Kingsolver 'internalized shame' of her rural roots, delaying Appalachian novel; now an 'ambassador between worlds'

Barbara Kingsolver (Guardian photo by Jessica Tezak)

Now that she has won this year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the UK's Women's Prize for Fiction for Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver tells Lisa Allardice, chief books writer for The Guardian, “I understand that my whole life I’ve been wanting to write the great Appalachian novel.”

But Kingsolver says it took her some time to get around to it, partly because she had “internalized the shame” of her rural Kentucky upbringing that preceded graduating Phi Beta Kappa at DePauw University in Indiana and many years in Tucson before she amd her second husband moved to southwest Virginia, Allardice reports. "Now she feels she has not 'just the right but the duty' to represent her community. Kingsolver said, “The news, the movies, TV, it’s all manufactured in cities about city people. We’re nothing. We don’t see ourselves at all. And if we do show up, it’s as a joke, the hillbillies. We are the last demographic that progressive people still mock with impunity.”

Allardice cites "one memorable passage" in which Demon Copperhead lists the insults thrown at Appalachians: “Hillbilly, rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables.” The last one refers to a 2016 comment by her friend Hillary Clinton, referring to half of Donald Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables” because they were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” Clinton apologized the next day for what she said was an exaggeration; Kingsolver's "agent and editor, both based in New York, questioned whether she should include it," Allardice reports, giving her answer: “I decided, yes, I’m leaving it in because I want this to make the reader uncomfortable.” Kingsolver said she sees bumper stickers in Washington County, Virginia, saying "I'm a deplorable." 

“I understand why rural people are so mad they want to blow up the system,” she told Allardice. “That contempt of urban culture for half the country. I feel like I’m an ambassador between these worlds, trying to explain that if you want to have a conversation you don’t start it with the words, ‘You idiot’.”

LGBTQ+ Eastern Kentuckians are refuting Appalachian stereotype of intolerance, creating a regional community

Cara Ellis, left, at Pikeville Pride's booth at the Hillbilly Days
Festival in Pikeville, Ky. (Photo by Ryan C. Hermens, Herald-Leader)

LGBTQ+ Eastern Kentuckians aren't big-city transplants, as you might think; they're native Appalachians reaching out to break stereotypes and form a supportive community, reports Rick Childress of the Lexington Herald-Leader. Childress' visit to the "Pikeville Pride" booth during Hillbilly Days, Pikeville's annual festival "celebrating all things Appalachia," provides a good example. "Members of Pikeville Pride sat at a booth strewn with rainbow flags and banners. The grassroots organization works to highlight Eastern Kentucky's LGBTQ+ community. . . . In a town and region long assumed to be unwelcome to LGBTQ+ people, members were met with honest questions, smiles, thank yous and even a 'grandma' who got their grandson their 'first pride flag,' said Cara Ellis, who is Pikeville Pride's president and a Pikeville native." Ellis said, "I never thought we would have this in this town."

Outreach allows the group to support young people who may struggle. "It's never been necessarily easy to be gay in the mountains, and a ratcheting up of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and legislation, both in Kentucky and nationally, will make life harder for those who are out in rural communities," Childress writes. "The suicide rate among LGBTQ youth is much higher than their peers. A national survey conducted last year by the Trevor Project, an organization that provides crisis help for LGBTQ youth, found that 45% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered suicide in the past year. . . . But that suicide rate goes down if students come from households that affirm their gender identity, attend an LGBTQ-affirming school or live in an accepting community."

The group's presence at events like Hillbilly Days provides a human face inviting conversations that educate the region. "They also defied a common misconception that Ellis said she's encountered in her work with Pikeville Pride," Childress reports. "Many assume that those in the group have moved in from bigger cities and aren't native Appalachians. Ellis told him, "It's like, no, we've been born here. . . . We've been raised here. We're from here; we stay here." Childress adds, "According to Jonathan Coleman, a historian and co-founder of the Faulkner Morgan Archive, a nonprofit that saves and shares Kentucky's LGBTQ history, the typical narrative about Eastern Kentucky is incomplete. Coleman said: "The story of what it is to be queer in Eastern Kentucky is always a really flattened-out, simple narrative. . . . You leave if you can, as soon as you can. You're traumatized, and then you try to escape. That, of course, is not accurate for lots and lots of folks."

