Everybody has to move. Thank you for coming out. Im ginger, part of the event team. If you will do me a favor and check your cell phones and make sure they are turned to vibrate. We do 300 events around town each year. If you are not on our mailing list you can set up for our mailing list at the front. We send 3 or 4 emails a month. Tonight we welcome four contributors to the anthology appalachian reckoning. Anthony harkins, meredith mccarroll, bob hutton and ivy brashear. This is a diverse, complex and the management of response to hillbilly elegy a memoir of family and culture in crisis. I will turn the floor over to them. Anthony harkins is professor of history, the author of hillbilly, a cultural history of an american icon. Meredith mccarroll is director of writing and rhetoric, the author of race and film. T. R. C. Hutton teaches american studies at the university of tennessee and is the author of it is i will say this wrong. Blood he blessed. Politics and violence published to the university of kentucky. Ivy brashear is apposition translator for Community Economic development in maria, kentucky. Welcome tonight. Thank you for coming. I will turn the floor over to you. Thanks for helping to organize this and thanks to parnassus for holding this. Can you hear all right . I want to thank West Virginia university press, the publisher of this book, this weird thing that we might do. Abby has been amazing at getting this book out there. Tony and i are going to talk about the process. We decided to have two contributors from the collection, there is a little bit going on in nashville right now. The structure tonight is a lot like the structure of this book. We will hear from tony about the concept of the book, why we wrote this book and then we will hear from bob hutton on interrogating hillbilly section of the book. And grounded in his work as a historian. Iv will read from her peace, the appalachia i know is very much alive which is drawn from the responding section of the book and a powerful personal response to hillbilly elegy a memoir of family and culture in crisis. The final section of the book is called beyond hillbilly elegy a memoir of family and culture in crisis, a collection of different voices that are not speaking directly to j. D. Vance. I will read from my piece, on academic power. From there we hope the conversation will open up and you will join us in thinking about it. You want to talk about it . I thought taylor swift was going to be here. It is not on her itinerary. Thank you all for coming, we appreciate it. The book it came as an idea from the press because i lead a panel at the Appalachian Studies conference a couple years ago on hillbilly elegy a memoir of family and culture in crisis and the reactions to it. You all know about its phenomenal book sales. There are a lot of concerns about the book. It is not just a response directly to hillbilly elegy a memoir of family and culture in crisis but a response beyond to think about what it is to be appalachian and other ways to think about the appalachian experience and move beyond the limited experience of what the appalachian experience is. I just thought i would read the questions that we are seeking answers for. What about j. D. Vance in his book account for the explosion of interest in this historical moment of National Political turmoil. Bobble speak to this as well, that book hillbilly elegy a memoir of family and culture in crisis would not be what it was without the trump phenomenon in the trump election. Other pieces in the book talk about trump appalachia, it is defined as a single sort of voting block that is important to mercy. Why have the ideas caused such a firestorm in the region . What can we learn about actual appalachia and the weight is perceived . As a student of the image, i think about what purpose these representations serve in politics and why is it, when i wrote my original book hillbilly 25 years ago i thought this image cannot continue to last. It has just been every other image of that timeframe, native stereo typical image has continued in the culture and yet hillbilly just keeps coming and coming and coming. What purpose is it serving the culture . What does it mean in the 21st century to be appalachian and most significantly, one of our contributors asks in his poem social capital what other appalachian voices have been drowned out in the attention this book has garnered. Three of us are academics and ivy brashear is a lapsed academic now doing actual work, community development. We have a lot of contributors who are not academics, who are poets, photography. We have personal narratives, we thought it was important to have multiple perspectives speaking not just from the perspective of scholarship and they are lapsing back and forth between peoples experiences and the work that they do. The book is designed to address all those different issues from a number of different visions and ultimately make the case no single book, no single voice can speak for a place as broad and diverse as appalachia. Go ahead, ivy brashear. I am good to go wherever. I am from Eastern Kentucky, and for five generations we have lived in central appalachia for ten generations. I have been told to be proud of where we come from and who we are, to be proud of cornbread and sauerkraut, to be proud of playing in the creek in the summertime making but pies with my cousin and all that. When i got older and into the world and saw the narratives, but people who live there i was angry, most of the stories told about the region are false or at the very least lacking in some way so my response was about that, pushing back on who gets to tell the story of this place because it matters. It matters who tells the story, it matters what those stories