Cookie Consent by FreePrivacyPolicy.com
Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer

Special Issue Articles

Vol. 6 No. 1 (2024): (Re)Imagining Flyover Fictions

"Magic Dirt": Transcending Great Divides in Scott McClanahan's Crapalachia

Submitted
June 16, 2023
Published
2024-10-16

Abstract

Scott McClanahan, rising star of the US Indie Lit world and "Poet Laureate of Real America" (Moran), writes miasmic chronicles of life in a West Virginian holler. In Crapalachia: A Biography of Place (2013), as in many of the tales he releases in Dickensian pace, McClanahan ties the fate of a place to the fate of its people and connects environmental destruction to the ruins of life. Where mountains are stripped away, happiness is not at home. McClanahan tells family stories of deforestation and disability, mining disasters and mental illness, structural poverty and opportunities denied. His stories are about the slow and fast deaths of forgotten people in forgotten places and he tells them with a ballistic sensibility that opens up new spaces to negotiate difference. Crapalachia is a threnody for a wounded region that complicates imagined hierarchies of center and periphery and blends the worlds of fact and fiction as well as tragedy and comedy. The semi-autobiography mines so deeply for privation that, at its close, it lays bare some of the most hopeful principles of American transcendentalism. In between personal hardships, local misery, national movements, and universal human experience, McClanahan has us see "Crapalachia as the center of the world" (35). This paper explores how the aesthetic, narrative, and stylistic strategies of Crapalachia help navigate the local, national, and global routes of fictions of disregard.

