Why I Write about Appalachia

 “If you’re tired of narratives that paint Appalachians as helpless, backward caricatures. . . “,

This phrase, from an anonymous Amazon review of bell hooks’ poetry collection, Appalachian Elegy, captures part of the reason I write about Appalachia.

Thank you for reading The Foark River Salon and Bait Shop. It may not strike you as an Appalachian novel because it does not come anywhere near some of the standard themes and tropes that Appalachian novels are traditionally expected to use. That is exactly why I want it to be considered Appalachian; not only is it set smack dab, as we say, in the middle of Southern Appalachia (south of the Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee) but it purposefully does avoid stereotypical themes. Or does it?

One standard trope is the outsider coming in to “save” the benighted mountain people. Another is that the characters are benighted: poor, ignorant, uneducated, barefoot, addicted, outlaw, religiously fanatically, sexually or morally deviant, and any number of portrayed traits that cause us who live here to cringe. And then there are the more optimistic stories where the “outsider” is civilized in reverse by the ways of the pure, simple mountain people. The Foark River Salon and Bait Shop is set in 2019, for goodness sake, not 1819, or like my first Appalachian novel, 1918. Not that those stereotypes were universally true one hundred or two hundred years ago any more than today. More recent Appalachian fiction explores the darkness of what goes on away from straight, flat roads and populated cities, from economic and social opportunities and supposed middle class ways of being.

In a sense, however, Foark River turns these common story lines sideways. Outsiders do come into an Appalachian setting not to better the lives of residents but, at the very least, to exploit them—not unlike the timber and coal companies of the past. The “outsiders” find that the principals are ambivalent or even hostile about whatever the outsiders have to offer. The characters of Foark River are not fools, just suspicious. They aren’t taken in by the offers of media fame. They don’t live in Foark River because of lack of opportunities or education or ability. Roger, Tom, and Juanette do not fit any stereotypes, no matter how hard Andrea and Duffy try. The modern world has already come to their part of Appalachia despite what others might think, and they are very happy to live in it, thank you very much, without the pressures of traffic, pollution, and crowding.

Some, or many, of the stereotypes found in Appalachian literature stem from many years go, at the very least pre-World War II and pre-electrification (due to Tennessee Valley Authority and other New Deal projects). East Tennessee, and its lakes, dams, hydroelectric plants, and nuclear reactors created by TVA were centerpieces of this work. President Eisenhower’s desire to realize an Autobahn in the U.S. via the Interstate system also made travel through the region (whether to actually visit it or as a bypass to sunny Florida) far more accessible. These massive engineering projects also made all the difference in the “mainstreaming” of culture in the area.

Appalachia is a diverse region, whether everyone wants to admit it or not. It is a geographical large region as well. It is a land around, on top of, and in between a mountain range, one considered the oldest in the country, far older than the Rockies. To some accounts that range stretches from Canada down to North Georgia and even to parts of Mississippi’s northeastern corner. Because it is believed that the continents were all connected at one time, some say it even went into Scotland. This leads to the rather romantic notions that Appalachian “culture” is Scottish in origin. I can’t say I buy that fully, but I will tell you I felt very much at home when I was in Scotland for two days twenty-eight years ago. This former geographic joining is used to explain why so many of the Scots-Irish settled throughout the mountains and why the music sounds so much the same.

When I visited New England I was shocked by how mountainous it is, especially in the western part, but I overlooked that the range reached that region. However, those states are not considered part of Appalachia, despite the beloved Appalachian Trail stretching up to Mount Katahdin in Maine. Northern Appalachia is New York, Maryland, and Pennsylvania; Middle is West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky, and Southern is Virginia down—Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and even Mississippi. West Virginia is “all Appalachia,” the only state that is.

This delineation is how the Appalachian Regional Commission defines the area, which equals 206,000 square miles and spans 423 counties in 13 states. There are also geographical divisions on the actual way the land lies, regardless of the states, which are man-made constructs. I think it’s more interesting to the region as a double set of ranges with a string of valleys in between, each with names, Coosa, Tennessee, Holston (the three nearest to me, named after rivers) and so on up to Champlain Valley in New England. The pair of ranges is surrounded by the piedmont to the east, which means “foot of mountain” which then stretches to the coastal plain, and a plateau to the west, in some parts. I’m simplifying a little, no, a lot, so I recommend you look at a variety of maps to get a sense of what’s really going on when we talk about Appalachia.

The area is naturally beautiful, but I have to admit mankind has scarred and abused it, so there is too much man-made ugliness. Mountain top removal, locations not developed with ecology in mind and then deserted, areas used as massive landfills and toxic waste dumps for cities and industries near and far, trailers and trash and rundown buildings, old coal towns, and places I call “cut outs of the hillsides that look like big clay gouges.” It does not often have the majestic snow capped beauty of the Rockies, but it has more diverse ecosystems, more vegetation, and a more temperate climate.

But it is not usually, or not primarily, these physical and political descriptions thought of when the word “Appalachia” is invoked. It is something more, and something only those who have spent a long time there can sense. It is something that people with roots there or an appreciation of roots anywhere can feel and know in that feeling. It is knowing the region’s history or at least one’s family’s history in it. It is what is often referred to as sense of place in literature.

