The Trump administration has moved to open 80,000 acres of public land in Virginia and Tennessee to logging and road construction. This land includes parts of North Fork Pound and Seng Mountain in Virginia, along with Flint Mill and Rogers Ridge in Tennessee. These areas lie within the George Washington, Jefferson, and Cherokee National Forests.
The forests in these hollers have long been protected from heavy industrial use. The new plan would allow timber companies to bring equipment into areas that have seen little disturbance. Local residents and environmental groups warn this could lead to serious damage.
The mountains in this region have steep slopes and fragile soil. Trees help hold the ground in place. Removing large sections risks erosion, causing mud and sediment to flow into nearby streams. This threatens water quality downstream in communities that rely on these rivers.
Residents in towns like Damascus, Virginia, depend on visitors who come for hiking and fishing. These businesses rely on the quiet, natural landscape. Clear-cutting and road building could reduce tourism, harming local economies.
Wildlife that depends on intact forest habitat may also suffer. The region is home to bears, deer, salamanders, and many bird species. Logging roads often fragment habitat, making it harder for animals to survive.
Officials argue the logging will be managed carefully and that some areas need thinning to reduce wildfire risk. However, critics say this is a cover for large-scale timber extraction and road expansion.
Public comments and legal challenges are expected as the plan moves forward. Many in the Appalachian communities hope to keep these forests standing, protecting water, wildlife, and ways of life tied to the land.
The decision marks a major shift in how federal land in the Southern Appalachians is managed. It remains to be seen how much of the proposed logging and road building will happen. What is clear is that the hills and hollers of Virginia and Tennessee face a new kind of pressure. And before you say this is “fake news” do yourself a favor and research this for yourself. Not only is this administration attacking poor people of Appalachia, now they are coming for our mountains.
Are you ready to speak up? Are you ready to stand up to these politicians?
There’s a story passed around about the people of Appalachia. It gets told by outsiders with a crooked smile, by policymakers with no stake in the outcome, and even by folks here who’ve heard it long enough to believe it. The story says we like to take care of our own. That we don’t want outside help. That we can fix what’s broken with our own hands. The words “self-reliance” gets dragged out like a flag, and we’re supposed to salute.
That idea has been around a long time, and it serves a purpose. Not one that lifts us up. It works the other way.
When a hillside community loses its only clinic and has nowhere left to go for medical care, there’s silence from the top. The excuse always circles back to cost and “community independence.” When a mine closes and no one comes to talk retraining, to offer jobs, or to bring investment, there’s talk about pride and tradition. When children sit through winter in crumbling school buildings with peeling paint and mold on the ceiling, officials say it’s about resilience. As if stubborn survival is all we deserve.
The word self-reliance carries weight. It was made to sound like strength. And yes, folks here know how to do for themselves. They garden, can, repair, build. They care for one another in ways cities lost long ago. But that’s not what politicians mean when they say it. They don’t praise it out of respect. They use it to cut the cord.
Over time, this idea has crept into every excuse for cutting programs. They say we don’t need transit, because we drive. They say we don’t need broadband, because we aren’t interested. They say we don’t need maternity wards, because we’ve always made do. This story, told again and again, becomes a reason for nothing to change. It becomes a reason to leave us behind.
This manipulation didn’t start yesterday. The coal companies shaped it early on. They liked the image of the strong mountain man, the quiet woman who doesn’t ask for help. It made organizing harder. It turned community struggle into personal failure. If you were laid off, it was on you. If your water ran brown, it was your job to figure it out. And if you couldn’t pull through, then you weren’t strong enough.
The government picked up that line later. Every time folks tried to demand better schools, better wages, safer roads, the answer was always the same. They pointed to self-reliance. They said it like it was a compliment, when really it was a way to walk away.
There are people in the halls of power who love this arrangement. When folks take care of everything on their own, they don’t have to show up. When we stop asking because we know the answer is silence, they can go on funneling money to where they want it to go. Places that already have more than enough.
The trouble is, people still believe in the story. Not everyone, not always, but enough. It’s passed through generations like a family heirloom. It gets into church sermons, school plays, even campaign slogans. It makes it harder to organize. When folks are taught to feel shame for needing help, they don’t ask. When someone says, “That’s not how we do things here,” it shuts down conversation before it starts.
