I Am Appalachia
Reflections in Times of Hardship & Resilience
At the end of this short essay, I’ve included links to several local, mutual aid organizations and resources, all working right now across Western North Carolina, Southwest Virginia, and Eastern Tennessee. I also encourage you to reach out directly to your friends, loved ones, and local mutual aid orgs to locate specific accounts on Venmo, PayPal, and GoFundMe. Please donate and share as much as you can.
My favorite place in the world is hurting, and so am I. I don’t have the words to encapsulate the insurmountable grief my community is feeling this week. It’s so thick and heavy; we haven’t even begun the process to try and process it.
An image of a woman sifting through the wreckage of her home, her belongings—books, furniture, clothes—covered in flood water and mud. Small businesses washed away entirely. Two and three-story homes reduced to wood piles and bones. An old, solid oak tree fallen onto a roof. Our beloved land and backroads, now dug up, broken, and torn. Rivers rising over the banks and pouring through once-thriving downtowns. Biblical floods terrorizing our most vulnerable, our most remote.
I tried my best to show up for those friends I know and love on the ground. They need my support right now. They need my attention. And then, I got a call too. My own family has also been deeply affected by this storm.
It’s the most personal thing.
But, I’m not there to be with them. Some people may interpret that as abandonment. You can call it whatever you like, but it doesn’t mean my heart doesn’t call out for those mountains and those folks—people who reared me, people I went to school with, and people who share the same love, joy, and passion as I do for our beloved region.
Beloved—that is my word for Appalachia. My beloved Appalachia, my heart breaks for you when I see you suffer. My heart wrenches every time you are left to fend for yourself against adversity and build yourself back up out of the ashes. My heart aches when I watch concerned politicians visit us just for the optics. My heart cracks right in two whenever outsiders pretend they know more about us than we do.
But my heart sings too—when community members and neighbors show us what the stuff of true compassion is. My heart sings when I see those organizations pour their hearts, resources, and thoughts into the funds, homes, and lives of those in need. Because that’s who Appalachia is—we take care of our own. We shoulder each other’s burdens. We lend a hand and always, always take a moment to say, “We’re here to help. This is for you.”
I leave you with the words of one of us, an Appalachian, whose voice and courage always give me strength in times like these.
4.
earth works
thick brown mud
clinging pulling
a body down
heard wounded earth cry
bequeath to me
the hoe the hope
ancestral rights
to turn the ground over
to shovel and sift
until history
rewritten resurrected
returns to its rightful owners
a past to claim
yet another stone lifted to
throw against the enemy
making way for new endings
random seeds
spreading over the hillside
wild roses
come by fierce wind and hard rain
unleashed furies
here in this touched wood
a dirge a lamentation
for earth to live again
earth that is all at once a grave
a resting place a bed of new beginnings
avalanche of splendor
—bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy
Appalachian Voices calls on Congress to approve disaster relief funding for Helene damage
Donation Resources:
Local Mutual Aid & Cultural Organizations to Follow & Support: