Book tv. Org. For the title of his book the American Dream is not dead using the search box at the top of the page. Okay. Good evening everyone and thank you all for joining us tonight. , im behalf of carmichaels bookstore im delighted to welcome you to tonights event. If we could take a moment and silence are cell phone i would greatly appreciate that. Tonight we are joined by kathy chambers who was the day bore honors her childhood appalachia and the strong women who raised her. She went on to earn a degree from harvard law and has now worked extensively with Domestic Violence survivors here in kentucky. She currently lives in louisville with her husband. Please join me and giving a very warm welcome to cassie. Think you all. I just want to thank everyone for being here and coming out in the rain on a cold night. Its wonderful to see you all here. I want to thank carmichaels for hosting this eventlli please carmichaels and does so does so much for our community. Please purchase books. Lets support them and use our dollars to do that. At the end of tonight i would appreciate it. I will be assigning them over at the signing table after this wraps up. P. What i want to do tonight and can read some excerpts and talk a little bit about why i wrote this book and what inspired me to write it. And give you all a little bit of an overview of how this book came to be and how i came into the world. After that i will have time for questions so please anything that is on your mind i would love to hear from you all. E i look for to hearing your thoughts on this book. And anything you head on your mind. The first part that i want to read comes from the introduction when i am talking about alloway county. This is in kentucky. One of the poorest counties in all of america is sort of in deep appalachia a small county county about 4500 people. It is hard foror me to know which part of the county i should share it with the rest of the world. The broken fallen in places helps people to understand the extent of the poverty. Ce i do want them to know how deep it goes. Maybe if they understand it they can help fix it. I also dont want them to think that this poverty is all that exists in appalachia. To see its hopeless. Broken. Dirty. Hi that is not what i see when i look at this place that i love. Along the way some of the lawns are scattered with what appears to be junk. Old car parts. Refrigerators, childrens toys. I know that for some people the piles of useless stuff serve a purpose in the entrepreneurial one at that. People here make a living however they can selling old car parts. Refrigerators organizing yard sales they collect anything a possible value because they do not know what will come in handy. If nothing else they can sell the junk in a nearby town. They are always thinking of ways to earn money help a neighbor provide for a family there is drives creativity effort in unexpected places. Some people look at this image a positive poverty with disgust. Others view it with aiv sense of pity those poor people w trapped in set off awful circumstances. I try to look at it with a sense of respect to remember how hard they are working to survive in the other corner of the world they call home. But last view. The fewest truest of me. In the categories that outsiders want to create. There is hope in the spirit of the people who find creative ways to exist. And men and women who take care of each other even when the outside world does not take care of them. And people who broke their bodyem and tobacco fields and calm winds to make a living inly their only community they have ever known. We dont take the time to see it the hope and the poverty the spark against the drury backdrop. In the mountain women. I see it every day in my clients once i recognize it i side effects everywhere. The way it has shaped me. Not everything is exceptional exceptionally horrible or virtuous with whatever we wanted to be. In many ways it is ordinary for normal People Living normal lives these lives take t a different shape than they do and some other places but the basic themes are the same. People care about lovee community family. About a mile outside of town is a narrow gravel road that drops dramatically over the side of the help. It is called cal creek. It shows the name with this dream that cut through. I am at the bottom of this valley a small flat space enclosed by rolling hills. On the top of one of the hills is a farmhouse looking out on the fields below. It resembles an elderly woman leaning into itself fully around an ever weakening structure it is great now. The wood and boards are worn and faded. There is a strength in its brokenness it has withstood whether time and families. Its vacant now resting, watching waiting as nude day go through. This house feels like family. There are stories here stories of resilience and love and strength this Community Knows them will but their echo has not reached far enough into the outside world fut instead, they have ricocheted within the mounds growing more faint with time. T i want to tell the stories because they matter because i am afraid they will be forgotten because they have the power to make this community visible as i stopped my vehicle and walked towards the house the memories wash over me like the sunlight on the mountain hills. Em and so this introduction i think it says a lot about why i wrote hell women and how i see it being in conversation with some other depictions. That we see being really popular in recent years and presently. Around 2016 there was a lot of things been written about appalachia at a lot of people emre depicting the problems there. They were problems that i saw. But what i was hearing a lot about was the hope and the way that people were coping with those problems in the Creative Solutions i wrote this book in large part to tell that side of the story to show that there really is hope in these communities that people talk about the problem so often that there is hope in poverty and strength in communities that struggle. I have always known this i had been awarerend of these virtuesf appalachia and the way that struggling communities have so much to offer it wasnt until i began seeing these other for trails and books that i realized something about the story about the community was noteworthy. Its not something that