Katelyn Damron's Appalachian Love Story

2/12/2018

I’m finally ready and willing to start sharing photos/poetry/thoughts/reflections on my experiences as a player playing many parts in that great family feud, as it were, of 2017 that, unfortunately, is not yet quite over.

2017 - that whirlwind of a contemptuously impossible year - proved to be my greatest failure, my greatest disappointment, my greatest education, and, somehow too, my greatest hope. Firstly, that jaded, rundown kind of hope which mandates the belief that eventually, things were going to have to be okay. And, later (currently), a sanguine hope, reddened in the face from drunkenness on the precipice of full redemption of those things truly important - a hope that shines in the darkness and which leads wise folks hither; truth is righteous, truth is clarity, and truth is the way of the world (courts).

For catharsis, I took to writing this all down, scrawling the phrases as they popped into my head and piecing them together a little more artfully in the still quiet of many nights robbed of sleep.
Unfortunately, in this society, our standard of strength is wholly contingent upon the amount of abuse that one can endure. Who would I be without suffering all this BS? Probably someone having far fewer anxiety attacks, but at the very least, it makes for a good story about how good prevails invariably, probably. This is the first manifestation of that.

This particular set of photos signifies the preciousness and the seriousness of place - these are those couple hundred acres of red clay that someone once convinced me was home. These lands are held hostage and eerily quiet in the bonds of injunction, awaiting release. If stolen from me, they are stolen from everyone on this creek, farming families here hundreds of years, and their ancestors’ bones crushed under bulldozers of wealth. It is the latest, most personal iteration of the legacy of absentee land ownership, white collar theft, geographic pillage, and general abuse of the poor by the rich, the irrelevant, the outsider, in this area. But we are still fighting.

Katelyn Damron, 19, is a 2017-2018 STAY Project steering committee member from Tornado, WV.

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Appalachian Love Stories

Appalachian Loves Stories was a storytelling project started at the Stay Summer Institute in 2014 and has expanded into a campaign focused on making space for the stories of young people in Appalachia who may have no other space to tell their story.

So what does STAY mean when we talk about our Appalachian Love Story? We're talking about "love" as a verb, as an action, as a process we are continuing to change and shift. We are talking about love as a choice, like how we choose to love Appalachia and how we choose to stay even when it might be easier to leave. We are talking about love as an intersectional youth movement that is building towards a regenerative and inclusive Appalachia. We are talking about love being hard work sometimes, and about how love comes with both joys and heartache. We are talking about how love is building a network of young people who uplift and support each other. So we are asking y'all to tell us how do you love Appalachia? Tell us how it is hard to love Appalachia. Tell us how you choose to stay. Tell us your Appalachian Love Story so we can feature it on the blog. #appalachianlovestory