Her book Storming Heaven was a Discovery Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and received the 1987 W. D. Weatherford Award for the best published work about the Appalachian South.
[3] As a member of a coal-mining family, and growing up with a 1960s social consciousness, Giardina often found herself in political conflict with the people and culture around her.
Her pastor, Jim Lewis, provided reading suggestions that helped steer Giardina from law school to seminary:[5] "I thought I was called to be ordained.
Though she sought a more liberal religious setting later, her early church experience inculcated Giardina with basic values of charity and fairness that reinforced her mother's lessons on justice and tolerance.
Long live the people of West Virginia.According to Still journal, her "anti-mountaintop removal platform she became a folk hero and is often looked to as one of the primary commentators on the state of contemporary Appalachia".
[11] Giardina became interested in the Appallachian tradition of storytelling at an early age, and this oral literary heritage of the mountains informed much of her later work.
Unable to sell it, she took a class with visiting novelist George Garrett, who helped with revisions and also recommended Giardina to agent Jane Gelfman, who sold the novel to Aaron Asher at Harper & Row.
The climax of the novel is based upon the historical 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, when in 1921 U.S. Army troops marched on a small group of resisting miners working to create a fledgling union.
The mining camp Giardina spent her childhood in was less than 100 miles from Blair Mountain and served as the model for the town of Winco in the novel.
This includes such important issues as Coalworker's pneumoconiosis and culminates in a catastrophic flood at the novel's end, the author's fictionalization of the 1972 Buffalo Creek Disaster.
Both coal-country novels were inspired in part by Wuthering Heights, with its rugged landscape and tales of women "who have this passion for a difficult man."
Bonhoeffer, her next main character in Saints and Villains, also fits that pattern: "I guess in none of my books are the personal relationships real easy.
"[2] Giardina also drew on local histories, childhood memories and even people she met in eastern Kentucky, where she lived in a "hovel" while writing The Unquiet Earth and also volunteering for a citizens' group fighting strip mining.
She moved to Durham, North Carolina, while still working on the novel, got a bookstore job, and studied with novelist Laurel Goldman at Duke University.
The book is a fictionalized retelling of the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor who opposed fascism, became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler and was hanged by the Nazis for his theological principles.
Grappling with the moral and theological struggles in the book also brought Giardina back to her church, in a journey to "live in God" that culminated with her being re-ordained in 2007.
She also decided to shift from past to present tense for the book's final scenes, adding suspense to the question of whether the imprisoned Bonhoeffer would be freed by the advancing Allies.
[11] In the book, Jolliff dedicates a chapter to each of the writer and activist's novels, examining them from three perspectives: Regional, political, and theological.
[11] He concludes that though her writing is largely informed by her own religious beliefs, Giardina never provides theological answers to the issues raised in her very political fiction; rather, she pushes both characters and readers to confront and wrangle with ever more complex and challenging moral and philosophical questions.