anybody else would be interested in. All the sudden the stories start coming out about people who came from the background of poverty and then went to the hold of the ivy leaguee and some how that was a journey w. And look to people telling the stories in many ways they have very similar plot points to my own life story and i realized from the outside that is what my life looks like. K that is what the story of my familys life looks like. It looks like a story of being born in a trailer. And then going on to have the opportunity to earn a degree. The way that i thought about those experiences was very different than what i was reading about. Everything i have and every opportunity that i had was because of my community and because of those people that shaped me and formed me. I talk about this book a lotme i call it the anti boot strap narrative. We all know about the pull yourself up by the bootstraps. The take away from my story is that the only reason i was able to do that is because not just my immediate family and my Immediate Community but the generations that came before me and how the women in my family is try to do something a little bit better for the next generation. And for the women came after them. Its really at its core. Its a story about women in the ways that they work to make their communities better and make their families t better. Just to give you a little bit of a calm text and the flavor and the stories that are in it. It starts off with my grandmother i called my grandmother granny. She at a third grade education. Poverty is so bad that her blanket used to freeze at night because her house was so cold. F she never got to go to the movies or play or to a restaurant or even have toys. She was treated like an adult from the time she was a child. And more than anything and she didnt really have the ability to understand what getting an education meant. She wanted her children to be able to do better than she have done. And to go further than she had been able to go. She had seven children the sixth of which was my mom f she pushed my mom to graduate high school. Because of my moms sister ruth who encouraged her to get a degree. She became the first and in her family to graduate high school. She went to brea college many of you know our familiar with that. It allowed her to get a Free Education which was something her family did not have the money to have. And quite frankly if she have to go into debt. She would not had have the chance to get her degree if she had head that variation. My mom coming from that background saw the way education changed her life. For her she felt like she have come so far from that holler that nobody left to be able to go to brea college where she felt like she could learn about ideas in the world had and just head her horizons brought in. She raised me to believe that there was nothing i was not capable of being and doing. She believed i have the ability to do anything in the world that i wanted to. And because my mom instilled in me from a very early age how important it was to go and get an education and experience the world take chances because shed take a taken chances i was able to go on and earn a scholarship to yale college. All of the effort and care has been able to go to who they are. I returned to kentuckyho and came back. Trying to continue to provide other opportunities. I have another expert that i want to read from the book that plays on that theme. When i was 5 00 my mother graduated from college. I remember getting a new dress for this occasion. It have a lace trim and a delicate flower print. My mother bought me a child side down. And let me walk with her in the professional. We are graduating. We walked past them down the aisle. I didnt know how you know how true the statement was. Graduate with a degree my mother changed both of our lives. How the value they have come to place an education. Al the ability to better understand themselves and their family would help me up ur success. The local newspaper ran a picture of the two of us. My mother and me thinning sidebyside. Sitting sidebyside. I focus forward. Graduated to the next phase of my life. The last thing i want to talk about. Ut i want to have a conversation about appalachia. I called myself a onewoman traveling law firm. I had had a printer in the back of my car and met clients in subways, gas stations an Public Libraries and i got very good at figuring out how people didnt have access to technology and email things when they didnt have an email address and i have a lot of really fun memories from, you know, life on the road. But in this work one of the things that was important to me was to find tangible ways to make the system better because my experience working in rural kentucky and in Eastern Kentucky showed me that there are a lot of barriers that exist in places that we dont necessarily see them. When i was working in the Civil Justice system, i saw the way that there were a lot of financial barriers that stopped women from being able to fully access to court system and keep themselves and their families safe. We talk about this a lot in the criminal law context. A lot of people here, you know, have the right to an attorney. If you cant afford an attorney, an attorney will be provided for you and people dont realize that you donthe have the same right in the civil law context. When i was working with the women trying to get custody orders or protective orders, they didnt necessarily have a right to get an attorney and so i was representing them for free and that was certainly helpful but it wasnt always enough but there are a lot of times there are fees, attorney appointed for your children, commissioner systems, you to pay hourly fees to have your case heard on the docket. All the little fees that add up, and one of the things that i noticed was that there was a law on the books that required women or anyone if they wanted to divorce an abusive partner and the partner was in jail for assaulting them, the law required that that person be appointed an attorney which in itself is not a bad thing. I believe that people should have representation and if theyre incarcerated they should have a lawyer to make sure interests are represented. The problem with the law was who had to pay for that attorney and in these situations the person