Pikeville's 2020 population was 7,754.
(Sperling's Best Places map)

Pikeville Pride continues to provide a supportive community "especially in a place where an accepting group of people hasn't always been easy to find," Childress reports. "The group started in 2017 as an organized counter-protest to a white-nationalist march in the city's downtown. After that protest, about 20-25 people continued to meet. They decided to put together Pikeville's first pride event in 2018 in an attempt to 'highlight the diversity and inclusion that we actually do have here in Pikeville, that maybe people don't realize,' Ellis said. . . . . Tonya Jones, who, along with her wife, has fostered multiple LGBTQ+ youth in Pike County, was among the original group that started the organization, said they had a free hugs booth at the first event." Jones told him, "I had someone just come up and just wrap their arms around me and just start bawling. Because they said it was the first time anyone accepted them for who they truly were."

Appalachian author Silas House becomes Kentucky's first openly gay poet laureate, but he dislikes being categorized

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, center, with state poets
laureate Crystal Wilkinson (outgoing) and Silas House
(incoming), both with rural roots. (Photo by Al Cross)  

Author and activist Silas House, who has become a leading voice of Appalachia, is the new poet laureate of his home state of Kentucky. As he got the honor from Gov. Andy Beshear Monday, House highlighted his regional roots and his status as the state's first openly gay poet laureate.

"I am also a person of faith who has always refused to allow that to be taken away from me by a culture that insists on narrow definitions of Christianity," House told a crowd in the state Capitol rotunda. "I am a teacher, I'm a father; like most people, I have many identities. . . . But all too often the world tries to reduce us all to one neat and tidy label. This troubles me, the way we so often operate in absolutes. It has become too easy to categorize people as wholly good or wholly bad. I believe we can offer both grace and defiance. We can give people grace while also knowing there is a line we won't allow to be crossed. Art, and especially writing, can help to build empathy. I believe this is one of our most important roles as artists. Literature gives us the opportunity to see differing points of view more easily and more clearly."

Earlier, House recounted the working lives of his ancestors and said, "For the first eight years of my life, we lived in a trailer, just like almost everyone else in my family, and I can tell you this for shore, the rain sounds loveliest on a trailer roof. While most of the world often told us that we were no good because of where we lived, my family taught me to always be proud of being country, being Appalachian and being a Kentuckian. When you are from a place, or culture, or way of being that is constantly negated, belittled or erased, you love it harder. But I have learned this: The more people try to erase us, the more pride we have. The more they try to dull us the brighter we will shine."

House is the author of several best-sellers, including Clay's Quilt, A Parchment of Leaves, The Coal Tattoo, Southernmost and Eli the Good. His latest novel, Lark Ascending, was published last year.

As poet laureate, House said, "I want to celebrate the rich literary tradition of the commonwealth in ways that can help build our tourism. Most of all, I want to always show others how to shine their own lights more brightly, to celebrate books, to make clear that our similarities far outweigh our differences."

Rural editor-publisher with racist writings is ejected from Maryland-D.C.-Delaware Press Assn. Hall of Fame

A rural journalist "who helped shape public opinion on Maryland’s Eastern Shore for decades during the mid-20th century has been stripped of one of the region’s top professional honors after a review of his work found writings that were 'viciously racist' and even promoted lynching," The Baltimore Sun reports.

The Maryland-D.C.-Delaware Press Association, which inducted Edward J. Clarke, the longtime owner and editor of the Worcester Democrat, into its Hall of Fame in 1954, "voted last week to terminate that honor after Gabriel Pietrorazio, a University of Maryland journalism student, brought to light editorials written by Clarke that likened the Black suspects in a 1940 homicide to 'a rabid dog,' 'a disease-spreading germ' and 'garbage'," the Sun's Jonathan Pitts reports.

"The work of Pietrorazio, a 23-year-old master’s degree student, is part of 'Printing Hate,' a collaborative research project at the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism," Pitts explains. "Journalism students from seven colleges and universities across the country are reviewing racist media coverage of the past as part of the project. The focus is on the years between the end of Reconstruction and the mid-20th century, a time when more than 5,000 people lost their lives in terror lynchings, most of them Black men and boys at the hands of white mobs, researchers say. Such research centers as the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, have shown in recent years that white-owned press outlets routinely played a role in encouraging the practice, either by displaying indifference toward its horrors or using the kind of biased and incendiary language that could foment violence."

Other schools participating are the University of Arkansas and five historically Black institutions: Morgan State University in Baltimore, Howard University in Washington, Hampton University in Virginia, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, and Morehouse College in Atlanta. The effort has produced 30 investigative stories, which are posted twice a week on the Capital News Service’s Howard Center website, on the National Association of Black Journalists’ news site, and on Word in Black, a collaboration of prominent African American news publishers.

