A Letter: Appalachian History and Literature
Dr. Berry.
I thought i’d send you a quick note to begin discussing a paper topic. I am entirely at a loss here, so i thought maybe you could help me get on the right track toward a sucessful topic selection. If it is at all possible, i would like to read about the place where I come from, as it is very different from Eastern Tennessee or Kentucky. Most of the general ideas we’ve discussed do apply there, but differently. I certainly know what you meant today when you discussed that tension that exists within the homesickness, and in discussing that very matter i’ve most often come up against a problem when people are at different stages in that development of attitude we discussed today as well. (as an aside, i had a girlfriend and self proclaimed radical feminist two years ago, and she became more furious than i had ever seen anyone ever be at the mere suggestion that the language where she comes from might be a part of a heritage and might not be as horrible as she had been taught to believe. I would think she would want to shirk notions of cultural inferiority jsut as much as those of gender inferiority, but a swift punch in the stomach proved me quite wrong.)
anyway… I’ve noticed another dichotomy like the one concerning pros/cons in appalachia. Thinking about where I’m from in the context of appalachian studies, I’ve begun to see a lot of cultural invasion. I’ve begun to see a history of cultural invasion. The hippies and the Back to the Land people flooded the place years before i was born. Lured by romantic notions that the “folk way” was an answer to their problems, enough of them showed up in my tiny little community to make a difference in it. For the most part, nothing much changed. The structure of the community was such that you never had to leave it if you didn’t want to. you could walk to the grocery store, the pharmacy, the hardware store, etc.The post office was a cultural center, much as it is portrayed in “a Parchment of Leaves”. Most everything was all on the same street, where they all had been since 1790. The cobblestone roads were paved in 1980. Over the course of my life there, the place and I were witness to a new kind of culture coming in — The people we called “yuppies” and spat at as children. They expected us to like them, because they brought their money with them and bought things. Nobody much cared for that, for a time.
anymore, there is no grocery store. the pharmacy has been made into a cute little restaraunt. a tourists’ facimile of the thing it was. There are more than a dozen restaraunts, where once there was one, which wasn’t even any good, but most importantly, the culture of individual people, people i know and love, it has changed radically. I will never be able to afford to live in my own community, thanks to the changes in property values. when i was a child we rented a 200 year old house for $100/month. I could go on forever, because I’m heartbroken about it, and eventully i hope to write my own novel about it, somehow, but in the meantime i need to write a paper for your class. I was wondering if there are any books out there that I could read about the things I’ve developed these notions about, books which might help me solidify my observations into something a bit more coherent.
sorry this ended up bing so long. i talk too much.
dylan
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