Welcome to Small Town Dispatches, a new feature on The Peak that recognizes the efforts of sustaining a writing practice in places with unconventional resources. Writing can be deeply isolating, especially when you live outside of cities that are seen as cultural epicenters. So here, Special Features Editor Nadeen Kharputly interviews Shenandoah contributors to gain insights about what it’s like to live in small towns (and towns that feel small): rural areas, college towns, islands, hamlets, and more.
Photo by Melissa Helton: Amy and Neema playing the dulcimers
Writer: Melissa Helton
Town: Hindman, Kentucky
Bio: Melissa Helton is Literary Arts Director for Hindman Settlement School, a cultural and historic nonprofit in southeastern Kentucky. Her poetry, photos, and essays have appeared in Still: The Journal, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Norwegian Writers Climate Campaign, Appalachian Review, and more. Her chapbooks include Inertia: A Study and Hewn. She is editor of the literary and arts journal Untelling and the anthology Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky, due out September 2024, which documents and responds to the catastrophic flooding of the region in July of 2022. She is a dual citizen in the United Kingdom.
Tell us about your small town – how small is it?
We’re pretty small population-wise—700 according to the 2020 census. We have one red light in town. We have the courthouse. A little ways out we have some shopping (Walgreens, IGA, Dairy Queen, Yoder’s Country Market, etc.). We have some restaurants. If you want a bookstore or tattoo shop, it’s a 25-minute drive. If you want a queer bar, it’s about 2.5 hours away. Main street is our downtown and it’s about a quarter of a mile long. We have some cool cultural things like the Appalachian Artisan Center and Troublesome Creek Stringed Instruments Company. One of the main things in town is Hindman Settlement School, where I work.
What makes your town a unique place for your writing practice? Do you have a favorite writing spot? And how do you build community with other writers or creatives in your town?
It’s gonna sound like an advertisement or propaganda, but it’s not: I have my dream job. I work for a cultural and historic nonprofit which was the first rural settlement school in the country. It’s Hindman Settlement School, and we were founded in 1902. We’re no longer a boarding school but we provide education inside and outside of the K-12 schools through our four main programs. For decades we’ve been providing dyslexia and literacy tutoring. We have a foodways program that does school gardens and helps families grow their own food. Our traditional arts program holds square dances and quilting classes, after school art clubs, and free music lessons where kids can learn instruments like banjo, mandolin, and dulcimer. And then, we have the literary arts. I’m the director of that program.
I came to the settlement school through the writing community and after seven years of loving this place, I now get to help steer the ship.
For almost 50 years we’ve had the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, which is a week-long event where writers from across the region (and beyond) stay on our campus, write, learn, and celebrate community. We have online writing classes. We have a creative writing summer camp called Ironwood for high schoolers. We have spring and fall weekend retreats. We have a publishing imprint called Fireside Industries through the University Press of Kentucky. We are starting a literary and arts magazine called Untelling. And more.
We are a small, small town, but the settlement school acts as an anchor point for so much cool stuff.
Through this place, seemingly out in the middle of nowhere if you look on a map, I’ve gotten to meet and learn from folks like Nikki Giovanni, Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, Silas House, Beth Macy. I don’t know anywhere else I could just porch sit with Dorothy Allison on a random Thursday morning in July.
Our literary tradition on this ground is deep. James Still, Lucy Furman, Albert Stewart, Harriet Arnow, Jim Wayne Miller. Gurney Norman, Frank X Walker, George Ella Lyon, Neema Avashia, Crystal Wilkinson, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle. If I were to list the writers that have, and still do, pass through this place, it would be a long, long list. National award winners and poets laureate side-by-side with emerging writers and those who haven’t yet had a single publication.
It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s magical. Like I said, my dream job.
One of the great things that happens in our work here is the building of this community, especially for our young writers. Our week-long studio for high schoolers, Ironwood Writers Studio, brings together these teenagers who are often rural, and because of that, often isolated from opportunities to study creative writing, and isolated from other peers interested in writing. We had our third year this past June, and we had students come from across Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and North Carolina. And there are always tears when we have to leave. It’s such an affirming week for these young people, seeing that yes, they are valued writers, yes, the broader Appalachian writing community is supportive and so excited to welcome them into the fold.
Photo by Tyler Barrett: Ironwood students on the bridge
What do you appreciate most about where you live?
