Interview with Author and Poet Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.

In this episode of Screen Door Queers, Writer Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. speaks of the importance of visibly queer teachers, storytelling as survival, growing up queer in Appalachia, and so much more. 

The episode is the third in a three-part story focused on queer life in Eastern Kentucky. The series is produced by students in a Media and Communications course at Warren Wilson College. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:08

Hey folks, welcome to today's episode of Screen Door Queers. This podcast is a production of the Media Communications Queer Migrations course at Warren Wilson College, nestled in the mountains of Swantanoa and Western North Carolina. This anthology series explores the stories of queer people living in Appalachia by queer people in Appalachia.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Hey y'all, my name is Donnie Henry, and on our last day in Kentucky, my classmate J Charr and I had the honor of speaking with Willie Carver. Willie is an educator, activist, and advocate for queer folks in Kentucky. I'll let him tell the rest.

SPEAKER_03 0:40

Thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview with us. I'm so excited to get to talk with you.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Same here. Very nice to meet you.

SPEAKER_03 0:46

My second grade teacher was queer, and she has been such an impactful and inspirational person in my life. So I think the work you're doing is so cool. And I was wondering if you could talk about the importance of having queer teachers in rural areas in particular.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

I don't think it can be over-emphasized. Um what we know about the way the brought the body and brain work together to process story, to process reality, is that we need stories in front of us. We are a story making species. You can't really quantify this stuff, but all of the best research says that the majority of what we call thinking is storytelling. Um every emotion we feel is storytelling. The words we tell are storytelling. Um the words we use to tell those are. And so young people seeing a queer adult existing happily, functionally, um, are subconsciously telling themselves the story. I can be a queer adult. I can be functional. And knowing what we know about suicide rates, knowing what we know about anxiety and depression. If for no other reason, if I never reference my queerness at all, just being in a room is telling a story.

SPEAKER_03 2:07

Yeah, being, especially being at Warren Wilson and having openly queer professors for the first time, or not openly queer professors for the first time in my life, I've had queer professors before, but professors who incorporate their queerness into their teaching too has been very profound for me.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

I'm so very glad that you had that. And what what's frustrating to me is straight people incorporate their straightness constantly into reality. Um, every story that is picked that has straight couples, every every story a teacher tells to give an example of something. Um those are all incorporating your own life. Um, and my thought process has always been I will be equally out about my life as my straight colleagues are. Um they don't run into rooms saying, hey, I'm straight. So I don't need to run into rooms saying, hey, I'm gay. Um but if I need to show an example of, I don't know, anything that might involve telling a story about my husband and me, then I'm gonna do that.

SPEAKER_03 3:08

Can you tell me more about what you're currently involved with?

SPEAKER_00 3:11

Yeah, so I'm with the Kentucky Youth Law Project. We provide free legal help to any queer people that we can provide it to. And um, so far we haven't had to turn anyone down, but I always want to throw that caveat out. Uh uh who is under, who is young, and I think we we call that 26 and under. Um, so that means a lot of different things. It means um helping fight back against um unjust laws that are being passed. It means helping people with name change paperwork, it means connecting people to groups, oftentimes it means working in K-12 spaces because I think a queer person is most likely in life to have to need legal help because of something that a school is doing. I'm also with um Kentucky 120 United, which is a uh the Kentucky branch of the American Federation of Teachers. So I'm I had their queer justice task force, and I'm also on the National Queer Justice Task Force. And luckily, it has gotten more rural. Um, but there was a time period when I feel like it was New York, California, me. Uh, and and I sort of was representing everyone. Um, but it's not for lack of the group wanting us, it was for how hard it is to find um people. So that and lots of reading work, uh, lots of going places and and helping people um think about the impact of the stories that they've heard and think about the stories that they can tell. Um so what I found is all of these things start to merge uh and are really the same work at the end of the day. This is what intersectionality looks like at its root to me. Um it's recognizing and and storytelling. It's recognizing that the truth of who you are is centered around a complexity and that narratives that you're hearing about who you are do not fit neatly with who you actually are. The narratives are intentional.

SPEAKER_03 5:14

You mentioned you're doing a lot of work with the law and how the law targets us as queer people. Has the current administration made that even more difficult?

SPEAKER_00 5:22

For sure. Um, and I'm gonna just be up front and say I think the biggest difficulty has been less the fact that the current administration hates LGBTQ people and more that our presupposed allies capitulate.

