try this here. So I'm Brian Matthews Library.
Welcome you to the library. You are Sorry.
Installment of the Visible Scholar Initiative, which is a
great project. A great partnership between the College of
Arts minutes. One day I learned how to say
that it's a mouthful. And this this program which
we kind of record make available. Is Arabians very
interesting in the last someone to talk about the sort
of craft for that, there's very polarizing. So
interesting. Go down with the portrayal. Well,
I did it interesting. I think the image is
really nice. What kind of shows? Depending on
the medium that you're viewing this, it's sort of
a total. So you care about that? Let's
just go and get started. I'm gonna invite Tom
you from the college Jeffy remarks and to the speaker
in my job interview that made me say that five
. Thanks. I appreciate your coming, um,
through this so racial or scholarship and the market Community
College of Law and university libraries, I should say
right at the beginning that not only do we have
, I do have one Thank you scholarship here.
We also have a prize winning book just last Friday
. I think Dear Appalachia won the weather for award
for the best non fiction monograph presented by the Appalachian
Studies Organization. That went well, thank you.
I got a plaque. It's very nice, so
interesting kind of shift for us in terms of the
kinds of scholars. Mhm. You know most of
what we've been looking at our text, a scholarship
as texts that are produced by academics. But this
is an issue because here we have a book that's
actually written about letters that were written about books.
And so we have really three different kinds of text
the text as product that's actually scholar product ladders as
a kind of text. And then the book.
No, it's mostly those books that are on display
here from the library collection in terms of I guess
mostly fiction, maybe some other travel accounts. So
I encourage you to come up and look at some
of these books, which I don't know if they
inspired Emily or not, but they inspired a lot
of people to write the letters that she looked at
in some of these collection. And for those of
us who right about texts, obviously, libraries are
very important place, a building full of text and
I think particularly for those of us and I've done
this. Some who use letters in our research libraries
are often the places where those letters are active,
reserved and made available to scholars. Obviously, archives
, special collections depends on what kind of letter and
how they are preserved. Um, but letters are
tricky because they're very often very fragmentary. Okay,
they are written usually in response to something. In
this case book. The case is some action or
some statement. But when you come to read letters
and use them as a scholar resource, you don't
always know what happened before, and often you don't
know what happened. And so part of the process
of using letters, um, texts for analysis is
kind of recognizing that they are this kind of momentary
thing. And how do you make how much important
and as I found about this book and this scholar
in comparison to some of the others series and Brian
man, um, that's actually common, You know
, if we go back to prison audio book in
the beginning, she was looking at peacekeeping as a
particular moment. Okay, What's the strategy with the
practices and discourses that are involved in those efforts?
Obviously, Brian Bridge study how the person the traditions
are you think letters are, you know, pretty
fried first. Yeah. Uhh. Neil Kings,
I think, was a particularly interesting case move right
after the Christ. But a movie in a particular
and what it meant at that moment, both.
They are also for the viewers. The situation,
I think, perhaps most interesting out of all of
these last month, Um, scholar Dr Ziegler's efforts
to transform a textual version of an emotion the music
will come. How do you make that process not
only lasting but also get following up the theme of
this this series How do you make How do you
recognize that transition and take something that is written down
and turning? Um, an analytical argument. And
so in some ways, I think the topics are
very different. Challenges are the same. And so
what I'm looking forward to, um, as we
turn this over to Emily is how she does this
in her prize winning coming out of a humanities background
. Also where studies and I guess more specifically,
Appalachian studies. Um kind of scholarship and how she
takes on this challenge. Turn it over. Thank
you. As Tom mentioned my primary sources fan mail
and none of it's big enough for you to see
from afar. It doesn't really matter which one you
get. But if you just take one and pass
I just wanted you to have in your hands start
half on the other side. One example of one
of the many, many sources that I used and
I brought you mostly ones that are typed. Um
, so it looks like my job was fairly easy
, but a lot of them were handwritten. And
Virginia Tech work study spent a lot of time transcribing
those handwritten, uh, letters into the things that
I could could read and search and do control fines
. And but this will give you a little bit
of a sense of the range of sources that I
was drawing on. Um, thank you all for
coming. I want to thank Associate Dean Tom Ewing
and the folks here at the library, especially Leslie
Moyo, but also Robert and Emily and everyone who
did all the work to put together this series of
exhibits and receptions Um and I just want to mention
especially thanks to Tyler, Walter's head of the library
, and Dean Stuart Rowlands is head of the college
for their support of this visible scholarship initiative. So
where I started with this is that, uh,
in Appalachian studies. We talk a lot about negative
stereotyping of Appalachia, but as I was reading lot
of the books that you see up on display here
, I was noticing that fiction, generally speaking,
has a more celebratory approach to Appalachia, especially the
popular, the more popular words and these at the
top here, the best sellers that I looked at
in particular. And so I was interested in how
, um how this fiction might be celebrating Appalachia as
an alternative to what people see as the downsides of
civilization. Dear Appalachia is the story of what I
learned about the readers of these books that you see
here. And it's about, um, what the
readers took away from the novels, why they read
them, what they got out of them. Um
, how these books were important for their identities.
