0 Comments
WMMT’s Rachel Garringer sat down in the studio with founding STAY member, Willa Johnson, current STAY coordinator Lou Murrey, and new STAY member Katelyn Damron- who joined by phone to talk about their annual #appalachianlovestory campaign. Appalachian Love Week is February 12-18, 2018 and STAY asks folks to share their #appalachianlovestory online with this hashtag.
Listen to the story here: www.wmmt.org/mtn-news-reflections/ I’m finally ready and willing to start sharing photos/poetry/thoughts/reflections on my experiences as a player playing many parts in that great family feud, as it were, of 2017 that, unfortunately, is not yet quite over. 2017 - that whirlwind of a contemptuously impossible year - proved to be my greatest failure, my greatest disappointment, my greatest education, and, somehow too, my greatest hope. Firstly, that jaded, rundown kind of hope which mandates the belief that eventually, things were going to have to be okay. And, later (currently), a sanguine hope, reddened in the face from drunkenness on the precipice of full redemption of those things truly important - a hope that shines in the darkness and which leads wise folks hither; truth is righteous, truth is clarity, and truth is the way of the world (courts). For catharsis, I took to writing this all down, scrawling the phrases as they popped into my head and piecing them together a little more artfully in the still quiet of many nights robbed of sleep. Unfortunately, in this society, our standard of strength is wholly contingent upon the amount of abuse that one can endure. Who would I be without suffering all this BS? Probably someone having far fewer anxiety attacks, but at the very least, it makes for a good story about how good prevails invariably, probably. This is the first manifestation of that. This particular set of photos signifies the preciousness and the seriousness of place - these are those couple hundred acres of red clay that someone once convinced me was home. These lands are held hostage and eerily quiet in the bonds of injunction, awaiting release. If stolen from me, they are stolen from everyone on this creek, farming families here hundreds of years, and their ancestors’ bones crushed under bulldozers of wealth. It is the latest, most personal iteration of the legacy of absentee land ownership, white collar theft, geographic pillage, and general abuse of the poor by the rich, the irrelevant, the outsider, in this area. But we are still fighting.  Katelyn Damron, 19, is a 2017-2018 STAY Project steering committee member from Tornado, WV. |
Appalachian Love Stories
|
RSS Feed