SPEAKER_02 5:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

People who will not be harmed choose to let us be harmed uh to make their lives easier. Um so what that looks like is I had a I had a grant um to host a rural queer youth conference and a school district that loves to show off its um queer affirming side um literally with just a couple of weeks before, maybe maybe a couple of months um beforehand, suddenly wanted me to share with them the names of everyone who was coming, every every word they were going to say. There were so many stipulations being added that I just said, no, thank you. I I'm I do you make the young Republicans do this, or is it only LGBTQ people? Um so that also meant having to share up a thousand dollars and find an alternative space, and frankly, only working with queer spaces because I decided um I didn't want to work with non-queer spaces because I didn't want kids to see um places that are supposed to be protecting them, turning on them. Um so there's been that sort of literal part um where I also do um talks on civil student rights. Basically, what I do is I'll I'll show students a scenario and have them talk about what they think a student's rights are in a situation, and then I show them Supreme Court rulings that hold up that actually show that, as a general rule, students have much more rights than they think. It's a very basic introductory talk. And the number of school districts that have uninvited me from giving this talk. Um, and again, these are school districts that wouldn't have invited me in the first place, um, except that they likely see themselves as um progressive, wonderful. Um, one school district actually asked that I not refer to any specific group of people at all. And I heard through the grapevine that there were some complaints when parents saw my name. So I'm assuming homophobic parents see the name of uh a queer writer. And there was actually nothing specifically queer in the entire presentation, but they said, we just want to know that you're you're only gonna reference things that apply to everyone. And I said, You want me to give a civil rights talk that doesn't mention a specific group? And I was like, absolutely not. Under no circumstances am I going to do this because one, you can't, because every single civil rights win has come because a specific group is being targeted, and you're asking me to deny that, and I'm not gonna deny this. That's that's been most of the work, honestly. It's been it's been fighting otherwise progressive claiming uh districts. The other part of this is real, and that is that the administration has made it really hard to get funding. But luckily, uh we're all willing to do what we need to do for free if we have to. Um but it it impacts. It impacts our ability. I know we we were really hoping to do some work about um what's happening to LGBTQ youth in government care, uh, in foster care. And that that takes actual resources that that we now don't have.

SPEAKER_03 8:43

What are queer youth in the in government care experiencing right now?

SPEAKER_00 8:47

For example, I have friends who foster uh and and I think when we when we think foster, we think someone who has children for years and years. But oftentimes children just are going to be with a family for a week or two weeks um because there's some legal situation. Maybe their parents have been arrested, maybe maybe whoever was currently fostering them has become sick. There's lots of reasons um that children might need um secondary care. And we already know uh in the in the state of Kentucky, especially, but it's across the country, the situation is dire. Um, children sleeping in um office spaces. Um I have friends who foster who tell me that they're the only people in a multi-county circle that will foster trans youth, for example. Um, so we have trans children in in counties where no one wants to take them. Um that's terrifying to me. And it's terrifying that the government won't let us do research to find out what that looks like. I know just anecdotally from hearing young people talk um that oftentimes they're placed in hostile families that not only don't respect them, but that take their personal beliefs um as something to challenge the young person. So you have a young person who's already in a very scary situation, being placed with a family that might be hostile, that might intentionally misgender them, that might take them to church services. Again, we it's really hard for us to know the exact nature of everything because uh the current models for how grants are being distributed uh prevent us from knowing anything. I just read this morning that Doge cut funding to a documentary about Holocaust survivors because it was focusing on women Holocaust survivors. An organization uh actually was working on resources for K through 12 for understanding LGBTQ issues, especially as they occur in K-12. And I was told after they filmed it that they had already done the work, but they wouldn't be allowed to share it. And again, oftentimes there isn't a law on the books making this happen. It is the interpretation of that law. And the best work I've done has been fighting back against the presupposed interpretations. An under-discussed thing, too, is exhausted. So uh in Kentucky, our anti-LGBTQ clover bill was Kentucky Senate Bill 150, which passed, I think, in 2022. The initial version of this bill was passed in one evening. They submitted it at night, passed it the next morning, and it wasn't horrific. It it basically allowed teachers to misgender students if it was part of their religious beliefs. That was the entirety of the bill. And still bad. I actually wrote two amendments for that bill in conservative language. Um, one just said if parents are affirming of their child and want their child in another classroom, let them move. Like the parents should have the right, which I thought this goes with what Republicans say they want, which is parents' rights. Uh, and the other bill was that no teacher should be forced to act against their own conscience. Um, and I think I even used the phrase closely held religious beliefs, um, because progressive people have those too. And of course, neither one of those passed. But what was interesting and sad is the last day of the legislative session at lunch, Republicans rewrote the bill. And we, I was with my friend Rachel, uh, who is a trans youth advocate, and we were reading it out loud to each other. We didn't even finish reading it until they voted. Uh, so no one knew what was going to be in this bill. But what was beautiful is I sat down with some women, some teachers, and we looked at the bill and we imagined what will school districts try to do. We knew they would try to remove pride flags. We knew they would try to ban any curricular discussion that involved an LGBTQ person. We knew they would try to out uh gay and trans students. Nothing in the bill said they had to. The bill just prohibited instruction on gender, sexuality, and gender identity, which all of us have, straight or queer, right? Um, so we made a little flyer, a little shareable meme that basically said SB 150 does not. Here's what it actually says, and then we decide the actual words, and then we just put a little legal disclaimer like, if you try to do this thing, here's gonna be the result. So you've removed plausible deniability from a school district that now knows because it has seen this little meme, this will cause students to die at higher rates if you do it. Um, and we were able in probably five or six different counties to have conversations when teachers would say, Hey, my school's trying to do this. And then we would share this, teachers would share it, and then when we had the conversation, the school district every single time retracted and said, Oh, no, we we didn't mean that. We weren't actually going to do that. Um, and to some extent, obviously I blame the school districts, but often no one was interpreting this. No one at all. And the um the Kentucky Department of Education, which was a lot smarter uh than the Republicans who wrote this bill, noticed that they used the word or and not the word and. So their entire uh their entire interpretation was you don't have to do it. Uh the word or says you don't.

