Nestled between rolling hills and misty valleys of the Eastern United States lies a region that’s not just a geographical expanse, but a tapestry of tales spun with threads of tradition, resiliences, and a touch of the mystical.
Welcome to Appalachia, a land where the mountains are older than the trees (literally!). The Appalachian Mountains encompasses a large part of the eastern United States, including southern New York, the western and central parts of Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, southern West Virginia (often considered the heart of Appalachia), western Maryland, eastern Kentucky, east Tennessee, western North Carolina, northwestern corner of South Carolina, northern Georgia, northeastern Alabama, northeastern Mississippi.
In this blog post, we’re talking all about Appalachian literature. Many of these stories of rural America are meant to battle the common Appalachian stereotypes, and show that Appalachia is a diverse place with a rich literary history, and that the Appalachian people are much more than they seem (and Appalachian literature is about SO much more than Hillbilly Elegy!).
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Another Appalachia by Neema Avashia
When Neema Avashia tells people where she’s from, their response is nearly always a disbelieving “There are Indian people in West Virginia?” A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes. But the lessons she learned from her own experiences in childhood about race and class, gender and sexuality continue to inform the way she moves through the world today: how she loves, how she teaches, how she advocates, how she struggles.
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte
In 2016, headlines declared Appalachia ground zero for America’s “forgotten tribe” of white working class voters. Journalists flocked to the region to extract sympathetic profiles of families devastated by poverty, abandoned by establishment politics, and eager to consume cheap campaign promises. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia is a frank assessment of America’s recent fascination with the people and problems of the region. The book analyzes trends in contemporary writing on Appalachia, presents a brief history of Appalachia with an eye toward unpacking Appalachian stereotypes, and provides examples of writing, art, and policy created by Appalachians as opposed to for Appalachians. The book offers a must-needed insider’s perspective on the region.
Appalachia on the Table by Erica Abrams Locklear
Appalachia on the Table argues, in part, that since the conception of Appalachia as a distinctly different region from the rest of the South and the United States, the foods associated with the region and its people have often been used to socially categorize and stigmatize mountain people. Rather than investigate the actual foods consumed in Appalachia, Locklear instead focuses on the representations of foods consumed, implied moral judgments about those foods, and how those judgments shape reader perceptions of those depicted. The question at the core of Locklear’s analysis asks, How did the dominant culinary narrative of the region come into existence and what consequences has that narrative had for people in the mountains?
The Third Rainbow Girl by Emma Copley Eisenberg
In the early evening of June 25, 1980 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived. For thirteen years, no one was prosecuted for the “Rainbow Murders” though deep suspicion was cast on a succession of local residents in the community, depicted as poor, dangerous, and backward. In 1993, a local farmer was convicted, only to be released when a known serial killer and diagnosed schizophrenic named Joseph Paul Franklin claimed responsibility. As time passed, the truth seemed to slip away, and the investigation itself inflicted its own traumas—-turning neighbor against neighbor and confirming the fears of violence outsiders have done to this region for centuries.
F*ckface and Other Stories by Leah Hampton
The twelve stories in this knockout short story collection―some comedic, some tragic, many both at once―examine the interdependence between rural denizens and their environment.A young girl, desperate for a way out of her small town, finds support in an unlikely place. A ranger working along the Blue Ridge Parkway realizes that the dark side of the job, the all too frequent discovery of dead bodies, has taken its toll on her. Haunted by his past, and his future, a tech sergeant reluctantly spends a night with his estranged parents before being deployed to Afghanistan. Nearing fifty and facing new medical problems, a woman wonders if her short stint at the local chemical plant is to blame. A woman takes her husband’s research partner on a day trip to her favorite place on earth, Dollywood, and briefly imagines a different life.
House of Cotton by Monica Brashears
Magnolia Brown is nineteen years old, broke, and effectively an orphan. She feels stuck and haunted: by her overdrawn bank account, her predatory landlord, and the ghost of her late grandmother Mama Brown.
One night, while working at her dead-end gas station job, a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton walks in and offers to turn Magnolia’s luck around with a lucrative “modeling” job at his family’s funeral home. She accepts. But despite things looking up, Magnolia’s problems fatten along with her wallet. When Cotton’s requests become increasingly weird, Magnolia discovers there’s a lot more at stake than just her rent.