And when I say identities, I mean their sense
of belonging, community belonging, regional belonging, national
belonging reader sense of roots, their sense of connection
to a not quite white ethnic identity. And readers
sense of themselves as as cultivated and discerning and knowledgeable
and civil as civilized because they could appreciate, um
, the books. They can appreciate the primitive peoples
represented in the books. I just want to pause
for a minute to say something about this cover image
. I love this image. It was in a
Virginia Tech Research Magazine article about Appalachian studies at Virginia
Tech, and a class of graphic arts students were
asked to illustrate the article. And the young woman
who got my portion had to illustrate my work created
this Amanda Co Bista. She's now a professional graphic
artist, but she graduated from Virginia Tech, and
I love it. She somehow read that interview and
captured my argument that that the readers saw in Appalachia
their own familial histories, Um, and also their
own best simple, soulful, non generically white rooted
Selves. The urban woman looking at herself as an
overall, um, country country person. So I
love I love the story of the image of the
cover. All right, so now, in the
spirit of the visible scholarship mission, to make visible
the stages of research and creative scholarship I'm going to
talk for, I hope only about 15 minutes about
how the book came to be, um, Tom's
idea behind the visible scholarship initiative is to see how
faculty address key questions, employ varied methods and produce
significant results. So I'll say a little bit about
each of these three steps, questions, methods and
results. So questions. There's a lesson here for
any of you who are new researchers, because I
found my book topic totally by accident. I wanted
to write a seminar paper in grad school about Mary
Knowles Murphree and how she proved that insiders to Appalachia
who were urban's and elites actually had the same stereotypical
representations of Appalachians as, um, as outsiders.
This identity politics thing is really big in Appalachian studies
, but it turned out when I went to do
the research that Murfreesboro wasn't in Appalachia at all,
So I had to scramble really fast and find a
different paper topic for the for the seminar. So
I noticed in the catalog. Among the entries for
Murphree was her, her all her materials, her
archival materials actually were in the very library where I
was trying to figure out how I was going to
write a paper in the next week. And so
I went to up to special collections as as Tom
was mentioning. Luckily, special collections was a place
where these materials had been housed, and that's when
I discovered fan mail. I learned that although the
local elites who read her work were able to imagine
her as like themselves, someone who could the sort
of patronising but appreciating of these locals, um,
metropolitan elites in Boston, In places like this,
you could tell from their fan mail that they imagined
, Murphy wrote under a pen name Charles Democratic.
So they imagined this rough and ready mountain man astride
a horse with a shotgun and going up and gathering
all these stories firsthand. Um, and so I
started to be really interested in geography of the fan
mail where the fan mail was coming from where the
writers of the fan mail had been, and what
difference that make not just their social location of class
and gender, but their actual physical location or locations
. What difference did that make in the way that
they interpreted the fiction the fiction did not mean the
same thing for every reader. And that became really
clear when I read these paltry few. I think
Chapter one. I remember when Dan Thorpe, who's
in history, almost fainted. When I said this
at a talk. My first semester here is based
on about 14 letters, and I make my whole
case around these. These letters, Um, and
then, um, I'm jumping ahead of myself.