are because those stories help to construct what the place is. This guy here, is it accurate, lacking in distinct ways. How do we combat that . We tell our own stories. Thats what i tried to do in my essay and i would like to read a little bit of it. Beginning, middle and end, into this space and try to bring her in when i can so i will start with her and a little bit of her story. She had had enough. She back along the road in front of her house, lifts the virginia slim in her mouth, pulled it from her purse, determined. The trip and been running day and night, in front of her house every day for weeks. They were toting every bit of furniture in an outside her home with a thick layer, her kitchen counter, the rocking chair she sat in when watching the price is right in the morning and wheel of fortune in the evening. The porch swings, the hanging ferns that encircled her porch, nothing could escape the intrusive dust kicked up from the road by the trip as they bailed backandforth to the mine, the dust squirreled in sick clouds seeping in under the front door and closed windows. It buried everything no matter the efforts to keep the tides that may hold the tsunamis were inescapable. Theres only so many times a womans windex can clean up after someone elses miss before the time comes to act. Give me 3 hot meals a day and a place to sleep, she proclaimed to my dad, to remove her 1woman barricade. She wasnt making a political stand, she was more interested in defending her home from unclean intrusions. He didnt make the truck stop forever but did turn around and go home that infamous day and she couldnt take it any longer. A small victory for a woman who fought for everything she had. Fierce is a good word, fiercely loyal to her children and grandchildren. She threatened to coach at the local hospital, give her son a letterman jacket, fierce advocate for doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. She kept most of the hungry children in saint customer kentucky fed their entire childhood. Fierce mountain woman with big dreams of city life playing piano and singing in chicago or new york city but 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 the fierce sense of duty. To me she was granny, a fierce storyteller had the most enormous zest for love and life with hard to match. The last thing to echo on the walls and reverberate off the hills, music was her one true love second only to the fierce, expensive love she had for her family. Made up songs about everyday life, rolled up her lips as easily as the values, she would often catch the words someone spoke to her and trail off into a song containing the word. The sunshine is bright today, she would answer in melody, in the paths, in the paths where the sun never shines, she always wore pink lipstick and white powder and clip on earrings, she had arthritis in her toes from a youth spend in high heels with matching dresses, she was a beautiful woman. Once she took her firstborn to have their portraits made and her photographer was so struck by her beauty she insisted on taking her portrait too. She is wearing pearls in that photo. She maintained a standing hair appointment every friday, always had short hair which she preferred even for her only daughter, my mom preferred what her parents wanted. She got her drivers license and earned her ged when she was in her 40s, kept a newspaper clipping in a drawer, her and her fellow ged recipients, she lived the life of confinement in some ways always meeting others expectations inside minor own dreams in the process. Her middleage was about reclaiming independence, creating life outside her husband and children. She was and remains one of the fiercest, strongest women i have ever known. We lived up the hill from her and i knew her door was open to me. I could run down the hill and into her house without warning any day and she would welcome me in welcoming me with food and conversation. She put up peaches and bags for winter, i watered her 11 hanging ferns, she played piano every sunday, the Family Church founded by my great grandfather a mile from my home. She told me i had piano fingers. I felt so special like she had chosen me to carry on her music. Sometimes mom and i would visit in the evening, watch wheel of fortune coming in the summer her porch would be filled with families who lived with a mile radius, great aunts, cousins, uncles and neighbors, lots of updates to family stories late into the evening. She was outspoken. Once telling a man to get a life and get a job and another time telling longtime preachers 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 and praised her and followed her lead. I would never ever in my wildest dreams or imaginings disrespect her in any format because of her fairness by calling her a lunatic as j. D. Vance referred to his mama in his memoir hillbilly elegy a memoir of family and culture in crisis was the way he describes this woman he claims to revere and credit as the reason he made it out of his low income life in suburban ohio and Yale Law School is shameful. He sells out his family members by tapping into long history, distorted and intentionally made stereotypical images of central appalachia that have been imposed on my region by outside media makers for 300 years. After the prospectors were spent and the region by George Washington himself. His history of misleading images of the place and people who live there proves his end game, monetary gain and National Notoriety to bolster a potential political run for office supported of course by his carefully created and curated self image as a socalled expert on the white workingclass of appalachia. 