So think you guys for coming out tonight my name is ginger and a part of the team here. If you will do me a favor and check your cell phones and make sure they are turned to vibrate. We have had it author who has had his phone go off. We do about 300 events around town each year. If you are not on our mailing list and want to know what else is coming up, you should sign up for mailing list at the front. We will not spam you we will send three to four emails. Month. Tonight we welcome for contributors to the anthology reckoning, going to see if i get this right, tony harkins, meredith mccarroll, bob hudson, and iv bashir. This is a diverse response to hillbilly allergy. Shares a little bit about eat these for contributors and then ill turn the floor over to them. Tony harkins is the author of hillbilly a cultural history of an american icon. Meredith mccarroll is a directive writing and rhetoric at Bowdoin College he is an author. Bob hudson teaches at the university of tennessee and knoxville and is an author. And iv bashirs transition kumar data for Community Economic development in kentucky. Welcome tonight, thank you guys for coming. Im going to turn the floor over to you. So thank you for helping organize this, and thanks for having us. And thanks all for being here. Can you hear all right . Okay. I also want to thank West VirginiaUniversity Press who is the publisher for this book. Who sought this kind of weird thing that we wanted to do and kind of helped us to this thing we might do. Derek and abby have been especially amazing at helping get this book out there. Tony and eiko edited this collection, we will talk about that process. We are really excited to have two contributors hear from the collection. So thanks to both iv and bob for making the drive to nashville. Theres a little bit coin on in nashville right now. [laughter] so the structure tonight is going to be a lot like the structure of the book. We will hear from tony about the concept of the book, basically why we wrote this book. Then we will hear from bob, his pieces in the interrogating section of the book. He will read a bit about hillbilly elite is him which is grounded in his work as a historian. I will read herpes, appalachia is very much live which is drawn from the responding section of the book. And ivs piece is a powerful personal response to hillbilly allergy. And the final section of the book is called beyond hillbilly and it is a good collection of different voices that are not speaking directly to jd vance. I will read a little bit about my peace and then academic powder in and that section. And then from there, just like the book we hope that the conversation will open up and you will join us in thinking about it. Tony wanted talk a little bit about it . So i thought taylor swift was good to be here. [laughter] anyway on to thank you all for coming. The book said West Virginia publish the book but in many ways they also sort of came into the idea from the press because i had led a panel at the appellation study conference a couple of years ago. On hillbilly elegy and the reactions to it. And you wont know about it as a kind of phenomenal book sales. It would there is a lot of concerns about the books i lead this panel and out of that is this book and its not just a response directly to hillbilly elegy its also a response beyond that to think about what it is to be appalachian, how we move beyond this experience of the limited vision of what the experience is, to discuss more. And i just thought i would read the questions that will be thinking the answers mike will be seeking answers for. What about vance and his book counts for the explosion of appalachian and its people, its a historical moment of political turmoil. I think all of you can speak to this as well. But certainly that book, hillbilly elegy would not be without the trump phenomenon and the trump election. Then there pieces and their which you think about the construction of the idea trump alaska that all of the lashes a single float and trim voting block its important diversity. Why have the ideas in hillbilly elegy called such a firestorm in the region . What come and learn about the actual appalachian, and will how it is perceived from its reactions . As a student of the image, and the image of the hillbilly, i think a lot about what purpose are these representations serving in politics . And why is it that when i wrote this book, with my original book of thought this ct continue to because it has just been every other image of that timeframe and i started to looking early 1900s this meant negative stereotypical has been discontinued in the culture because we move beyond. Yet hillbilly keeps coming and coming and coming. So what purpose is it serving the culture . What is it mean in the 21st century to be appalachian. And perhaps most significantly one of our contributors asks in his poem social capital, what other appalachian voices have been drowned out in the flood of attention for this book have garnered . We are well three of us are academics and iv as a lapsed academic. [laughter] Community Development something that matters. [laughter] we have a lot of contributors in the book or not academics who are poets who are photography we have personal narratives and we have scholarship we thought it was really important to have multiple perspectives and voices that are speaking not just from the perspective of a scholarship but also lived experience. These things are constantly lapsing back and forth between peoples experience in the kind of work they do. So the book is designed to address all of those different issues, from a number of different visions and to ultimately make the case that no single book, no single voice can speak for a place as broad and diverse as appalachian. Thank you. I can do that goahead ivy. Im good to go wherever. So maybe should come up with how you can help with the topic. I am from appalachia, eastern kentucky. My family has lived at the head of the creek for five generations. We have lived in central appalachian for ten generations. We are pretty deeply rooted in this place. I think all my life i have been told to be proud of where we come from and be proud of who we are. To be proud of eating soup beans and cornbread and sauerkraut. To be proud of playing in the creeks in the summertime barefoot and