This leaves us in a bad place. Our clinics are underfunded. Our teachers are overworked and underpaid. Emergency rooms sit an hour away. The power grid is brittle. Water lines crack and go unrepaired for months. And when someone speaks up, they’re met with that same old line. Self-reliance.
The people of this region have never been afraid of work. They’ve held it all together with calloused hands and worn boots. That’s real. What’s false is pretending that pride means silence. What’s dangerous is using strength as an excuse to deny support.
Some will say this is about culture. That what makes this place special is the old way. That interference brings trouble. The truth is, we already live with the interference. It comes in the form of out-of-state investors taking mineral rights for pennies. It comes in the form of lawmakers cutting taxes for corporations while small towns struggle to keep the lights on in public buildings.
Self-reliance means nothing when the tools are stripped away. You can’t patch up a school when the roof’s caved in and there’s no money for a ladder. You can’t grow food when the land’s poisoned. You can’t build a future when every bit of investment skips you over.
We need to name what’s happening here. This isn’t about values or independence. It’s about abandonment. It’s about choosing who matters and who doesn’t. And those decisions have real consequences. Children who grow up without access to specialists. Parents forced to drive hours to deliver a baby. Grandparents with no choice but to die early because there’s no dialysis clinic within reach.
There’s no dignity in being ignored. There’s no honor in watching your community crumble because someone somewhere thinks you’re too proud to ask for help.
So what do we do?
We tell a different story. One that starts with truth. We call out the lie when we hear it. We remind each other that asking for what we need isn’t weakness. It’s survival. We find allies, whether they live in the next holler or across the country. We say out loud that infrastructure matters. That schools should be safe. That health care is a right. That no one should have to choose between feeding their family and paying for insulin.
Appalachia doesn’t lack strength. It lacks investment. It lacks respect from the people in charge. And that won’t change until we tear down the false story and speak the real one.
You can love your community and still demand better. You can plant your roots deep and still ask for clean water. You can be proud and still raise your voice. These things don’t cancel each other out. They build on each other.
There was a time when the church was the heartbeat of Appalachian life. Families gathered on Sundays for sermons, but also for soup dinners, quilting circles, and shared song. Pews filled with tired coal miners, young mothers, retired teachers and farmers. It didn’t matter what one’s political view was, or if their coat had holes. There was space for them. The church didn’t ask for purity. It offered belonging.
That spirit has faded.
There was a time when the church held my entire world together. I belonged to a small one in rural Appalachia. White steeple, gravel lot, potlucks after the service. The kind of place where folks knew your middle name, where prayer lists circled around family, friends and neighbors. It was a place for all people to feel safe.
I don’t go anymore.
I started to drift after the sermons changed. Scripture gave way to slogans. Week after week, the pulpit turned into a place for warnings instead of sermons. Someone was always a threat. The message shifted. Grace got smaller. Judgment got louder. People I loved were spoken of like problems. Others nodded along.
I sat through it for longer than I care to admit. I told myself it was a phase. Then I realized it wasn’t a phase. It was the direction the church was heading.
Now I question everything I was taught growing up. And I would be lying if I didn’t say I am even questioning God’s existence. What once felt sacred feels hollow. Words that once comforted me now sound like weapons. The Jesus I grew up with—the one who walked with the poor, who fed the hungry, who told us to love—feels farther away from the one preached now.
I’m not the only one. The pews sit more empty than they ever was. Old families stopped coming. Young people disappeared first. Then the quieter ones. A few tried to hold on, tried to change things from inside. Most gave up. Some found new places. Some walked away for good.
Churches used to carry communities through hard times. Through layoffs, floods, funerals. They were lifelines. You could knock on the door and someone would open it. Now the doors feel closed to anyone who doesn’t fit the script.
The sermons speak more about enemies than mercy. More about rules than forgiveness. Faith gets used to divide neighbors, friends and family, to test loyalty, to control stories. A gospel once rooted in love now feels tangled in fear.
I remember how it used to feel. I still believe something real once lived in those rooms. I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it. And I mourn what’s been lost.
