At Q-and-A with Ken Ward Jr., 'Heartland' author Smarsh critiques simplistic media portrayals of rural America

Sarah Smarsh and Ken Ward Jr. talk at the Life in Rural America Symposium on May 21.
(Robert Wood Johnson Foundation photo by Shawn Poynter)

At the recent Life in Rural America Symposium, journalists Ken Ward Jr. and Sarah Smarsh spoke about the relationship between "good journalism, community health, and our collective future," Tim Marema reports for The Daily Yonder. Ward is an award-winning Charleston Gazette-Mail reporter known for covering West Virginia's coal industry, and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." Smarsh is up for a National Book Award for her memoir Heartland, which shows readers how her rural Kansas family went from working class to the working poor.

The Yonder provides a transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. Some highlights:

Smarsh said there's a "great dissonance" between what urban residents and the news media think is happening in rural areas and what is actually happening in rural areas. "If you’re a cable news network, and you like conflict, and you want to whip up the idea of cities versus country (which drives up ratings and enforces some sort of unfortunate cultural identities), then you put up a map of the United States where each state is colored either red or blue, as though that monochromatic color would represent everyone in that state," Smarsh said. The reality is not so simple or monolithic.

Ward observed that it might not be appropriate to talk about "one rural America, and to assume that farmland in Kansas and the people who live there have all the same ways of doing things, and thinking, and talking as people in the coal fields of southern West Virginia, or steel country in western Pennsylvania and Ohio."

Smarsh agreed, saying "Of course, there's not just one rural America." She said that those who "set the narrative" often offer a reductive view of rural America, whether through malice or ignorance. But rural America is more diverse, politically and demographically, than is often reflected in the news media, she said. For instance, she said, about 100 rural Kansans showed up at a recent county health event and "every single person in there" supported expanding Medicaid. The bottom line, she said, was to be humble and not make assumptions about people or areas you're unfamiliar with.

Many people have no idea how deep economic equality is in the U.S., and part of the reason is that many rural people are ashamed to talk about poverty or poor health, Smarsh said.

Ward asked how people can find information to better understand what's happening in rural America. Smarsh said paying attention to local news was a good start, but noted that rural local reporting has been weakened in recent years, and many rural people only have access to national news: "We have half the country watching Fox News and half the country watching MSNBC. While I’m all for increasing efforts on the local level, there is something that is so toxic in that top-level system being broken from the rest of the information sphere that that’s, I think, a bigger problem to contend with."

Smarsh said the simplistic, frequently negative narrative about rural America hurts rural communities and people. "If every story being told about you is that you’re backwards, ignorant, your community is dying, why don’t you just leave, and meanwhile, you’re doing the work of picking the lettuce in California or raising the wheat in Kansas that’s on the plate of the people who are carelessly levying those condescending comments, that is a bitter pill to swallow spiritually and psychologically," she said. "That has reverberations in the way of wellness and health, whether it’s that shame or a sense of not being validated somehow. It’s related to a general malaise and a need to self-medicate. The stories that we tell about ourselves and about specific populations within our country, they affect the wellness of those communities."

Heartland author sees signs of 'brain gain' in some rural areas, starts a podcast to explore 'shift in the zeitgeist'

In news and pop-culture narratives, rural America is often represented as a dismal place to live, but some studies show that most people in rural areas like where they live and feel hopeful about the future. And though 80-plus percent of Americans live in urban areas, 27% say they wish they lived in a rural area. That may be helping to fuel a population shift across the U.S., writes Sarah Smarsh in an op-ed for The New York Times. Smarsh is the author of rural Kansas memoir Heartland.

The nation's biggest cities, New York and Los Angeles, are losing population but cities in the South and the West are gaining population. Some rural areas are gaining, too, Smarsh notes, citing a study that found most rural Minnesota counties gained well-to-do early- and mid-career adults from 2000 to 2010, and only a third are returning to their hometowns; the rest are new to their new rural homes.

Many urban and suburban residents deeply miss their rural hometowns, Smarsh writes. In the year since Heartland was published, Smarsh said she has been approached by thousands of such people—a surprisingly diverse crowd—who spoke longingly of their rural roots and their desire to return. "These aren’t just white people lamenting the loss of the family wheat farm. They are black women missing their families in the rural South, Muslim women organizing workers in meatpacking towns on the plains, young gay men hoping to return to their small-town roots," Smarsh writes. "This is the rural America I know and love — a place rife with problems, yes, but containing diversity, vibrancy and cross-cultural camaraderie."

Smarsh is exploring this "shift in the zeitgeist" with a new podcast, The Homecomers, featuring rural and working class advocates from all over the country. "From where I sit, they are heroes of the American odyssey — seeing value where others see lack, returning with the elixir of hard-won social capital to help solve the troubles of home," Smarsh writes.