Many contemporary authors of fiction write deeply about place. That is a way of saying their stories are embedded in the lives of people in a specific location.

The places where we make our lives, and the ways in which these spaces themselves change, impacts us irreversibly. All work is written from someplace.”
– Sara Perez

Writing place in fiction is a skill worth developing. When place is an essential part of the story, it should be as authentic and whole as any protagonist. When place is more than a backdrop, it takes on a symbolic role that can be portrayed in a variety of ways, from the naming of place to its architecture and weather. - Yasmin Chopin

Appalachia is a geographical place, a sometimes isolated one, and as such it does not change a great deal physically from year to year. In Appalachia, alterations in the roads, buildings, infrastructure, and population dispersion are going to take a long time. Dickenson County, Virginia, and its neighbors, in the 1960s when I would visit as a child, was not developed like the Washington, D.C., suburbs where I grew up, so the difference was stark for me. My mother’s hometown of McClure was reached by roads with winding and sharp curves and negligent paving. Municipalities and small towns might have “city water” and sewers, but not the part I knew. Grocery stores like I was used to were few and far between. A creek ran aside the road or ran below it. That creek might overflow dangerously in spring. Little coal towns of decrepit houses popped up in huddled masses along the roads, accompanied by some antiquated mining machinery. There were no street lights.

I should interject here that I take my identity as Appalachian seriously, despite my upbringing in suburban Prince George’s County, Maryland. Both of my parents were part of the post-World War II diaspora from the mountains. My father’s family, the prolific Grahams, hails from Pennsylvania and landed in the Shenandoah Valley in Augusta County, Virginia, after the Civil War; my mother’s ancestors—Fraleys, Vanovers, Elkins, and Ashbys—made their way to Southwestern Virginia in the 1840s. Now I live in sight of Lookout Mountain, Georgia, to my west and the Blue Ridge mountains to the east.

The book you hold in your hand is not my first novel where I pay homage to my background. That would be Lying In, a book far more in line with what is typically thought of as Appalachian—set in the past, somewhat connected to coal mining, depicting hardscrabble lives. As I wrote Lying In, published in 2024, I imagined what the 1960s Appalachia of my childish mind looked like fifty years earlier, before TVA, electrification, even before most of the coal mines.

Lucy Cruikshanks, a British author, wrote;

In fiction, ‘place’ is wherever matters to your characters, but the most powerful stories transport their readers there wholeheartedly, wherever ‘there’ may be. To truly transport readers, a setting must be more than a mere backdrop. The most memorable locations are central to the story itself, adding to the readers’ understanding of characters, building the atmosphere and driving the action forward. Their every detail, beguiling or terrifying, is charged with emotion. They are not striking for how they look or smell or sound in isolation, but for how they make their readers feel.

Early settlers to the region either stayed or moved on. Appalachia has its own history, its own diversity, its own mysteries. A lot of writers focus on the ghosts and spirits and witches element. That’s not me, nor is it my family’s experience. In Lying In, Telly considers herself a person who learned science in her cut-short career in nursing school and didn’t take much to stories of haints and such, but she did know what other people said and wasn’t unaffected by it. Appalachia is also a place of religious faith. Not everyone there is a snake handler; that is a stereotype and the number of churches that actually do that is very small, maybe 125, almost all in southern Appalachia and confined to tiny, isolated congregations. There are large cities in Appalachia—Asheville, Pittsburgh, Charleston, and Chattanooga being some of them and plenty of colleges and universities.

Returning to what Lucy Cruikshanks wrote about place, “Their every detail, beguiling or terrifying, is charged with emotion. They are not striking for how they look or smell or sound in isolation, but for how they make their readers feel.”

I had very real feelings about being in Appalachia. It felt both protective and imprisoning, something I allude to in Lying In when Telly gets to leave the mountains, something she wants desperately as a young woman, and when she has to return. They were both beautiful and rich, green in summer and stark in winter, dark and foreboding and fresh and inspiring. Morning really does come later and night earlier when there is a mountain ridge right behind or in front of your home. Flat land is prized and needed for growing. Wild animals are not for entertainment but sometimes food and sometimes the adversary. Hard work is the only way to have a full stomach and a roof over your head. You don’t see outsiders much and you don’t benefit from contact with faraway places. Although things are somewhat different today with the onslaught of Starbucks and cell towers, the landscape is still the same.

That metaphor or image of the mountains as both protective and imprisoning I think is strong in Lying In, and I intended for it to be. In Foark River, I-75 and I-40, Dollywood, the Internet, and cell phones have made the mountains’ density and height far less of an impediment to living a “normal American life,” whatever that happens to be. The mountains of Appalachia are no more isolated than the plains of the Midwest or the Western states.

Those are my feelings about the geography of where my people are from, but my stories are more about the people influenced by and trying to carve a life in those mountains. What I did not want to do is portray the Appalachian people as other, as less than, as sub-anything. As the opening line of this essay states, “If you’re tired of narratives that paint Appalachians as helpless, backward caricatures. . .” I was and am tired of those portrayals. I went into writing about Appalachia with that sentiment. I did not want to write about moonshiners, incest, ignorance, poverty, and drug addiction per se. Some of that might appear, but as unfortunate realities, not insoluble, genetic characteristics.

