![]() To effectively say: maybe that’s one rendering of Appalachia, but here’s another one. But after watching people migrate towards that book as an explainer for Appalachia and Appalachian people, despite the fact that it never acknowledged the existence of queer folks, Black folks, immigrants, or progressives in Appalachia, and really using this culture of poverty rhetoric to describe White Appalachians, I felt compelled to write a counter-narrative. ![]() Prior to the publication of that book, I’d always viewed my experience as anomalous, and as something I’d spend my life explaining to people. It really wasn’t until 2016, when a certain senator from Ohio published a certain political screed masquerading as memoir, that I started to try to write about my experiences growing up at the intersection of queer, Desi, and Appalachian. I studied creative writing in undergrad, and then didn’t write for a long time afterwards because of family blowback around my senior thesis. NA: I definitely did not know that I was working towards a memoir. I guess a general and a specific question there: did you have a concept of this kind of memoir in your mind when you started, or were you writing essays and saw that there was some connective tissue in them, or did the writing project come about in some other way? ![]() Dave Housley: Since a lot of our readers are writers themselves, I’d like to start off talking a bit about the book’s path to publication. ![]()
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