seeking the divorce normally the person who had been, you know, the victim of the abuse or the person was in jail for abusing them, it was that person, the victim, the survivor who got stuck with then legal bill for that and i saw time and again that this made women feel that the court was working for their abuser and made them hesitant to use the legal system to get the kind of help and relief that they needed. They saw it as a place that didnt protect their interests and didnt have anything to help them. Ti decided to work with one ofy clients, a woman named janet to be able to address this problem and i believe strongly in correspondent of clientdriven solutions and partnering with people who experience the problems the most to find solutions to them together, and so i want to read an excerpt from the latter part of the book where im talking about janets and our work together. So what janet and i did together started with me saying, janet, can i use your story as a way to try to make the system better, janet had a pretty, you know, dramatic story. She had experienced violence and abuse for a number of years at the hands of her then husband. One night he came home, he was intoxicated, he assaulted her. He fired a pistol at her and the bullet ripped through her clothing and her clothes to this place are in police custody. At first it was just me asking janet if i could use her story, the fact when she tried to get the divorce she got stuck with a legal bill so that he could have a lawyer even though i was crepresenting her for free because she couldnt afford an attorney, and every time that ive asked a a survivor, can i tell your story to try to make stories better for other people, the person had said, yes, absolutely, if my story can help someone, use it. The fact that she had to pay for her incarcerated husband have an attorney although she couldnt have one, she we wanted to tell the world and wanted to make a change. I wrote an oped and i started to tell a story and got attention and s lawmakers fileda bill and at that point janet said, you knoww what, im okay telling myam story myself, i wat to use my face, i want to use my name, i want to carry the torch because im not ashamed anymore, im not embarrassed and im not afraid. I want to make the system better myself. Janet and i had conversations about how she could get involved and one of the most powerful things ive ever seen, janet decidingak to testify in front f the kentucky General Assembly and go on news media and tell anyone and k everyone that would about her story and experience and why it mattered and why things needed to change, and so as a result of that a bill passed through the kentucky General Assembly and was signed into law by the governor and it was calledhr janets law and it was named after her and to this day the thing shes most proud of in the world and im so proud to have t been able to watch her transform the system that had taken advantage of her and so i want to read you a little bit of an excerpt about janet and janets law. My experience with janet was a powerful reminder about the importance of telling womens stories, her voice led to tangible changes in the state law. Because of her bravery other womens laws will be better and each one is just that, a win, and each win is a reminder that things can change. These wins are also a reminder that the people who have been victimized by a spouse or unjust system are nonetheless powerful. Some people portray survivors of Domestic Violence as weak. Some people portray the women in appalachia the same way. I think janets story illustrates the opposite. Ooen given the right tools, support, and environment, these women are capable of changing the world. And so with that, i will conclude my reading part of of the night and i really look forward to hearing all of you alls questions. Again, i want to thank carl michael and support your local bookstores, with that,i will open it up to questions. Theres a microphone at the aisle here and i know to make sure that we are capturing the audio, stay ask that you speak into the microphone if you have a question. [applause] any questions . Ly ask a i will ask a. Question. Im also an attorney. Wonderful. I think up with of the books that youre talking about is hill billy you got it. [laughter] i also had a similar negative reaction to it because i had a great time growing up in Eastern Kentucky. I was lucky and and was not in the poorest county and it was a wonderful place to grow up at the time. Another thing that i want ask you, how do you pronounce vinea sausages. Viena. We pronounce them viena sausages. I will take that. Im from morrison county. Okay, thats good to know. Just to touch on that, one of the books that gained a lot of attention and became what the rest of the world knew about appalachia was hillbilly ideal and focuses on problems and on people and doesnt acknowledge the ways that systems have marginalized people over time and how hard people are really working in marginalized communities and how much honor theres in that and working hard in a community thats been marginalized over time and that was one of the driving forces behind writing hill women, trying to put something in the world that show the true view of appalachia and the positive view of appalachia and women on the Community Take on leadership roles, but they make a difference in the community and in the larger world and i think that this is a book, i hope it elevates womens voices and tells womens stories. Thank you for the question. Any other questions . I see someone in the back. Yeah, let me take hers and i will get you. I was wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what it was like to write about your family and both they were going to read it and people who knew or didnt know your family that were going to read it and if you thank you for the question. So for those of you that might not be able to hear the question was about the process of writing a m memoir and what its like to write about your family and write about people that are going toto read the book. So b to write a memoir i think s a really interesting process and sseres a lot to be said. I think you have to work with an editor that really understands you and how your brain works. Im lucky that my editor is here tonight. Shes an incredible woman