By Patricia Thrushart (aka Joanne Scheier Bugay)

“We find something to say that means us,
That names us neighbors and kin,
That finds within us words to connect…”
          Richard Hague, Talking Together

I wasn’t born or raised in Appalachia.  In truth, I wasn’t raised in any one place— we moved regularly up and down the East Coast as my father took jobs at one corporation and then another.  Each of my parent’s four girls were born in a different locale— Long Island, D.C., Connecticut, New Jersey. We were distant from kin. Then, when I was about to enter high school, we landed in Pittsburgh— the place where I’ve lived the longest, but never felt a native.  My New York grandmother bemoaned my father’s decision to work in the “Smoky City.”  She was convinced we’d all have black lung by the end.  My mother considered it the Midwest, and that wasn’t a compliment. In spite of this negativity, I grew to love it, going to both college and graduate school there, watching with amazement as it recovered from rust belt scars, its East End becoming a gastronomical destination and hipster enclave.  But no one called it Appalachia— not even the natives who became my friends.  I didn’t know I was living in the city considered to be the Parisof a region otherwise often maligned and stereotyped.  I’m pretty sure that if my family had known Pittsburgh was in Appalachia, they’d have thrown that in as an insult for good measure. “Paris, right,” they would have snorted— I can hear it as if it happened.  But it never came up, and I never thought of myself as an Appalachian resident.  It wasn’t until I married a native of Northwestern PA and bought land to live on outside of Cook Forest in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains that I began to connect— albeit as an outsider— with the place we call Northern Appalachia. 

Throughout my life, I’ve often wondered what it is like to be ‘from’ somewhere, since I wasn’t.  I was especially intrigued by the people who were still immersed in their childhood haunts— who had cousins down the street, uncles on the next forty acres, sisters in the next town.  Maybe, like my spouse, they left for a while— even for a long while— but they were back, living where roads were named after their family, giving directions by referring to a landmark long gone, recognized in bars and restaurants.  They walked in with a sense of belonging that they almost always took for granted.  I walk in like a guest.  But, over the nine years I’ve lived in Northern Appalachia, I’ve seen the beauty of its hills and forests, its wildlife and seasons, inform my work.  Thus I’ve come to call myself a Northern Appalachian poet. Maybe forty years in the region qualifies me.

That honorary title (as I like to think of it) led me, on September 11th, to attend the third annual conference held by the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia (WANA).  The schedule was impressive, and the fact that the in-person conference was moved online in no way diminished the effectiveness of the planning the conference hosts had done.  The day started with the first of two keynote speakers— delivered by the poet Richard Hague. (Read about him on Wikipedia here.)  Hague’s talk throbbed with that sense of place honed by roots, by connections, by a common emotional lexicon that stripped the listener down to the most fundamental understanding of exactly what I sought to understand— what it is like to really be from somewhere. Listening to him, I was mesmerized.  In that hour, I found myself both more bereft, knowing what I was not, and more deeply understanding of the people around me who were, like him, the product of and grounded in a physical place. 

At the end of Hague’s talk, he read a poem titled Talking Together, which was, for me, the penultimate note of his musings.  The poem was a hymn to the belonging I see in those people around me who never left, or left and returned, who “…have seen the same birds/flock among the white pine groves/ of the old ground we’ve helped heal… have heard the same stories,/seen the same men on street corners/of small towns so barren/they have no football team…” The poem evokes the totem spirits of Northern Appalachia: birds, stones, deer, creeks; and yet, as any good hymn does, it remembers the tribulations:  “…how we have failed the same jobs,/workers slumped over Chevys and Fords,/machinists hurt in our hears by slivers of steel,/hunters limping upridge with bloodied feet.”  I was reminded how dark times sew hearts and souls together just as much as celebrations— perhaps even more tightly.

Although written nearly fifteen years ago, the last stanza of the poem was a breathtaking and prescient message for us who, native or newcomer, struggle with divisions in our country, state, county and borough— divisions that have turned cousin against cousin, sister against mother, neighbor against neighbor.  “How we know one we know another,” Hague writes, “how we love even what we hate/for how it brings us together.”  When he stopped reading, I had a catch in my throat from the beauty of the notion that, thanks to “…coon hounds loved in common,/a relative with the same name,/a character true to type in all our places…” we have the hope that place is stronger than hate, connection mightier than division.