To start us off . . .

West Virginia University Press, 2019

To start us off, I thought I’d highlight Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. You know, just so we're all on the same page here. 😉

“Collectively, the scholarship, personal reflections, poetry, and photography in this books offer a rejoinder to the national reportage on Appalachia that is rooted in the Hillbilly Elegy phenomenon and that defines the region monochromatically and almost completely in terms of backwardness, ignorance, isolation, violence, dependency, and passivity—ultimately as a place of social, economic, and cultural death. This book instead presents a very different Appalachia and Appalachians as a place and people with undeniable problems but also intellectual vitality, diversity (in terms of ideology, gender, and sexuality, race, and ethnicity), and powerful resilience. It is these characteristics that are lost in imagining Hillbilly Elegy as the sole window into the Appalachian experience. . . .

“So when coworkers in Maine or in-laws in Florida or even college friends in western Kentucky say that they now understand Appalachia because they have read Hillbilly Elegy, it strikes a nerve. We’ve been defined by so many journalists and filmmakers over the years who’ve briefly dropped in only to confirm what they are already suspected, and we’re sick of it.”