Appalachia gets a bad rap. Certainly everywhere has its problems, but the media from outside the region historically (and still to this day) has had the tendency of coming in, scooping up their “poverty porn” images and presenting those out-of-context images and stories as this hegemonic truth of the region. And this is why fostering Appalachian writers and artists is so important to me. If we see a more accurate presentation of ourselves and our region, it can not only affect how the outside world sees us, but also how we see ourselves. When we have youth whose family has lived in the region for generations, who themselves have lived here their whole lives, and they’re hesitant to identify as Appalachian, we must pause and ask why.
The more voices we have telling the story of Appalachia, the more accurate and nuanced it is. Then more people from here can see themselves as being of, from, for, in, and with this place.
I’m originally from Toledo, Ohio, and my family had never lived in the region. My father was actually an immigrant to the US. So it’s very important for me to be careful of how I’m viewing the region, its people, its traditions, its languages. I’ve lived here and chosen to raise my kids here and feel a desire to identify myself as Appalachian, and Kentuckian, because there are so many things I love.
In Hindman, southeastern Kentucky, and Appalachia more broadly, there is a sense of helping each other out. You will always be offered food. When you leave, people will say “Be careful” as an expression of love. There is value in self-sufficiency and preparation. When the nearest grocery store is a 30-minute drive away, you plan ahead and you make do. When a lot of folks are struggling in different ways, you learn to share and help out. They ask if you need anything before they go to town.
Photo by Melissa Helton: the drying flooded photos
There is a deep connection to the land, its flora and fauna, its seasons. There is a lot of honor placed on making things by hand, whether that be music, biscuits, a quilt, a jar of jam, or a stack of firewood.
In Hindman in particular, I love the landscape. Where we live is so vibrant with life that moss grows on the side of my one-lane road. Just this morning I saw turkeys walk past my porch, and a couple nights ago, coyotes crying on the mountain woke me. I love my hillside of oaks. Just maneuvering through your day, you’re connected to the landscape in ways I never experienced in the Midwest suburbs. People will update each other about road and bridge conditions after a storm or winter freeze. You tell your neighbor about a bear, copperhead, or pack of wild dogs. People go hunting for what is in season: hickory chickens (AKA morel mushrooms), ramps, ginseng, turkeys, deer, and so much more.
I love being between bigger towns Hazard and Pikeville, also being close enough to cities (“close enough” by these standards as being a 2.5 hr drive you can make for a daytrip) like Lexington and Knoxville. And the vibrant arts community around me.
Besides things here in Hindman, there is a great bookstore (Read Spotted Newt) and art center (Appalachian Arts Alliance) in Hazard, and great literary and arts happenings close enough, such as Mountain Heritage Literary Festival in Harrogate, TN.
What are some of the challenges of living there?
Like many other rural places, we have those common struggles like problems with poverty, underfunded schools, poor access to health care or food, drug addiction, crappy infrastructure (especially internet access). We are suffering population loss in a decades-long diaspora for education and jobs like other rural communities. Some of our unique challenges stem from a history of extractive industry. Logging, strip mining, and mountain top removal have altered our landscape and our bodies and left many of our communities struggling to diversify their economies and to thrive in a world where coal is no longer a reliable meal ticket for communities. I will refrain from going on too much about this as there are many more articulate and knowledgeable people to discuss these relationships. But suffice it to say, the pollution and flooding, the folks dying of black lung, the psychological violence of seeing a mountain that is older than the rings of Saturn un-made in an instant so a few families can get a paycheck and an out-of state company can get even richer… this is part of life in the coalfields.
It is also common for some folks to struggle to find community. We are a nation that thrives on division. Us and them. Right and left. So yes, finding diversity can be easier in a city with a million people. But that doesn’t mean Appalachia is this monolithic place where everyone is white, straight, Christian, natural-born citizens. One of Appalachia’s rising demographics on the last census was a rise in Hispanic and Latinx residents. I read the state with the highest per capita population of transgender teens in the whole country is West Virginia. Decades ago, former poet laureate of Kentucky, Frank X Walker, coined the term “Affriliachian” to fight against this whitewashing of Appalachia, and in his poem he reminds/teaches us that “part of the bluegrass is Black.” I was afraid to come out as a queer woman, because I had internalized this fear that my neighbors would be homophobic. But thankfully, I found everyone to be pretty accepting. Yes, there are some trucks with confederate battle flags on them, and there is homophobia and Islamophobia and all of that. And also, that is everywhere in the US. It is not isolated to the South, or the mountains, or to rural spaces, or to majority white communities.
