Queering and Disrupting Appalachian Narratives
A Collective Rumination on Craft and Community
Neema Avashia, W. David Hall, Mesha Maren, Carter Sickels, and Jamie Lyn Smith | February 2024
Appalachia is a complicated notion: it’s both noun and adjective, place and descriptor. The region itself stretches from Alabama to Maine, encompassing many landscapes, peoples, and cultures. It is also one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. Despite this, Appalachian people living in its borders and Appalachian writers from the migrant diaspora are often treated as a racial, cultural, political, and geographic monolith.
Despite portrayals of its places and people that remain doggedly narrow in contemporary media outlets, Appalachia exists in many places and in many ways. We’ve come together as writers from and about Appalachia to talk about craft approaches to our work, and the ways that our lived experiences inform our approach to art, place, and identity, adding our voices to the diversity of Appalachia’s literary landscape.
—The Authors
Neema Avashia
Although I was born and raised in West Virginia, the general reaction from people outside Appalachia when I tell them where I’m from is one of disbelief. There are Indian people in West Virginia? This invisibility became even more intense with the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, which was viewed by many non-Appalachians as a definitive text about the region, and yet did not resonate with my experience of Appalachia. My first book, an essay collection entitled Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, is my attempt to make my experience in Appalachia visible, as well as to talk about the ways my Appalachian upbringing continues to resonate in my adult life. I am particularly interested in questions of belonging: What does it look like to find belonging in spaces where representation is limited? What is the impact of invisibility on our ability to find belonging? What happens when people that we love, and places where we once experienced belonging, begin to espouse beliefs that invalidate our existence?
I think the simple fact that my collection describes what it was like to grow up queer and Indian in Appalachia disrupts the mainstream narrative about our region, which, if you were to rely on media from publishers like Harper and entities like Netflix, would tell you that Appalachia is entirely white, Christian, straight, and poor. In that context, a book with Indian families on the cover already disrupts a narrative.
As for narrative strategies, the one I employ most is to ground readers in the specific details of my experience, because without those details, I don’t think they can get the kind of proximity and clarity that I want them to have. For example, the first essay in my collection is written in the second person, and directs the reader to take the drive from the airport in Charleston, West Virginia to my home in Cross Lanes. The reader is in the driver’s seat, as proximate as I can possibly get them. In other essays, I immerse them in the sensory details of religious rituals, or put them in the center of the circle that my aunties danced in each fall during the festival of Navratri. There is no opportunity for judgment or distance, really, when I’m holding fast to the reader’s hand, making sure that they are always right beside me.
When I think about the notion of queering a story, I think about bell hooks’s work, and her defining of queerness as a willingness to question normative structures, to ask the questions, “Why are we doing it this way? Is there another way we could be doing it?” Questioning, as a result, plays a central role in my writing. I often say that I didn’t write a book of answers; I wrote a book of questions. Questions about how I was raised, and why I was raised that way, and about the culture and context of my upbringing. Questions about how I’ve changed, and how that place has changed, and how our changes have sometimes made it more difficult to understand each other.
What does it look like to find belonging in spaces where representation is limited? What is the impact of invisibility on our ability to find belonging? What happens when people that we love, and places where we once experienced belonging, begin to espouse beliefs that invalidate our existence?
In another nod to bell hooks, I think that centering relationships with chosen family in my storytelling is a way of queering narratives. My essays talk about deep relationships with coaches and neighbors and my dad’s colleagues from work—not typical source material for writing, but certainly some of the most formative relationships in my life.
I had a lot of anxiety prior to the publication of my book. I’ve lived outside Appalachia for as long as I lived in Appalachia, and I wanted to be sure that my writing reflected my specific experience, and didn’t make broader claims that didn’t align with the present reality. I worried that even if I hewed as close as possible to my own story, it might ring false to Appalachian readers. I also knew that no matter what I wrote, being an Indian woman who has opinions, writes them down, and seeks to publish them was going to put me at odds with the most patriarchal and sexist members of my family and community.