Journalist-author, a rural native, says metro and national editors should commission stories from rural journalists

Editors of national and metropolitan publications should commission stories from rural journalists who have more knowledge of their communities than urban reporters who parachute in, journalist Sarah Smarsh told Journalist's Resource, a service of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, where she was recently a Joan Shorenstein fellow, developing a podcast about the intersection of health and poverty.

Sarah Smarsh

“I’m most partial to the strategies that essentially harness the reporting power of people who are already there in those places who perhaps were laid off five years ago from their local newspaper,” Smarsh said. “I think we’ll find out the extent to which those strategies succeed over the next few years.”

Smarsh says too many urban reports on rural areas paid with a broad, white brush. “Rural areas are much more racially diverse than one would think from reading national headlines,” she told JR. “Those parts of the country have always been much more than white people, and as we speak they are diversifying, in some places quite rapidly, often due to an influx in immigrant populations taking jobs in industries like industrial agriculture and meatpacking plants. Barely a majority of the eligible voting population ends up at the polls, and then somewhere around under half of people vote for the candidate who wins that state, and then the whole square is colored red on a cable-news graphic.”

"Smarsh reports on socioeconomic class, politics and more for national and international outlets, including The Guardian, The New Yorker and The Cut," JR reports. "Her forthcoming book, Heartland: A Daughter of the Working Class Reconciles an American Divide, delves into her experiences with class and place growing up on a working farm in Kansas."

Rural commentators on PBS, from right and left, agree Haley had strongest peformance in Republican debate

Gary Abernathy and Sarah Smarsh (PBS image)

The commentary section of "PBS NewsHour" Friday night was all rural, as former southern Ohio editor Gary Abernathy and Kansas author and freelance journalist Sarah Smarsh filled in for their conservative and liberal counterparts, respectively. They agreed on most things, including a belief that former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley did best in the first presidential debate, among eight Republicans,

After a clip of Haley telling Mike Pence that a federal abortion ban won't fly because of the Senate, Abernathy said, "Republicans have overstepped on abortion. I think the Supreme Court was right to send it bach to the states. Nikki Haley was right . . . I felt she was the strongest in that debate."

Smarsh agreed. Noting last year's Kansas referendum in favor of abortion rights, she said Democrats are "reclaiming the notion of freedom or liberty and applying that to bodily automony. . . . The post-Roe landscape seems to have affected voter behavior in ways pre-Roe models can't necessarily predict."

Butg that hasn't changed how GOP candidates approach the issue in their race, Abernathy said: "You can't be too pro-life for the Republican electorate."

When host Geoff Bennett played Ohio biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy's declaration that "The climate-change agenda is a hoax" and said "Climate change is settled science," Abernathy said, "It's not settled among Republicans, Geoff. . . . Ramaswamy was playing right to that base."

Asked about the Atlanta booking of former president Donald Trump. Smarsh said, "Millions of Americans are aghast that this person facing all these indictments and criminal charges is still the eminent front-runner." Abernathy, describing the widely circulated mug shot, said "That's a portrait Trump may have commissioned and sat for himself, the way it turned out."

Rural commentators on PBS say revelations about Trump and the pandemic won't shake his supporters from him

President Trump's newly reported admission that he downplayed the threat of the novel coronavirus will cost him very little if any support among his followers in rural areas and smaller cities, two rural commentators said on the "PBS NewsHour" Wednesday night.

Heartland author Sarah Smarsh of Kansas and Gary Abernathy, a former newspaper editor in southern Ohio, were interviewed by anchor Judy Woodward.

"I don't know that there's a big contradiction like some people are saying," Abertnathy said. "He wanted to keep the economy open, he wanted to keep things rolling. . . . I think most people here who support him will say, yeah, we all kind of knew it was deadly ... but he was trying to keep people calm, he didn't want a panic across the country, he wanted things to remain as normal as possible."

Smarsh said she agreed that "supporters likely will not bail form the Trump ship over this."

Woodward asked how the virus issue is liked to Trump's economic messages.

"People weren't happy, where I lived, that everything was totally shut down to begin with," Abertahy said, and wanted "a more targeted approach" that would not have been as drastic in rural areas. He said Trump voters believe his policies have worked, "and if we can get things back up and running, they'll work again."

Smarsh said people's feeling about the pandemic "kind of predicts how they feel abut the economy and whether Trump is doing a good job or not."

New books detail the opioid epidemic in West Virginia, growing up poor in Kansas

Bored this weekend? Check out these two new books that examine rural issues:

In American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts, veteran British reporter Chris McGreal of The Guardian, an award-winning writer stationed in the U.S., takes a deep dive into the opioid epidemic in a narrative anchored in Williamson, W.Va. He provides not just an overarching treatment of the epidemic's roots but also heart-wrenching anecdotes and discussion of how classist prejudice against poor Appalachians slowed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's response. McGreal doesn't hesitate to paint drug companies as the villains, especially OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma. "This urgent, readable chronicle, which names names and pulls no punches, clearly and compassionately illuminates the evolution of America’s mass addiction problem," Zoe Pagnamenta writes for Publisher's Weekly.