References

  1. Applebome, Peter. "The Nation; for Better and Worse, Poverty's Poster Child." The New York Times, 11 July 1999, p. WK3, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/11/weekinreview/the-nation-for-better-and-worse-poverty-s-poster-child.html.
  2. Aspiz, Harold. So Long! Walt Whitman's Poetry of Death. U of Alabama P, 2004.
  3. Averill, Thomas F. "American Eye: Flyover Country: An Introduction." The North American Review, vol. 284, no. 1, Jan.–Feb. 1999, pp. 4–9.
  4. Barcus, Holly R., and Stanley D. Brunn. "Towards a Typology of Mobility and Place At-tachment in Rural America." Journal of Appalachian Studies, vol. 15, no. 1–2, 2009, pp. 26–48.
  5. Batteau, Allen. The Invention of Appalachia. U of Arizona P, 1990.
  6. Bowler, Betty Miller. "'That Ribbon of Social Neglect': Appalachia and the Media in 1964." Appalachian Journal, vol. 12, no. 3, 1985, pp. 239–47.
  7. Cronon, William. "The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Na-ture." Environmental History, vol. 1, no. 1, 1996, pp. 7–28.
  8. DePietro, Andrew. "US Poverty Rate by State in 2021." Forbes, 4 Nov. 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewdepietro/2021/11/04/us-poverty-rate-by-state-in-2021/?sh=38f7a99a1b38.
  9. Eller, Ronald D. Uneven Ground: Appalachia since 1945. UP of Kentucky, 2008.
  10. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. James Munroe and Company, 1836.
  11. Fackler, Katharina. "Looking at Appalachia: Online Intermediality, Collaboration, and Mountain Multiplicity." Appalachian Journal, vol. 48, no. 3–4, pp. 188–211.
  12. Fisher, Steve, and Barbara Ellen Smith. "Internal Colony – Are you Sure? Defining, Theorizing, Organizing Appalachia." Journal of Appalachian Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, 2016, pp. 45–50.
  13. Flynt, Wayne. Dixie's Forgotten People: The South's Poor Whites. Indiana UP, 2004.
  14. "Flyover States: Flight Data Shows Which States Americans Think Are Boring." Cham-pion Traveler, https://www.championtraveler.com/news/flyover-states-flight-data-shows-which-states-americans-think-are-boring/. Accessed 6 June 2023.
  15. Fraley, Jill M. "Appalachian Stereotypes and Mountain Top Removal." Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, vol. 19, no. 3, 2007, pp. 365–70.
  16. O'Gieblyn, Meghan. "Dispatch from Flyover Country." Interior States, edited by Me-ghan O'Gieblyn, Penguin, 2018, pp. 3–18.
  17. Hansell, Tom. After Coal: Stories of Survival in Appalachia and Wales. West Virginia UP, 2018.
  18. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016.
  19. Harkins, Anthony. Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon. Oxford UP, 2004.
  20. Harkins, Anthony. "The Midwest and the Evolution of 'Flyover Country.'" Middle West Review, vol. 3, no. 1, 2016, pp. 97–121.
  21. Harrison, Summer. "Mountaintop Removal Mining Fiction: Energy Humanities and En-vironmental Injustice." Appalachian Journal, vol. 45, no. 3–4, 2018, pp. 732–62.
  22. Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh UP, 2000.
  23. Henry, Matthew S. "Extractive Fictions and Postextraction Futurisms: Energy and Envi-ronmental Injustice in Appalachia." Environmental Humanities, vol. 11, no. 2, 2019, pp. 402–26.
  24. Jones, Bradley M. "(Com)Post-Capitalism: Cultivating a More-Than-Human Economy in the Appalachian Anthropocene." Environmental Humanities, vol. 11, no. 1, 2019, pp. 3–26.
  25. Kendzior, Sarah. The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America. Flatiron Books, 2018.
  26. Killingsworth, Jimmie M. Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics. U of Io-wa P, 2004.
  27. Ledford, Katherine, and Theresa Lloyd, editors. Writing Appalachia: An Anthology. UP of Kentucky, 2020.
  28. Macfarlane, Robert. Mountains of the Mind. Pantheon Books, 2003.
  29. Martinez, Diane. "Agency and Environmentalism in Appalachia." Appalachian Journal, vol. 48, no. 3–4, 2021, pp. 228–44.
  30. McClanahan, Scott. Crapalachia: A Biography of Place. Two Dollar Radio, 2013.
  31. Mihr, Anja. Glocal Governance: How to Govern in the Anthropocene. Springer, 2022.
  32. Moran, Nick. "A Year in Reading: Nick Moran." The Millions, 8 Dec. 2013, https://www.themillions.com/2013/12/a-year-in-reading-nick-moran-3.html.
  33. "Mountains of Misery." The New York Times, 4 Nov. 1963, p. 34, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1963/11/04/89571302.html.
  34. Müller, Eva-Maria, and Christian Quendler. "Mediating Mountains: Introduction to the Special Issue." JAAAS: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 2021, pp. 105–14.
  35. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. U of Washington P, 1997.
  36. Nixon, Rob. "The Anthropocene and Environmental Justice." Curating the Future: Museums, Communities, and Climate Change, edited by Jennifer Newell et al., Routledge, 2017, pp. 23–31.
  37. Pöhlmann, Sascha. "Whitman's Compost: The Romantic Posthuman Futures of Cas-cadian Black Metal." Sounds of the Future: Musical and Sonic Anticipation in Ameri-can Culture, edited by Jeanne Cortiel and Christian Schmidt, ACT: Zeitschrift für Musik und Performance, vol. 6, 2015, https://www.act.uni-bayreuth.de/de/archiv/201506/02_Poehlmann/index.html.
  38. Portelli, Alessandro. They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History. Oxford UP, 2011.
  39. Quendler, Christian, and Benjamin Robbins, editors. Transnational Perspectives: At-tachment and Appropriation in 'Our' Appalachia. Special Issue of Appalachian Journal, vol. 48, no. 3–4, 2021.
  40. Reed, Brian, host. S-Town. This American Life, 28 Mar. 2017, stownpodcast.org.
  41. Robertson, Sarah. "The Green, Green Hills of Home: Representations of Mining in the Fiction of Appalachia and Wales." Transatlantic Exchanges: The American South in Europe, Europe in the American South, edited by Richard Gray and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, Austrian Academy of the Sciences, 2007.
  42. Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. Vintage Books, 1995.
  43. Schumann, William. "Introduction: Place and Place-Making in Appalachia." Appalachia Revisited: New Perspectives on Place, Tradition, and Progress, edited by William R. Schumann and Rebecca Adkins Fletcher, UP of Kentucky, 2016, pp. 1–25.
  44. Scott, Rebecca R. Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachian Coalfields. U of Minnesota P, 2010.
  45. Stewart, Kathleen. A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an 'Other' America. Princeton UP, 1996.
  46. Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capi-tal Ruins. Princeton UP, 2015.
  47. Tsing, Anna, et al. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. U of Minnesota P, 2017.
  48. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Edited by Michael Moon, W. W. Norton and Company, 2002.
  49. Zipper, Carl E., et al. "The Appalachian Coalfield in Historical Context." Appalachia's Coal-Mined Landscapes, edited by Carl E. Zipper and Jeff Skousen, Springer, 2021, pp. 1–26.

Similar Articles

51-60 of 112

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.