Gene Dalton | The Roanoke Times

Meredith Dean, executive director of Appalachian Womens Alliance, in front of the quilt made over the years by the core leaders of the Appalachian Women’s Alliance. The quilt is hung as a backdrop at the Mountain Women Rising performances.

Want to go?

• Mountain Women Rising Performance
• When: 7 p.m. Wednesday
• Where: Bonnie Hurlburt Student Center Auditorium, Radford University

Edna Gulley was raised in a coal mining town on Virginia's western tip, just east of the Kentucky border. The population is just about 400 people. The median household income, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, was $18,393 in 2000.

Clinchco was a boom town in the early 1900s, reports Dickenson County's Web site, thanks to the success of the Clinchfield Coal Corp. But when Clinchfield closed its mines in Clinchco in the early 1950s, the town's population began to erode as people headed north to settle.

Today, the 2000 census reports that Clinchco is 91 percent white and is dominated by women -- for every 100 women, there are 86 men. Gulley still makes her home there and has seen the Appalachian community change in many ways.

This is her story.

"We played out in the streets," she recalled of her childhood. "Growing up in Clinchco, we are all low-income, but we didn't know we were low income because everybody worked and played together. We knew there was racism, but we knew where to go and where not to go."

Gulley will share her story at Radford University on Wednesday as part of Mountain Women Rising, a performance group stemming from the Appalachian Women's Alliance.

The alliance formed in 1993, according to Executive Director Meredith Dean. Dean comes from eight generations of Carroll County farmers and preachers on her father's side. She now lives in Floyd.

"I was involved in doing social change work through church institutions in Appalachia, and out of that I met all these women who were the movers and shakers in their community who were involved in community groups," Dean said. "Women in Appalachian communities are usually the ones making change, but they're not always the ones up front."

An immediate result of the group's formation was the Appalachian Women's Journal, an assortment of poetry and stories published twice a year for and by mountain women. In 1994, the Women's Caravan project hit the road.

"Instead of having a big meeting and trying to get women from all over the region to come to it, we went to different communities because so many of our women are isolated," Dean said.

In each workshop, women were asked to share and record their stories. Alliance members would then share the stories at the next stop. This is how Mountain Women Rising, a network of performing artists, sprouted.

"Mountain Women Rising grew from a small group of women going around in the caravan to a presentation, to an actual performance," Dean said.

The performance includes poems, prose, stories and songs that recreate the experiences of Appalachian women. Many of these experiences include poverty, racism, homophobia and violence.

Dean estimates that the group performs in five to 10 small communities by caravan each year, but larger performances began last year. In March, the alliance traveled to the United Nations in New York City to perform in honor of International Women's Day and, since then, at numerous colleges and universities. This March the group is scheduled to perform at the Appalachian Studies Association Conference in Tennessee. In June, it is scheduled to perform at the United States Social Forum in Atlanta.

Dean estimates that 500 to 600 people are on the alliance's mailing list and that 200 are active in the group.

In 2004, the alliance established a center in Clinchco that is devoted to bringing women together in a safe place and encouraging education and voter turnout.

"The community is the alliance, and the alliance is the community," said Gulley, who serves on staff there.

Meanwhile, more than 18 women have performed as part of Mountain Women Rising, but only four will perform Wednesday: Dean, Gulley, Gaye Johnson and Rema Keen.

Johnson is a singer and musician from North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains, and Keen is a playwright, storyteller, actor, poet, activist and musician from Southwest Virginia.

Despite the performance's many forms of expression, Dean said it all comes down to one simple objective.

"These are real women in real situations in real communities who've written their stories," she said.

On the Web: appalachianwomen.org