I missed my questions. I'm into my methods.
Um, so So let me let me step back
just for a minute and make sure that I do
say that Although I started out trying to prove something
, I did quickly learn that I needed some questions
, too. Then go and answer not just about
Murphree, but about these other bestsellers. So those
questions were, um, how did the readers imagine
the authors? And what difference did that make in
how they imagined Appalachia and how they imagined the stories
? Um, why did these fans want or need
to imagine the author in the region the way that
they did? What role did the idea of Appalachia
served for them in their lives? So those were
I did eventually have research questions, but but by
accident. As I mentioned, uh, Tom mentioned
in terms of methods, he mentioned American studies,
Appalachian studies. I want to say a little bit
about where I situate myself in terms of disciplines.
I actually situate myself more in terms of interdisciplinary fields
for interdisciplinary fields. There's Appalachian studies, which,
um, I think you can see how it's in
conversation with that. There's a fairly new group of
scholars working on reception studies, and they have been
very helpful for me in terms of the method.
Logical issues that Tom was talking about that are raised
by fan letters. What kind of evidence are they
? What cautions do you have to take? You
can't take them at face value what you have to
understand about the moment that they were written in order
to interpret them. It's about best sellers, so
I'm very much a conversation with pop culture studies.
And then, um, finally, it's a book
about the anxieties of white readers who worried that maybe
being just plain old white was too meaningless, meaningless
and ruthless, which means that I draw on the
work of critical whiteness studies as well. Mhm Um
I was starting to mention what I actually do in
terms of methodology. Going to archives. Uh,
Emery was where I was in grad school. University
of Kentucky. Agnes Scott in Atlanta. Um,
in the earlier period, I could read all 14
letters when I got to, um, Harry d'Arnaud
Henry sworn in the dollmaker. There are 128 letters
. I was able to read all of them and
map all of them, which I'll say a little
bit more about in a minute. But when I
get to James Dickey and also Katherine Marshall, whom
some of you probably know is huge fan base for
Christie and all her other works talking about thousands of
letters. So I had to make a decision about
how much I could look at and what kind of
sampling that I wanted to do when I got when
I got to those, and to try to sort
through. And I was trying to pull out true
fans, not just colleagues or acquaintances who might write
in praise of the book, but people who had
never met this person because I felt like that was
the, um, sort of purest way of getting
at what somebody who had not heard the author's intent
. What they made made off with it got tricky
when I got to Chapter five, the more recent
novels Cold Mountain Plays Quilt, Big Stone Gap at
Home in Medford. Those are the four for that
chapter. I didn't want to asked the authors for
their fan mail because I didn't want to be beholden
to them, and I don't know if they would
have given it to me anyway. But I wanted
a source to get at reader responses. So I
used a customer reviews on Amazon for the for that
chapter, and I had to make up a whole
new plan for how to sample and how to understand
how these were different or similar as sources to the
fan mail and one of the most important things that
I did. Actually, um, and again,
to any, some of my students are here new
researchers. One of the most important things I did
is, uh and I did it because a reviewer
made me reviewer for the press made me, but
I'm really glad he did is an 18 page method
. Logical s a where I had to sit down
and remember what I looked at and why I looked
at that, and, um, and it lay
it all out in 18 pages. So I'm really
glad to have that document because I couldn't put it
back together if I hadn't sat down and done it
. At the time I mentioned mapping these the toner
without, So you can't see these. You can
pass them around. But I did try to map
these letters, and I also here's one that you
really can't see, but you might be able to
see all those lines. I mapped the migrations of
readers because one thing that I found was that,
um, the more mobile a person was, the
more that person was a missionary or a tourist or
somebody who had to out migrate from the region for
work. The more mobile the reader, the more
the reader wanted to believe in a rooted, static
, timeless place. And so the maps became a
a way for me to help make that argument.
