Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 20, 1990 TAG: 9007200304
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: By PAUL DELLINGER SOUTHWEST BUREAU
DATELINE: ABINGDON LENGTH: Medium
It could help locate participants for regional arts and crafts activities like the Virginia Highlands Festival, Wytheville Chautauqua Festival and Hungry Mother Arts and Crafts Festival and others, as well as events requiring historians, folk-life experts or other types of scholars.
The Southwest Regional Humanities Council voted Thursday to pursue the project, and will consider at its next meeting Sept. 5 whether to seek a grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy to fund it. The council is one of several regional advisory groups to the foundation across the state.
Buck Henson, who represents Wise County on the 2-year-old Southwest Council, said a catalog of human resources in the region would be one of the most valuable cultural contributions the council could make. "I think the knowledge of who can do what is going to die out unless somebody does that," he said in making the proposal.
Henson and Stuart McGehee of Bluefield College will study the idea between now and the next council meeting, including the type of questionnaire that might be mailed out to obtain the data. Council members representing Virginia's 15 westernmost counties also will start compiling lists of people with various talents in their own localities.
The directory could be used not only for those organizing arts, crafts, folk-life, writing or drama events, such as a traveling Chautauqua-style show being discussed by the regional council, but also by schools, colleges, libraries and other groups.
Joan Armstrong, Smyth County's council representative, has been named to the Virginia Foundation's board of directors. The council has invited Cathy Reynolds, Smyth-Bland Regional Library director, to be the new Smyth representative.
Ed Bearinger, representing the foundation, announced five grants approved for projects in Southwest Virginia:
$3,500 to the Appalachian Center for Poets and Writers in Abingdon for a series of public readings, lectures and discussion programs featuring well-known writers.
$8,450 to the Arts and Cultural Council of the Twin Counties, covering Galax and the counties of Carroll and Grayson, for a video production documenting traditional music of the Galax area.
$1,500 to Wytheville Community College for a one-day conference on the historical importance and present-day relevance of Alexis de Tocqueville's 19th-century look at "Democracy in America."
$1,800 to the Virginia Humanities Conference at New River Community College focusing on the origins of Transcendentalism and its continuing importance in American life.
$9,500 to Virginia Tech for a series of performances and community discussions of an original play by Jo Carson, based on actual inquiries by John Dos Passos and Theodore Dreiser into Harlan County, Ky., coal strikes of 1931.
The two writers visited Appalachia at that time to hold their own hearings on the strikes. The play will be performed in Floyd, Radford and Pearisburg and involve local people in the performances and script revisions.
by CNB