SPEAKER_03 14:05

That's still a good loophole, and I feel like a lot of the time we have to find loopholes to continue functioning because of how insidious this legislation is. You seem to be uncompromising in your principles and your care for these people, or for our people, I should say. How do you do that? Like, how do you make sure you get to stay true to your principles and pivot in a way that allows you to continue doing that?

SPEAKER_00 14:29

I think I had to decide what ethics I follow. Um I am only just realizing the extent to which I sort of have this um magical thinking that I have to be perfect, that something horrible will happen. Um thinking that comes from being a queer child, where um abuse was everywhere, and I was trying to find the elements I could control. And I think as an adult, I still do that. I still, you know, I'm on the plane and the turbulence is bad, and I'm thinking if I'm somehow just perfect, everything will be okay. It gets harder and harder to be perfect when the system asks you to do terrible things, um, when our definitions of good uh start competing. Um, so you know, the perfect part of you that says, I want to be the best teacher. Um, you have to start out, you know, best is a superlative of good. What does good mean? Does it mean high test scores, even if my students are depressed? Um, does it mean not fighting with administrators, even if we're banning black, brown, and queer authors? Um so I had to follow a model of ethics that said young people matter first and their safety matters first, above any and all things. And what ended up happening is when I was teacher of the year for the state of Kentucky, um, some crazed groups and individuals started harassing me. And I ignored that um for as long as I could and chose exactly what the lawyers told me to do, which was not to respond to it. And then those people started going after my now former students, um, doxing them, sharing their faces, sharing their names, sharing their after-school jobs. And then the ethical question got even more complicated because I couldn't stay in the classroom. As much as it felt like being in the classroom and being a safe space mattered, and it certainly did. Um we're now at a point socially where my presence in the classroom did not cause my students to be in danger, but caused dangerous people to harm my students. Um, I'm a teacher by heart. I think I will live and die on this planet uh as a teacher. And so when I left the classroom, it kind of just broke the classroom walls altogether. Um, so it's I still feel that same impulse uh to protect. Um I like your phrasing, to be uncompromising. Um, but I can now do it in a much bigger class uh with a lot more students. Um and I get to hear more stories. You know, it's funny. Um everything I know about being queer, I learned first being Appalachian. Um the the stories of of the people around me as a kid basically saying, well, they'll hate you before they know you, they'll make fun of you before they know you, the rest of the world doesn't really see you seriously. Um and here's how we're gonna gurge you, here's how we're gonna strengthen you, here's how we're gonna get you to laugh at it, um, get you to mock them, get you to be smarter than them before you meet them. When I say LGBTQIA, the A also means Appalachian. So I think it was just sort of inevitable. Um and so, yeah, the irony, the irony is I think that the people who wanted me to just shut up. Um, I wasn't even on social media when I was named Teacher of the Year at all. The Department of Education was like, you have to be on social media. You have to have you know a platform and a thing. Um, so I got on social media and started talking. And I think before I would have believed, what's the point? No one cares anyway. That's certainly the feeling I had working in the classroom. I felt like I was up constantly against book bannings and administrative policy that was harmful to my students. And that was just sort of life. You put on your armor and you go out and fight every day. And then social media taught me I am not alone at all. Lots of people want to do good work and lots of people want to help. Um, they taught me that. They taught me uh a new meaning of advocacy. I think I used to think of advocacy as like standing between someone and the thing that would hurt them with a sword in your hand. Uh it was a physical fight. And now I think to the root of the word. Um ad means to towards at. Vulcade means to call, but Latin has like eight words for calling. Um, vocade means to use your voice, uh, to bring someone else. So my my vision of advocacy now is very much um hopeful belief in other people, using your voice to call for the for the more powerful and listening because sometimes you are the more powerful. And I and I've been fortunate to hear when people were calling for help and I could help. So, yeah, I think in a lot of ways, the the more harmful things happened when they happened in a time period when I was able to get help. Um, and that helped me realize uh a lot of different things about other people. It gave me strangely enough hope uh in others. And so I think that's sort of how I move forward in life. And I can tell you, this is this is what MAGA Republicans desperately fear. Um, that we will realize that the world is a good place and a hopeful place. Um, it's why they're doing everything they possibly can to keep LGBTQ people away from the classroom. It's why um they just uh I don't know if you've seen Kentucky's newest uh anti-LGBTQ bill. It's hard to keep track. There are 50 states with hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills at any given moment. Um we have one that would ban trans people from even being allowed to teach, and that would force school districts to basically turn in anyone who's gender who doesn't gender conform well enough. It is pure hatred. Um and some of the legislative body in Kentucky, um, some of these members are the first to share the most hateful and disgusting things and say the most hateful and disgusting things. Um, this is the worst we've seen so far because it overrides dozens of constitutional protections and overrides every bit of medical advice. It actually would force doctors to use the DSM III, um, which would actually go against the Hippocratic Oath. So if a school district decided that I, for example, um the way it works is if if a teacher has what used to be called uh transgenderism or transvestism, um if they show any evidence of it, the school would have to turn them in, and then a doctor would have to evaluate them according to, you know, medical terminology from a century ago. It'll fail if it passes, but if it passes, it'll be something that makes people afraid, and it will stand for a while until it falls again. But yeah, the the real thing that they're trying to do is determine which stories get told. And for me, it it's actually kind of hopeful. I will point back to the 1990s when I was uh a young person. I saw them cancel Ellen's show because a woman kissed another woman. And Ellen's show was the most PG possible show. Um and it sent a quick lesson, right? That we will not tolerate your existence. I saw two men get arrested for being gay. I didn't see them with my own eyes, but I saw it in the papers. Um, because I think the last arrest of people for being gay was in the 19, it was in 1998. It was two men in, could have been Georgia, could have been Texas, but I remember my dad was a truck driver and I was reading it and I was so scared, and I thought, this this might this is basically my life. I'm gonna be arrested for Being gay. And I saw 100% of Republicans and the majority of Democrats vote to make gay marriage illegal. And then I saw the next 15 years, right? All of that rough action was people fighting against a story that was already here. You can't unsee a story. And we already know the story. The future is trans. The future is queer. We're going to be here. And they're terrified of it. And yes, our our allies aren't the best allies. But they're not the worst either.

