Member Spotlight: Waltr Lane

By Molly Moore

“I write to say things, not to be talked about,” the poet says.

Waltr Lane began writing when he was 11, but the habit truly took off after his first poems were published in 1985 by the Appalachian Journal.

A resident of Eastern Kentucky, Waltr has also been published in Appalachian Heritage and the Journal of Kentucky Studies, among others. His poems are frank, decrying abuses of land and water while also condemning society for preventing people from fishing with dynamite, as he says his grandfather used to do. His work also comments on the “hillbilly” stereotype, a label that he proudly reclaims as a self-described Hillbilly Poet. While much of Waltr’s writing carries an environmental theme, he shies away from the term “environmentalist.”

“I’m just a person who has an interest in a lifestyle capable of supporting my family and supporting the life of the people around me without having to suffer from cancer, without having to breathe the dust of the road, without having to get in trouble for expressing opinions,” Waltr says. “I don’t consider myself an environmentalist, I consider myself a ‘greenneck.’”

“I can be writing about a kids’ story and the environmental issue will crop up in it because I worry about my grandbabies and what kind of life they’re going to have,” he adds.

He describes the Tug River in West Virginia running black from coal pollution when he was a child, and struggling to breathe while driving past a coal-fired power plant in the 1950s when the emissions exacerbated a headcold. Waltr comments that the establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has made a big difference, but he doesn’t think environmental protections are being adequately enforced. “I feel like the regulations are a hoax,” he says.

Waltr’s experience is personal; his former house was threatened by an old, unstable mine slope. Now, he says, kids aren’t allowed to play on the hill because of the sinkholes. One day, he and his wife came home to find that the ceiling had fallen in on their bed, a fact that he attributes to underground mining nearby.

According to Waltr, many people share his concerns, even if they don’t feel comfortable speaking out.

He distributes several dozen copies of each issue of The Appalachian Voice, and says he is “having a happy second childhood and am a paper boy.” In addition to bringing copies to locations like libraries and a medical clinic, he also hands them out to individuals as an entry point for conversations about environmental issues.

“The important thing is, if we don’t stand for something, we fall for everything,” Waltr says. “And if we make a dent in life for a better purpose then we’ve accomplished more than some people do. The purpose is to leave things better after we’re gone.”

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