Proposed rural Alabama charter school faces opposition, partly because its manager is a foreign-born Muslim

Flyer produced by charter opponent and included in local newspaper in May
(Courtesy of Alabama Media Group; click on the image to enlarge it)

There are several reasons many locals in Chatom, Alabama, oppose a proposed charter school that state officials recently approved. They worry it will cost public schools enrollment and taxpayer funding; and a nonprofit that reviews charter organizations for the state gave Woodland Preparatory School a thumbs down, saying it didn't have a good curriculum or financial plan, and not enough information was available about the company that will operate the school.

There's another reason many object to the school: The manager is a Muslim with possible ties to a controversial cleric, Trisha Powell Crain reports for Alabama Media Group, comprising the Advance Publications newspapers in the state (including nearby Mobile): "Retired teacher Wayne Blackwell, among others, made his concerns clear in a letter to the editor of the Washington County News in March. 'It personally concerns me that Dr. Soner Tarim,' Blackwell wrote, 'is from Turkey and is of the Muslim faith.'"

Tarim told Crain that opening the school "is an excellent opportunity for me to prove that in a small community where there is no option, no choice, parents are fleeing to find a proper education outside of this county . . . This is the place that I can prove again -- one more time -- that the charter school model can work." Tarim owns charter school company Unity School Services, based in Sugar Land, Texas. He previously co-founded and was chief executive of charter-school chain Harmony Public Schools, which "critics say is part of an informal network of scores of charter schools operated by followers of Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim preacher from Turkey who lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania and is wanted by the Turkish government," Valerie Strauss reports for The Washington Post.

"A number of schools in the unofficial network have been investigated over a period of years by state and federal agencies amid allegations regarding hiring practices that favor Turkish nationals, abuse of the H-1B visa process and preferences in the awarding of contracts to related Turkish businesses," Strauss reports. "Former employees have alleged that they were required to contribute some of their salaries to the Gülen political movement, although representatives of Gülen have denied it over the years. Tarim has repeatedly denied that Harmony is part of a Gülen network of charter schools."

Meanwhile, Woodland Prep is having a hard time keeping board members and convincing local parents to enroll their children because of intense pressure from charter opponents. Most recently, Ford dealership owner Gene Brown resigned in early July. (Brown gained nationwide attention in June for a promotion that offered a gun, a flag and a Bible with every car purchase.) "Brown has since shifted his support. Last week, his Ford dealership's Facebook page said he donated a 'large sum to the athletic department' at one of the county's schools," Crain reports.

Local opposition has stopped the school from even being built: "The Montgomery contractor hired to build the school told the state commission that workers have walked off the job after opponents threatened that they'd never again find work in Washington County," Crain reports. It's unclear when or if the school will open. It's suspected that only about 50 children are enrolled so far; without at least 200, it can't open, Crain reports.

Fact Check Monday: No evidence to support charge that 'inaccurate and fraudulent reporting' divides the country

By Al Cross, Director and Professor
Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, University of Kentucky

As editor and publisher of The Rural Blog, I have tried to keep it almost entirely fact-based, with no advocacy, except for issues that advance the cause of journalism as a servant of democracy, such as open-government laws. And for the sake of fairness and credibility, we have tried to balance our Monday fact-check items between those critical of Democrats and Republicans. Today, the former imperative outweighs the latter one.

As I told the Rotary Club in Bowling Green, Ky., last week, there is a war on journalism in this country, waged by people who want to discredit sources of news and information that are unfavorable to them, and to set themselves up as the preferred source of information for their followers. You may think is just about the national news media, but we have reported example after example of how distrust of journalists is having an effect on rural and community journalists and their employers.

That's why journalists at all levels need to be concerned, and speak out about, the latest series of Twitter posts in which President Trump blames the division in our country on the news media. We have become so accustomed to this invective that many of us just ignore it, but now the stakes are higher, because the division has led to death.

The deadliest attack on Jews in American history, Saturday's shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, was perpetrated by a man who had posted frequently on social media about the "migrant caravan" that has become a key pre-election talking point for Trump, who has used immigration as an issue from the day he entered politics.

