") or halfbackers (because they move from the northeast down to Florida, then move halfway back). The volume of newcomers has reached a threshold where they've become very noticeable to the locals. Some of the more conservative "good ole boys" have even started tout zoning and land use restrictions (unthinkable even five years ago) because they're getting worried about mountainside construction. What is interesting to me is when the number of newcomers increases to the point where they are able to elect people to represent them on local boards. I'm certainly not saying either side represents "the good guys," but looking at this societal clash is fascinating. When you get up close and into the gritty grimy details, it's not as fun, but from a distant, big-picture perspective, it's really interesting.
8- What are your plans for TNTDH in 2005?
We're working on issue 9 now. I'm trying to do tons of interviews in the vain hope that maybe we can present some sort of cross-section of the region, or at least among the artier people who want to do interviews. There's some of our more standard stuff too, including a dual review of Lon Savage's "Thunder in the Mountains: The West Virginia Coal Mining War 1920-21" and Eve Weinbaum's "To Move a Mountain" Fighting the Global Economy in Appalachia." Together they kind of present a take on how the economy here has changed the last 80 years, and how regional labor relations have changed along with it.
This spring we're going to try and revamp our website a bit. I'd like to open the weblog to several of our regular print contributors and try to do something that's a little more regular and diverse, sort of a boingboing.net for southern Appalachia. And after the summer I think we're going to take a temporary hiatus from the print issues. My wallet's taken a bit of a beating from the first eight: I'm able to get by, but even with advertising, I'm living check to check and need to save a bit. I'd like to use that time to do a few TNTDH-related projects that are a bit more focused.
Other than issue 9 and the website revamp, this is all a bit speculative though.
Finally, I'd like to encourage your readers in western NC to reach out and communicate with some other folks in the region. It would be cool to see Sylvawhee bands hitting Roanoke and Blacksburg, and vice versa. If you want to try the message board route, check out the boards at Star City Punk (Roanoke), Worthless Booking (Harrisonburg), Quiet zine (Sylva/Cullowhee), This City Can Burn (Asheville) and Get Rocked Out (Blacksburg). Just my own suggestion: I'd go on and participate in some of the regular threads ("What are you listening to?" "Books I'm reading" and show discussions about bands you know) rather than plunging in and starting a bunch of threads about your band looking for shows. It's a little more time-intensive, but it's better to do that and get the feel of the board and its members. Maybe once you've figured out some like-minded folks there, send them a PM letting them know your deal. That's a little more diplomatic, and it'll save you a bunch of flaming or being ignored.