A Novelist Runs for Governor.

Truth may not be stranger than fiction, says Denise Giardina, but politics definitely is. She should know. She has traded in the literary life to wage a spirited third party campaign for governor of West Virginia. The author of four acclaimed novels--including The Unquiet Earth (Norton, 1992), which won an American Book Award--Giardina is running a bold, uphill campaign on the ballot line of the newly created Mountain Party against Republican Governor Cecil Underwood and his Democratic challenger, U.S. Representative Bob Wise.

The stranger-than-fiction theme is well illustrated on a typical campaign day, as Giardina finds herself talking by phone with a Virginia Public Radio reporter. She asks what the other candidates are saying--and then catches herself.

"Oh, right," Giardina responds, raising her hands in a "what's-up-with-that?" gesture of exasperation. "I forgot. The candidates don't speak. Their spokesmen speak. Politicians spend their whole lives positioning themselves to run for powerful positions, then they hire people to speak for them. I mean, what sense does that make?"

Giardina speaks for herself. Bluntly. A forty-eight-year-old ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church with a history of anti-poverty activism, she preaches a social gospel. She favors tax hikes for the out-of-state corporations that own much of West Virginia, a crackdown on the mining and timber industries to protect the environment, a halt to the spread of legal gambling that preys on the poor, increased support for education, state-based universal health care initiatives, sensible gun control, campaign finance reform, and a living wage. In addition to raising otherwise unaddressed issues, Giardina's candidacy has provided a measure of hope for groups such as the West Virginia Gay and Lesbian Coalition by speaking out in support of hate-crimes protections and anti-discrimination legislation.

"If I weren't running, I'm sure that most of these issues would not be addressed," says Giardina, sitting amid the stacks of newspapers, magazines, and books that fill the living room of her modest, two-story home in an integrated Charleston neighborhood. "I try not to let the other candidates get away with things. I'm trying to force them, especially Wise, to take some good stands. That's really what third party candidates have always done--on everything from slavery to social policy right up to Ralph Nader this year talking about corporate power."

Like Medea Benjamin, the human rights activist who waded into this year's California Senate race as a Green candidate, Giardina embodies a new, freelance approach to politics. A number of progressives who are not professional politicians are entering the fray as third party contenders. They refuse to be constrained by the narrow boundaries that are imposed by political action committees, corporate lobbyists, and campaign consultants.

Dan Radmacher, editorial page editor of the Charleston Gazette, the state's most widely circulated daily newspaper, says that Giardina's very presence on the ballot has changed the nature of the race. "She's served to give voice to the state's progressives on issues, especially the environment, but also on such things as gay rights," says Radmacher, who in a recent column praised her "refreshingly candid" campaign.

In West Virginia, candor works. Giardina's underdog campaign has raised only about $20,000 so far, not nearly enough to air television commercials. Yet the candidate is a freemedia star. After an August debate appearance with Wise and Underwood in which she got high marks for humor and frankness, even conservative radio hosts were booking the quick-witted contender. She uses appearances to talk about her deviations from standard political practice. For instance, she is tithing 10 percent of campaign contributions to Habitat for Humanity to "ensure that the massive amounts of money spent on political campaigns [are] not a total waste."

Groups like Habitat can use the money, as they've got plenty of work to do in the Mountain State. The median household income there is $10,000 below the national level, and the unemployment rate still outpaces the national average by several percentage points. Even where there is work, it rarely provides the security and income that West Virginia families knew fifty years ago, when one out of five workers in the state was a coal miner carrying the card of the mighty United Mine Workers. Today, less than one in twenty West Virginia workers is a miner, and the union's power has declined to such an extent that its endorsement--while still coveted--is no longer a guarantee of election. (In 1996, the union gave strong backing to Charlotte Pritt, who lost when much of the traditional Democratic power structure abandoned her candidacy to back Republican Underwood. This year, the union has endorsed Wise, but a number of Pritt backers have jumped ship to support Giardina.)

Even now, as Underwood talks of building a "technology superhighway system" in the state, West Virginia officials still look to King Coal for economic salvation, backing a particularly destructive form of mining known as "mountaintop removal." Coal companies literally rip the tops of mountains off and scoop the coal out of the open wounds, dumping their waste in the valleys below. Environmentalists have fought the practice in Congress and the courts, with mixed success, but it remains such a linchpin of state economic development strategy that Wise--with strong backing from the United Mine Workers and other unions--has worked in Congress to limit the ability of federal judges to restrict the practice.

Thousands of West Virginians oppose mountaintop removal, however, and Giardina has become their tribune. After she spoke last year at a rally opposing the practice, activists with the state's frequently battered environmental movement joined dissident Democrats to ask her to mount a gubernatorial campaign. It was a tall order; merely to get on the November ballot, West Virginia requires third party candidates to collect 13,000 signatures from voters who are then barred from participating in major party primaries.

Giardina may have leapt off the page and onto the campaign trail, but she is still more a writer than a politician.

"The thing about being a fiction writer is that you learn not to censor yourself," explains Giardina. "I have to be outspoken as a candidate because, if I were to start censoring myself in the campaign, I might censor myself as a writer. That's not a habit I want to get into."

Like other writers turned political contenders--Upton Sinclair, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal--Giardina did not merely stumble onto the campaign trail. `I've always been fascinated by politics," she says. In McDowell County, where she grew up, she worked with the United Mine Workers, the NAACP, and other groups on a campaign to tax absentee landowners--coal, power, and railroad companies that owned most of the region's soil.

Later, while living in Kentucky, she served as secretary-treasurer of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, an activist group that seeks to limit strip mining and other corporate excesses. Still later, when miners in southwest Virginia struck the Pittston Coal Company, Giardina was arrested when she crossed police lines to tell the story of a bitter, violent labor struggle that played out amid a virtual media blackout. She opens The Unquiet Earth by thanking the Pittston strikers, "whose rich lives inspired this book."

"The writing fed the activism, and the activism fed the writing," says Giardina. A former bookstore clerk who read great novels to learn the writer's craft, she's been hailed by the Los Angeles Times as an author of "brilliant, diamond-hard fiction." Her 1987 novel of union battles in the West Virginia coal fields, Storming Heaven, has been optioned by TNT for a television miniseries to be directed by John Frankenheimer.

In West Virginia, her literary star shines. At a recent parade, a woman grabbed Giardina's arm, looked the author in the eye, and said, "Somebody who could write a book like that, someone who feels for West Virginia the way you do, that's who I want for my governor."

As with Nader's Presidential campaign, West Virginia Democratic Party insiders warn that Giardina's candidacy could spoil Wise's chances. Indeed, the Congressman, for whom Giardina once worked as a campaign volunteer and Congressional aide, approached her at a parade and asked, "How are you going to live with yourself after you cost me the election?"

Giardina says she'll manage. "The thing I'm interested to see is how far you can get in politics with stark honesty and no money," she says. "I think if you can do it anywhere, it can be done in West Virginia. If any place appreciates stark honesty, it's West Virginia. Also, if any place appreciates having no money, it's West Virginia."

Despite efforts by the Wise camp to exclude her, Giardina secured places in several debates--significant achievements for a candidate who dreams that such appearances might still bring a Jesse Ventura-style breakthrough, or at least the sort of moral victory her novels relate.

Giardina admits that she wouldn't mind controlling the course of this campaign as she does a novel. "Every once in a while, I find myself wanting the plot turn to come," the novelist says. "I want to turn the page and have something exciting happen--like a third party candidate suddenly getting as much money and attention as the big guys and then, you know, winning."

John Nichols is editorial page editor for The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. He writes about electoral politics for The Progressive.