SPEAKER_03 22:31

So I really believe that too. I mean, I've seen it in my lifetime and with my family and my friends and just the people around me. The acceptance of mine and other people's being queer and trans has gotten so much greater on an individual level. I feel like I went from being completely terrified of talking about my transness and queerness in public and even at school to being able to talk about it openly and incorporate it into what I'm learning at the same time as all of this administration's and like the government crackdown on that being possible. So yeah, it really is just the stories that they're telling us as opposed to the stories that we're experiencing ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 23:09

When I was getting my teaching degree, I was we used to have to do this digital portfolio. And back this was like thumbnails. The idea was you're going to be recording yourself teaching and sending it to school districts before you even get there. This is the future. So we'd record ourselves teaching. And I recorded myself. A professor recorded me, and I got this very sweet message from the from the professor that basically said, I want to be honest. You come across your mannerisms are very gay-coded. And I'm afraid you won't get a job if this is the video. Do you want to re-record? And I thought for a long time, well, I I sat in this computer lab reading that, thinking about like what does it mean if I re-record? Um, what kind of future do I want to create? What kind of future do I want to stand into? And I just decided to take the video that I had just done, attach it, and hit submit. Um, and I became the you know, teacher of the year for the entire state, you know, out of 40,000 people. There was a story that was being told to me that was based upon a past that I did not live in about who I would get to be. And I decided instead to point my ship in a hopeful direction, and it worked. Another thing I think about my first year of teaching, absolute first year, full-time in a public school, I had a very kind student who basically kept me alive. And I felt such love for him and didn't, I mean, queer people only know how to process their love with shame. It's it's all we're taught. This person has made my life worth living by making this classroom so dynamic every day. It was a kid who had the power to do this. I wrote about it and shared it with another, with a friend who was older, who said, one, I couldn't stop crying reading this. And two, maybe don't share it. Maybe the world just won't understand things. And I thought about that. And it felt like the same moment again. And I'm like, no, I'm tired. I'm tired of having to be guilty when I haven't done anything. I'm tired of like having to look at myself through ugly eyes. Um so I instead shared it with the American Writers Guild and it won. And what that meant was uh Jason Strathurn and um another actor who's not coming to me, they actually performed this piece. Um, two straight men performed it as me and this student in front of actors in Manhattan, and I got to see video of that, and it just reminds me those things that the world most desperately fears. It fears because they're true, and it fears because they're good. And our goodness, it shows their ugliness. That's what they're afraid of. They know they're wrong or they wouldn't be fighting.

SPEAKER_03 25:48

How are you expecting the reception of your books to be? I mean, after getting told that people don't want to see this or that you can't share it, and then for them to be so excited for it.

