INTRODUCTION

On Appalachian Roots

By Jeremy Paden, Guest Poetry Editor     VOLUME 58 No. 1

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Who gets to speak for a region? What voices, stories, and accents get to represent a place? And when the place is as vast as Appalachia, one that spans thirteen states and is divided into five subregions? Culture is the result of humans interacting with each other and with a landscape over time: people, place, and past develop foodways, speechways, building ways, family ways, and all the other ways that make a culture. While a region might share many of the same folkways, no region is a monolith.

Once J.D. Vance was picked as the vice presidential running mate for the Republican ticket in the summer of 2024, his 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy, returned to bestseller lists and the national conversation. As a result, I was asked to curate a selection of poems on Appalachia by Appalachians. After all, whatever people think of his memoir, it is not about Appalachia.

I immediately thought of four categories of poets to consider: lifelong residents; immigrants to Appalachia; emigrants from Appalachia; and the Affrilachian Poets. Limitations of space meant that sampling every region would be impossible. Still, I wanted a broad selection of poets connected to Central Appalachia. When I invited them, I suggested that they not respond directly to the memoir, but instead give us something that would provide a truer picture of life in these mountains.

There is a tension in literature, most often imposed by the industry—by scholars and publishers—between cosmopolitanism and regionalism. But the dichotomy is false. Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Nikky Finney, and countless other poets of national and international repute are bound to the regions where they were born and raised or where they have lived. Take the current poet laureate of the United States, Ada Limón. While undeniably a poet of Northern California, both New York City and Kentucky appear throughout her poetry. Appalachia, as the poems will remind us, is not disconnected from the rest of the world.

I am not strictly Appalachian. My paternal ancestors, like many of the settler-colonists that moved into the American West, moved through Appalachia. One branch of the Padens, the Ulster-Scots, ended up founding the settlement that became Paden City, West Virginia. My line of Padens, second cousins to the Ulster-Scots, moved into southwest Virginia. Both sets of Padens fought in the Revolutionary War against the crown. Thus, I have distant relatives throughout these mountains, but my side of the family has not lived here since the mid-nineteenth century. Not only this, but I also grew up outside the US. However, when I have lived in the States, it has been in and around the borders of Appalachia—the northern Georgia mountains and the Bluegrass region of Kentucky. I also married a girl from Weaverville, North Carolina. On my mom’s side, I am Texan of English stock and Puerto Rican.

I note my relationship with Appalachia because Vance is another Appalachian adjacent person. Both he and his mother were born and raised in a southern Ohio steel town to Appalachian emigrants. When Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis came out, it sparked debates about who gets to use the term hillbilly and speak for Appalachia and about how this multifaceted region should be represented. Countless blog posts, op-eds, and book reviews took up the matter. Two excellent responses are: Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy from West Virginia University Press and edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll and What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia from Belt Publishing and written by Elizabeth Catte.

Now that Vance will serve as the vice president, I want to flag something in Hillbilly Elegy that we have all seen him do multiple times over the course of the campaign. He uses incendiary terms because of what they let him claim about himself or others. His use is not born out of reflection, but out of knee-jerk reactions. He deploys hillbilly because of the political and identitarian meanings it carries, but he does not situate the word within its sociohistorical context. The term characterizes moments when family members do not behave according to middle-class morality; misbehavior that, in turn, he uses to validate his claim of being Appalachian. To be fair, grandchildren of immigrants (and his is a story of immigration) often have strong attachments to their grandparental homeland. Still, his love for the holler from which his grandparents hail is his only claim to insider status. His is a tricky balancing act of identity politics and privilege to speak. What authority one possesses to speak on these matters, when not resting on careful study, relies on the intersection of identity and lived experience. His lived experience in Appalachia is slight. Thus, the need to double down on identitarian claims to bolster his authority. His story is the kind where even the most local of narrators would have their authority and authenticity questioned by other locals, not because it airs dirty laundry, but because it fails to represent the region honestly. It is not a story about Appalachia—it does not even take place there—but about the appropriation of negative Appalachian stereotypes for political expediency.

The subtitle A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis sets the book up as a classic autoethnography, a study of self that moves beyond self to comment on society at large. The book, though, does not bear out that expectation of analysis. Given the politics of assigning titles to books, one could possibly forgive this lack, except Vance is explicit in the preface that his memoir intends to be an analysis. Furthermore, at various moments he tries to ground his personal narrative in larger cultural questions. The problem lies not with the book’s Dickensian narrative of a young man looking for stability (this possibly drew in many readers) nor its repetitive and flat prose (something that should have pushed more away), but with the fact that Vance only feints toward cultural analysis. He never does his homework, and his language, while specific, is never precise. Appalachia and hillbillies are only empty symbols of an economic and social malaise that, for him, characterizes white working-class America.