That is a good segue to results. One of
the things that I found through this methodology, Um
, what else did I learned? I learned that
most fans of Appalachian fiction imagined the author as an
authentic representative of the region. And that's where I
actually came up with the title Dear Appalachia in writing
a fan letter. Dear Mrs Arno. Dear Mr
Dickey, the readers. We're in a way writing
to Appalachia. It's not just that Appalachia was dear
to them, which it was. It was also
that it was dear, authentic representative of this place
you stand in for the region. Another thing I
found was that whether you're talking about 18, 78
or 2001, readers hungered for a romantic vision of
Appalachia. They wanted to see it as a place
apart, distinct from the rest of the country.
They emphasized it as rural pastoral, as home as
homeland, with all the sort of nationalisms that that
calls up in these days of homeland Security. And
this was even when the fiction was what I would
argue, offering a far more complicated message about the
region. White readers turn to Appalachia out of a
fear of culture lawlessness out of a need for reassurance
that there's such a thing as authentic white culture out
there somewhere. Um, and then some readers use
the idea of Appalachia as a critique of capitalism to
project onto Appalachia their desires for a less commercialised,
less virtual, less bureaucratic place. So on the
one hand, please, the pleasures that readers took
an Appalachian distinctiveness often arose from an admirable commitment to
cultural pluralism. A celebration of difference. Um,
and these novels certainly reject the usual, um,
you know, stereotypes that rural places are dumb and
backwards, and there an effective way to combat that
. But, they assert, what I argue is
an equally stereotypical set of romantic images in reply.
And this, by the conclusion, was a a
real place of worry for me about readers uncritical embrace
of an authentic Appalachia because I found it overlapped with
some things that I don't think that most people who
are fans in Appalachian studies fans of Appalachia would necessarily
want to identify themselves with, For example, as
a celebration of whiteness, Appalachia is often mistakenly assumed
to be a white region. Celebrations of Appalachia can
overlap, or I fear that it could support a
kind of celebration of whiteness, especially of white folks
and the idea of white folks as what America is
. So I worry in the conclusion about Appalachian,
Ah, readers as, um, unintentionally, perhaps
, but endorsing a kind of white nationalism. White
American nationalism, Um, that America is at heart
just a simple, white, goodhearted innocent place with
nothing with no real ambitions or mean to harm anybody
else good and innocent, and that it might also
overlap with celebrations of American imperialism. Because I argued
that the novel's teach readers how to recognize supposedly primitive
peoples in need of guidance not just in Appalachia but
around the world, and that there are explicit parallels
that readers frequently make. Oh, this is just
like my mission work in Africa, or this is
just like the when I was in Ulster, or
these people are just like and that consistent paralleling of
primitive peoples helps train a certain view of these peoples
. I argue, in need of guidance, um
, as a wonderful object of tourism, um,
and also of economic imperialism in closing Last thing,
I'd like to say, when readers learned about Appalachia
via these popular regional novels, they learned a fairly
conventional version of the region is home to a colorful
way of life that includes nonstandard speech, folk traditions
, closeness to the land. Suppose is more authentic
relationship between close knit kin and neighbors. So I
found that the popular novels may not offer up enough
different stories about enough of the different kinds of people
in places that make up Appalachia to serve as they
are often used in the classroom and elsewhere as a
kind of Appalachian Studies. One. Oh one.
Thank you. I've been asked to take questions.
So if anybody has any questions, I'd love to
talk about this. More Gail know about? Yes
. Well, how do I know about the migration
of the fans? I, um there's a There's
a large body of scholarship about the Southern diaspora.
So I knew to look for it, Uh,
for one thing, not just African Americans who are
associated with the great migration, but upland whites as
well. Um, and in fact, in greater
numbers. But I it was this it was that
the fan letters when when Appalachia was important in the
fan letter and it wasn't always, you know,
sometimes it might be. I can't believe that you
let Billy do such and such or whatever. You
know, there were other quibbles, but when the
when the readers discussed Appalachia, they often also told
their stories so their narrative would be I'm from.