Sharp as a belted knife, this sly social commentary cuts straight to the bone. House of Cotton will keep you mesmerized until the very end.
Tar Hollow Trans by Stacy Jane Grover
In Tar Hollow Trans, Grover explores her transgender experience through common Appalachian cultural traditions. In “Dead Furrows,” a death vigil and funeral leads to an investigation of Appalachian funerary rituals and their failure to help Grover cope with the grief of being denied her transness. “Homeplace” threads family interactions with farm animals and Grover’s coming out journey, illuminating the disturbing parallels between the American Veterinary Association’s guidelines for ethical euthanasia and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s guidelines for transgender care.
Together, her essays in this new collection write transgender experience into broader cultural narratives beyond transition and interrogate the failures of concepts such as memory, metaphor, heritage, and tradition. Tar Hollow Trans investigates the ways the labels of transgender and Appalachian have been created and understood and reckons with the ways the ever-becoming transgender self, like a stigmatized region, can find new spaces of growth.
Good Women by Halle Hill
Darkly funny and deeply human, Good Women observes how place, blood-ties, generational trauma, obsession, and boundaries—or lack thereof—influence how we navigate our small worlds, and how those worlds so often collide in ways we don’t expect. Through intimate moments of personal choice, Hill carefully shines a light on how these twelve women shape and form themselves through faith and abandon, transgression and conformity, community, caution, and solitude.
With precision and empathy, Hill captures the mundane in moments of absurdity, and bears witness to both joy and heartbreak, reminding us how the next moment could be life-changing. Vibrant and exacting, Hill is a must-read new voice in literary fiction.
Fair and Tender Ladies by Lee Smith
Ivy Rowe, Virginia mountain girl, then wife, mother, and finally “Mawmaw,” never strays far from her home-but the letters she writes take her across the country and over the ocean. Writing “to hold onto what’s passing,” she tells stories that are rich with the life of Appalachia in words that are colloquial, often misspelled, but always beautiful.From childhood, when teachers encouraged her gift for language, to her rebellious teenage years when she swore against motherhood-only to then become a mother-and on through life, Ivy writes with insight, honesty, and a passion for living that is sure to be infectious.
Making Our Future by Emily Hilliard
Drawing from her work as state folklorist, Emily Hilliard explores contemporary folklife in West Virginia and challenges the common perception of both folklore and Appalachian culture as static, antiquated forms, offering instead the concept of “visionary folklore” as a future-focused, materialist, and collaborative approach to cultural work.
Take What You Need by Idra Novey
Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Appalachia, Take What You Need traces the parallel lives of Jean and her beloved but estranged stepdaughter, Leah, who’s sought a clean break from her rural childhood. In Leah’s urban life with her young family, she’s revealed little about Jean, how much she misses her stepmother’s hard-won insights and joyful lack of inhibition. But with Jean’s death, Leah must return to sort through what’s been left behind.What Leah discovers is staggering: Jean has filled her ramshackle house with giant sculptures she’s welded from scraps of the area’s industrial history. There’s also a young man now living in the house who played an unknown role in Jean’s last years and in her art.
Something’s Rising by Silas House and Jason Howard
In the oral tradition of the Appalachian Mountains, this book features a series of oral stories from the people who have been effected by mountaintop removal. These stories demonstrate the effects of mountaintop removal on the surrounding communities, and how mountaintop removal mining is a harmful thing for inhabitants of the Appalachian Mountains.
When These Mountains Burn
When his addict son gets in deep with his dealer, it takes everything Raymond Mathis has to bail him out of trouble one last time. Frustrated by the slow pace and limitations of the law, Raymond decides to take matters into his own hands.
After a workplace accident left him out of a job and in pain, Denny Rattler has spent years chasing his next high. He supports his habit through careful theft, following strict rules that keep him under the radar and out of jail. But when faced with opportunities too easy to resist, Denny makes two choices that change everything.
And as a bonus, if you want to know about more amazing Appalachian literature, check out the podcast Read Appalachia by Kendra Winchester, who is the founder of Read Appalachia!