When writing about the Scots-Irish ethnic subgroup to which he belongs, and which he takes synecdochically to be white America, he could have referenced Colin Woodard’s American Nations or David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, instead he only cites a blog post from Discover Magazine. His point is not to understand the Scots-Irish experience and its relationship to America, but to claim hastily that he and they are synonymous with the working class. Or, when discussing the Appalachian dialect in chapter two, he provides only a hot take on how Appalachians like to add twists and turns to words. I know of no Appalachian lawyer, much less schoolteacher or reader of any kind, who will not, when given the opportunity, expound on the deep history of Appalachian English, and how what Vance presents as curious flourishes have their roots in an English older than our broadcast news lingua franca. In each mentioned case—hillbilly, Scots-Irish, Appalachian English—there is a vast bibliography he could have referenced, but he did not. So, it is hard to take the book seriously as the work of a young writer trying to understand the world he lives in through a study of self, culture, and place. Instead, it seems to be simply a story of bootstrapism and anti-elite bitterness speaking.

The poets in this selection are all from Central Appalachia or nearby states. Some, like Silas House, Jane Hicks, Willie Carver, Marianne Worthington, and William Woolfitt have always lived in these mountains. Marianne managed Still: The Journal during its fifteen-year run. Others, like Bernard Clay and Marc Harshman moved to Appalachia as adults. Bernard, a native of the West End of Louisville, moved to the outskirts of Berea, Kentucky, and tends Scorpion Hollow Farm with his herbalist partner. Marc, an Indiana native, attended college in Bethany, West Virginia, and made his home in those mountains after graduate school at Yale and the University of Pittsburgh.

Pauletta Hansel moved away from southeast Kentucky to Cincinnati as a young woman and has lived there ever since. Among other things, she has worked for the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition and edited Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the journal of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative. Lisa J. Parker lived in New York City for a stint before returning to Virginia, while Randi Ward lived in Scandinavia for a decade, moving between Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands, before she returned to West Virginia. Bernard and Dorian Hairston are members of the Affrilachian Poets, a collective of mostly African American writers from Appalachian states who celebrate the lived experiences of Black and Brown folk in this region.

The diversity of voices falls not just along the color line, but experience too. Bernard, Dorian, and Willie are all writers who have published one book. Randi’s first book was written in Faroese, Norwegian, and English; her second, only in English. Silas and Marc are the poet laureates of their respective states. Lisa and William are well-established, mid-career poets. Pauletta, Jane, and Marianne are fixtures in the region and have long run writing workshops. Likewise, this grouping includes straight and LGBTQ+ voices. Anything less than this variety would not be true to life in these mountains.

This selection begins with Jane Hicks’s “A Mountain Poet Reads Lorca.” I met Jane at a writer’s event at Hindman Settlement School. As soon as we said hello, she began reciting the poetry of Federico García Lorca to me in Spanish. Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads are poems that take their themes and their form from the long arc of the Spanish ballad tradition—stories of death, longing, night, lovers, the moon, brigands, orchards, and more are told in octosyllabic lines. His ballads turn and twist the tradition with imagery and a dream logic taken from surrealism. Modernity meets tradition in these poems, the language of the city meets the old songs of the countryside, and the result has thrilled readers ever since. There is an affinity between his work and hers, between his ballads and much Appalachian poetry and songcraft. Jean Ritchie, Molly O’Day, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn—and the list could go on to include men and more singers past and present—have cut their teeth on the old-time mountain songs brought over from the British Isles. Jane coined the termed cosmic possum, to refer to first-generation mountain people who move in between the holler and large urban centers; a good number of these poets are just that, cosmic possums.

After the invitation extended by Jane’s mountain poet and the welcome of Pauletta’s grandmother, after Lisa’s return from the Big Apple to the hills she so deeply loves, Randi leads us to a pawpaw patch and shows us how a close description of the land and its fruit can be a meditation on identity and trauma. Willie, in turn, introduces us to the generosity of distant kin. Yet, Bernard reminds us how provisional any welcome can be, and Silas takes us even further down that road. Love for a place and a people also means recognizing the violence inside us and the violence we do to others and to the land. William gives us a novel perspective from which to view the extractivist violence that characterizes our relationship with the natural wealth of these mountains. Dorian, continuing along this path, turns toward the current political situation, as does Marianne. Though if Dorian’s poem meditates on the gender politics of where we are, Marianne’s contains echoes of the wars in Ukraine and Palestine. Care and worry about kin bind us not just to our region, but to the world. Marc’s poem shows that the floods of climate change are here, reminding us, again, of how all regions of the world are connected. His verse, as do all of those in this feature, contains that indomitable spirit that is Appalachia.

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JEREMY PADEN (BA, Harding University; MA, University of Memphis; PhD, Emory University) is an academic scholar, poet, and translator. He is the author of several books of poems in both English and Spanish. Most recently, his Spanish-language translation of Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind, De las que duelen (Valparaíso Ediciones, 2024) has just come out, and his English-language translation of Mario Meléndez’s Esperando a Perec, Waiting for Perec, just won the Action, Spectacle publication prize. He is a professor of Spanish and the chair of the Division of Humanities at Transylvania University. You can find him at: jpaden4.wixsite.com/jeremypadenpoet.


VOLUME 58 No. 1