Photo by Justin Brown: workshop group photo in front of cabin
What sort of rituals have you cultivated in your town?
My rituals hover around my writing community through the settlement school. For years I’d come here every July for Writers’ Workshop. I’d come to other retreats and events as often as I could. And our writing community is good for rituals. During the beginning of the COVID shutdown, the writers began a monthly Zoom breakfast meeting where anyone who wants to logs on and we visit with each other in our pajamas on a Saturday morning, just to stay in touch. Years and years ago, someone began the writers’ workshop ritual of a community reading of Jim Wayne Miller’s poem, “The Brier Sermon,” where we gather at night and take turns reading sections of the poem by flashlight. It’s a long poem about leaving Appalachia and how when we abandon the ways of our homeplace and our homepeople, we lose part of ourselves and we need to be careful what we’re running to and what we’re leaving behind. Last year, one of our writers added in a poem “Motherland” by Crystal Wilkinson’s collection Perfect Black (which won an NAACP Image Award) that touches on the same themes. Then when the poems are done being read to the night and the mountains and the graves above us, someone begins singing “May the Circle Be Unbroken.” It’s magical every time.
I’ve lived in Hindman for a little less than a year, and so I’ve been setting up house in my new life here. I guess I don’t have any rituals just of my own yet.
Can you share any writing advice that’s inspired by your living situation?
Online community is great. It is vital when you live physically removed from people. But we have to be in community with other writers and other creatives when we can. We need to sit on porches and tell stories, listen to music together, eat meals together. Being with other creative brains and hearts ignites our own creativity. Ideas spark off each other best in real time, without the lag time delay of people unmuting their Zoom microphones.
And also, we should be flexible in our writing identity. Southeast Kentucky suffered a terrible flood in July 2022, six months after I started working here. I began a divorce. I moved, my youngest kid started high school, my eldest kid started college applications, my brother unexpectedly died,… life hits hard sometimes, ya know? And it’s been hard to read. Usually by this time of the year I’ve read 25 books. I’ve literally read 2. I couldn’t write a poem, so I forced myself to by organizing my writers to participate in the Stafford Challenge together (write a poem a day for a year). I have to come at the writing sideways, but first starting with drawing something, or painting, or tearing up paper and gluing it down, and then some words come forth as a poem. I’m behind my quota and my poems don’t feel like “good” poems, but I’m doing as much as I can. And that’s a victory I should allow myself to celebrate.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
As I said, we had a terrible flood. NOAA declared it a thousand-year flood. And it hit campus and threatened the lives of 60 of my writers who were staying on campus during Writers’ Workshop. The catastrophic flash flooding hit between 2 and 3 in the morning, but thank all the universe, my writers got up and out of the danger to higher ground. Some of them lost belongings. About a dozen of them lost their cars. None of them were physically injured, and all of them carry some trauma.
Troublesome Creek, which runs through our campus, is usually 6 inches deep. It tore through town at 20 feet high. Bridges, cars, propane tanks, sheds, whole houses were washed away.
The flood destroyed our offices, our archives, our dyslexia tutoring classrooms, our green house, and damaged other campus buildings. We still don’t have offices and are set up in temporary cubicles in our Great Hall, where we have square dances, community baby showers, and other gatherings.
Over 40 people died in the flooding, 22 from Knott County (of which Hindman is the county seat). It’s almost 2 years out and many, many places are still awaiting repair or rebuilding. In many cases, families and communities that were barely making it before, had the little security they’d built literally washed away in the middle of the night.
Photo by Melissa Helton: the car in the creek
The University Press of Kentucky asked me to put together an anthology about the flood. I mean if you have 60 writers and artists going through a flood together, it’ll be well-documented, right? The book, Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky, is due out in September 2024. It has new work from Lee Smith and Nikki Giovanni, it has writers like Wendell Berry and Carter Sickles, and spans all the way down to some folks’ first publication credit. It documents this flood, but also other historic floods and natural disasters, fictional floods, and metaphoric floods like diaspora, COVID, and opioid addiction. It interrogates the causes of these increasing natural disasters, how they impact and shape culture, and how communities rise up and help themselves and help each other.
If anyone wants to see what the Hindman writing community is like, it’s in those pages. It’s a manifesto and a love letter to our writers, and southeastern Kentucky, and Appalachia as a whole. It really demonstrates how smart, big-hearted, resilient, talented, and badass this community is. It shows how hard we’ve been knocked down again and again, and how each time, we get back up.
For more information: Hindman’s literary programming.