Books vs. Blogs: Appalachia

For most of my life, the term “Appalachia” meant almost nothing. There were vague associations of missing teeth, ragged porches, moonshine, and banjos, and -after watching Deliverance- inbreeding and twisty dirt roads, but I wasn’t even entirely sure where Appalachia was, to say nothing of the culture of its people. Two winters ago, I took a short-story writing class, and one of my classmates was a girl from Lexington, Kentucky. She was by far the best writer in the class- while the rest of us stumbled around stiff phrasing and cobbled imagery, she had already developed a distinctive narrative voice: colorful, zany, knowingly twangy, and she peppered her stories with colloquial phrases and stereotypical characters that somehow weren’t. Her narrators, I remember, were always either obsessed with leaving or had already left, and the plot lines were always dark (domestic abuse, marriage at 12, alcoholism), but they were presented as comedy.
So what about her writing was Appalachian, rather than creativity and an eye for detail?

In the works I read dealing with Appalachian literature, all touched on the struggles with place-based identity, manifested in the “migration and homecoming, disassociation and reaffiliation, denial and affirmation” of the narrator’s Appalachian-ness. Once accepted, Appalachian writers display an intense regional and ethnic pride- their stories are rarely placeless, and generally rooted in their writer’s backyard, interspersed with folklore, colloquial language, and specific sensory imagery.
The degree to which these conflicts and themes played out in the blogs depended mostly on the author’s age– the oldest blogger, Blind Pig and the Acorn, lived and breathed her mountain heritage. Her posts focused on folk music, photographic essays of her home in the hills of West Virginia, interviews with elderly “mountain people,” Appalachian expressions, and family lore, as well as recipes, gardening, and musings on motherhood. The youngest blogger, Erin Seabolt Bond, left her West Virginia home for Washington D.C., and her posts are nearly devoid of childhood and place memories, and though there is plenty of sensory imagery, it is restricted to people and emotions.
In Now and Then: Sense of Place in Appalachia, Pat Arnow speaks of the Appalachian writer’s “selective reinterpretation of a previously stigmatizing culture often culminating in symbolic or actual return to an idealized primordial community and homeplace” (3). The aspects of Appalachian culture discussed on Blind Pig and the Acorn are certainly selective- no mention is made of the illiteracy, poverty, or alcoholism that often accompanied life in the haunting shacks the author photographs.
This glorifying of selective detail forms the backbone of what Wilma Dykeman, who teaches courses on Appalachian studies at University of Tennessee in Knoxville, calls “parlor literature…full of romantic descriptions of the mountains, detailed records of mountaineers’ odd customs and peculiar speech” (26). If it isn’t parlor, Dykeman says, writing is in the “Sut Lovingood* tradition of old southwestern humor…dialect, tall tales, and earthy humor” (26). My classmate’s writing fell squarely in the latter, as does another Appalachian blog, Southern Fried Mama, whose heroine, Dejoni, hails from the “Redneck Riviera” in Kentucky. Dejoni refers to the her town as “hooterville,” her pickup as “the big rolling turd,” and her daughter as a “vienna sausage.” She regularly says things like “holy ritz cracker,” “badonkadonk,” and “tasmanian she-devils.” She has a rollicking narrative and a deadpan delivery well-suited to button-pushing asides. She regularly mocks her region, but not with any rancor, and if she hasn’t yet started to take pride in Appalachian customs, she is perfectly comfortable discussing aspects of mountain life, raccoon shootings, Cow Days and all.
Dejoni’s voice aligns with that Arnow deems characteristic of Appalachian literature: each is “terse, understated, expansive in its humor” (27). Many of Dejoni’s posts contain series of choppy, one-line-per-indent sentences whose flat delivery only add to the tongue-in-cheek weightiness. Though not always pertaining to humor, understatement is prevalent in all the Appalachian blogs I read- all the sensory detail and anecdotes come as are, free of emotion or emphatics.
Which is not to say they come free of embellishment: all of the bloggers use figurative language to some extent, mostly in the form of colorful similes and personification. Apart from Erin Seabolt Bond, regional expressions abound, and are rarely self-conscious. Southern dialect is also common- words like “ol,” “dang,” and “y’all,” along with myriad dropped g’s and exclamations in the vein of “bless her heart!”
In her introduction to Now and Then, Arnow equates a trip back to her hometown of Huntington, WV to “rereading a book…each page brings forgotten details back” (5). What separates Appalachia from the Deep South is its resistance to change, brought on by economic stagnancy and encouraged by a sense of “us vs. them” similar to that which isolates the crabbing communities of DelMarVa. Such conditions made for easy analysis- Appalachia is the only region where culture seemed unified, and, unlike the young Southern woman’s obsession with a prototype southern belle, a continuation (if also a melioration) of past heritage and traditions.
On the characteristics of Appalachian Literature, author Robert Morgan explains: “The setting and speech patterns are Appalachian. It has universal themes like struggle, family relationships, and loyalties. It includes Appalachian music and instruments such as the dulcimer, and strong women are often central characters” (Dunham, Teresa Diane. “Conversation with Shepherd’s 2003 Writer-in-Residence: Robert Morgan”). To these, I would add that penchant towards understatement, a love of colloquial expressions, punchy verbs, similes, and personifications, and a strong, often proud sense of place. All of these characteristics come out in the Appalachian blogs as well, and their frequency and strength seem most dependent on age (though figurative language is present in all, embracing of Appalachian culture and expressions is more present in the older bloggers’ writing), as well as location (West Virginia and Kentucky seem to have bolder, more generous narrative voices than does Tennessee).

On Appalachian Lit:
Arnow, Pat. “Now and Then: Sense of Place in Appalachia”
A Conversation with Shepherd’s 2003 Writer in Residence
Sicily Burn’s Wedding

Appalachian Bloggers:
Shamelessly Sassy (KY)
Southern Fried Mama (KY)
Pensieve (TN)
Like a Warm Cup of Coffee (TN)
Hifi Heart (TN)
Blind Pig and the Acorn (WV)

*Sut Lovingood was creation of Southwestern humorist George Washington Harris, a “nat’ral born durn’d fool” Tennessee mountain man with a “whiskey-proof gizzard” and the ability to “get into more durned misfortunate skeery scrapes, than anybody, and then run outen them faster, by golly, nor anybody” (Sut Lovingood. Yarns Spun by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool.” Warped and Wove for Public Wear). Lovingood served as the prototype hillbilly, intended to be laughed at but never empathized with.