making bad pies with my cousins and all of that. So, you know, when i got older and out into the world and sought the narratives that were being told about our place and the people who live there. I was rightfully angry. Because most of the stories that are told about the region are false. Or at the very least lacking in some way. My responses about that its pushing back on who gets to tell the stories of this place. Because it matters. It matters who tells the story, it matters what the stories are. Because those stories help to construct with this place is. In my mind it was like this guy got here telling the story that is not accurate. But is lacking in some very distinct ways, how do we combat that in the way we combat that is until her own stories. And thats what i tried to do in my essay. And i would like to read just a little bit of it. Beginning middle and end is how its structured im good to read you some pieces of it. Beginning with she deserves to be in all the spaces. Submitted try to bring her and when i can. So i will start. I will start with her. And a little bit of her story. Della trump berkshire had had enough. She backed her cadillac long ways across the one lane road in front of her house, lift the virginia slim in her mouth, pulled her 38 pistol from her purse and waited. Stonefaced and determined for the next cold truck to come along. The truck had been running day and night, up and down the head of the creek in front of her house every day for weeks. They were coaching every bit of furniture in and outside of her home with a thick layer of group coldest. Her kitchen counter, the rocking chair she sat in wall watching the price is right in the morning and well fortune in the evening. The porch swings, the hanging firms that encircled her ports, nothing could escape the intrusive insidious dust kicked up from the road by the trucks as they barreled the backandforth to the strip mine on the overlooking mountain. The dust swirled and thick gray clouds around the house, seeping in under the front door and closed windows. It buried everything. No matter her efforts to keep the tides at baked cold dust synonymys were inescapable theres only so many things a time can have clorox, pledge, and when next can clean up after someones mass before the time comes to ask. She was not afraid of jail, go get me three hot meals a day in the place to sleep she proclaimed to my dad when he tried to persuade her to remove her onewoman barricade. She is not really making a political stand against sin oppressive industry. She was more interested in defending her home from unwanted, unclean intrusion. She did it make the trip stock forever, but they did turn around and go home, that infamous day when she couldnt take it any longer. A small victory for a woman who fought for nearly everything she had. Fierce is a good word for her. Fiercely loyal to her children and grandchildren. She wants threaten the coach at the local high school so that he would give her son a lettermans jacket. Fierce advocate for doing onto others as you would have them do unto you. Legend has it she kept most of the hungry children and christopher, kentucky fed their entire childhood. Pearson mountain woman who had big dreams of city life, playing piano and singing in chicago or new york city. But who instead married a man, her mother picked for her, before she graduated high school. She stayed with him until the end of her life because of a fierce sense of duty. To me though, she was brandy. I fierce storyteller who had the most enormous zest for love and life. With a heart to match. Her laugh seemed to always echo off the walls and reverberate off the hills that held the hauler. Music was her one true love, second only to the fierce expansive love she had for her family. Made up songs about everyday life rolled over her lips as easily as the fall rolls into the valleys. Shoot often catch a word someone spoke to her and trail off into a song contained with those words. The sun sure is bright today seven would say, she would answer in the melody in the pines, and the pines were the sun never shines she always wore pink lipstick and white powder, and clipon earrings. She had arthritis in her toes from a spent in high heels with matching dresses. She was a beautiful woman. Once she took her to firstborn to have their portraits made in hazard and the photographer was so struck by her beauty he insisted on taking her portrait two. She was wearing pearls in that photo, she was always put together like that. She maintained a standing hair appointment every friday at the beauty shop. She always had short hair, which she preferred, even for her only daughter, my mom who preferred the opposite of almost everything her parents wanted. Granny got her drivers license and earned her ged when she was in her 40s. She kept a newspaper clipping in a drawer that was a picture of her and her fellow ged recipients that year. She lived a life of confinement in some ways, always meeting others expectations and sidelining her own dreams of the process. Her middle ages about reclaiming her independence, creating a life outside of her husband and children. She was, and remains, one of the fiercest, strongest women ive ever known. Iger upper neighbor, would live just up the hill from her and i knew her door was always open to me. I could run down the hill and into her house without warning any day and she would welcome me in, offering me food and conversation. I was often in her kitchen and she put up peaches and ziploc bags for winter, watered her beloved ferns and caged her porch. She. Played piano every day at the baptist church, the Church Founded by my great grandfather less than a mile from my home. When she told me i had piano fingers i felt so special. Like she had chosen me to it carry on her music. Sometimes mom and i would visit in the evenings and watched wheel of fortune with her. In the summer her porch of the full of family who lived within a mile radius. Great aunts and uncles, cousins, neighbors, life updates and family stories to be swapped late into the hours of the evening. Granite was a gregarious and outspoken. Once telling a man to get a life and get a job. And another time telling a longtime preacher he was wrong about god not giving people talent they didnt have to learn. Everyone knew where they stood with