And it wasn't always out migration from Appalachia. But
I'm from New Mexico and I'm homesick for the mountains
to Or in the 1919 10 about a writer would
say, Um, he would sign it. You
know, his letterhead would be Pennsylvania, but he
would sign it as a Kentucky and formerly of Whitehall
, Kentucky. And those identities were so important to
them. So I don't know every case in which
a fan was mobile in some way. But whenever
they were, I tried to, um, to
market and and then to map it was that something
? Hello, like something discovered. It's something I
discovered and I did not anticipate. It was cool
. It's very fun. It gave me excuse to
ask the press to spend a lot of money on
maps of migrations, that I needed them to make
my argument. Nathan early on you just perhaps in
the letter writers as being okay, The money,
Um uh, faster and looser than most historians would
like. Um, I was in that case,
assuming a kind of class status, and for that
chapter for the late 18 hundreds, based on the
other kinds of illusions that the letter writers made.
You opened up the world of literature to me when
I thought after Emerson it was closed. Or,
um um I have seen people just like that when
I lived in Tennessee. Um, so I was
actually, I don't have hard evidence about the economic
financial household of the letter writer, but I look
for any clues that I could about at least how
they see themselves. Um, and urban, I
could I could, or Metropolitan. Or, you
know, I could kind of tell by the by
the mapping or by the by the return address.
But the class status was one that I, um
I had to look for a lot of clues,
for example, in letters to, um, are
no, I believe the author of the dollmaker it
would it would be like, Oh, do you
know so and so the veterinarian or the doctor or
And I would try to feel out what class circles
they identified with fundamental texted the attitude that you saw
. I did, I did. I did not
do census research, for example, or, um
, I did, Uh, I did spend some
time. This is something that would not have been
possible when I started the project, but was by
the time I was trying to get ready for it
to go to press Googling these people because it turned
out in some cases that these were very well known
people that I just didn't recognize the names. And
so it is a last, desperate measure. I
went through and tried to identify some of those and
actually had an undergraduate research assistant, um, several
of them who were wonderful here at Virginia Tech,
but one in particular who caught a lot of that
for me as well. He said he had a
different range of cultural references and would say, Well
, actually, that Dickie fan is very well known
and and flag back for me. Bruce Mobley.
Unfair question, but perhaps fair game for the younger
research. Given what you've seen here, what would
you expect in the national literatures from other parts of
the country? Other internal colonies like the Midwest,
arguably Nevada because I can actually think of a novel
written Stewart, where the two main places actively or
Roanoke Las Vegas, I am very interested in what
I see as a resurgence of a local color movement
. The first chapter comes out of the local color
popularity that that literary movement of the late 18 hundreds
. And I would argue that since the late 19
eighties 19 nineties, we've seen a resurgence of interest
in regional fiction. And I would guess, um
and I have some mind to go and do some
comparative work. But I would guess that that it
functions similarly in the sense of producing regional identities.
And you mentioned Internal Colony in the sense of in
some ways talking back to an idea of an imposed
normal or or mainstream I would hesitate after, especially
after my research, to say, think too much
in terms of internal Colony, given the kinds of
imperial impulses that I found, the readers, um
, in Appalachia and outside of Appalachia, nurturing by
reading these these fictions. So, in some cases
, perhaps a kind of looking back from the margins
, but in some case, uh, reinforcing a
kind of hegemonic, hegemonic notion of Americanness in the
world. Yeah, I could ask you a question
. Sorry. Just seconds. Go ahead. Gary
. Um, you said that these people who are
more mobile, that were sort of map is being
more mobile. Had a sense that they wanted a
more rooted sense of place. Can you say something
about what was detectable in their letters? That sort
of gave you those clues. Um, well,
perhaps it might not be fair totally to jump to
this one. But the most obvious and evident place
was in respondents to our knows, the dollmaker,
which is a novel about migration from the Kentucky Hills
to Detroit. And unlike for the other authors,
a lot of our nose readers were also people who
had made a move from Kentucky to either Detroit or
California that during the Southern diaspora they had those experiences
and the overwhelming sense that you know, not not
a majority. But certainly a plurality of these letters
would say about the main character Gurdy, if you
know the dollmaker. Gertie goes from Kentucky to Detroit
, and life is difficult. There she, um
Well, I won't give it away. You should
read it. But in any case, um uh
, the readers fussed and fussed at Arno. Get
Gertie home. You get her home. Do not
keep her stalled up there the rest of her life
. Um, there, you know, I just
hate I would just was bracing myself that you would
leave her up there. And you did You better
write a sequel and redeem yourself. And just over
and over again. You get Gertie back to Kentucky
, and these are people who themselves did not return
to Kentucky. Um, but yeah. Mhm.