Much of that anxiety wasn’t borne out. I’ve been most struck by the love I’ve gotten from queer Appalachian readers, who have told me again and again how much my book has meant to them—how its stickiest questions resonate, how seeing me find a soft place to land has given them hope that they might find that space for
themselves. I’ve heard from readers who are also children of immigrants, who find themselves grappling with similar family and cultural dynamics to the ones I write about in the book.
Folks often say that one of the hallmarks of Appalachian writing is that character is a place in our work. I’d like to add a second hallmark to that list and say that for most Appalachian writers, we are perpetually grappling with the question Carter Sickels raises: What does it mean to love a place that doesn’t always love you back? In the context of legislation being passed in Appalachian states that seeks to render queer people and our stories nonexistent, writing is often the place where I feel like I can explore the pain that home causes me now, and the joy that it once offered me.
But I also think that if we are being honest about what it means to love people, or places, then we have to acknowledge that the people and places we love most are also those we find most irritating, because we know them best. Because we understand what they are capable of, we are frustrated when they fail us. I think strong writing doesn’t get trapped into easy ideas about love; it explores love in all its messiness and complexity and difficulty. And that’s what I hope to do when I write.
I’m very careful about being clear about my lane: What are the things I can talk about with clarity and specificity, and where are the places where I don’t know enough, or haven’t had enough experience, to speak with any authority? My Appalachia was, in many ways, a pretty different place from the stereotyped Appalachia. I grew up with an Indian community of aunties and uncles and chosen siblings whose love mitigated a lot of the more painful experiences with racism that happened to me in schools. My dad worked in chemicals, not in coal. We were Hindu, not Christian. So I write about those experiences, because they are the ones I know best. And when I am compelled to write about things I know less intimately, I try to do so from a stance of seeking to understand, rather than to explain. I don’t position myself as an expert on the topic, but rather as someone who is assembling the pieces of my learning to show readers how I’m making sense of my questions.
W. David Hall
I am not certain that I have a particular idea of “disruption” in mind when I write. As is the case with being Black in America, I disrupt just by moving through the world, or in this case, putting stories out into the world. Regardless of what I write, I am disrupting on some level because of certain expectations. One (of many) examples was during a creative writing workshop at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, where I was told a story didn’t work, simply because one reader could not wrap her head around the idea that my main character was named “Etienne.” Forget any real, usable feedback. “Etienne” became the weapon that killed any hope that this had a life story worth reading. The kicker was that the name became THE discussion about my piece. In a classic case of “too little, too late,” the instructor pulled me aside after class to say he knew of a Black football player named Etienne. Why he couldn’t say that during the attack on my character, I have yet to find an answer. That is not the kind of violence one can prepare for, just as one can’t prepare for being ignored by a waiter in a restaurant. But such is the life of disruption.
I do, however, have a particular idea of “disruption” when it comes to publishing BreakBread Magazine, the center of my nonprofit BreakBread Literacy Project work. All writers are expected to scurry along the hamster wheel of creating, submitting, getting rejected, revising, submitting, getting rejected, revising, ad nauseum, until someone sees the work for what it is, pauses the wheel, and publishes our work. For writers from communities like Appalachia, this scurry can be twofold. We can never be too sure what biases or expectations are driving the rejections. Perhaps the dialogue is false and incomprehensible; perhaps the editor has never had a real conversation about Lizzo or the Lakers with a Black person at a backyard barbeque. Either way, the answer is “no.” So why continue on the wheel when you don’t know what you are really up against?
That is, in part, why I publish BreakBread Magazine. BreakBread is all about giving thirteen- to twenty-five-year-olds a space in which to create and have their work taken seriously by other young people. When I was growing up in West Virginia, I never had a mentor of color. In fact, the only people who taught fiction were straight and white, and only one of those white professors was a woman. That experience warped my view of my work. In the years since, I have worked hard to iron out that warped view. I didn’t want my experience to become the next generation’s experience. At BreakBread, young creatives can have frank and honest conversations about their work, knowing that they will be seen, read, and heard as valuable contributors to the literary world. Thus, BreakBread is an agent of “disruption.”