Many who left still carry pieces of faith with them, quiet and unresolved. They light candles in memory. They hold on to fragments of what once was. Something deep inside still hopes for something better. Not for the old church to come back. That one’s gone.
In Tennessee, our representatives walk into government buildings and claim to speak for us. Then they vote in ways that go against what we need. They say they’re working for the people, but who are they really working for? It is clear they are serving money, lobbyists, and political machines that care nothing for the mountains or the people who live in them.
Kentucky has sent Mitch McConnell back to Washington over and over. He built a career in power while communities in his own state got hollowed out. He gained wealth. The people lost jobs, healthcare, and hope. Eastern Kentucky gave its trust and got little in return except more waiting and more struggle.
Virginia’s mountain counties do not even get a second glance. The people out there still wait for broadband, for clinics, for clean drinking water in some places. They see promises show up in speeches and disappear the minute the election ends.
Across all of Appalachia, the pattern repeats. Candidates roll in with big words and bigger promises. Then they disappear. The people get left behind again. It is not about party labels. It is about the fact that both sides have turned this region into a photo op and a talking point.
And every election cycle, here come the scare tactics. They try to stir up fear instead of offering real plans. “They’re putting transgender people in your bathrooms.” “They’re coming for your guns.” “They’re taking Christ out of Christmas.” It is always something meant to make you panic, distract you, and vote with your gut instead of your mind.
That fear keeps us distracted from what really matters. Jobs that pay enough to live on. Doctors close enough to reach. Places for our kids to live and stay. A future worth staying in the mountains for.
While they stir up fear over bathrooms and flags, they push bills that take food off our tables. The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” aims to gut Medicaid, Medicare, and food assistance by billions of dollars. That is healthcare for our parents. That is food for working families. That is the support many people rely on in counties where jobs have dried up. They do not talk about this part on the campaign trail. They count on us being too distracted to notice.
They want us scared. They want us angry at the wrong things. They want us to fight each other instead of holding them accountable.
We are not dumb. We are not weak. We do not need to be told what to fear. We need the truth. And the truth is this. Unless we educate ourselves, research every name on that ballot, and ask what they have really done for Appalachia, nothing will change.
They think we will keep falling for the same tricks, and in reality, we do keep falling for them. We have to prove them wrong. In 2026, every voter in Appalachia has a chance to flip the script. Ask the hard questions. Who brought clean industry to your county? Who stood up for rural hospitals? Who protected the rights of working people instead of corporate donors?
The answer to our problems will not come from outside the region. It will come from within. From people here who know what it is like to raise a family on low wages, drive an hour for a doctor, or live in a town where the mine is gone and nothing replaced it.
It is time. Time to wake up. Time to stop letting fear do the talking. Time to vote with purpose. Time to rebuild this region from the ground up with our voices, our votes, and our truth.
Appalachia is stronger than they think. Let us show them.
I am the hush of early morning mist, brushing soft against your cheek like a mother’s worn apron, smelling of cornmeal and spring water.
These mountains do not shout— they speak in seed, in shale, in the groan of a mule and the silence after.
You walk my roads, and I watch you with the eyes of dogwood, poplar, and soot-stained hands. I am not past—I am present, a rhythm still heard between fiddle tunes and funeral hymns.
Children leave me, carry pieces of me in their marrow— coal dust, gospel, moonshine songs. But I stay, holding quilts of red clay and sorrow, patched with hope stitched crooked.
Here, we’ve learned to live between landslides and lullabies, to draw dignity from spring water and stories long told on porches, smoke rising with memory.
Call me poor if you must, but not empty. I am Appalachia’s breath— rough, resolute, and real.
Across the Appalachian region, superstition remains part of daily life. In towns, hollers, and high mountain communities, signs are still read, warnings are still heeded, and old customs are carried forward, often without explanation.
Walk through a rural cemetery in eastern Kentucky and someone may remind you not to point at a grave. Rocking an empty chair can bring spirits into a house. A bird tapping on a window means death is near. These aren’t stories told for effect. These are rules—spoken with clarity, often passed down without debate.