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. Appalachia in fact, is a very matriarchal culture. We revere our grandmothers and mothers. We follow their lead as they enter the workforce because their husbands have been laidoff. For generations theyd have grown and harvested 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 economy in the way that is largely ignored and made invisible and unimportant and false narratives. In reality the work and Country Visions of women, people of color comic where folks across the region are vital to its past, present, and future survival. In short, hillbilly elegy present and, appalachia and whih my experiences and those of my family and those of many of the people i know and love in the region did not exist. It erases my story. A young appalachian with roots ten generations deep in kentucky whose ancestors settled five generations ago. I hold within meet the fierce loyalty and determination of my grandma, the unconditional compassion, the individuality of my parents and the mountain heart and soul, the private dignity of all my ancestors combined. And the truth is, we are an incredibly Diverse People in efficacy, race, class, beliefs and thoughts come just like any other place in america. We are the descendents of native people, slaves, subsistent farmers, coal miners, homemakers, schoolteachers, sharecroppers, business owners, eastern europeans and africans. I 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 disenfranchisement. Some of us are coal miners but more of his work in healthcare. Some of us live in abject poverty, a few of us live in extreme wealth and most of us live in the middle trying desperately monthtomonth to make it all worked. In these ways we are very similar to anyny other world ple in america right now, just try to figure out our place in a 21st century world that has for the most part left us to fend for ourselves. Whether j. D. Vance or anybody else in big medias orbit wants to admit it, those of us who are from or currently live in the region are all appalachians and we allll have a story to tell about the place we love, the place where our bones are from, the place j. D. Could only dream about truly knowing. My granny had enough that day. Although she didnt end up in jail and never faced punitive action for taking tuesday, she took matters into her own hands because as the dissent of generations of people, who have to do for themselves just to survive, she knew thats the way of appalachian people. Perhaps rather than the false narratives about our dna being encoded with laziness and poverty, the true makeup of our genes is intense selfreliance. We always hadse everything taken from us and weve always had other people telling us and everyone else who we are. So weve had to make do with what we already had for decades. As a result we become experts at cleaning up other peoples messes. We have cleaned up the messes and in my mental disasters left by extracting extraction compae artificial messes corporations try to make between us, and among races. Weve worked to clean up the mess big media have made us into. And long after we cleaned up what j. D. Vance has 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 simpler, false narratives about our place. Until then we will be waiting to clean up any new messes while simultaneously building our brighter future, despite the narratives telling us we cant do it and that we are not worth it. We simply t no better. More than anything, weve 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 to read a portion of that the strangest thing is what happened next. My mom asked me if she could borrow the copy i said of course in prevention with the review few months passed and i found out tony wanted to do a panel, he wanted a cop and asked for back for my mom. She said id donate it to a library us and why did you do that . She said you didnt like it. [laughter] i told her in academia sometimes we have to keep the books we dont like. So my very heavily marked up copy is in the Public Library and blacktop mountain and virginia very close to the Presbyterian Church were my mom preaches. So i will dedicate this reading to her and her congregation. I hope someone, whether they enjoyed the book i hope someone is actually reading that copy because i will never see it again. [laughter] also before what to start reading a went to mention my reaction i think was somewhat different when i did get around to reading it in august of 2016 i think it was obvious even though im from appalachia, reading it i didnt really seat much of appalachia in it. Instead of region, my first couple thoughts were more about economics so this is a little bit of what my reaction was i also want to mention thanks who allow this to be reproduced and appalachian reckoning was very nice of them. So anyway, hillbilly elegy is basically a work of what i would call self congratulations. [laughter] a literary victory lap in a vindication of the minimalist safety. Wasnt surprised someone like david brooks manure times with such a fan. Condescension over grew the love and what he called the crazy hillbillies phrase that comes up quite often in the book. His book ultimately illustrates the oxymoron, the capitalism and its defenders require. That is, any hardworking individual could rise to the top, but it any given time, far more individuals must remain on the bottom. This is a narrative for which many if not most of the american reading public has shown affection. The bipartisan popularity in 2016 that time when bipartisanship is in short supply the gist of the american reading public still wants to hear about and appalachia and by extension aye working class that is uniform tractable and easy to understand. The public advertise the complexity today is perhaps lower than usual weather social. The fact is Silicon Valley millionaire is the most popular sou