Breece D'J Pancake
Breece (Dexter John) Pancake was born in South Charleston, West Virginia, the youngest child of Clarence "Wicker" Pancake and Helen Frazier Pancake, and was raised in Milton, West Virginia. Pancake briefly attended West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon before transferring to Marshall University in Huntington where he completed a bachelor's degree in English education in 1974. After graduating from Marshall he spent time out West, visiting his sister in Santa Fe. As a graduate student he studied at the University of Virginia's creative writing program under John Casey and James Alan McPherson. Pancake also worked as an English teacher at two Virginia military academies, Fork Union and Staunton.
While at the University of Virginia, Pancake deliberately styled himself as an uncultured hillbilly, distancing himself from the mostly erudite students at the prestigious school. He was an avid outdoorsman who enjoyed hunting, fishing and camping. Pancake was a devout fan of the music of folk singer Phil Ochs, who had attended Staunton Military Academy, where Pancake later taught. His favorite song was Ochs' "Jim Dean of Indiana". Ochs committed suicide exactly three years and a day before Pancake.
The unusual middle name "D'J" originated from a misprint of Pancake's middle initials by The Atlantic Monthly (D.J., for Dexter John) when Pancake's first published story, "Trilobites" was published in 1977. Pancake decided not to correct it. Dexter is Pancake's middle name, while John is the name Pancake adopted after converting to Catholicism in his mid-20s.
Pancake died from a self-inflicted shotgun wound in Charlottesville, Virginia. His death was officially labeled a suicide, although there has, over the years, been some debate from people who believe the gunshot may have been an accident. Pancake was buried in Milton.
Pancake published six short stories in his lifetime, mostly in The Atlantic. These and six stories left unpublished at his death were later collected in The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake, a 178 page volume published by Little, Brown and Company in 1983. This includes the short story "Time and Again". It was reprinted in 2002 with a new afterword by Andre Dubus III. Pancake was posthumously nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake.
His vivid, compact style has been compared to that of Ernest Hemingway. Most of his stories are set in rural West Virginia and revolve around characters and naturalistic settings, often adapted from his own past. His stories received critical acclaim from readers and critics. The Atlantic's editor recalled receiving letters that "drifted in for months - asking for more stories - inquiring for collected stories, or simply expressing admiration and gratitude ... in 30-something years at The Atlantic, I cannot recall a response to a new author like the response to this one."
Among the writers who claim Pancake as a strong influence are Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog. After Pancake's death, author Kurt Vonnegut wrote in a letter to John Casey, "I give you my word of honor that he is merely the best writer, the most sincere writer I've ever read. What I suspect is that it hurt too much, was no fun at all to be that good. You and I will never know."
“I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.”
“Last night I dreamed of the "happy hunting ground." I passed through a place of bones that looked human, but weren't--the skulls were wrong. Then I came to a place where the days were the best of every season, the sweetest air and water in spring, then the dry heat where deer make dust in the road, the fog of fall with good leaves. And you could shoot without a gun, never kill, but the rabbits would do a little dance, all as if it were a game, and they were playing it too. Then winter came with heavy powder-snow, and big deer, horses, goats and buffaloes--all white--snorted, tossed their heads, and I lay down with my Army blanket, made my bed in the snow, then dreamed within the dream. I dreamed I was at Fleety's, and she told me the bones were poor people killed by bandits, and she took me back to the place, and under a huge rock where no light should have shown, a cave almost, was a dogwood tree. It glowed the kind of red those trees get at sundown, the buds were purple in that weird light, and a madman came out with an axe and chopped at the skulls, trying to make them human-looking. Then I went back to the other side of both dreams. --from a letter to his mother, Helen Pancake, where he describes a dream that seems to encapsulate the play between violence and gentleness in his life.”
“Daylight fires the ridges green, shifts the colors of the fog, touches the brick streets of Rock Camp with a reddish tone. The streetlights flicker out, and the traffic signal at the far end of Front Street's yoke snaps on; stopping nothing, warning nothing, rushing nothing on. --from The Honored Dead”
“I lean back, try to forget these fields and flanking hills. A long time before me or these tools, the Teays flowed here. I can almost feel the cold waters and the tickling the trilobites make when they crawl. All the water from the old mountains flowed west. But the land lifted. I have only the bottoms and stone animals I collect. I blink and breathe. My father is a khaki cloud in the canebrakes, and Ginny is no more to me than the bitter smell in the blackberry briers up on the ridge. --from Trilobites”
“I'm going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There's something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I'll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don't want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave." - from a letter to his mother Helen Pancake that Breece wrote in Charlottesville, where he was studying writing.”
“Well, when everybody's going this way, it's time to turn around and go that way, you know? ... I don't care if they end up shitting gold nuggets, somebody's got to dig in the damn ground. Somebody's got to.”