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Beth Macy is the bestselling author of Dopesick, Factory Man, and Paper Girl. Dopesick, her investigation of the opioid crisis, was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal, won the L.A. Times Book Prize for Science and Technology, and was described as a “masterwork of narrative nonfiction” by The New York Times. Dopesick was made into a Peabody- and Emmy Award-winning Hulu series on which Macy served as an executive producer and cowriter. Her most recent book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, is a combination memoir and reported analysis of the rural-urban divide told through the lenses of backward mobility, political polarization, and the decimation of local news.

Silas House is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the novels Clay’s Quilt, 2001; A Parchment of Leaves, 2003; The Coal Tattoo, 2005; Eli the Good, 2009; Same Sun Here (co-authored with Neela Vaswani) 2012, Southernmost, 2018, and Lark Ascending, 2022, as well as a book of creative nonfiction Something’s Rising, co-authored with Jason Howard, 2009; and four plays. His first book of poetry, All These Ghosts, was the recipient of the 2026 Southern Book Prize. He recently published his first murder-mystery (under the pseudonym S.D. House), Dead Man Blues. He was also Poet Laureate of Kentucky.

I sat down with these two amazing writers at the 50th John Fox, Jr. Literary Festival at Mountain Empire Community College to talk about writing, their process, and a what it means to chronicle the complex stories of this region.

Special thanks to MECC's Dr. Amy Greear, Brandon Maggard for audio, and MECC for allowing me to create this episode from our conversation.

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Talking Appalachian Podcast | Covering the Appalachian Region from North to South | Patreon
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Unless another artist is featured, acoustic music on most episodes: "Freight Train" written by Elizabeth Cotten and performed by Landon Spain

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Dr. Jennifer Cramer, Director of the Appalachian Studies Center at the University of Kentucky, joins me for a conversation about how she became a linguist (shifting from math to French and linguistics), her graduate training at Purdue and the University of Illinois-Urbana, and how Kentucky’s “in-betweenness” shaped her interest in Southern and Appalachian identities. She explains the Linguistic Atlas Project, a nearly century-long archive of U.S. dialect interviews now housed at the University of Kentucky and edited by Allison Burkette, and how it supports ongoing transcription, digitization, and new data collection. Kramer outlines perceptual dialectology methods (mental map tasks, labeling, and ratings) to study how non-linguists perceive dialect regions and attach attitudes and stereotypes that can affect discrimination. She argues that “dying dialect” claims are complicated, notes public reactions to reporting on Southern English change, and emphasizes accent pride, urging listeners not to judge people based on how they talk.

Support the show

*Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and review the podcast (if you like it)!
*Support the show by sharing links to episodes on social
*Subscribe to support the podcast on the Facebook Talking Appalachian page, or here at our Patreon page to get bonus content:
Talking Appalachian Podcast | Covering the Appalachian Region from North to South | Patreon
*Follow and message me on IG, FB, YouTube: @talkingappalachian
*To sponsor an episode or collaborate: talkingappalachianpodcast@gmail.com or message me at the link here or on social.

Unless another artist is featured, acoustic music on most episodes: "Freight Train" written by Elizabeth Cotten and performed by Landon Spain

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We're revisiting Season One and an episode with the legendary Crystal Wilkinson, author of Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts (which was published after this episode aired) and other works. Crystal discusses her journey from trying to erase her Appalachian accent to embracing it as an essential part of her identity and craft. She calls her native dialect her "mother tongue" and describes the revolutionary act of allowing her "tongue to rest in its normal state."

Crystal reads several powerful poems featuring her grandparents' voices:

• "Black Rapunzel" about her mother's struggle with schizophrenia
• "The Water Witch" series: poems in her grandfather's voice about wisdom, land, and literacy
• "Old Tobacco": a love letter to Kentucky's tobacco heritage

Crystal Wilkinson, a recent recipient of a Writing Freedom fellowship , is the award-winning author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, a national-bestselling culinary memoir, Perfect Black, a collection of poems, and three works of fiction—The Birds of Opulence , Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. She is the recipient of an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, an O. Henry Prize, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a USA Artists Fellowship, and an Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. She has received recognition from the Yaddo Foundation, Hedgebrook, The Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, The Hermitage Foundation and others. Her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, STORY, Agni Literary Journal, Emergence, Oxford American and Southern Cultures. She was Poet Laureate of Kentucky from 2021 to 2023. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Kentucky where she is a Bush-Holbrook Endowed Professor and Director of the Divsion of Creative Writing. Her memoir Heartsick is forthcoming from Crown.

Support the show

*Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and review the podcast (if you like it)!
*Support the show by sharing links to episodes on social
*Subscribe to support the podcast on the Facebook Talking Appalachian page, or here at our Patreon page to get bonus content:
Talking Appalachian Podcast | Covering the Appalachian Region from North to South | Patreon
*Follow and message me on IG, FB, YouTube: @talkingappalachian
*To sponsor an episode or collaborate: talkingappalachianpodcast@gmail.com or message me at the link here or on social.

Unless another artist is featured, acoustic music on most episodes: "Freight Train" written by Elizabeth Cotten and performed by Landon Spain