Overall, as a guide for any type of “disruption,” I would recommend novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay and TED Talk entitled “The Danger of a Single Story.” My takeaway from Adichie’s essay is that we are all victims of (and, sadly, perpetrators of) violence that occurs when viewing the world through a single lens, a single story, and that the only way anything gets better is if we explore a multiverse of stories. That kind of exploration for me has led to a kind of forgiveness, which has allowed me to make peace with my Appalachian home. At the end of the day, one truth overrides all else: we are all crazy of vice and virtue, and we owe it to ourselves, our readers, our craft, and our communities to wrestle with the good and bad in each of us through our art, both in what we create and how we critique. Readers come to a piece of work from all perspectives. You just have to be honest in your craft, be brave enough to disrupt, and hope that they will give your work a chance to stand on its own, to give you a chance of being heard as an individual artist.
Mesha Maren
As a novelist and as a queer woman living in Appalachia, I am abidingly interested in exploring the intersections of identity and landscape. My work is motivated by the question of how the specific place where a person is born and raised impacts them. How the very shapes of the hills and trees anchor themselves inside us and form our first vocabulary. And what it means to leave such a place, what it means to stay, and to return.
When I think about strategies to confront and confound dominant narratives about Appalachia, my thoughts come back to the idea of looking deeply and closely. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee wrote, “it is in some fear that I approach these matters at all, and in much confusion.” By “these matters” he meant the idea of representing, through writing, a group of people who are not your own individual self. He said that this process of writing about other people was “curious, obscene, terrifying, and unfathomably mysterious [and] if I could do it, I’d do no writing here at all. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement.” These details about lumps of earth and pieces of wood are a form of looking deeply and that is what I aim to do in my own fiction, bring the lumps of earth to the reader to hold in their own hands.
Confounding the dominant narrative is also about turning the camera and changing the lens. My friend Fernando Flores once told me a story about the Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller. He told me that Müller and Jim Jarmusch were scouting locations for one of their first movies together. When they’d find a visually well-known location, a real Hollywood-looking shot, Robby Müller would set up his camera to shoot in the opposite direction. That’s queering a narrative.
I’ve been most struck by the love I’ve gotten from queer Appalachian readers, who have told me again and again how much my book has meant to them—how its stickiest questions resonate, how seeing me find a soft place to land has given them hope that they might find that space for themselves.
When my first novel was published, I was nervous to talk about it with my closest neighbors because I was not sure what they would make of the fact that the main character is a lesbian. I should not have been worried. They were very supportive and several people told me that it helped them think through their own relationships to their queer or gay children. There was, however, a moment with a woman in Lewisburg, the larger, more hip town at the eastern end of Greenbrier County, West Virginia. I was doing a signing at the bookstore across the street from the silk scarf boutique that this woman owned. She came into the bookstore, picked up my book, read the back and said something like, “Oh, a hillbilly story, why do all the books about West Virginia have to be about hillbillies? I grew up in a very liberal family here and no one writes about people like me.” I was not very articulate at the moment but what I wish I had said to her is that there is likely more hillbilly in her than she thinks. My friend Scott McClanahan says, “Hillbilly is a state of mind. It’s metaphysical and ephemeral and contradictory.” And I like that definition. I think that a big part of that state of mind that is being a hillbilly is a real “do it yourself” way of living, not relying on outsiders. One thing that I find fascinating is that there is a very clear historical throughline with lots of different groups of people who have moved to West Virginia over the years, from back-to-the-land hippies to Scotch-Irish immigrants and African Americans who escaped slavery and came to West Virginia and joined folks like John Brown. The throughline is a desire to distance oneself from a form of government that was seen as unjust. When the British announced the Proclamation Line of 1763, stating that colonists could not settle west of the line, all of present-day West Virginia aside from the eastern panhandle was beyond the line. Colonists who wanted nothing to do with the British government crossed anyway. Now, I am not trying to celebrate colonialism and land grabbing, but it is fascinating to see this clear narrative from the eighteenth century up to present times, and that narrative is: we want to make our own community and take care of one another outside of the dominant society.
