By Mike Templeton
On September 7, 2024, 7 pm at the Southgate House Revival in Newport, Kentucky, a special evening of readings and music called “Troublesome Rising: An Evening of Art & Activism” will take place in commemoration of the disastrous floods that ravaged Eastern Kentucky in 2022. The evening is a celebration of the release of Troublesome Rising: A Thousand Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky an anthology of poetry, nonfiction, and art that works to memorialize and process the devastation in Eastern Kentucky. The event is hosted by the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition, Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, Hindman Settlement School, and Roebling Books & Coffee.
The evening is jam-packed with music and readings bringing some of the best that Appalachia—urban and rural—has to offer.
Daniel Martin Moore is a nationally recognized, widely recorded, and acclaimed singer and songwriter from Cold Spring, Kentucky.
Through their experimental pop theatrics, storytelling, and quirky live shows, A.p. Harbor (Andrew Preston and his band) have become recognizable mainstays of central Appalachia’s burgeoning indie scene.
Raison D’Etre is well loved by UACC folks for their traditional folk songs, acapella swing tunes, and cowboy anthems and original work, all delivered in their pure (northern) Kentucky blend.
The Farmer and the Crow are our beloved Dale Farmer and Ma Crow, along with guests Fred Hautau and Anna Curvin. Their bluegrass and old-time-inspired arrangements bring a unique twist to the traditional music genre. You could say the duo got its start at our 2022 Flood Relief Concert, as that is when they first paired up in this way.
Readers include former Kentucky poets laureate George Ella Lyon and Frank X Walker the current Ohio poet laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour as well as Bernard Clay, Robert Gipe, Amelia Kirby, Melissa Helton, Amy Le Ann Richardson, Mandi Fugate Sheffel and UACC’s own Richard Hague and Pauletta Hansel (Cincinnati’s first poet laureate). Music, readings and reports from those affected by the flood will also take place on Southgate House’s two stages. Pauletta Hansel said “the line-up is an amazing group of beloved writers and musicians excited to collaborate on this event highlighting the resilient creativity of Appalachian people.” It is hard to imagine a more powerful gathering of artists, poets, and writers unified in their love of the home place.
The anthology Troublesome Rising (Fireside Industries/University Press of Kentucky, 2024) is edited by Melissa Helton of Hindman Settlement School, who has worked tirelessly for her community in the months and years following the flood. It is, Pauletta Hansel says, “a book all who love Appalachia should have the opportunity to read.” Some of the writers in the collection and who will be present at the event were actually in Hindman when the flooding hit. They witnessed first-hand the devastation, and their works reflect these experiences.
The floods of 2022 are truly beyond imagination. Yet what Troublesome Rising does, and with force, is capture moments so that nothing there can ever be forgotten. As Melissa Helton says in the book, these works transform those terrible events into the “engine of art,” so that the reality of it all can be held, “trapped in amber.” A flood of this magnitude is considered a “1000-year flood” in this geographical area. The facts of the flood are well-documented, although some may not be as aware of the extent of what happened. Global climate change combined with mountainous topography and the damage left behind by the extraction industries teamed up to devastate a region lacking in infrastructure. There was simply no way to prepare for what hit, and no one was prepared to sufficiently provide assistance but the people already in the region. As is so often the case, Appalachian people unified to help other Appalachian people.
Kari Gunter Seymour, Poet Laureate of Ohio and an Appalachian from Eastern Ohio, is a powerful voice for Appalachians. She spoke to me about two poems she plans on reading: “One of my poems touches on the inevitability of the continuation of earth’s destruction when considering “up river” land management and ignorance of the very real effects of global warming.” The second “is a celebration of the strength of community, the way Appalachian roots anchor us, and when the call for help goes out, no matter how near or far we live, we head the call. In this instance, while politicians and the media stood around fumbling a variety of clichés.”
Writer and longtime friend of UACC Richard Hague provides his testimony in an essay called “After.” Here, Hague attempts to grapple with, reflect on, and present the unpresentable. One of the things that is truly striking about Richard Hague’s essay is that it consists of a response to an immediate reality, a work of collaboration, and the text is grounded in observations from the aftermath so as to galvanize our understanding that these things simply do not end. Richard Hague tells me: “My essay ‘After’ tries to capture not only something of the aftermath of the flood, but the response of members of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative [SAWC] as well, a group intimately tied to Hindman, both as staff and participants over the years at the Appalachian Writers Conference.” And in the aftermath of it all, SAWC came back to keep the momentum of recovery going: “SAWC was invited to be the first group to return to the campus for its annual conference in October of 2022, just a few months after the July disaster,” Hague told me.
And returning, picking up the pieces are perhaps things that can be done with what is left lying around, but can never get back the lives, the people, the memories, and the places. Melissa Helton writes of her and her thirteen-year old daughter picking up pieces of glass left by the floodwaters: “My kid and I picked up a hundred little pieces, washed them in a bucket of creekwater, and filled…” a “perfume bottle with them. They became “a little nonword poem of the broken in the unbroken.” I simply cannot add anything to this; it is perfection.
The Urban Appalachian Community Coalition, Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, Hindman Settlement School, and Roebling Books & Coffee host Troublesome Rising: An Evening of Art & Activism at The Southgate House Revival. The event will take place on September 7 at 7pm. Admission is $30 and benefits these organizations working for change in Appalachian communities, urban and rural. This event is to kick off the release of the anthology, Troublesome Rising: A Thousand Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky edited by Melissa Helton. The book includes works from some of the most important Appalachian writers and artists and some of the most compelling emerging Appalachian artists and writers.
Tickets are $30 in advance, $35 at the door, and $55 in advance with a reserved copy of Troublesome Rising, and are available from Southgate House Revival at: https://qrco.de/Troublesome.
Troublesome Rising: A Thousand Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky edited by Melissa Helton is published by The University Press of Kentucky/Fireside Industries and can also be purchased at this link: https://www.kentuckypress.com/9781950564439/troublesome-rising/.
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.