This edited collection addresses a major gap in current work focused on Appalachia’s glass industry. We have catalogs and reference books. We have histories focused on class, labor, and gender. We have histories focused on the rise and demise of glass factories. But the human work of meaning, identity, and memory in the context of Appalachian glass has yet to be gathered and shared in book form.

We seek creative nonfiction, memoir, personal essays, hybrid scholarship, oral history, literary journalism, reflective criticism, and interviews centered on Appalachian glass and the cultures surrounding it. The collection will explore the collectors, families, artists, dealers, thrifters, archivists, and communities who find and create meaning in glass. Submissions from staff and factory workers associated with Appalachian glassmakers, including both well-known and lesser-known companies, are also welcome.

Contributors may approach glass as material culture, inheritance, regional identity, memory, domestic ritual, aesthetic obsession, economic decline, craft tradition, or personal archive. Work from collectors, museum professionals, artists, former workers, descendants of workers, creative writers, scholars, and community historians is welcome.

The project is open to work involving Appalachian glass broadly defined, including but not limited to the following makers and companies:

• Corning Glass
• Blenko Glass Company
• Fenton Art Glass Company
• Pilgrim Glass Corporation
• Viking Glass Company
• Rainbow Art Glass Company
• Seneca Glass Company
• Morgantown Glassware Guild
• Kanawha Glass Company
• Paden City Glass Manufacturing Company
• L. E. Smith Glass Company
• Imperial Glass Company
• Cambridge Glass Company
• Westmoreland Glass Company
• Jeannette Glass Company
• Duncan & Miller Glass Company
• Northwood Glass Company
• New Martinsville Glass Company
• Fostoria Glass Company
• Steuben Glass
• Appalachian Glass
• LG Wright

Possible approaches should remain grounded in Appalachian glass, whether through objects, makers, collectors, families, factories, towns, archives, displays, rituals, or communities.

• Memoirs of collecting Blenko, Fenton, Pilgrim, Viking, or other glass
• Family inheritance stories involving glass objects
• The role of glass in memory, mourning, or family ritual
• Narratives about growing up in glass towns
• The emotional psychology of collecting
• Glass as creative, communal empowerment
• Glass and religion
• Glass cabinets and curio culture
• Creative nonfiction about specific objects or single pieces of glass
• Online collector groups and digital nostalgia
• Road-trip narratives centered on Appalachian glass sites
• Appalachian labor and community identity
• Essays about thrift stores, antique malls, flea markets, estate sales, or glass shows
• Oral histories of glassworkers, decorators, painters, mold makers, or salespeople
• Reflections on factory closures and deindustrialization
• Museum or archival encounters with glass collections
• Immigration and ethnic communities in glass production towns
• Queer, feminist, or disability-centered readings of decorative glass culture
• Mid-century modernism and American consumer identity
• Dealer culture and collector communities
• Ecocritical (environmentalist) approaches to the glass industry
• Documentary literary journalism about surviving glass communities
• Reflections on preserving endangered industrial arts

Work informed by cultural studies is welcome, though the content and style should be shaped for an educated but non-academic audience. The goal is not to produce a narrowly academic book. The goal is to gather serious, moving, intelligent, accessible writing about the ways Appalachian glass has lived in people’s hands, homes, memories, and communities.

Texts should be 3,000 words or fewer in length. If you need more space, please indicate this in your email.