Carter Sickels
Although I am not from Appalachia—I grew up in rural, central Ohio—I’ve spent a lot of time in the region, especially in southeastern Ohio, where my grandparents lived and the family roots reach back several generations. My childhood memories of the place— fishing in the creek with my brother and walking through the woods with my grandfather—instilled in me a profound feeling of belonging. Years later, when I was writing my first novel, The Evening Hour, I made many trips to the mountains of West Virginia, where the novel is set, and talked with people who’d witnessed their communities and homes destroyed by mountaintop removal coal mining. I taught for seven years at Eastern Kentucky University, where the majority of my students were Appalachian. Many grappled with complicated feelings toward the place they called home, a fusion of deep love and pain. In my fiction and essays, I try to write into those contradictions: how I, as a queer, trans man from rural America, encounter both a deep feeling of connection and an anxiety that I don’t belong whenever I visit rural Ohio or spend time in the mountains. One of the questions I’m grappling with in my work, and in my life, is, How do you love a place—and a community—that doesn’t seem to love you back?
For me, queering Appalachian narratives means shining a light on queer and trans people living in Appalachia and rural America, a vital intersection that I believe needs more visibility in contemporary literature. My novel The Prettiest Star follows a gay HIV-positive man who returns to die in the small Appalachian town where he grew up. The novel examines the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s through the lens of rural America. I center my queer character as the protagonist, but it’s also a novel about a community, a home, a family—and about shame, familial homophobia, and queer survival. In my fiction, I am interested in bringing queer and straight people living in rural spaces together, into the same room, the same story.
One of my narrative strategies is to write about rural people and queer people with complexity and empathy, which I think they are too often denied. I’m trying to show the characters’ humanity, which also means exposing flaws and contradictions. For example, in The Prettiest Star, I write from the perspective of the protagonist’s mother, whose worldview has been built by heteropatriarchal, oppressive religious beliefs. I want the reader to see her deep-seated homophobia, but also her pain and her love for her son. One of the novel’s questions is, Will she evolve and love her son unconditionally? As a creative writing teacher, I encourage my students to write into those difficult places, to imagine other perspectives, and create characters deserving of humanity. For examples, I turn to my literary influences, including James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, and Randall Kenan, who built complex worlds and wrote with startling empathy.
The Prettiest Star is a novel about a place, but it’s also about a devastating time in queer history, in American history, that many would like to forget or pretend never existed. I felt a responsibility to tell this story to recognize the dead, whose stories were rewritten or disappeared, sometimes by their own families. It’s been incredibly moving and profound to hear back from queer readers who live in or grew up in Appalachia, and who have shared their stories with me—stories about exclusion and alienation, and about love and acceptance. I also hear back from readers who lost a loved one to AIDS. A beloved uncle, a brother, a friend. Often, the cause of this person’s death and their sexuality is still a family secret, attesting to the legacy of shame and homophobia that’s passed down, generation to generation. I’ve heard from gay men who survived the hate and terror of the ’80s and ’90s, who were often shunned by their small towns and families, but who found queer community and support, and experienced love and joy.
As queer people, we carry an inheritance of loss and pain, but also the legacy of queer resistance and survival. Now we are witnessing cruel, conservative state legislatures try to disappear trans and queer people at a rapid pace, and most Appalachian states, including Kentucky and West Virginia, have passed horrific laws that deny trans youth access to affirming healthcare and bodily autonomy. Yet they can’t legislate us out of existence— queer and trans people will continue to exist and find ways to thrive, to build resistance and community, and to tell our unique stories.
