By Mike Templeton
Through our various projects and activities, including our longstanding Research Committee and Kith and Kin, the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition has focused attention on the ideas and issues that pertain to second and third generation urban Appalachians. It is timely and fitting that we should take a look at the work of Anya Liftig, a second-generation urban Appalachian, artist and writer, and her new book, Holler Rat: A Memoir, out now with Abrams Press. Liftig’s book is a powerful and compelling exploration of her life and the family and cultural influences that shaped her as an urban Appalachian.
Holler Rat is a story of paradox, of the ways people, cultures, and worlds can collide and become something altogether new without any attempts to hide or ignore contradictions and differences, and in saying this it is crucial that I mean this in the best possible ways. As a child of a distinctly Appalachian mother from Breathitt County, Kentucky, and a New England Jewish father from Connecticut, Anya Liftig emerges as both/and, and as something completely new: the daughter of hippies, a performance artist, a memoirist, a photographer, and a long list of other things that never become exclusive of each other. Like her life growing up in Connecticut and spending summers in Kentucky, Liftig makes it all part and parcel to her art and who she is.
Well before Anya Liftig came to write her memoir, one of her first photography projects was something she called “Jewbilly.” Liftig explained, “I set nine images of myself dressed up as the stereotypical JAP: the Jewish American Princess, then the images showed my transformation from that into images of the stereotypical white trash hillbilly. It was my first time performing in photography.”
The performance end of this would take over her work as an artist, but in this early project, we can see how she is wrestling with and depicting several processes at once. The popular ideas of both cultural positions, the ways a young person internalizes and rejects these positions, and the process of interrupting the stereotypes—all of this is at work in this early piece. Liftig’s approach to and ways of depicting difference characterize almost all of her work. As she told me, “My work deals with gaps, with splitting, the in-between, and all of this stems from the ways I grew up and the different worlds that shaped me.” These same ideas and issues are at work in her current memoir: Holler Rat. Liftig continued to work with this project as she moved on to performance art. As she explained: “In grad school I began working on identity using my own body as a medium to express ideas. Jewbilly became a monologue, and this then became the beginnings of what would become Holler Rat.
The very title Holler Rat: A Memoir speaks the kinds of things young Appalachian people have to endure as they are confronted with an outside world that treats Appalachian people with disdain. But it is also a term of endearment from someone who has had one foot in Appalachia and another in eastern urban culture. Anya Liftig is both, and she has always known this and embraced all of her cultural backgrounds. Liftig’s mother left Breathitt County for the Peace Corps. While in training, she met Liftig’s father. This was the 1960’s, and that hippie ethos would be a kind of spiritual glue for the two of them to sustain their cultural identities, be curious and accepting of each other’s, and to raise two daughters who knew who they were. As Liftig’s bio on her website tells us, she “grew up with a foot in two very different worlds: While her mother’s upbringing was so rural that the other kids called her “holler rat,” her father came from a comfortable, upper-middle-class Jewish family. Anya spent school years in affluent Connecticut and summers in the holler.” It is that undefinable space between identities, cultures, and worlds that fuels Anya Liftig’s art and her memoir.
Holler Rat dives into a family history that is at times brutal. The death of her grandfather, Ed, in an accident sets the narrative in motion, and Liftig never takes her foot off the accelerator. The book is brutally honest, but it is also extremely funny, yet the overall tone remains quite serious. Liftig’s memoir stands as a distinctly honest and illuminating portrait of an urban Appalachian experience. The author locates herself precisely and honestly in the kinds of privilege and advantage that characterizes her life and uses to it to offer a candid portrait of her family without having recourse of platitudes, stereotypes, and moralistic judgements. Read Holler Rat for an authentic depiction of an Appalachian family and the life of an urban Appalachian artist.
Holler Rat: A Memoir covers some difficult territory. There are moments of supreme heartbreak, tragedy, and the brutal realities of coming unglued in life. While the book is funny at times, and it is also heartwarming, Liftig is not one to shy away from or soften the blows of extremely serious moments in her life. That it all comes as a piece is completely consistent with those themes and ideas of the “in-between”; these ambiguous spaces are where the work gets done. Being a second-generation urban Appalachian, and one who has been shaped by vastly different worlds through her parents’ backgrounds, has made Anya Lifig as something of an authority of the in-between, a place upon which the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition has long focused. As urban Appalachians, we found our places in the urban world as outsiders and formed something entirely new from this position. Anya Liftig’s art, and her new book Holler Rat: A Memoir, capture that mystery of refusing either/or and lifting the virtues of both/and.
Anya Lifitg’s book, Holler Rat: A Memoir with Abrams Press, and more information about Liftig are available on her website: anyaliftig.com
Michael Templeton is a writer, and independent scholar. He is the author of The Chief of Birds: A Memoir published with Erratum Press and Impossible to Believe, forthcoming from Iff Books. He is also the author of Collected Apoems, forthcoming from LJMcD Communications and the awaiting of awaiting: a novella, forthcoming from Nut Hole Publishing. Check out his profile in UACC’s Cultural Directory. He has published numerous articles and essays on contemporary culture and works of creative non-fiction as well as experimental works and poetry. He lives in West Milton, Ohio with his wife who is an artist.