SPEAKER_00 25:57

You know, it's interesting because those two moments were tied up so clearly. I was it was in the middle of all of this ugliness, you know, the the people making threats against my former students, and um I felt like I was it's strange, like I had climbed this mountain and then was named Teacher of the Year, which I did not expect at all. Um in fact, the reason that happened is because I didn't expect it. I um my students were making fun of me when they heard that I had been nominated, uh, the way students do. And I was trying to write on the board and I had written the word weapon three times, and I misspelled it three times in a row. Uh, and one of the kids goes, Teacher of the year here, folks. And then we all laughed, myself included. And then one of them goes, Yeah, like they're gonna let some big gay Appalachian be teacher of the year. And we all laughed again. Um, but that night I kept hearing that student's voice in my head. Because that student was a big gay Appalachian, and I thought, you are 16, and you're already trying to build some humor around the fact that you think you're not gonna win anything, that you think you can't become something. I'm a shit teacher if I let that story stand. I asked them to fill the application out with me. Um, I asked them to talk about what they were proudest of, um what they wanted the state to see. And I thought, well, even if I don't win, they'll think I think it, and the state will see who these kids are. And they were the ones shining on that application, not me. Um, they were the ones just brimming with belief in themselves. You know, you get to this summit and then you're watching the world collapse around you. Uh, and I'm I've realized I'm probably never gonna be back in the K-12 classroom in Kentucky at least. And it was like this big game over sign was falling from the sky directly in front of me. And this kid inside of me started wanting to talk. Um, he was the one who was almost furious at me. I think we we put a lot of distance between ourselves and who we were as kids uh because we think we were vulnerable and we think we were weak and we don't want to be that anymore. And this kid was like, You think I was weak? How the hell do you think you're here? That was the message he wanted to tell me. He wrote this book. I was just listening intently every morning as he wrote it. But then afterwards, I was like, I don't know how this works. I don't know how to publish a book. So, long story short, uh, when the ugliness was at its worst, uh, the Kentucky writing community was fantastic. No one knew me as a writer, they knew me as a teacher. And a bunch of writers reached out to me. Silas House reached out to me. Um, Robert Geype reached out to me. Robert Gype is my favorite writer on earth, and we were just chatting. And he I think he started by saying, Hey, are you okay? I sent this book to West Virginia University Press solely because they published uh Nima Avashi is another Appalachia, and I thought they published queer things because even as recently as two years ago, I thought Appalachia would not accept me. They wrote back very quickly, within like six hours, which is unheard of, I've later learned, um, and said, We can't publish poetry, but you need to get this somewhere. So I asked Robert Guy, where might somebody send gay Appalachian poems? Do you have any ideas? And he was like, Send it to me. And I was like, I'm not trying to get a reading from you, just where would I send it? And he was like, Don't be an asshole, send it. So I sent it, and then he wrote me back later and said, Don't be mad, but I may have sent this to Crystal Wilkinson, who was poet laureate. Um, and she may have said, You have to talk to her. And from then on, it was really me relearning this story that people cared uh in so many ways because the reception has been so lovely. It's been so lovely, and people have been so good. I've gotten to hear so many queer people respond with poetry. I've gotten to meet so many young, queer people who have shown me where they text the short poems to each other. A person in West Virginia painted two of the poems as art and sent them to me. The coolest part is this young kid that I used to be went in with me to the first meeting with the University of Press of Kentucky. And at this point, this was the biggest dream I could ever even imagine, like publishing a book. But they the publicist said, What's your biggest dream for this book? I'm thinking we already did it, like it's here. But this kid who I used to be, like the kid who got me here, said, Say the biggest things you can imagine. And I said to this kid, like, Shh, we're a meeting. And he goes, Say the biggest things you can imagine. So I said the biggest things. I said, I want to be on Good Morning America and I want to win a Stonewall Book Award. You know, to me, like the highest queer honor you can get from a book. Uh and they looked at me like, you know that we are a small regional press. Uh both of those things happened. Both of those things happen within a year, probably within six months. Um, because that kid reminded me, like, you're the one that's going to make this happen. Um, you have to believe it before other people are going to believe it. And most importantly, the world cares. So reach out to any author you had the misfortune of meeting because they were checking on this story about death threats, you know. Um, use that for good. Ask them how does a person get on Good Morning America? They responded. Uh, and they responded kindly. Uh, and yeah, it taught me a lot about what it means to write vulnerably and what it means to trust in people, which are really the same thing.

SPEAKER_03 31:18

It's really so inspiring, honestly, to hear you talk about your younger self pushing you and being there for you in a way that we as queer people don't often get. And it has been so impactful in my life just in the last couple of years to realize that and to really take the time to care for my younger self, the younger self that exists within me and still needs that love.

SPEAKER_00 31:38

And that kid is is 100% still here, and that's one of the most beautiful things. Like, you can you can ask that kid, like, what do you want? Sorry. That kid wants to eat cereal and watch Captain Planet for some reason. Um so about once a year. And it has to be on a work day. The kid wants me to miss work. I'll eat um pretty pebbles and watch Captain Planet. Uh we can we can give so much uh to those kids. And in doing so, learn a lot about what they've given us. Um, one of the things I do um when I teach adults about queer youth, I ask them, who's ever been in a job in which the supervisor didn't want you there? And there's usually 20% of the room will raise their hand, and then you ask them, what does it feel like? And these otherwise um adults who are strong, I mean, they're at a conference, they're living their lives, will tell you that they went home and cried every night, that they were depressed, that they turned to alcohol, um, that they didn't want to get up in the mornings, that it shifted how they felt about themselves. I've had people tell me they got divorced because of it, all because they couldn't handle the emotions of being in a place that didn't want them. And I said, Are these young kids do this for 12 years straight? They go into spaces that don't want them and they survive it. Anyone who can survive that sort of thing has a lot to teach us. And I don't mean to undermine the people who don't survive it, because they have a lot to teach us as well.

SPEAKER_03 33:07

Can I ask more about what it was like growing up in Kentucky?