I think it’s critical that we not look away. It’s my job as a writer to get as close as possible, to bear witness. I challenge myself to write into the difficult realities and interrogate the troubled parts of Appalachia (which align with the troubled parts of America). In The Evening Hour, I write about the opioid epidemic and generational poverty, and about the extraction companies creating this economic disparity and wreaking havoc on the environment. I write about the consequences of toxic masculinity in a rural place, but also show the tenderness and intimacy between men in the mountains. I want to show the brokenness and beauty of this misunderstood place. I want to make visible the diverse, varied people living in Appalachia, and coax the reader to look closer. Storytelling gives me a way to do this. Fiction is such a powerful, unique art form because it invites us as readers to enter another person’s thoughts, swim around in their dreams, walk through different landscapes, and start to see outside our own limitations.
Jamie Lyn Smith
I struggle with some ambivalence in writing about Appalachia, and often recall the words of Louise Erdrich: “Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.” That’s where I find myself, and I bring that to my prose. The whole truth about my corner of Appalachia is that our lives, experiences, families, genders, jobs, identities, faiths—all the things that make us astonishingly complicated and human—are a beautiful, ungovernable mess. That mess is evident in my short-story collection, Township. Set in contemporary northern Appalachia, characters grapple with belonging, love, sexuality and gender, gentrification, family violence, isolation, desperation, and forgiveness. There are similar threads in my forthcoming novel, Hometown; in that book, a transgender kid’s quest to live a normal life devolves into a community-wide reckoning about who belongs and the Christian nationalist movement’s determination to say who doesn’t.
My work pushes back against the misconception that Appalachians are all straight, white, evangelical conservatives. This stereotype damages and dismisses queer and historically resilient communities of care that exist alongside the dominant narrative—communities that are often in conflict and communion with each other. Sometimes those conflicts and communions exist within the same place and person, and my characters hold close the cognitive dissonance that I witness as a progressive, politically engaged writer living in a deep-red, northern Appalachian place.
I draw inspiration from my own experiences and witness as an artist, woman, activist, educator, and ally. My work brings the fullness of life in Appalachia to the forefront, and that work disrupts and queers dominant narratives and stereotypes. I want readers to see all of us, in our abundant humanity: people who are queer, people who migrated and immigrated here, people of color and multiethnic backgrounds who have been here existing and resisting for centuries. My work seeks to push back against false narratives that mis-eulogize places and peoples that I know are here and alive and raising all kinds of hell, reflecting a thriving and vibrant Appalachia that won’t allow itself to be diminished just for the sake of a politically expedient, faux-bootstrap diatribe.
As is the case with being Black in America, I disrupt just by moving through the world, or in this case, putting stories out into the world.
I’ve become much more straightforward in my writing about the risks our communities face from an energized and empowered rising tide of right-wing extremism that seeks to weaponize legislation and hold us in everyday terror. I tell these stories because I’m not sure how long some communities will be able to safely exist. The premise of my current novel, Hometown, is loosely based on a federal court case over trans discrimination at my former high school. The court documents are shocking, the Facebook comments were vile, the faculty and administration failed this kid, and I cannot unsee the ugliness that unfolded. Looking square at that ugliness is the reality of writing truth, particularly when the status quo trucks in lies designed to bring harm to the people I love. Saying that out loud is disruptive as hell; showing it on the page is my way of pulling the fire alarm about the oppressive forces that seek to obscure truths about Appalachian lives.
Serious and depressing as I may sound, I find that the most effective vehicle for truth telling in fiction is humor, a lesson learned from writers like Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Luis Alberto Urrea. Humor and pathos are disruption strategies that let me write through the lens of characters’ self-awareness and intelligence. Culturally, humor and irreverence are coping mechanisms and means of survival. They are also powerful tools activists use to galvanize solidarity in fights for freedom, equity, and justice. Those fights propel and inform my work. My fiction explores characters who both infuriate and inspire me to keep complicating, queering, and pushing back through the power of story.