Fifth-generation Kansan Sarah Smarsh explores the common struggles of the working poor through a memoir of her childhood in Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. "Smarsh shows us through the fate of her own family how the working class became the working poor. She takes us through the welfare cuts of the Reagan administration that stigmatized her working mother and through the modern housing crisis that ruined her father’s construction business," Elizabeth Catte writes for The Washington Post. "Heartland is her map of home, drawn with loving hands and tender words. This is the nation’s class divide brought into sharp relief through personal history . . . a welcome interruption in the national silence that hangs over the lives of the poor and a repudiation of the culture of shame that swamps people who deserve better."

Life in Rural America Symposium, with reporter Ken Ward Jr. and author Sarah Smarsh, to livestream May 21

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation will livestream its Life in Rural America Symposium in Charleston, W.Va., from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on May 21. 

The event will feature experts and community leaders from across the nation discussing how to solve rural challenges, the latest data on rural health and economic experiences, how to use research and data to bring change, and examples of rural communities and regions where important change is happening. The symposium will also premiere new data about the economic, social and health experiences of people living in rural and tribal communities. 

The keynote speakers will be Sarah Smarsh, author of the New York Times bestseller Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, and Ken Ward Jr., investigative journalist for the Charleston Gazette-Mail and recipient of the 2018 MacArthur "Genius" Award. Click here for more details about the symposium and how to tune in.

U.S. Postal Service is a rural lifeline in jeopardy

The post office in Seco, in far southeastern Kentucky, is open two hours a day. It's one of thousands of rural USPS locations that has cut hours to reduce costs. (National Geographic photo)

"Rural post offices and mail carriers connect our smallest towns to the world and provide a sense of community. But a burdensome financial structure, and lack of federal aid amid a pandemic, threaten their future," Sarah Smarsh reports for National Geographic. 

In addition to adeptly summarizing the necessity of the U.S. Postal Service to rural Americans and threats it faces (such as urbanization and privatization), Smarsh's photo-rich piece recounts her childhood in rural Kansas and what the mail meant for her and her family. Read more here.

Many rural Republicans rejected Kansas abortion measure

New York Times map; click the image to enlarge it.

On Tuesday Kansans turned out in record numbers to reject, by a 3 to 2 margin, a ballot measure that would have negated a court decision that established a right to abortion in the state constitution. "In a state where Republicans far outnumber Democrats, Kansans delivered a clear message in the first major vote testing the potency of abortion politics since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade: Abortion opponents are going too far," Katie Glueck and Shane Goldmacher report for The New York Times.

Many Republicans and rural residents rejected the proposed constitutional amendment. "Despite red-and-blue maps suggesting that the political fault line of our era runs between urban and rural areas, much of the countryside joined cities like Wichita and Kansas City in voting down the amendment," native Kansan Sara Smarsh writes for the Times. "Fourteen Kansas counties that went for Mr. Trump in the 2020 presidential election, as well as all five that went for Joe Biden, saw majority votes against the amendment. Even in counties where most voted yes, sizable numbers voted no."

More than 463,000 Republicans voted in the U.S. Senate race and more than 451,000 in the gubernatorial race, but the amendment only got around 375,000 votes; that means Republicans who showed up to vote for the other races either voted against the amendment or left it blank. Kansas has a closed primary, but all registered voters could vote on the amendment. 

Some conservatives said they rejected the amendment because they remembered how dangerous it was for women before abortion was legal. Another possible reason: "Abortion-rights supporters used conservative-sounding language about government mandates and personal freedom in their pitch to voters, and made a point of reaching out to independents, Libertarians and moderate Republicans," Mitch Smith, Lauren Fox and Elizabeth Dias report for the Times.

NYT map, adapted by The Rural Blog, of its estimates; click on it to enlarge.

Opponents of a similar amendment on the Nov. 8 ballot in Kentucky were encouraged by the Kansas result, Kentucky Health News reports, and a Times analysis estimated that 53% of Kentucky voters would support abortion rights in the referendum, based on how demographics predicted results of recent abortion referenda. The Times made estimates for every state.

More broadly, "Both Republicans and Democrats caution against conflating the results of an up-or-down ballot question with how Americans will vote in November, when they will be weighing a long list of issues, personalities and their views of Democratic control of Washington," Glueck and Goldmacher report. However, "a Kaiser Family Foundation poll released this week showed that the issue of abortion access had become more salient for women 18 to 49 years old, with a 14-percentage-point jump since February for those who say it will be very important to their vote in midterm elections, up to 73%. That is roughly equal to the share of voters overall who said inflation would be very important this fall — and a sign of how animating abortion has become for many women."