SPEAKER_00 33:10

I think it was very similar to the experience of a lot of queer people. Uh I went to a um a Pentecostal church that was um the sort of evangelical that teaches self-hatred. Um and I spent my time around people who often said pretty anti-LGBTQ things, some of whom are now aware of it and stand by it, many of whom regret um who they were in that moment and who they weren't in that moment. I grew up surrounded by poverty and hardworking people, but hard work is not enough. Most importantly, I had school. School was, for all of its faults, God, and I hate to use a Harry Potter reference, but it was like the room of requirement. When we didn't have electricity, school had electricity. When we didn't have food, school had food. When my teachers knew we didn't have food, the food ended up in my backpacks. When I didn't have shoes, the shoes ended up in my backpack. Um, school was and always will be absolutely magical. It was it was beautiful because everything I needed was there. And it seemed like this place outside of reality. Reality was where you couldn't get what you needed necessarily and where things could go wrong. School was outside of it. It was this space-time unto its own. I didn't feel I I still feel like my teachers were these angels with teaching degrees. The women, at least. There were some terrible men. That's what makes me so angry about what MAGA Republicans are doing. They recognize school as a safe place that builds strong people, and strong people don't vote MAGA. Fearful people vote MAGA. People who are hateful vote MAGA. And not everyone who votes MAGA is hateful. Many of them are just terrified. I had the fortune of having really good parents. I had a a mother who was affirming before she could be. I had a father who was affirming before they had language for it, before they knew what I was and what they were. They showed me over and over that I was here for a reason. And that that carried me a long way. Appalachia taught me resourcefulness. It taught me to love the underdog. It taught me that the people in power were usually in power because they had done something wrong to get there. Not always, but often. And those things helped me navigate the world.

SPEAKER_03 35:28

It's been really interesting and fun to learn, or not fun, but like we were talking to some people at Apple Shop a couple days ago, and I had mentioned the parallels between queerness and Appalachia and the hardship that we experience and the fact that we have to focus on our community and how our community is going to be there for us when the people in power aren't. And that parallel is just really obvious and present, and I never really noticed it before coming to Warren Wilson and being in Appalachia and specifically seeing queer Appalachia.

SPEAKER_00 35:57

I heard a talk at, I forget the exact name of it, but it's the Appalachian Studies Program at the University of Kentucky puts on a sort of one-day conference that mixes undergrad and professional work all at once. And one of the people speaking said that although Appalachia accounts for many of the top 10 poorest zip codes in the United States and has lower income levels, the mutual aid network in central Appalachia is among the most expansive that you can find. And I've always found this to be true. I can go back even to my days delivering pizzas. Deliver a pizza to the richest subdivision and they will count down to the penny a 10% tip and give you that. Deliver a pizza to a single wide trailer and you're going to get a 20% tip easily. People who work hard for other people know what it means to need and not have enough. When I try to think about, like, I don't know, some version of God, whether God exists or what God is. God to me is Christmas and Appalachia. Um, because I know people who are living off of government checks of $700 a month, who are the first to give until it hurts when they find out that their children in need. It's the one day they make sure uh that every kid feels seen. And I look back at my own childhood and look at the people who were making sure that I didn't feel like I didn't have anything that day. Um, and these were not people who had enough to give, uh, but they still did.

SPEAKER_03 37:24

How do you manage being a poet in terms of your time and financially as well? Like how do you do time management?

SPEAKER_00 37:30

So I think the first year there were over there were definitely over a hundred events uh in person, uh, which was wild. I think it's it's a pastime um that if I were doing it judiciously, I could probably live off of, but otherwise uh I work um outside of that. And for me, every chance to have a dollar is a chance just to give that dollar back. Um so I think of poetry as this sort of self-sustained system that can help generate funds for other things uh for LGBTQ uh youth organizations. Uh it's really cool when I can find a way to give books uh to queer youth. The ACLU of West Virginia has a summer camp uh for LGBTQ youth, uh, and it's an awesome, awesome place. And I got to give every one of those uh young people a copy of Gay Palms for Red States, for example. Anytime I can find a way to get books uh to queer youth in Appalachia, like I'm gonna do that. I don't know what other people do for pastimes. I've always been a reader uh anyway. So I think, yeah, I think of it as that. Uh it doesn't feel like work. And it's made me so much stronger, uh, especially with emotions. Um, when you write about the most vulnerable and tender parts of your entire life and then read about and share them over and over and over again, they change shape. There's a there's a poem about a time when my uncle threw the only thing I had in the world away in anger. It was a bear. Uh took me forever to write about it because it's it's sort of my central memory. Like the world is the world is dangerous and something bad's about to happen at any point. Every emotional breakdown I've ever had in my entire life leads back to that moment. Every time when I feel most afraid, that moment is sort of looming. And now I get to read it to people. And what I've found is that same emotion of powerlessness comes, but now it's changed textures and shapes. I feel like, as weird as it sounds like, I feel like the memory is there beside of me now, and I'm looking at it, and it's almost like it's this old friend, like, hey, I see you. We know each other, we've known each other for a long time. Uh, but now I can look at you, and I'm not afraid of you, um, not hurt by you. And I'll still cry, but the crying feels different. The crying feels like recognition, not fear.

