On this second day of #UPWeek2023, the University Press of Kentucky answers the question “Who does our press help #SpeakUP?” University presses’ mission is to give voice to the scholarship and ideas shaping conversations around the world, so it’s crucial that we uplift and amplify individuals and stories from communities that are too often lost in the mainstream.
In today’s guest post, Dr. Melissa Helton, literary arts director at Hindman Settlement School, writes about the devastation of the catastrophic flash flood of July 2022 that claimed the lives of more than 40 people in Central Appalachia. Appalachia is so rarely thought of as anything beyond “the holler”, let alone as a place with a beautiful and irreplaceable culture and people. Today’s writing from Dr. Helton shares in our mission to celebrate and give voice to that very same Appalachian community—its strength, determination, and resilience.
Founded in 1902, the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, Kentucky has been known as “the seedbed” for Appalachian literature. Here, you can see modern Appalachian writers like Frank X Walker, Neema Avashia, and Robert Gipe mentoring high school students during our week-long summer Ironwood Writers Studio, or Kari Gunter-Seymour, Lisa Kwong, and Jim Minick teaching online classes for The Makery. We can scroll back in time to the early years of the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, where you can see Jim Wayne Miller, Albert Stewart, and Harriet Arnow gathering with their students over meals in the dining hall, or we could scroll further back still to the early years with James Still and Lucy Furman on campus, or even back to the very beginning when our founders May Stone and Katherine Pettit wrote journals of their first years here in the mountains as they detailed the people, culture, and natural landscape they encountered. All of these snapshots show that the claim of being a seedbed for Appalachian literature is well-earned. As the first rural settlement school in the country, to now a cultural and historical non-profit, Hindman Settlement School has been working to document, foster, and develop Appalachian voices and stories for over a century.
Our tagline is that we celebrate heritage and strive to meet the changing needs of the region. Some of the ways we have done that is as our institution continues to add to the literary ecosystem, we look for ways we can address the unmet needs of our writers, readers, educators, students, and community neighbors. This has included online writing classes, the development of our inaugural Winter Burrow Literary & Arts Conference this December, and our forthcoming literary and arts journal Untelling. Also included is the Fireside Industries publishing imprint through the University Press of Kentucky, which was founded in 2018.
Fireside Industries is devoted to telling authentic rural stories and Appalachian stories from those who live in those places, and the imprint strives to bring more attention to Appalachian classics while also lifting up new, diverse voices. The series editor, current Kentucky Poet Laureate Silas House, has said his goal as editor is to pay homage to the past and give much deserved attention to important Appalachian books, as well as keeping an eye on the future to bring in diverse writers with engaging and interesting perspectives. We can see that commitment to honor the past in the re-release of Lucy Furman’s The Quare Women and James Still’s Hounds on the Mountain. And we can see that commitment to bring in diverse voices and tell the untold stories in the celebrated release of Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle’s Even as We Breathe, a historical fiction about two Cherokee youth during World War 2; Patricia L. Hudson’s Traces, which tells the story of Daniel Boone through the lives of his wife Rebecca and their daughters; and The Girl Singer by Marianne Worthington, which is a poetry collection that celebrates the hidden women of early country music.
The Fireside Industries imprint publishes 2-3 books a year, showcasing a mix of genre and subject matter. Our forthcoming titles include Monic Ductan’s short story collection The Daughters of Muscadine, which centers Black women characters in Georgia (November 2023) and Jane Hicks’s poetry collection The Safety of Small Things which, among other things, explores the experience of battling and surviving breast cancer (January 2024). Due out September 2024 is the anthology Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky, which I was the special guest editor for.
In July 2022, several counties throughout southeast Kentucky experienced devastating flash flooding, including Knott County and our Hindman Settlement School campus. Half of the total death toll from the storms and flooding were suffered here in Knott County, and our campus suffered damage to 5 of our buildings, including classrooms, offices, living spaces, and our archive. We were in the middle of the 45th Appalachian Writers’ Workshop with 60 attendees on campus.
After the immediate rescue began to slow down and the community transitioned into the long-term rebuilding and recovering, I was asked to edit an anthology about the flood—this would become Troublesome Rising. The pieces include accounts of that terrible night in July and the aftermath, some document other floods throughout Appalachia, some are fictional floods, and some are metaphorical floods like diaspora, COVID, and addiction.
Many of the included writers were ones that physically went through the flood, and some experienced it from a distance. For some of these contributors, this is their first or second publishing credit, all the way up to prolific writers like Wendell Berry, George Ella Lyon, Nikki Giovanni, and Lee Smith.
As a member of the Hindman writing community before becoming an employee, documenting what our writers went through was an honor. The collection also documents some of the surrounding community’s experience of this flood, the effects of climate change and extractive industries that exacerbate our natural disasters in the region, and the profound loss and strength of the people of Central Appalachia, all of which are much-needed conversations to be had within the region and beyond. As a book on the Fireside Industries imprint, we’re proud to gather these pieces and contribute them to these conversations.
Contact Dr. Melissa Helton, the writer of this guest post:
melissa@hindman.org or (606) 785-5475.
You can find information about Hindman Settlement School’s literary programming here: https://hindman.org/literary/
Preorder Troublesome Rising here: https://www.kentuckypress.com/9781950564439/troublesome-rising/
The University Press of Kentucky 