Yeah, and changes the ending. So, um
yeah, beware. Beware of the movie versions.
But for them, it was very important to remember
nostalgically away of of life and a community in Kentucky
. But, um, for they needed in fiction
, at least for that to be resolved even though
they didn't in their lives. So that was one
place where you could really see a notion of,
um, uh, a pastoralism with a belief in
a rooted nous and a more whole and holistic way
of life. One of her readers called it Get
her out of that radio screaming world. Um,
and who needs one of the things that becomes an
icon of life in Detroit in the ways that it
draws the family into debt and into consumer society?
Is this hulking icy heart refrigerator that takes up the
whole kitchen. And the readers would say, Who
needs an icy heart? Refrigerator, after all?
And so there. And the reviews did this,
too, and I haven't talked about reviews today,
but I did try to triangulate with critical published professional
reviews as well. And and they often portrayed Kentucky
as authentic and Detroit as hell. Amy. It
is. Yes, yes, tempered up. Well
, you can you can try. I mean,
you can ask the question, and I can try
to answer it. Um, why did they choose
to write about Okay? Mm. Mhm three.
No, that's a really, really great question,
and it becomes a really important point in the reception
to, so it's a totally fair question. Um
, the first chapter that was talking about Murfreesboro is
not in Appalachia, but she She summered at the
springs in Appalachia. So she grew up her whole
life with this kind of sense of elite plantation,
life versus mountain, um, life. And,
uh, she happened to be living in a time
when this gained great popularity and highbrow magazines like the
Atlantic Monthly. Um, John Foxx, Junior moved
there to try to take advantage of coal boom.
So he was from Central Kentucky. Um, he
was often marketed as someone who knew the mountains intimately
and loved the mountain people. But he was there
. Um, he was often off traveling the hills
, doing land speculation for his brother's business for coal
mining. Um, Harry d'Arnaud is from the westernmost
edge, the plateau area of Appalachia. Um,
she's often romanticized, is sort of the most authentic
of these authors, and she is in the sense
that she actually did grow up in that place.
She, um, was from a town looking off
into the mountains. She still had a kind of
distance, and her family also moved around a lot
. Her dad worked in the oil fields, so
even she had a kind of displacement that gave her
an advantage point from which to be interested. And
so she actually end up in Louisville and then in
Cincinnati. And ultimately she married a reporter, moved
who moved back with her to the Detroit area.
Um, and that's where she did. Her most
productive writing was not when she was trying to run
a subsistence farm and the National Forest. Dickie is
a really interesting case because he is probably emblematic of
a lot of these folks because he so wanted to
be, uh, sorry. The word that came
to my head was a cracker. Um, it
was really not right, But, uh, he
grew up in Buckhead really rich, even in the
Great Depression. But he identified with his father's family
. His father had a place where he could go
cock fighting, watch cockfighting up in the north Georgia
. And Dickie sort of just always wanted to be
that and not what he was. He identified Buckhead
with being feminized. Um, he wanted the masculine
life of the people who can make it in the
rough, which is, you see, in deliverance
. Um, so he went in interviews he would
talk about. I'm from there. My people are
all from there, which is true. And they
were all slaveholders. They were the largest landowners in
those mountain counties, and they were the biggest slaveholders
in those mountain county. So he referencing his Appalachian
roots was supposed to be a way of representing himself
as kind of working man or whatever, but he
was from even His mountain relatives were were relatively quite
wealthy. So that begins, I won't go through
all the rest of them. But, um,
that begins to answer the kind of insider outsider shifts
that they were making that they were able to write
about this place and in some ways identified with it
in some ways identified with the more cosmopolitan, highbrow
network that was appreciating these places in such a way
that they could become published itself would not be true
. Okay, so another one, Silas, uh
, all the reviews of Silas talked about his blue
collar cred. A postal worker. I love Silas
, by the way. I'm not trying to make
fun. Um, really played up that it's important
to me that he wrote about a county two counties
away where he visited his grandparents every summer. So
he is from Appalachia. He is completely devoted to
the region. He's a great voice against mountaintop removal