SPEAKER_03 39:51

That's beautiful. The kind of accepting, I don't want to call it demons, but accepting the unfortunate things that um can be things that make you stronger, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 40:01

In a lot of ways, I think it's it's it's unraveling the story.

SPEAKER_01 40:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:06

The story was the demon. The story, you know, the story is that the world's not a safe place. Um and that story becomes I think of stories as streams, as as these as movements of water crashing together. We've always got thousands of stories crashing at any point in front of us, kind of directing what we think is real. And the bigger that stream gets, the more it can just take over other stories. And when you can face it and say, no, you are not this. You are not the world being an unsafe place. You are a particularly cruel man in a particularly cruel moment. And I'm not weak, and you are not the world. So it's almost de-demonification. I think that's a good word. This the story was the demon, and now I'm like, you're a different story altogether. Change your mind, change your world. Which doesn't mean there aren't shitty things happening. It it's a I think sometimes that can be used in a toxic way, but it's an acknowledgement that any power I have can only come from the shift uh in perspective. Uh, we can't access any power, we can't access any hope without it. I mean, I think the best kind of hope is the hope that's looking around at the darkness around it and is still hopeful. It's defiant.

SPEAKER_03 41:16

Defiant is a good word. I like that word.

SPEAKER_00 41:19

I like being defiant.

SPEAKER_03 41:21

Yeah, me too. I mean, clearly. Speaking of which, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your queer identity and figuring out defiance, I guess, in a rear in a rural setting.

SPEAKER_00 41:33

I didn't have a whole lot of queer people around me uh as a kid. Um there was I have a distant cousin named Jamie, uh, who was just sparkles. Uh he was a drag queen, um, hairdresser, so soft. Um every time he saw me, he told me I was beautiful. Um I remember that because I didn't feel beautiful uh as a kid. Uh, but he always told me. Um he told every woman he saw that she was beautiful. He left, um, the way a lot of people have to. He was murdered, actually, in Louisville. And the commissioner who was doing the investigation described him as the sort of person from the hills no one would miss. I remember that sinking in when I was younger, uh, that this is this this is who you are in these aqueer affirming places. Someone in a box that no one would miss uh because of your poverty. I knew that I liked boys, but it didn't occur to me that I was gay because in church gay was monster, and I didn't feel like a monster at first. And here we're talking like first, second, third grade. I didn't know to connect the two. I started connecting it around fourth grade. Um, like, oh, okay, I'm gay, I'm a monster. And so the next probably five or six years was trying to figure out what that meant to be a monster. I would sneak peeks at lives. Uh Jerry Springer, honestly. Like that, I there was no queer teacher, but there were gay people on Jerry Springer. And even if they were brought on to like be mocked and made fun of, I would think these are real people with skin and bodies, and they're going somewhere after this episode. So like there's a place I can go. There will be a place. And maybe I'll be a joke, but I I'll be alive. That helped me for the longest time. And then when I got to college, I came out to the first person, my friend Carrie. And then I think, you know, the rest is history. Um, the way coming out is so expansive. Like the whole universe gets so bigger and lighter. But then then the defiance took over. Uh, that's when it was a really quick shift. Uh, I went from thinking these terrible things to becoming as Appalachian in my queerness as I was on the rest of me. The one thing I know, if if I'm I'm not sure of a whole lot in the world, but like I know I love myself. And I know like that was a really, really hard fight. Uh, and I got there. It's nice to To know one thing. If you can truly know one thing, it makes you a good writer because I want to write characters I love. And so it's easy to do. I just inject myself into every character in some way. I think it's also for those negative things, it's also reminded me there are versions of myself I used to be that I would find abhorrent now. And that kid was a good kid. He was just raised uh on a steady diet of hatred. Uh and it took him a while uh to get over it. Uh so I try my best, um, especially when people aren't in power, to be understanding when they're when they're not who uh we would want them to be. I think it's also helped me be a much better, I don't know, liberal, progressive, whatever, Democrat type, um, because I see the same hatred against poverty in against white poverty uh in Democrats. And they won't there's there's there's no way to get progressive folks to talk about it because they're not gonna they they refuse to learn from hillbillies anyway.

SPEAKER_03 45:06

Um they all see them as a legitimate constituency, which is crazy to me.

SPEAKER_00 45:10

Yeah. They have shot themselves in the foot, but they they mock rural people. I think they think you can see it in the memes, like where it's the it's the hillbilly person who says, now that them trans can't uh play sports, our eggs is cheap. And I'm like, what they're doing is working from an initial start that this is a person who doesn't get to be taken seriously and who is somehow broken. And they they're basically claiming both the poverty and the conservativism come from the same place. And so, one, they erase all poor people who aren't conservative, two, they uninvite any poor person from ever being progressive. And three, they I think they forget entirely about young people. Like my uncle, my my nephews are trying to figure out who they are politically. Why in the world would they choose a party that thinks they're disgusting monsters? Because they, when they look at that ad, what they see is mocking someone who lives in a trailer, mocking someone who has Appalachian grammar. They see that first. Um, there's no reason uh to mock that part of themselves. Um, I think another part of this, I think it's very racist because you don't see the progressive liberals mocking um other groups when they live in poverty. They will claim it's somehow systemic, but they deny systemic issues when it's white people living in poverty, which lets me know I think they think that white people should somehow automatically have access to the ability to free themselves, um, which means they actually buy into the very systems that they claim they don't buy into. And they also must believe that there's something inherent in whiteness that means you can escape that system that's telling to me uh about what they think about race.

