When my husband first proposed moving to Appalachia in the winter of 2011, I flat out rejected the idea: “No way in HELL am I going to move to Appalachia” (which I pronounced at that time as App-a-LAY-sha, not properly as App-a-LATCH-a.)
My impressions of Appalachia as a region of unrelenting poverty, coal mining and hopelessness were vivid and very real, built not on any personal experience with the region but on images from Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 tour of Appalachia, Jon Boorman’s Deliverance and Harlan County USA, Barbara Kopple’s Academy-Award winning documentary on the battles waged by coal miners against Duke Energy in the early 1970s.
Coal, poverty and banjo music. That’s what Appalachia seemed to me to be.
And then I moved to Appalachia and discovered a far more interesting place than stereotypes portrayed it to be. It’s a region with university towns like Boone, NC and cities like Asheville and Knoxville. There are vineyards in Appalachia. Though poverty is a very real issue, there is far more than coal and hillbillies here. Continue reading
Watauga County, USA 