Giardina spent her first 13 years in Black Wolf, a 10-house coal camp in southern West Virginia, a place of winding roads and steep hills, where ruling coal companies rend the land. It wouldn't have mattered if there'd been a novel about Bonhoeffer on the bestseller list. Sure, she acknowledges, there are biographies of Bonhoeffer, but they're "mostly out of print or kinda dry." In conversation, a guarded intensity emerges from her West Virginia twang, which compounds her unpretentious demeanor: "I write what I have to write. Books for her research occupy her living-room horizon, along with a cat, a TV and a NordicTrack. Giardina has ruminated on Bonhoeffer for some 20 years, ever since an Episcopal priest first gave her a book of his writings. She lives with two cats and a dog in a modest house in a quiet neighborhood a few blocks from downtown Charleston and the coal barges flowing down the Kanawha River. "I'm interested in how people with a conscience deal with the compromises they have to make," declares Giardina, a blunt-featured, brown-haired woman, youthful at 46 in jeans and a sweater. If Germany seems far from Appalachia, the questions of responsibility and belief entwined in the episodic narrative remain close to the author, a licensed lay Episcopal preacher.
PW's starred review observed that Giardina manages to give "a known story genuine tension and spiritual resonance." Now settled in Charleston, West Virginia's capital city, Giardina has grappled with even bigger questions in Saints and Villains (Norton), an epic drama chronicling the life of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, noted for his role in a failed plot to kill Hitler. From West Virginia and outside the region, Giardina has written Good King Harry, a historical novel about Henry V, and two acclaimed novels, Storming Heaven and The Unquiet Earth, grounded in West Virginia's storied mine wars. "Real writers live in New York apartments or sit at sidewalk cafés in Paris," Jackie declares.Well, no. In Denise Giardina's 1992 novel, The Unquiet Earth, an Appalachian fifth-grader named Jackie, whose life roughly parallels the author's own, decides she can't become a writer.
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