Barbara Kingsolver on being an Appalachian

Listening to Ezra Klein show interview of Kingsolver.

Barbara Kingsolver (b 1955) grew up on the border of Appalachia in Kentucky. She went to Congo in 2nd grade. She found out she was a hillbilly when she went to college in Indiana. Now she lives in Virginia. She backpacked around Europe for a few years. She lived in Tuscon Arizona for some time. She read a book set in Appalachia and she got into Kentucky writers, and embraced her own roots. She wrote Beantrees because she owned her background. She lives close to Kentucky in Virginia. Demon Copperhead is an Appalachian story. She wanted to write the great Appalachian novel. All the views about Appalachia are just put on things. People ask her how she can live in the middle of nowhere. She feels it's somewhere, everywhere. Being part of the land is harder to tax. If you live in the city you can be taxed. The Whiskey rebellion is a war about this issue. If you look at the way rural people are mocked, it's how they're self sufficient. People look down on country people, and it's pretty unfair. The opioid epidemic is the latest iteration of condescension about rural people from Appalachia. "Flyover country". Most of the media is created in the city. (I'm thinking about that show about farmers in Montana as a counter example, but that's about the one I think of.) I do love a sense of place.

Ezra Klein talks about condescension going the other way, to city dwellers.

She talks about the influence of Charles Dickens. You don't have to read David Copperfield to read this book, she says, but the parallel will be interesting. All you hear about Appalachia is negative news. Stupid rural people movies, Deliverance, etc. I love how Kingsolver focuses in on social workers. I read one of her novels in social work school (Pigs in Heaven). She reads from Demon Copperhead.

She talks about the moralizing about substance abuse in terms of brain washing and judgement and criminalizing. Addiction is a disease.

Because lower population, it's harder to find doctors, and the care is different.

Kingsolver Book recommendations:

Landings: A Crooked Creek Farm Year by Arwen Donahue

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America's Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy

Pod by Laline Paull

I grew up one month in Hayesville North Carolina, with my grandparents, who were not so much from there. I got 16 stitches from Bullet, a German Shepard with 4 teeth.

I mostly grew up in Madison Wisconsin, but I was born in Columbia South Carolina and spent time in Pittsburg Pennsylvania, and have lived in New York City for the past 33 years. I spent 2 years in England. Where do I belong? I'm probably going to move to Santa Fe in 10 years.

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