By Mike Templeton
We hope you will join us for “Troublesome Rising: An Evening of Art & Activism” on September 7, 2024, 7 pm at the Southgate House Revival in Newport, Kentucky. This is a special evening of readings and music hosted by The Urban Appalachian Community Coalition, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Hindman Settlement School, and Roebling Books & Coffee. Two people scheduled to read have had schedule changes, and we are fortunate to have Kelli Hansel Haywood to step in to read from her essay from the anthology Troublesome Rising: A Thousand Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky. Kelli and her family were directly impacted by the disastrous floods that ravaged Eastern Kentucky in 2022, and her contribution to the collection recounts her first-hand experiences. Readers of this blog may remember that Kelli’s cousin and sister-writer, UACC Core member Pauletta Hansel, quoted Kelli in the days after the flood as reporting that the situation was “worse than folks can imagine.” We’ve taken this opportunity to catch up with Kelli to discuss her life and community now.
Kelli, who lives in Letcher County, Kentucky, was at the Hindman Settlement School for the annual Appalachian Writer’s Workshop when the rains and floods began. She told me this was all far too familiar to her, “The big flood was actually the third one in a matter of a few weeks. The previous one had flooded out my minivan as I tried to get to my daughters up my mother’s holler.” Kelli Hansel Haywood knows the area of Eastern Kentucky impacted by the floods as an insider. She knows the region, the land, and the natural landscape from her upbringing. “I’m a fifth-generation coal miner’s daughter. My dad worked his way up in the industry to the role of environmental engineer without the college degree. He taught me most of everything I know about the science of the mountains – flora and fauna, and importantly how to watch my environment and keep myself safe while living in the natural world. I knew we could not handle more rain.”
Kelli says, “Two years later, my community still holds what feel like permanent scars. Many of the neighborhoods are completely changed as those who sold to FEMA cannot rebuild on that land anything that is meant for occupancy. Entire residential streets will remain uninhabited. Major buildings in our downtown will also suffer this fate. Roads both major and backroads are still in disrepair causing accidents from time to time. People are moving away in droves.”
Kelli Hansel Haywood’s essay, “Backwash” from the anthology Troublesome Rising is about these events. It unfolds through a series of fragments. Those horrifying moments, days, weeks, and months that unfolded in Eastern Kentucky during the floods did not fit together into a direct narrative. In the ways the straight flow of the rivers became a chaotic overflow into and over everything, the fragmented narrative flow of Haywood’s text reveals and describes the rising nightmare of the floods. This style of writing also follows the trajectory of her focus as a writer in which she has moved from writing directly about things like “the social structure and the politics of the region” and has recently turned inward to center her writing on the level of ‘the vulnerabilities of being human,” as she recently told me.
Kelli Hansel Haywood’s full-length memoir/personal growth book, Sacred Catharsis: A Personal Healing Journey Amidst the Forced Pause of Pandemic will also be available at the Troublesome Rising event on September 7. A second book is in the works will be entitled Body Reclamation. Kelli is not the only artist in the family. She told me, “Recently, I dropped my oldest daughter, Deladis Rose Haywood, four hours from home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts to begin their four-year degree program in filmmaking. Deladis has always been interested in making movies. She completed 2 years of the Appalachian Media Institute’s Summer Documentary Institute, and heard about UNCSA from another student there. She made it her mission to apply and be accepted.” It is worth noting that one of Deladis’ mentors was Malcolm Wilson, the photographer for UACC’s Perceptions of Home exhibit, now part of our Kith and Kin program.
In addition to writing, Kelli teaches and practices yoga. She told me that “my main work is as a yoga teacher, workshop leader, and public speaker. I have been doing yoga for 25 years, and teaching for 14. I teach five classes a week locally. Some of them have been going on for a decade now.” She teaches at a local yoga studio in Letcher County Kentucky that is free and open to the public. “It is a place where anyone can come and feel safe to just breathe, move, and be in community. I work very hard to make my classes an inclusive space,” she explains. In writing and in teaching, Haywood’s focus is on connecting with people and connecting people to each other. Breathing is a theme in her essay that returns here, this time as something she helps others to attain through yoga.
Still, Kelli Hansel Haywood remains a writer. It is part of the lifeblood of her world and has been for generations. In Haywood’s words: “Writing has been a part of my life from my earliest memories.” And the work of the writer and teacher goes back through her family history, too: “One of my great grandmothers taught in the one room schoolhouse on Goose Creek in the Fleming-Neon area of Letcher County.” With that, we can all look forward to hearing her read at the Southgate House Revival on September 7, 7 pm, where The Urban Appalachian Community Coalition, Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, Hindman Settlement School, and Roebling Books & Coffee host Troublesome Rising: An Evening of Art & Activism. 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 Kentuckyedited 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.