The roots of Appalachian superstition go back centuries. Scots-Irish settlers brought beliefs about weather, luck, and death. African traditions added signs, charms, and protective practices. Cherokee customs contributed meaning drawn from the natural world. These traditions blended into a system of knowledge shaped by hardship, land, and isolation.
In many mountain communities, crops are planted based on moon phases. A waning moon is best for root vegetables. A waxing moon is for above-ground crops. The practice is followed closely. Almanacs are consulted. Few question the logic. The method works because it always has.
Beliefs surrounding death are widespread. When someone dies, mirrors are covered to keep the spirit from getting trapped. Clocks are stopped at the hour of death. Beekeepers often speak to their hives to report a death in the family. Failing to do so could cause the bees to leave or die. These customs remain common in certain parts of the region.
Animals often signal danger. A whip-poor-will calling near a home is said to warn of death. A black cat crossing the road may cause someone to turn around and delay travel. A howling dog at the door draws concern. These signs are not treated lightly.
Some families carry items for protection. A buckeye in the pocket is said to bring luck and ward off illness. Red thread tied around a baby’s wrist keeps away harm. A horseshoe nailed over a doorway—open end up—keeps luck from spilling out. Hung the wrong way, it draws bad fortune.
Witchcraft, in the Appalachian sense, has nothing to do with popular imagery. Witches are believed to cause illness, spoil milk, or harm livestock. Their signs are subtle—knots in a horse’s mane, spoiled butter, sudden sickness without cause. Protection comes through salt, iron nails, silver coins, or old words passed down through families.
Stories spread through quiet conversations. A neighbor may share how their mother would bury a snake after killing it, to keep it from coming back. Others place a broom across the doorway to prevent spirits from entering. These actions are often done without ceremony or attention.
Appalachia’s geography helped preserve these customs. Communities remained isolated well into the 20th century. Roads came late. Electricity came later. For decades, people relied on memory, oral tradition, and practical knowledge. Doctors were scarce. Books were few. Belief helped fill the space between the known and the unknown.
Some call these practices folklore. Others live by them. Many follow the signs not out of fear, but out of respect. A lesson ignored once became a rule passed down. One warning becomes ten stories. After enough time, belief turns into practice.
Younger generations are picking up old habits again. Some record oral histories. Others grow herbs, read the moon, and study family customs. Online platforms have made it easier to share these traditions, but many still keep them private, passed hand to hand, voice to voice.
Universities and researchers have begun to take these beliefs more seriously. Appalachian superstition is being documented as part of the region’s cultural record. Not entertainment. Not myth. A practical system built over time, shaped by the need to understand the world without relying on outside institutions.
In the end, the question of whether these beliefs are true doesn’t matter to the people who follow them. A sign that kept a family safe once will be followed again. A habit that brought luck will be repeated. These practices continue because they have purpose.
In Appalachian life, superstition is not decoration. It’s part of the structure. A way of listening, watching, and acting. A quiet rulebook written without ink. Passed along with the understanding that some things are better not tested.
Some places get into your bones. Appalachia is like that—and Bloodroot and Coal Dust is a book that knows it by heart.
This collection of poems doesn’t just talk about the mountains, the coal, the people—it lives there. These are poems that come from red dirt and long shifts underground, from porches where stories get passed down in quiet voices and strong coffee. They’re about the ones who stay, who remember, who carry the weight of the past and still manage to sing.
There’s beauty here, but it’s not polished or perfect. It’s the kind of beauty that grows in rough ground—like bloodroot pushing up through frost, or a song hummed at the end of a hard day. These poems aren’t trying to impress anyone. They’re just telling it how it is.
You’ll hear voices in this book—miners, mothers, old folks with good stories, lovers who’ve seen too much but still hope for more. There’s grit, yes. There’s grief. But there’s also tenderness, memory, and a deep, steady love for a place that doesn’t always love you back.
Bloodroot and Coal Dust isn’t trying to explain Appalachia to the world. It’s just telling the truth for the ones who already know it in their bones—and maybe for the ones who want to understand it a little better.
If you come from the hills, or if you’ve ever felt the pull of home in your chest, this book might feel like someone sitting down beside you and saying, “Let me tell you a story.” And it’s one worth hearing.