I had written eight novels before I decided to start one that was rooted in my family’s past and present. Lying In, published in 2024, was a book that had been in my head for a while, sitting there, not gathering mental dust but germinating like a seed in a brain that needed to let it do so. To follow the metaphor, the soil of my brain, and perhaps more of my heart, needed more nourishment. Jesus told a wonderful parable, often referred to and sometimes misunderstood, about the sower and the seed. The common interpretation is that not all soils are ready for a message. However, they might be at a later time under different conditions. My mind and emotions were not ready to write about Appalachia and my family’s origins in my younger years. Why I was ready in the early 2020s I’m not sure, other than we all spent a lot of time at home alone, and at the time I was living alone. My mother, the instigator of the story, had died in 2014 and I had not been back to the setting of the book, her home county, since 2013. Something about her, her extended families, and my many trips through the area was calling me.

The main way Lying In is personal and familial is place. It is set in a very real place, Dickenson County, the towns of McClure, Nora, Clintwood, the dirt roads and few paved ones, the isolated farms and homesteads of 1918. I have been back there twice since the publication. Dickenson County is called “Virginia’s Baby” because it was the last created county in Virginia, carved out of Russell, Buchanan, and Wise Counties in 1880. It borders Pike County, KY. My mother’s ancestors, landed there in the 1840s when it was Russell or Wise county and very isolated. In many ways it still is, as no U.S. highway or Interstate goes through it. The population today is about 15,000, 97% white. The most famous persons from there are Ralph and Carter Stanley, who knew my mom as children.

Dickenson County is neither representative of all Appalachia nor very unique. It is what I know, other than having lived in an Appalachian part of Ohio for graduate school (Ohio University) and living in the southern toe of Appalachian, not far from where the Appalachian Trail starts at Stringer’s Mountain, Georgia.

As I study more and more about Appalachia’s history, problems, people, and narratives, I see that I must write about the region not just because of family and not just because our world needs to know more about this region that has been maligned and misunderstood. I write about it because it microcosm of human experience, just like any other place that has caught the imagination of readers. My goal is to write about it realistically. Not warts and all, as is often said, but sins and virtues, beauty and ugliness, people who build and those who might destroy, people who love and those who succumb to hate, people who are comic and those who have tragic stories, people who lose and those who win.

Appalachia has seen a resurgence in publishing in the last twenty to thirty years. Hillbilly Elegy and Demon Copperhead are two recent books about Appalachia, or supposedly about them, that have garnered a good deal of fame or notoriety, and I use notoriety in the correct way. Notorious, as in famous for bad reasons. Hillbilly Elegy purported to be about Appalachia but really was about one family that had lived there. I will leave my commentary on the Vice President’s memoir at that. Demon Copperhead is, at least partially, about one aspect of a current problem in the region, opioid addiction. Those are two examples and there are hundreds of other literary works that look at other themes, periods, and social issues. Lying In is one of a few that deals with the 1918 Flu Pandemic in an Appalachian context. The Foark River Salon and Bait Shop may seem to begin as satire and to include a lot of silliness, but I think an honest reading will reveal humans looking for answers to their personal dilemmas when external forces try to take over their lives.

I recently attended the Association of Writers and Writers Program Convention in Baltimore, MD, in March 2026. It was a stressful trip, but it was also, as I process it, worth the hassle of travel and traffic. I was not able to get to many of the sessions because I was staffing a booth, but I did get to one about Appalachian stereotypes. One of the writers is a South Asian, Hindu, lesbian writer who grew up in WV—yes, not exactly stereotypical. And another was a Black writer who grew up in an all-Black town in WV and didn’t know the rest of the state was almost completely white until he was in junior high school. It was a lively and intriguing discussion from the panel and the audience. What the panel, which included two other writers, both White and native to Appalachia, emphasized is writing about the particulars and writing about the whole person, not just the one thing that fits the stereotype. Appalachian writing has to be “beyond the stereotypes” to be real literature. That means going beyond, but not ignoring, the social, environmental, and economic issues which exist everywhere in the United States.

I bring up the AWP conference to say, I want less to write about Appalachia than I do Appalachians, and to do so as three-dimensional: good people who are capable of bad, smart people who can be stupid, selfish people who can also be giving, hard workers rather than indolent “Snuffy Smiths” running a still (some of you will not know that reference). I want to portray people who commit crimes and people who prosecute crimes, as religious people who can doubt or disobey their God, as people who love their home and yet wonder what the world beyond it is.

Ultimately, I write about Appalachia, or the part of it I know, because it is my story. I am who I am because of where my mom and dad came from, even though as I enter my eighth decade I feel that I did not really know them. Some of the memories and stories they did leave me are harsh and painful, but those stories built me. I encourage everyone to know the stories that made them, and when I say stories I don’t mean made up ones, but the real ones, the factual ones, as the trendy saying goes, “the lived experience” ones. You probably will not want to publish them in a book, but there are other ways to celebrate and find meaning in them.