SPEAKER_03 46:55

What is next for you? I mean, you've already talked a little bit about what you're doing already, but do you have anything on the horizon that you're looking forward to?

SPEAKER_00 47:01

I do have a few things. Um, so Tor Auto Pieces comes out March 17th. Um, I'm so excited about it. I think Gay Porns for Red States helped me. It reminded me of how I survived. Um, and I survived through love, period. That that was it. Um and Appalachians taught me love. So Tore All to Pieces is in a lot of ways a love letter to Appalachia. It's literally dedicated to everyone born south of the mountain parkway, which is the line of demarcation uh in Kentucky. And I have a book called Them, T-H-E-M, uh, which is about the Mothman. I won't even say reimagined because I don't think we need to. I think Mothman has always been a queer figure. It looks at the genderful Mothman in all their queerness as maybe we could say a queer god who shows up when a teacher from eastern Kentucky is put on public trial after doing something good. That's basically uh what happens. And um, the novel traces his life in a lot of different ways, and we see this Mothman sort of haunting um that happens. I'm really excited about it. It goes before the board at the press in April. So we got a month before we find out uh what's next for that. I've got a Mothman poetry collection um called The Red Ahead uh that comes out soon. Uh we can say uh we're still figuring out the exact deadlines, but I'm really excited about it too. It's it's the same Mothman, but that that whole collection, I want to take the profane and Mothman and just put it in a jar and shake it uh and see what waspers come out. And it's it's strange as hell. Uh there's Mothman and his 12-inch probiscus. Uh but it's it's looking at uh at queer humanity and what what initial God stories kind of compel us uh and where Mothman kind of fits into that. Because I think I I think the stories that we tell ourselves about the nature of reality are such that when Mothman as a figure appeared, that was the shape I think that for so many of us made sense. Um so that is coming out for North Meridian Press soon. And then finally, uh I've got a collection I'm working on called um groomer. Uh I've been called that a few thousand times. So I thought, what is a groomer? Someone who prepares someone for something very important. Hell yeah, I have been a groomer. Uh that is that is that is my goal as a teacher. It's to believe that people can be better versions of themselves and that they can articulate those versions and they can dream those versions, and I can get them what tools they need uh to become those things. Um so it's sort of an autobiographical mixture of poetry and creative nonfiction that looks at um what compelled me to education.

SPEAKER_03 50:06

That's awesome. I only just learned about Mothman and the queer connections that he has, and I really love the idea of him being a queer god, too. I would love to ask you more about that.

SPEAKER_00 50:16

What I can say is I think Mothman is just the container we need to hold the vastness of our feelings. Uh, because they're they're they need something sacred. They it but they also need, I mean, Mothman, it's funny. It is funny and sacred. To me, the most profane thing is a hot pocket. Like it is the it is the goofiest product that our culture can create, yet it is unequivocally good. Uh, I also live in a town that produces uh the nation's hot pockets. So I said, if I can write a serious poem about a hot pocket, um, then I will have done my work as a poet. And so I started writing, and damn, I wrote it. I wrote the poem, the serious poem about a microwave hot pocket. Uh, and of course it became a Mothman poem. Like it it emerged as a Mothman poem. Um, so that was like that was the sign. Let's write, let's write this Mothman.

SPEAKER_03 51:08

What advice would you give to uh rural queer Appalachian kids?

SPEAKER_00 51:11

Not to take on anybody else's stories, not to take anything good from queer elders and not to take the pain. Sometimes that pain will be given to you as if it's a survival tool. Um refuse it. I have made the mistake many times of thinking I'm helping a young person survive when what I was doing was giving them a yoke that I have already shaken off and that they have no intention of carrying. I once yelled at a 17-year-old uh who whose mother was a hairdresser and who was queer, came from poverty, brilliant, not poverty, just came from a lower working, came from a blue-collar background. And he didn't turn in his first essay uh in a college class that I was teaching. And I pulled him to the side and yelled, and I was like, You don't get this choice. Your classmates get this choice, you don't get it. You are gay and coming from hard work, like you you can't make these mistakes. And years later I got saw him and I was like, hey, I'm sorry. And he was like, I knew then you weren't talking to me. You were talking to some kids you used to be and you were scared. Listen when people are talking to you and ask yourself if they're talking to you. Because sometimes we see you as vulnerable and you're not vulnerable, and we weren't as vulnerable as we think. Tell your own story. Like, get a pencil, get a pen, write it. Leave if you want, stay if you want. Um, be careful of stories that are telling you what to do. Um, be open to stories that tell you how powerful you are.