In new 'Southern Storytellers' series, N.C. author David Joy bemoans changes in his rural county; locals can't afford it

Author David Joy shares thoughts about his changing home. (PBS image)

Tracing a Southern county's history and landscape is one thing, "but drawing a singular image of our people, that's when things get difficult, or rather impossible," reflects David Joy in PBS's new "Southern Storytellers"series, which celebrates Southern identity with contemporary creators of literature, music, film, and TV.

In Western North Carolina, Joy takes viewers into backwoods hemmed with raspberry bushes laden with fruit and a cool spring for trout fishing. He holds up a small trout and says it's genetically different than all other brook trout. An Appalachian native, you might say.

But to Joy, the area's way of life is threatened. "Jackson County, North Carolina, is not the coalfields of Kentucky or West Virginia; coal isn't destroying our mountain tops; ours are threatened by unrestricted land development," he says. "There are millionaires hitting golf balls on Tom Fazio-designed golf courses just over the ridgeline from people surviving on mayonnaise sandwiches."

Against a backdrop of cedared woods, Joy and best friend Raymond head out to hunt deer and mull the the price of change. Raymond tells Joy he is not sure the area can reach beyond its current culture and get back to where it was. Raymond tells Joy, "I don't know if there's gonna be enough young people left to continue on. . . . Young people leave here to have a better lifestyle or to be able to afford a house. . . . All the local people will be displaced by going to fill a job, or get priced out because they can't afford to be able to stay here, and I think it's an inevitability. This culture, this place, will be gone." Joy nods, saying, "It's hard for other people to understand . . . the finality of that, that displacement." 

Sitting on his back steps surrounded by spring blooms, Joy reads a piece from his novel When These Mountains Burn: "When the paper mill shut down and when the old plastic plant at the south end of the county left, the very fabric that once defined the mountains fragmented and was replaced with outsiders who built second and third homes on the ridgeline and drove the property values up so high that what few locals were left couldn't afford to pay the taxes on their land."

Joy credits his Southern upbringing with giving him a place to hang every story. Asked to describe the South, he says, "I think what I want people to recognize about the South is that it's a very, very complex place. . . full of a whole lotta beauty and a whole lot of bad things as well. And I don't want to lose a bit of it."