If you read my review of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, then you’ll recognize that Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia has done my work for me, though we arrived at similar conclusions independently. Catte is a historian with more than simply an anecdotal interest in Appalachia. WhereasContinue Reading
“Shut up, you fucker. You smart-ass. If I wasn’t crippled, I’d get up right now and smack your head and ass together.” – Mamaw from J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy My suspicion is that J.D. Vance tries to shock his readers by pretending he’s unfazed by his family’s white trashContinue Reading
**Photograph: A crowd of miners confronting soldiers – Harlan County, Kentucky 1939 My stage play, “Which Side Are You On: The Florence Reece Story,” debuted at Pellissippi State Community College on April 15, 2016. The play recounts episodes in the life of Florence Reece, an American social activist, poet,Continue Reading
I know Daddy knows what he’s doing. Even when he’s quiet he’s thinking. The old man with tobacco sitting in his jaw like a tumor is our enemy. He would keep us from buying the truck we need that slopes on the weedy ridge of this junkyard. Because I amContinue Reading
Without a nod you give yourself to us Where hedges grew and trolleys screeched on track and you once played without a trace of fuss the swollen games of children back to back. A hump-backed sidewalk stretches at the seams. Here once James Agee woke from awkward sleep to findContinue Reading
Its own metaphor for ineradicable nuisance, it plays at the mind’s edges, encroaching in the dullest greens, doffing the hat of a rude guest, last to leave the party. In some distant country it could be haiku climbing the walls in search of obscure interpretations, its tendrils reaching for meaningContinue Reading
Ma: You fixed thishere ringer warsher yet? Pa: I’ll git to it terreckly. Ma: When? Pa: I might could fix it tamaree fit don’t rain. Ma: You might ought to’ve fixed it yestidy when there warn’t no threat of rain. ‘Sides, rain ain’t got nuthin’ to do with it.Continue Reading
He was a pariah among his own people, having been born with a club foot. His formal education ended early because boys at school taunted him. Maybe that was fate’s way of ensuring the child, who later became Sequoyah, aka Edward Guess, inventor of the Cherokee syllabary, discovered in hisContinue Reading