Reading List: Revisiting Rural Homeplaces

As the winter holidays draw near—and a time for gathering prompts many of us to revisit the significant places and people of our pasts—here is our gift to you: a few nonfiction recommendations that explore rural homeplaces in all their complexities as sites of enduring emotional, spiritual, geographical, and cultural identity.

This is the first in what we hope will become a new series of reading lists curated by our new editor, Sabrina Ehmke Sergeant. In this first offering, Sabrina shares memoirs and essay collections that locate rurality in both the familiar and the unexpected in deeply personal experiences that challenge assumptions of rural lives and stories.

With this reading list, the Rural Review is also going to step back for a few weeks for our own holiday break. We’ll be back soon to share more of the latest rural-related research, news, events, and commentary and wish you and yours happy holidays and a joyful 2024.

• Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place by Neema Avashia (West Virgina University Press, 2022)
  When asked where she’s from, Neema Avashia’s answer—West Virigina—tends to surprise people. In the early 1970s, Avashia’s family immigrated from India to Appalachia’s Kanawha County where she was born and raised in a community peopled both by a small immigrant Hindu circle and by long-time area residents. Now many years and miles removed, her rural homeplace is the site to which she returns in her collected essays, examining Appalachia’s enduring impact on her identity as a queer, Desi woman. The essays highlight the resonances between being part of immigrant and rural groups, where the same need for connection draws residents together to create community.

• Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (Drawn & Quarterly, 2022)
  Much of Kate Beaton’s graphic memoir takes place away from her rural home in Cape Breton, a tight-knit seaside community with its own strong sense of identity and equally lacking in job opportunities. But that separation is essential to understanding how rurality defines Beaton’s identity. Culture and community bind her to the place; economic factors forced her away. “This push and pull defines us,” Benton writes of her Cape Breton community, “It’s all over our music, our literature, and our understanding of our place in the world.” Beaton explores the consequences of being forced away from one’s home by economic necessity and dehumanized by an industry that extracts what is useable from employees and environment alike, leaving people untethered from community and attempting to survive in “a place where they don’t live.”

• Engine Running: Essays by Cade Mason (Ohio State University Press, 2022)
  “Exodus,” the opening essay of Cade Mason’s debut collection, traces the path he took away from his family’s cotton farm in rural West Texas, following roads lined with pumpjacks perpetually rocking in place “like anchored ships.” While Mason slips the physical bonds to the place of his upbringing where his childhood memories and family’s secrets are infused with the dynamics of religion, masculinity, and queerness in the rural South, his homeplace remains a touchstone for his own sense of self. Mason’s essays explore how you can love a place and yet need to leave it, and how in leaving it, it nonetheless remains an unescapable part of your identity.