I showed up at the Millennium Cincinnati for the annual Appalachian Studies Association conference with a reservation and trash bag luggage, and some serious class guilt for asking the bellhop to drag my crinkly burden all the way to the eighteenth floor…
Tag: Appalachian Features
From Granny Witch to Modern Midwife: Catching Babies in Eastern KY
My own personal experience with women’s care in Eastern Kentucky is pretty much limited to finding birth control as a teen. A friend drove me to the health department, and I ended up with a doc who was the mother of a younger school acquaintance. She was surprised that I was a virgin…
Granny Witch of the Week: Byron Ballard
“We are house-clearing, baby-blessing, marriage-making, herb-swilling miscreants who answer to our personal ethical codes. We heal, we hex, we dance, we howl.”
Appalachian Pride: B is for Bisexual/ Frankie Wolf
This piece was part of the show “Queerology 101,” performed in April 2017 for Rowan County Pride. In the show, a misguided professor attempts to define each letter of LGBTQ, getting it wrong every time. For the B, he said that, like the Sasquatch, Appalachian Black Panther, and other “mythical” creatures, there simply was no proof that bisexuals are real.
Queer Appalachia: Not-So-Mythical Critters
The Appalachian LGBTQ+ community doesn’t need me to say a damn thing for them. Their voices are ringing down the gravel roads and bouncing off twenty story buildings. If you listen you might learn something…
Ridge & Holler: If Your Right Hand Offends Then Use Your Left
Lonnie Ray was all gangly arms and lanky legs and big ears and toothy grin when he lit out across the Ohio River looking for work. His big brother in the driver’s seat put his mind at ease and they had some food to hold them over till their first payday: a couple fried baloney and biscuit sandwiches, six Cokes, four whole Hershey bars. The Skaggs boys weren’t strangers to growling bellies. That grumble and a little gnawing on their backbones didn’t intimidate them boys a bit.
RABBLE LIT 