Earlier, a Trump fan in South Florida was charged with sending pipe bombs to several prominent Trump critics, and a white man in Louisville who had tried to enter a predominantly black church killed two African Americans at a Kroger and told a man as he left, "Whites don't kill whites." The shooter has a violent history, but police branded it a hate crime. The reasons for the shooting are unknown, but it fits a pattern of increased violence linked to racial and religious prejudice.

So, our fact-check for today is this: There's no proof that the president's rhetoric is causing more violence, but there is circumstantial evidence. His accusation that anger is caused by "inaccurate and even fraudulent reporting" by the news media is completely unsupported by evidence. The fraud is being perpetrated on social media, which have no verification, not by journalism, which practices a discipline of verification and corrects its errors. Trump's tweet appears to be a reaction to critics who blame him for the violence; they have been quoted in news media, or have offered their views on broadcast shows that offer more opinion than fact -- and add to the confusion between the two. The president seems to be capitalizing on that confusion between reporting and commentary.

One responsibility of journalists and their employers is to prevent confusion, through clear and factual reporting and responsible commentary. An increasing responsibility is to explain how journalism works, and to defend it from irresponsible commentary. Community journalists, who are close to their audiences and remain credible among them, are in the best position to do that. Do it.

UPDATE: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell "said 'it’s hard to know' if the heightened political rhetoric in the Trump era and during fiercely contested midterm elections are an impetus for violent hate crimes," Ronnie Ellis reports for CHNI News Service.

“The political rhetoric is always pretty hot before an election,” McConnell told Kentucky reporters Monday. “But I think the whole tone in the country right now needs to be ratcheted down, and these horrible, criminal acts only underscore the need for all of us to dial it back to a more respectful place.” Ellis adds: "But when a reporter asked the Senate president if Trump’s off-the-cuff comments on Twitter and at his campaign rallies may have contributed to the climate of disrespect, McConnell walked away without answering."

Story of Muslim doctor dealing with prejudice in rural Minn. puts you inside his head and heart

Ayaz Virji and his wife, Mussarrat
(Post photo by Salwan Georges)

When a Muslim became the third doctor in a small Minnesota town, “It felt right,” to him, he told The Washington Post's Stephanie McCrummen. "But that feeling began to change after the election of Donald Trump," McCrummen writes, in a story that puts you inside the head and heart of Ayaz Virji, "the first Muslim to ever live in Dawson, a farming town of 1,400," she reports.

When Virji moved with his wife and three children from Harrisburg, Pa., "No one seemed to care that he was Muslim, of Indian descent, born in Kenya and raised in Florida. They just needed a good doctor," McCrummen writes. "He never thought Trump would win, much less in Dawson," which Barack Obama had carried twice. But Trump won the town by 6 percentage points and Lac qui Parle County in a landslide.

Virji was "shocked and angry . . . saying he hoped people realized that they just voted to put his family on a Muslim registry, and how would he be treated around here if he didn’t have M.D. after his name," McCrummen reports. He and his wife thought about leaving, but decided to stay, "and he tried to transform his anger into understanding." Then a patient asked him to talk about Islam at her Lutheran church, and 400 people came. In a county of 7,300. He won a semi-standing ovation.

Virji spoke in Dawson (green dot), Montevideo (B)
and Granite Falls, Minnesota. (Map Quest image)

But a few weeks later, in Montevideo, pop. 5,200, the seat of Chippewa County, pop. 12,500, which also flipped from Obama to Trump, things were different. "They yelled that they were praying for his salvation and called him the Antichrist. Their tone became so hostile that Musarrat, who had brought their 9-year-old daughter, moved to the back of the room, closer to the exit," McCrummen reports. "In the days after, people wrote letters to the local paper saying how embarrassed they were at the doctor’s reception, but Ayaz decided he was done with trying to explain Islam to rural Minnesota. Except that the invitations kept coming."

McCrummen went with Virji to Granite Falls, pop. 2,900, the seat of Yellow Medicine County, pop. 12,500, which voted Republican in 2012 and 2016. She describes in great detail his preparation, thoughts and his presentation, which was angry at times. During the question time, one man said, "I hear a lot of pain from you this evening. . . . I'm sorry." Virji won applause, but as he arrived back in Dawson, "He still felt different, more and more like a stranger in a rural Midwestern town," McCrummen writes. "He didn’t want to feel that way. He hoped in time he wouldn’t. He turned onto Pine Street, and then he was home."