her, and where she stood on certain issues. Mostly everyone knew you didnt cross her or just respect her. They revered her and praised her and followed her lead. She was one fierce mountain woman, and it showed. But i would never ever in my wildest dreams or imaginings, disrespect her in any format. Because of her fierceness by calling her a lunatic as jd vancil often referred to his memo and his memoir hillbilly elegy. The way he describes this woman, who claims to revere in credits is the reason he made it out of his low income life in suburban ohio, and into Yale Law School is shameful. I displays a willingness to sell out his family members by tapping into the long history of distorted, false, and intentionally made stereotypical images of some troll appalachia that have been imposed on my region by outside media makers for nearly 300 years. Ever since the first white land prospectors were sent into the region by George Washington himself. Fences willingness to tap into that long history of misleading images of the place and people who live there, proves his endgame. Monetary gain and National Notoriety to bolster a potential political run for office. Supported of course by his carefully created and curated self image. And his socalled expert on the White Working Class of appalachia. A place for which he has never lived. His only connection to the realities were visits with grandparents who traveled home for short periods for a few summers when vance was a child. Vance also actively diminishes, glosses over, and ignores the reality of the Critical Role that appalachia women play. And have played in the economy and in shaping the regions culture and understanding of itself. Appalachian facts, in the very matriarch of culture. We revere our grandmothers and mothers. We follow their lead as they enter the workforce because their husbands have been laid off. For generations, they have grown and harvested our food and fed our bellies three times a day. They have stood on picket lines when men were banned from doing so. They have chained themselves to bulldozers and refused to leave their homes. They prop up our economy in a way that is largely ignored and made invisible and unimportant and false narratives like vances. In reality, the work and contributions of these women, people of color, and queer folks across the region are vital to this past, present, future survival. In short, hillbilly elegy. Denson appalachian which my experiences and those of my family, and those of many of the people i know and love in the region, do not exist. It erases my story, a young clear appalachian with roots ten generations deep in eastern kentucky. His ancestors settled ahead of the creek five generations ago. I hold within me the fierce loyalty enter termination of my granny. The unconditional compassion of my granny hazel, the individual of my parents and the mountain heart and soul. The pride and dignity of all my ancestors combine. And the truth is, we are an incredibly Diverse People in ethnicity, race, class, beliefs, and thoughts. Just like any other place in america. We are the descendents of native people, slaves, subsistent farmers, homeowners, homemakers, schoolteachers, sharecroppers, business owners, eastern europeans, africans. A rapidly increasing number of us have come from mexico or south america. We are gay, straight, and everything in between. We are democrats and republicans. And more than anything, most of us dont vote at all because of apathy and disenfranchised meant. Some of us are coal miners, but more of its work in healthcare. Some of us live in abject poverty, few of us leaving extreme wealth. In most of live in the middle trying desperately monthtomonth to make it all work. In these ways, we are very similar to any other world place in america right now. Just trying to figure at our place in a 21st century world that has for the most part left us to fend for ourselves. Whether jd vancil or anybody else wants to admit it, those of us who are from or currently live in the region are all appalachians and we all have a story to tell about the place we love. The place where our bones are from. The place vance could only dream of ever truly knowing. My granny della had had enough that day although she did not end up in jail and never faced any punitive action for taking your stand she took matters into her own hands because as a descendent of generations of people who had to do for themselves just to survive, she inherently knew that was aware the appalachian people. Perhaps rather than the false narratives about her dna being encoded with laziness and poverty, the true makeup of our genes is intense selfreliance. We always had everything taken from us. And we have always had other people telling us, and everyone else, who we are. So we have had to make do with what we already had for decades. We have become experts at cleaning up other peoples messes. We have cleaned up the messes and environmental disasters left by fraction companies and the artificial message corporations try to make between and among races. And wework to clean up the mess big media has made us into. And long after we clean up what jd vances done, we will go on living in this place, making stories here and telling them to anyone who will listen. Maybe someday our complex stories will overpower the simple or false narratives about our place. Until then, we will be waiting to clean up any new messes will simultaneously building a Brighter Future despite the narrative telling us we cant do it and that we arent worth it. We simply know better. And more than anything, we have had enough of those lies. Thank you. [applause] [applause] well, i first heard about this book in the summer of 2016 im sure thats the case with a lot of people here. Not because i have a spot at the bookstore, well, im from southern appalachia and i teach history at a university that sometimes acknowledges it isnt appalachian sometimes it doesnt. And i teach that history. When the book started circulating the summer of 2016 that had the word hillbilly in it, a bunch of people had asked me if i had read this book. For the first half of this some more nothing except every one asking about of these see if you things on the internet, finally sometime in august someone send me a copy and asked me to it review it. In a moment im going t