Read Your Way Through Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver: NYT

Last edited Wed Aug 9, 2023, 10:13 AM - Edit history (2)

'Read Your Way Through Appalachia,' Barbara Kingsolver, New York Times, Aug. 9, 2023. -Ed. 📚 Barbara Kingsolver, whose Pulitzer-winning “Demon Copperhead” offered a variegated portrait of the region, guides readers through a literary landscape “as bracing and complex as a tumbling mountain creek.”

The Appalachian Range runs from Alabama to Newfoundland, extending far north and south of culturally defined Appalachia.

Appalachia is a region and a mind-set. Our devotion to our place belies the fact that we’re hard to pin down on a map: a swath of highlands crossing parts of Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia & the coal country of Kentucky and West Virginia, plus a smidgen of Pennsylvania and points north. State lines make little sense here; we have more in common with other mountain communities than with the far ends of our states and their capitals. Appalachia has few large cities, our economies are land-based and, unless you live here, we’re probably not what you think.

For starters, outsiders call it “Appal-AY-sha,” a mispronunciation that hurts our ears. It’s “Appal-achia.” As in, “If you keep that up, I’ll throw this apple atcha.” But in fact, we won’t. 🍏

We tend toward heart-blessing kindness in the way of small-town folks who rely on each other in good times and bad, and live together regardless. We love our families to death, and laugh at ourselves. As one of the nation’s last strongholds of small family farms, we’re likely to measure time by the planting seasons. We make things: gardens, quilts, music and, above all, stories, in a vernacular all our own with its lexical ties to working class Anglo-Irish and the King James Bible. It adds up to a literature as bracing and complex as a tumbling mountain creek.

What should I read before I pack my bags? Weighing in at nearly 3 pounds, “Writing Appalachia: An Anthology,” edited by Katherine Ledford & Theresa Lloyd, is too big to pack but too wonderful to miss. It serves up the region’s iconic talents — James Still, Jesse Stuart & Harriette Simpson Arnow, to name a few — in appetizer sized portions to tempt a reader to go find their longer works. (And you should, especially Arnow’s “The Dollmaker.”) But the comprehensive sweep of this collection begins with Native American oral traditions, enslaved people’s narratives, & work songs, then moves through 20th c. classics into a modern chorus of queer and straight, white, Black and Indigenous voices.

For any reader who needs it, this book will put away the stereotype of Appalachians as a dull monoculture.

Another good starting point is Steven Stoll’s “Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia,” a readable social history that offers a rare understanding of land-based economies, & how cultural rootedness has been penalized by global development. Stoll explains Appalachia’s poverty & “otherness” not as the failing of mountain people, but as a fate perpetrated on them by centuries of extractive industries & urban presumptions of success. A reader may be impressed by how cannily Appalachians have survived anyway.. Frank X Walker’s “Affrilachia,” published in 2000, first gave a name to the Black Appalachian experience, a poetic tradition further enriched by Nikki Giovanni, bell hooks & Crystal Wilkinson, among many others...

- Read More, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/books/barbara-kingsolver-appalachia-books.html?unlocked_article_code=PHVL4VAqtcScDYgdq6ag0NE9-lwsIjfi_HKQltoboNY414a4rUDJ1ldt_euai0fMPXa_64LT3sI8ZVG6BkpbSIT10FbUaoDRkvpbMH_KQGOY0IL2NIDPbjA-lu08z7RtwLOBc_u10epWu7Lc6ueYPqeA9bAev5VqnBhgpzkNVGB-LYWzTOHV3Xxr2qu-O9xyi5RkdOase-JwzkZJlPBQ1UYuTeHkLFw3eCSOXIDndEg75lEXHw4qsrtyW_QNiikyBLV38f0JVEdbLNPpp-u6WFo_b0x-jHMV97zb-9S7Pq6LYVpX-Ag46s6PL21qu7_CfD5wXS73qL_cAEAVxy-Kd_kttLIcYrScMFAt&smid=url-share
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- 🎥 APPALSHOP started as a film workshop in 1969, & 50 years later we're still documenting and revitalizing the traditions and creativity of Appalachia.We tell stories that commercial industries don’t tell. We challenge stereotypes with Appalachian voices. And we do it all with artists who are from and committed to this region. 🪕https://appalshop.org/

- 📖 How Black Poets and Writers Gave Voice To Affrilachia, The Conversation, 2021, Nikki Giovanni, More,
https://theconversation.com/how-black-poets-and-writers-gave-a-voice-to-affrilachia-155706

- 🖊 Expatalachians is an Appalachian journalism project written by those who left–and returned–home. Our writing covers politics, culture, and economics in the region to show its dynamism, problems, and changes. http://expatalachians.com/home

5:44 mins.-Dean Hill, Photographing Appalachia, 🍁 West Liberty, Kentucky. (KY Life, KET/KY Ed TV).
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- APPALACHIA is a socio-economic region located in the central & southern sections of the Appalachian Mountains of the Eastern US.. It stretches from the western Catskill Mountains in the east end of the Southern Tier of NY state west & south into PA, continuing on through the Blue Ridge Mountains into northern GA, & through the Great Smoky Mountains from NC into TN & northern AL In 2020, the region was home to an estimated 26.1 million people, of whom roughly 80% are white. Since its recognition as a cultural region in the late 19th c., Appalachia has been a source of enduring myths & distortions regarding the isolation, temperament, & behavior of its inhabitants.

Early 20th-c. writers often engaged in yellow journalism focused on sensationalistic aspects of the region's culture, such as moonshining & clan feuding, & often portrayed the region's inhabitants as uneducated & prone to impulsive acts of violence. Sociological studies in the 1960s and 1970s helped to re-examine & dispel these stereotypes. Stereotypes about Appalachian people being ignorant, anti-progress, and racist are still grappled in the region by portrayals in media and press publications.

🦉 While endowed with abundant natural resources, Appalachia has long struggled economically & been associated w/ poverty. In the early 20th c., large-scale logging & coal mining firms brought wage-paying jobs & modern amenities to the region, but by the 1960s Appalachia had failed to capitalize on long-term benefits from these 2 industries. In the 1930s, the federal government sought to alleviate poverty there with a series of New Deal initiatives, specifically the Tenn. Valley Authority. This was responsible for the construction of hydroelectric dams that provide a vast amount of electricity & that support programs for better farming practices, regional planning, & economic dvmt.
In 1965, the Appalachian Regional Commission was created to further alleviate poverty in the region, mainly by diversifying the region's economy & helping to provide better health care & educational opportunities to the region's inhabitants. By 1990, the region had largely joined the economic mainstream but still lagged behind the rest of the nation in most economic indicators...https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachia