Memoir in Progress
Tied-Down: Lifted-Up
An Appalachian Life
Tied-Down: Lifted-Up: An Appalachian Life is a memoir-in-progress about West Virginia, disability, poverty, religion, family violence, Appalachian identity, and glass.
The book begins with one life, but it is not only a private story. It is an attempt to think about Appalachia through a family, through a body, through class, through place, and through the ordinary objects that survive us.
The central question is simple enough: what holds us down, and what lifts us up? The harder truth is that sometimes the answer is the same thing.
Project
Each chapter of Tied-Down: Lifted-Up focuses on a different part of Appalachian life: disability, poverty, religion, abuse, geography, glass, family, and place.
I call the book a memoir, but the goal is not simply to reveal something about me. The goal is to find a creative way to think about Appalachia from inside one life, one family, and one set of places.
The chapters begin in actual rooms, actual bodies, actual churches, actual streets, actual thrift stores, actual factories, and actual family stories. I am interested in how the social world shapes people. I am also interested in how people live inside that shaping, sometimes damaged by it, sometimes sustained by it, sometimes lifted by the very ties that might have seemed only limiting.
Chapters
The memoir is being written chapter by chapter. One chapter is forthcoming. One chapter is under editorial review. One chapter is currently being written. The central glass chapter is being prepared through research, family memory, and the cataloging of inherited objects.
- Finding Myself Elsewhere: My Impaired, Appalachian Self, forthcoming in 2027 in Kendra Winchester’s Appalachian Disability Anthology
- Tied-Down: Lifted-Up, under editorial review for Monic Ductan’s Hand to Mouth: Southern Writers on Poverty
- A chapter now being written for Jody DiPerna, Doralee Brooks, and Patrick McGinty’s Appalachian Cities Project: An Anthology of New Nonfiction
- Appalachian Glass, the planned central chapter of the memoir