Apple chief, at center of controversy over privacy, forged his moral ideals growing up in rural South

Apple chief executive Tim Cook—an openly gay man, a champion for gay rights, and a native son of the rural South—is at the heart of a controversy, having refused to assist the FBI in unlocking an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino terrorists. Cook's childhood growing up in the 1960s in rural Robertsdale, Ala. (Best Places map) forged his current ideals about right and wrong and the need for privacy, especially from the government, Todd Frankel reports for The Washington Post.

Cook was instilled with a sense of right and wrong at an early age, Frankel writes. "In the early 1970s, he was riding his new 10-speed bicycle at night along a rural road just outside Robertsdale when he spotted a burning cross. He pedaled closer. He saw Klansmen in white hoods and robes. The cross was on the property of a family he knew was black. It was almost more than he could comprehend. Without thinking, he shouted, 'Stop!' The group turned toward the boy. One of them raised his hood. Cook recognized the man as a local deacon at one of the dozen churches in town, but not the one attended by Cook’s family. The man warned the boy to keep moving." Cook said at a speech in 2013, “This image was permanently imprinted in my brain and it would change my life forever."

Tim Cook (Mashable photo)

When he was 16 "Cook won an essay contest sponsored by a rural electric company and, as part of the prize, met Alabama Gov. George Wallace, the segregationist who resisted the federal government’s attempts to integrate the state’s public schools during the ’60s," Frankel writes. Cook said in a speech that shaking Wallace's hand was "a betrayal of my own beliefs . . . It felt wrong. Like I was selling a piece of my soul.” During the same trip, Cook met President Jimmy Carter at the White House. He said the difference between the two men was impossible to miss: “One was right and one was wrong.”

In 2011, when he took over Apple, Cook began advocating "for gay rights and to change laws in states such as Alabama, where employees can be fired for being gay," Frankel writes. "He criticized states with 'religious freedom' laws that seemed to him to sanction some forms of discrimination. Last December, shortly before the fate of a terrorist’s iPhone would explode onto the national scene, he accepted the Ripple of Hope award from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. In his speech, Cook talked about learning to 'take a stand for what is right, for what is just.' And when the terrorist’s iPhone case erupted last month, Cook returned to that 'moral sense' he learned back in Robertsdale."

In a letter to customers, Cook "wrote that 'it would be wrong' for Apple to be forced to create a backdoor to its security system," Frankel writes. Cook wrote, “We feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the U.S. government” The Justice Department "has accused Apple of focusing on 'a perceived negative impact on its reputation.'" Cook responded in an interview with ABC News by saying, “Some things are hard, and some things are right, and some things are both. This is one of those things.”

Whites respond more negatively to immigration news about Hispanics than about Europeans

White Americans are more likely to feel negatively about immigration if news stories portray immigrants in a negative light, but are even more inclined to respond in a negative manner if the immigrants are Hispanics, not Europeans, Scott Clement reports for The Washington Post. "What immigrants look like – and where they come from – changes how we see the issue. When immigrants are Hispanic, white Americans worry a lot more."

One of reason is that Americans often only think of Hispanics as immigrants, said Nicholas Valentino, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, who did the 2003 study about which Clement writes. Valentino told him, "Latinos trigger an anxiety in some Americans that other ethnic groups simply do not trigger. It changes both attitudes and behaviors on immigration policy.”

Valentino's study had white participants read fake stories about immigration, with half the stories showing immigration in a positive light and the other half in a negative light, Clement writes. Stories also altered the ethnicity of some subjects, telling the exact same story, except changing the name and origin of a subject from Mexican to Russian. While participants who read negative stories were more likely to say the story lessened their support of immigration, "the impact of seeing a negative story featuring a Mexican immigrant was double the size of a negative story about the Russian immigrant."

"Valentino and his colleagues investigated the differing reactions, and found that negative news featuring a Latino immigrant raised whites’ worries and anxieties about increasing immigration, but not for those about Russian immigrants," Clement writes. "Whites who read a negative story featuring an Hispanic immigrant had a strong political reaction. In addition to higher opposition to immigration, they became more supportive of an 'English-only' law, asked for more information about the issue and were more apt to send an e-mail  to their congressional representative advocating reduced immigration levels when asked in the survey. Negative news about a Russian immigrant had little impact on political motivation."

"Just 26 percent of respondents chose to e-mail a member of Congress advocating a reduction in immigration after reading a positive story featuring a Latino immigrant," Clement writes, but "45 percent sent congressional e-mails when the Latino-focused story was negative. But the negative stories had no impact when the subject of the story was Russian." Valentino said a separate study using Mexican and Dutch subjects in the fake stories had similar results. (Read more)