mining. You know, I'm not trying to paint
him as some kind of exploitative outsider, but again
that remove that you're not you're not sort of just
like opening your mouth. And the truth about your
place comes out. There is a necessary distance to
write, as Lee Smith says, and even Silas
as that. Yes, ma'am. Today they start
other books in your I don't think so. In
our nose case, Yes. If they read the
dollmaker, which was a was a huge bestseller,
they might then go back and find Hunter's horn in
a mountain and mountain path before that. But I
did try to track who they were referencing because I
was helping me try to track their class ambitions or
class status. And they often did not mention they
mentioned other bestsellers that had nothing to do with Appalachia
. Um, how did they find out about them
? I look at a lot of advertisements. They
probably found out about them in the highbrow periodic ALS
that they were reading. Um, with the exception
of our know who again, her readership was was
very different. Those women were passing books around the
neighborhood, and there were really long lists at libraries
in Cincinnati and Detroit and other places where Appalachian out
migrants were concentrated. And so they were finding out
about word of mouth. There was one who who
told a story about her husband, had taken it
out of the library, and he was away,
off and on business trips. So women were always
dodging into the house to grab his copy of the
book and then try to bring it back before he
got back from his business trip. So both very
top down formal, you know, um mass Media
Marketing 19 oh eight. John Fox. Chapter two
is basically the advent of the bestseller when this really
becomes a machine. But then also through more informal
means as well representatives of Oh yeah, the literature
. Um, I don't know enough about There's so
many of them. I don't know enough about them
and I haven't read their fan mail, have dabbled
in their customer reviews online. I. So this
is pure speculation. But I would say I would
venture to say that part of my whole project is
to sort of undermine the notion of authentic at all
either the author or the book or the representation.
Um, whether people who have long time residents in
the region then have readers who use the reading for
more counter hegemonic challenging the man kind of reasons or
not, I just can't say hmm, who actually
comes out of the culture, continues to spread it
. I love it That's right. Mhm really made
a life out. That's what I call that's what
kind of story dishes. But the trick is that
these people, if they either get picked up by
the larger mass media or or not, and and
I don't I wouldn't say that the ones that do
get picked up by New York publishers or record labels
out of wherever that those are necessarily the less authentic
ones. There are supposedly more authentic authors who don't
have a readership and ones who get picked up and
, you know, promulgated by people in it for
profit. So even Jean Ritchie, of course,
David. Wishing, it would argue is, is
popularized by certain people for very particular white supremacists,
kinds of reasons and other reasons as well. Brian
, it's switching to customer views, changed the process
because writing you gotta get dirty back. You got
to get back right? They're not writing to the
author anymore. They're writing. Yes, sure.
I'm sorry. Brian was asking how the change from
fan mail to customer views shifted. Um, what
I was finding because the fan mail was written to
the author or in at least one instant to gurdy
or the main character, whereas the customer review is
written not to the author. It's written to an
audience of other potential readers. And so how did
that change what kinds of evidence that I could find
? Um, I won't say a lot about that
. But when I say is that the most important
thing is that what it didn't change was the desire
to share their own narratives. And so I was
still able to see stories like, Well, I
grew up in the coalfields and move to Florida,
and this helps me feel like I'm back at home
and sort of feeds my homesickness and my nostalgia for
place. So luckily, that piece of it carried
over, Um, and I'll leave it at that
. But yeah, there are definitely the shift in
audience makes changes it from more private to more public
and more performative more sort of clearly. Well,
I don't know about that. There's a fan mail
genre that you see, and then you can recognize
the customer review genre so the genre shifts, and
that does change things. But luckily for me,
one of the most important things was that people still
told their stories, not always, but often,
often enough. I, um I want to make
sure everybody has time for cookies. I'll be happy
to talk some more, but, um, why
don't we shift into juice and cookie mode for smaller
conversations? Thank you.