A growing number of writers, poets, musicians, and filmmakers from Appalachia are pushing back against long-held stereotypes about their home—one story, song, or frame at a time.
Their work doesn’t dwell in nostalgia or frame the region as broken. Instead, it brings nuance, complexity, and contradiction to a place often reduced to caricature.
“We’re not here to romanticize poverty or beg for attention,” one author said at a recent reading in Berea. “We’re here to be heard on our own terms.”
The tradition isn’t new. Decades ago, writers like Breece D’J Pancake and bell hooks gave voice to Appalachian experience with raw, unsentimental truth. hooks, from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, wrote about race, feminism, and place with clarity that echoed across the country. Pancake’s short stories, filled with loneliness and grit, became cult classics.
Today, the baton is being carried forward by a new generation.
Silas House, Kentucky’s current poet laureate, writes fiction rooted in small-town life that explores climate, identity, and queerness. His latest novels have earned national acclaim—and pushed back on the idea that rural equals conservative.
Crystal Wilkinson, a Black Appalachian writer and former poet laureate, has gained attention for her work spotlighting Black life in the region—a history often erased. Her poetry and fiction blend place, history, and voice in ways that are both intimate and political.
Musicians like Tyler Childers and Rhiannon Giddens are reaching national audiences while singing about addiction, poverty, and resistance without glorifying any of it. Giddens, a Grammy-winning artist, uses her platform to talk about the overlooked contributions of Black and Indigenous people in Southern music.
Independent filmmakers are telling their own stories too. In Whitesburg, a media collective is helping young people document everything from flooding to family life. Their short films have played at festivals from Louisville to New York.
“This region isn’t a museum or a problem to solve,” said a filmmaker whose documentary on opioid recovery recently won a regional award. “It’s full of artists, thinkers, and builders who’ve been ignored too long.”
At a time when Appalachia is often politicized in national media, these creators are offering something more honest. Their work doesn’t deny the region’s struggles—but it refuses to let those struggles define it entirely.
“We’ve been written about for a hundred years,” the poet said. “It’s time we write ourselves.”
A Quiet Glory
This place don’t ask for much, just that you notice— how the fog holds the holler like a mother, how the creek keeps talking even when nobody listens. There’s holiness in a woodstove’s hum, in the porch light left on just in case.
You won’t find the mountains braggin’. They stand quiet, like old folks who’ve seen too much to speak quick. They know sorrow’s just another kind of knowing. And that beauty don’t need ceremony.
My uncle used to say every ridge has a memory tucked inside it, a coal seam that whispers names no one writes down anymore. But I still hear them— in the hush between whip-poor-wills, in the tobacco barn’s sigh.
We make do. We hold fast. We carry our dead with us— not in grief, but in gratitude. Their songs come out in the way we stir the soup pot or hum low while hanging clothes.
There is no polished ending here. No neat bow on the story. Just morning glories crawling up the porch rail, a half-split stack of wood, and a road that bends, always out of sight.
In the hills and cities, something is shifting. Fewer people are walking through church doors. More are turning toward what feels real — not louder, not newer, but closer to the bone.
A growing number are leaving organized religion behind, not because they’ve lost belief, but because the church stopped feeling like home. In too many places, pulpits turned into podiums. Sermons turned political. The sacred got tangled in party lines and power grabs. Some churches now echo more with culture war rhetoric than with compassion. People looking for peace are finding the door instead.
New laws shaped around narrow interpretations of Christianity are adding to the fracture. Policies meant to enforce “biblical values” have started to push people out rather than pull them in. When government and religion blur, trust erodes. Many who once sat in pews now feel they’re being told how to live, who to love, and what to believe — not by spirit, but by statute. That weight sends people searching elsewhere.
In Appalachian towns, meditation circles meet in barns or backyards. Folks call it Appalachian Buddhism. No sermons, no pressure. People sit in silence, breathing with the land around them. This way of practice doesn’t try to erase old traditions. It walks beside them. Many who show up still carry hymns in their heads. Now they carry chants too.
Ancestral healing has come forward again. People want to know who they come from. They’re asking for names, cooking old dishes, digging into family histories that were boxed up or forgotten. Healing doesn’t always come from books or professionals. Sometimes it’s in knowing what your grandmother survived. Sometimes it’s in keeping her photo near your bed.
