Matthew Ferrence is the author of the new book I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me: Essays on Rural Political Decay. His other books include Appalachia North. He teaches creative writing at Allegheny College.
Q: Over how long a period did you write the essays in your new collection?
A: As a memoirist, the cheeky answer would be, “my entire life!” But as a discrete book, this project started in November of 2020, right after the election. I wrote a proposal and got a contract with a press, rewrote the book three times in dialogue with the publisher, who then kicked the book to the curb. That was a bummer, to say the least.
I was going to give up on the book and move on with my life, but just for kicks I got in touch with the editor who had worked with my past book at WVU Press. He was receptive, but he also said I’d have to rewrite the whole book again — top-to-bottom — since it couldn’t come out until 2024 at the earliest.
So I started over, wrote a new proposal for an utterly different version of the book. He liked it. I rewrote the book again into its present form, and now it’s out in the world. A winding path with a good ending!
Q: How were the memoir’s title and subtitle chosen, and what do they signify for you?
A: I knew from the start of the project that the book needed a title that captured the complicated mixture of frustration and hope that comes along with being a candidate, and person, who is quite a bit more progressive than what’s expected in rural politics.
I mean, I ran because I wanted to be part of the answer to vexing problems in my home region, and in running I came to realize how much the tropes of politics prevent the election of people who might actually come up with solutions. But I also deeply love where I am from.
That’s the internal conflict I wanted the title to convey, as well as indicate that such conflicts are tied up in the way rural politics have been collapsed into a single red monolith that implies the absence of anything else.
Q: The writer Edward Karshner said of the book, “Ferrence wrestles with how he understands himself as an individual, a demographic, and then as Aristotle's political animal. It is a fascinating look at the making of political and cultural tropes from the inside.” What do you think of that description?
A: Oh, I love that description of the book and am grateful for it. Aristotle writes in that passage that an individual who turns away from the group politic is like “a bird which flies alone,” and so much of what I’m writing about feels like that.
When you exist obliquely to the political tropes of your region, you feel very much like you’re just out there winging it by yourself. I experienced that quite viscerally as a candidate, out there and being told by the GOP that I couldn’t possibly represent my home because of what I believed, but also told by the DNC that I could never win because of where I lived.
Yet the most important part of running, I’d say, was finding that there’s a pretty sizable flock of birds in rural America who are all made to feel like they’re outcasts.
Stereotype and pre-determined stories have the effect of keeping all those “solitary” birds alone. But we’re here, always have been and always will be. It’s our home too, and I’m tired of living within the terms others have decided will always define us. That’s why I ran for office, and why I wrote the book.
Q: What do you see looking ahead when it comes to rural American politics?
A: In the short term, I imagine a lot of the same tropes will pop up in the 2024 election cycle. Realistically, the usual voting patterns will likely remain pretty much the same.
But I am buoyed by how so many Appalachian folks have been speaking up since the selection of J.D. Vance as the GOP veep, decrying the cynical stereotypes of Hillbilly Elegy and demanding that we be given credit for the complex and diverse and energetic reality of our region.
So many people are refusing to be collapsed, again, into rural typecasting. As others have said, Appalachians aren’t dead and don’t need an elegy.
I think we might be headed toward an inflection point where it ceases to be so easy to ignore rural Americans politically, and harder still to lump us into the same caricatures we usually see. Right now, we’re refusing to accept the narrowed lane we’re always offered in the national conversation.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Mostly doom-scrolling on social media! But I do have two writing projects in the very early stages. One is an eco-fabulist Appalachian novel about, more or less, light pollution. The other is a nonfiction examination of the history of saxophone manufacture, which is quite a bit more fascinating than you’d think.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Well, it’s an election year, and if you’re reading this you’re a reader, and being a serious reader is an excellent way to combat the nutso politics that surrounds us.
I will shout until my last breath that politics is really a narrative problem, and the route to better politics is all about being a better reader of stories. That makes it harder for politicians to sell us thin, bad, self-serving ones. So, read and book and save the nation!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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