Typically, there’s a price to pay for that. So I was surprised when some of the people whose criticism I dreaded turned out to be big fans of Township. I wrote many of those stories as part of my MFA thesis at Ohio State in 2015. Six years later—after 2016, after the family separations, after Charlottesville, after the murder of George Floyd, after the January 6 Insurrection—I found myself editing those stories with a very different perspective and in a world that has changed inexorably, a world that is hard to love. Sandra Cisneros says that “we do our best work when we write from love,” but my love of place and persons is now more nuanced, more wary. I want to vault back to a time when I could describe my relationship with my home as “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed,” but frankly, I’m both those things, and I’m in a perpetual state of sorrowful outrage, sounding the alarm about what’s really happening on the ground with extremism in rural America: both the people trying to erase queer and BIPOC voices, and the historically-resistant communities resisting that erasure. That’s why these stories must be told.
The threat is real. So is the resistance. For both those elements to exist alongside each other in my prose, I follow the adage, “tell the truth, it’s easier to remember.” I know that I’m writing it right when characters surprise me and unsettle my readers. When I have it wrong, I can’t let the story rest. It gnaws at me, comes up in conversations with my husband and friends and dog; memory and tension pops up in my dreams, churning in my subconscious until I satisfy my curiosity about it. I try to write about place with honesty by staying curious and keeping my heart open, even as some aspects of life in Appalachia test the limits of that love.
Conclusion
We welcome people from inside and outside Appalachia to reconsider its complexities and rich offerings, and to celebrate dissent with us in the service of truth telling, honoring and laying claim to this place that made us writers, and gave us so much to write about. And this is just the beginning. We hope that writers and artists of all backgrounds consider how dominant narratives about places and peoples might be honored and informed by examining race, class, gender, sexuality, and politics in the places they, too, call home.
Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants, and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. She has been an educator and activist in the Boston Public Schools since 2003 and was named a City of Boston Educator of the Year in 2013. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was published by West Virginia University Press in 2022. It has been called “a timely collection that begins to fill the gap in literature focused mainly on the white male experience” by Ms. Magazine, and “a graceful exploration of identity, community, and contradictions” by Scalawag.
W. David Hall teaches English at Valley International Preparatory High School in Chatsworth, California. Most recently, he retired from a twenty-year stint as on-site director of the Kenyon Young Writers Program. His work can be seen in The Kenyon Review, Callalloo, After The Pause, and The Best African American Fiction, and he is the author of Culture In Context: A Basic Writing Guide with Readings. Founder of BreakBread Literacy Project, he serves as editor-in-chief and CEO of the youth literary nonprofit.
Mesha Maren is the author of the novels Sugar Run, Perpetual West, and Shae (forthcoming in May 2024 from Algonquin Books). Her short stories and essays can be read in Tin House, the Oxford American, The Guardian, Crazyhorse, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Sou’wester, Hobart, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an Appalachian Writing Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She was the 2018–19 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an assistant professor of the practice of English at Duke University and also serves as a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the federal prison camp in Alderson, West Virginia.
Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star, published by Hub City Press, and winner of the 2021 Southern Book Prize and the Weatherford Award. The Prettiest Star was also selected as a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and a Best LGBT Book of 2020 by O Magazine. His debut novel, The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury 2012), an Oregon Book Award finalist and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. His essays and fiction have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Joyland,Guernica, Catapult, and Electric Literature. Carter has earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and MacDowell.
Jamie Lyn Smith is a writer, editor, activist, and educator. An alumna of Kenyon College, Fordham University, and Ohio State, she is a founding member of the Leadership Team at BreakBread Literacy Project and an editor-at-large for BreakBread Magazine. She serves as a consulting editor for The Kenyon Review. Her work appears in The Pinch, The Mississippi Review, The Kenyon Review, Bayou, and elsewhere. Her short-story collection, Township, debuted from Cornerstone Press in January 2022. The recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for her forthcoming novel Hometown, Jamie Lyn has nonfiction in Ploughshares this fall.
