A traditional gathering place where the public meets the private becomes the critical point of contact for Appalachian families. On any day in Appalachia, you can find gifts in front of houses, left on porches for the people inside: mushrooms just foraged, cookies freshly baked. The porch is an extension […]
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In her forthcoming book, Rx Appalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky, Lesly-Marie Buer focuses on women’s encounters with substance use treatment in rural Central Appalachia. Buer is an applied medical anthropoligst and director of Research at Choice Health Network Harm Reduction in Knoxville, Tennessee. In her own […]
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Just outside Fayetteville, West Virginia, there’s a 42-acre farm that has just about everything — chickens, lambs, sheep, produce and dogs. The latest addition is a litter of Great Pyrenees puppies, who will become guardian dogs for the sheep. Christine Weirick owns and operates Deep Mountain Farm with her husband […]
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Girls Rock Whitesburg in Whitesburg, Kentucky is a music camp for female, gender-fluid, non-binary, and trans youth. Over the course of a week campers learn an electric instrument, form a band and write songs. At the end, they perform in front of a live audience. While the camp focuses on […]
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The COVID-19 pandemic has changed life in Appalachia. More than 250,000 people in central Appalachia have applied for unemployment benefits, creating backlogs and significant delays. Rural health clinics that were already struggling to provide adequate health care to their communities are even more strained and more and more workers in […]
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On June 25, 1980, Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero were killed in Pocahontas County. They were on the way to the Rainbow Family Gathering, an annual meeting of hippies and other like-minded people that celebrate peace, harmony and freedom held at different national forests across the country. The murders captivated […]
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