Spiritualism, once a drawing-room curiosity, is finding space again. Mediums now go by different names — intuitive, energy reader, guide — but the heart of the work remains. People want to speak with the ones who’ve passed on. They want to believe those voices haven’t gone completely quiet. They gather in small rooms or over video calls. They light candles and pay attention to the air.
In city neighborhoods, mysticism has taken new forms. Tarot decks sit on kitchen counters. Smoke from incense winds around charging phones. Birth charts get read at parties. Sound baths fill up faster than concerts. Some are skeptical. Many are sincere. People are seeking meaning wherever they can find it — and more importantly, where it speaks back.
The old ways — church pews, creeds, one-size-fits-all belief — no longer hold everyone. So people build their own paths. They piece together bits of story, intuition, nature, memory. A little from the stars, a little from the earth. They light candles without waiting for someone else to say it matters.
Younger generations are leading much of this. They look for truth, even when it’s messy. They want practices that hold up under pressure. Some find it through ritual, some through music, some in silence. They build altars from what they have — thrift store trays, matches, dried flowers, a photo or two.
This shift has nothing to do with trends. It’s about meaning, about spirit. Not the kind written down for someone else, but the kind that rises up when everything else falls flat. What’s growing now doesn’t ask for permission. It moves on its own.
The trouble started over a hog. That’s what they’ll tell you, and that’s what’s written down in most places. But what started before the hog was land, pride, and the kind of family loyalty that don’t bend even when it ought to. The Hatfields were from West Virginia, over on the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River. The McCoys were on the Kentucky side. Back then, being from one side or the other meant something. It meant everything.
Randolph McCoy, they called him “Ole Ran’l,” had himself a hog, and he swore it had been taken by Floyd Hatfield. Floyd said it was his hog, had the notches in the ear to prove it. So, they went to court—justice of the peace, local kind of court. The man who ruled in favor of the Hatfields was a Hatfield himself by blood, which didn’t help the McCoys feel any better about losing. It didn’t help that a McCoy who testified for the Hatfields was later found shot dead in the woods. Some say the hog didn’t matter at all. But it was enough to let things roll downhill.
Devil Anse Hatfield was the head of his clan. Tall, hard, smart. He made money off timber and knew how to use a rifle. He wasn’t the devil they made him out to be, but he wasn’t the kind of man to take a slight. Not from a McCoy. Randolph had his pride too. A Bible man, he’d pray with the same hands he’d use to pull a trigger. When one of his boys was found courting a Hatfield girl, there was no soft music. There was hate.
In 1882, it broke open. Ellison Hatfield, Devil Anse’s brother, was stabbed and shot during an Election Day fight with three of Randolph’s sons. Ellison lingered for a few days before dying. Then the Hatfields took justice into their own hands. They tied the McCoy boys to pawpaw bushes and shot them dead by the river. It wasn’t law—it was revenge. And the law, when it did come, came like a storm.
For years, the feud dragged on. The families burned each other’s homes. Shot each other in the dark. Children died. Women too. In 1888, Frank Phillips rode in with a posse, hunting Hatfields. Some were hanged, others imprisoned. The courts got involved across state lines, and that just made things worse. Governors argued. The country started watching.
When it was done, the war had claimed more than a dozen lives. Maybe more, depending on who you ask. Devil Anse had a statue made of himself before he died. He found the Lord in his last years, got baptized in a creek he used to fish. Randolph lived quiet and broken. His wife lost her mind after two of her kids were murdered in their sleep. You don’t come back from that.
People like to laugh about the Hatfields and the McCoys now, like it was some cartoon hillbilly thing. But it was blood. It was grief that didn’t leave. It was boys killed before they could be men. It was mothers burying sons with no peace to be found. And it was a lesson, if anybody was looking for one: family can lift you, but it can also drown you if you don’t know when to let go.
They had a truce in 2003, the descendants of both families. Signed it up formal. Smiles and handshakes. But the real peace came long before that, when the fighting stopped because there was nothing left to burn.
Echoes of Appalachia 