by Marguerite Avery and Mo Daviau
West Virginia University Press is thrilled to welcome Meredith McCarroll to our acquisitions team. As co-editor of our bestselling title, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, McCarroll has demonstrated her dedication to and deep understanding of Appalachia as a region and a culture. In her new role, she will be acquiring Appalachian titles for the press, and we cannot think of a better person for the job! To introduce her, we asked Meredith a few questions about her writing, research, and vision for the future of Appalachian Studies.
How long have you been working in Appalachian Studies?
In one way or another, I have been studying Appalachia since my first year of college, when I took a class called “Experiencing Appalachia.” I turned more seriously toward Appalachian Studies in graduate school, writing a master’s thesis (with support from Chip Arnold, Lynn Sanders, and Cece Conway) at Appalachian State University, which explored several Appalachian novels with an emphasis on the role of women’s labor in those texts.
What was your pathway to Appalachian Studies? Was there a specific “lightbulb” moment when you decided this is what you wanted to focus on?
After the project in graduate school, I turned my attention toward Critical Race and Critical Whiteness studies, analyzing primarily African American novels and films. My dissertation focused on representations of whiteness in Black-authored texts of the twentieth century. Although I was living in Appalachia, studying at University of Tennessee, I was not thinking much about Appalachian texts.
My lightbulb moment happened as I was deep into revision on a chapter about Native Son. I had taken a break to walk into the English Department mailroom and noticed a flier for a library reading happening in ten minutes. I decided to go and walked into a reading of the Affrilachian Poets. I realized that all the ways I had been thinking about constructions of identity tied to race could be complicated by a layer of regional identity. This led to interviews with several Affrilachian Poets, and I began to turn back toward Appalachian Studies with a more complex and layered approach.
You’re from the South, but you’ve spent considerable time in the North in both Boston and Southern Maine. Does anything stand out about these experiences? How do you understand the cultural differences?
Poet and novelist Robert Morgan told me in an interview way back in my first MA program that if he hadn’t left Appalachia, he doesn’t think he would have written about it. He might not have truly seen it. I feel similarly. Moving to Boston in my twenties helped me understand how Appalachia was misperceived. I grew very defensive about where I was from and eventually became committed to complicating simplistic or false narratives about the region.
In many ways, there are commonalities among Maine and my experience of Appalachia. Maine felt more familiar to me—more like the mountains of North Carolina—than upstate South Carolina or Atlanta did. Each place is so unique, and perhaps we find what we seek wherever we are. The more I’ve lived and studied, the more I’ve learned that there is really no way to characterize a region that holds for everyone there.
You have distinguished yourself as a writer of nonfiction, but you also write fiction. Does your academic and research experience inform your approach to fiction? What is the biggest difference between the two?
What links the two genres for me is an adherence to truth. Perhaps because I wrote scholarship first, then nonfiction essays, and then fiction, I focus on ensuring whatever I write feels very real. I am interested in exploring the ways that stories allow us to access emotion and experience, and the distinction between nonfiction and fiction is less important for me than the emphasis on real feeling. This means that I sometimes do more research for fiction writing because I want to get straight what song might have been playing or what a character might have been reading—but it is all to get toward truth.
When did you first decide you wanted to be a writer?
For many years, I was writing about writers, and I felt very much on the other side of a scholar/creative divide. The moment I felt like a writer began as I spoke an essay into my phone while driving home from Appalachian Studies Association. That essay became “On and On: Appalachian Accent and Academic Power,” published in Southern Cultures with fantastic illustrations by Natalie Nelson. Soon after publication, The Guardian ran the piece, suddenly giving me an audience—a real audience with thousands of shares and hundreds of comments and emails. Knowing I had connected with actual readers out there changed everything, and I began to write in a very different mode.
If you could write anything, what would it be? Your “if only” project?
I have begun interviews with Black musicians who played in the Chitlin’ Circuit during segregation, primarily in the Southern US. So many of these musicians are near the end of their lives. If I could, I would pause everything and interview as many as possible to capture their stories while they are still here to tell them.
What is your current project?
I always have several projects going. Right now, I’m moving between two major works: a nonfiction manuscript that deals with remembrance and inheritance, asking questions of mythological Cherokee ancestors, and a novel that moves between Maine and western North Carolina in the 1930s. I’m also always writing shorter pieces that I hope can have more immediate and wider impact.
As the co-editor and contributor of Appalachian Reckoning, a core book (and a perennial bestseller!), you have already had a major influence on our list. What works would you like to bring into WVU Press? What would you like to see covered?
What I’m proudest of with Appalachian Reckoning is the ways that it refuses to offer a simple narrative of the region. I’d love to have more books that keep us on our toes when we think of Appalachia—memoirs of place from perspectives that we haven’t heard, scholarship that approaches the region in new ways, leaving us both nodding along and scratching our heads. I love books that confront misunderstandings straight on but am also eager to see more stories that add to the chorus of Appalachian voices—not necessarily pushing back but instead focusing on moving ahead.