Marnie Rustemeyer helps breast cancer survivors regain self-confidence through medical tattooing. A mastectomy is more than a medical procedure. It’s a watershed moment in a woman’s life. Marnie Rustemeyer, a Charleston native who was diagnosed with a breast cancer gene mutation and had a bilateral mastectomy in 2013, knows that as well as anyone. “I understand how it feels to…
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More than an autobiography, Billy Edd Wheeler’s new book is a love letter to West Virginia. In 1964, a boy from Boone county hit No. 3 on the U.S. country charts with a song titled “Ode to the Little Brown Shack Out Back.” They passed an ordinance in the town, they said we’d have to tear it down, That little…
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Ackenpucky is shaping experiences through interior design. What do Black Sheep Burrito and Brews, The Peddler, Bahnhof WVrsthaus & Biergarten, and Christ Temple Church have in common? Ackenpucky. No, that’s not a new curse word. Owner Jill LaFear named her creative design shop Ackenpucky because the word is an Appalachian colloquialism for a stew made of unspecified ingredients. “Within stew,…
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Your hypothetical guide to post-nuclear war West Virginia in Fallout 76. On may 30, Bethesda game studios dropped the big one: The latest installment of its popular post-apocalyptic Fallout series will be set in West Virginia. We still don’t know exactly how the game will work—Fallout 76 won’t be released until November and Bethesda is tight-lipped with details—but here are…
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Remembering those buried at Charleston’s Spring Hill Cemetery Park fills us in on the day-by-day building of our state. Miles Vernon Dixson worked as a teller at Kanawha Valley Bank in Charleston in the 1930s. What he really wanted to do, though, was fly. As a young man he took lessons at a seaplane school on the Kanawha River. But…
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