As the sun rises over Ohio County, J. Arnold steps out her front door overlooking the southern portion of Warwood, a Wheeling neighborhood two miles north of the city’s urban core. It’s a quiet neighborhood, all things considered. Arnold can see the mighty Ohio River with the town of Martins Ferry, Ohio, to the west. Through her neighbor’s yards, she can see a shopping complex close enough to hear conversations held in the parking lot. South of the former Save-a-Lot, Arnold sees the historic Centre Foundry and its gray-blue walls. 

When Arnold first bought her home, Centre Foundry was still an operating steel mill – the same steel mill that lasted some 183 years since its founding before West Virginia was even a state. In 2023, the foundry quieted as its furnaces ran cold, parking lots emptied, jobs evaporated, and its doors closed for one final time. Now, a new business is preparing to move in; and it’s a neighbor Arnold, and other Warwood residents, are concerned about. 

June 14th was a productive day for me. I had just replaced the banister railings on both sides of my steps that led up to my back porch, cleaned off the porch, and set up the new storage bench I had put together the day before. I had also laid a new patio the previous weekend. The place was really coming together. I had been steadily working on my trailer almost every weekend since 2023. My plan was to sell it and use that money for a down payment on purchasing a house. 

As an Uplift WV member and artist,  Idle is one of the lead curators of Inside→OUT: incARceraTion, a traveling exhibit that fosters community conversations and education on mass incarceration and the need for community-driven, supportive reentry in West Virginia and across the nation. This might seem unexpected, as Idle is incarcerated at Mount Olive Correctional Facility, serving a life-without-mercy sentence. He views his work as an opportunity for restitution — to repair the harm he has caused and to help create the world he needed as a child.

As dawn broke over the city of Wheeling on Thursday, January 18, on the heels of a statewide emergency declaration related to a massive winter storm, city officials mobilized dump trucks and bulldozers to a hillside in the neighborhood of East Wheeling.