Abby Retz has already written about herself and her life for the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition. Her blog article, “Home Away from Home,” appeared back in August, and she explained how her background has shaped her life and intellectual pursuits. It was clear that her approaches to all of these things are personal, scholarly, and tremendously nuanced. In her writing, Abby emphasized her personal ties to Appalachia and the ways these ties are complicated but also quite strong. While she did mention the nature of her scholarly work, she only brushed the surface, and there is so much more to discover about her research. Abby Retz is completing her undergraduate thesis at Butler University in Indianapolis. Her research on Appalachian traditional healing practices is certain to make a powerful and far-reaching contribution to the ways we understand the Appalachian migrant experience and the urban Appalachian experience.

From the outset of our conversation, I felt an immediate sense of kinship with Abby’s experiences as an urban Appalachian. We talked about the ambivalent relationship some folks have with their Appalachian heritage, especially those of us who are a generation or two (or even three) out from the initial migration from the Appalachian region. Abby chooses to reframe ambivalence as complexity, and this is exactly the kind of attention and nuance she brings to her understandings of these kinds of everything she does. When Abby introduced herself in her own article, she described how the Appalachian cultural practices that come down to her from her maternal grandmother are filtered through geographical paths that are outside the Appalachian region. However, in the final analysis, it is the weight of cultural influence rather than geography that bears down on her sense of identity. Cultural influence has led her to a specific area of research and her approach to research sustains the same level of complexity she comes her own life experiences.

Abby Retz’s work focuses on Appalachian healing practices among Appalachian migrants. I asked Abby where this fits into academic study and she demonstrated a bit of reluctance about naming a discipline: “If I had to place it into a category it would be Anthropology, but I want to try to de-colonize the way the university captures these kinds of things,” she told me. By de-colonize, Abby means to put the healing practices within the larger collection of knowledge, rather than over-simplifying it by giving it a specific academic label. Academic language often places forms of knowledge such as folk medicine and healing practices under a system that does not allow for the complexity of these practices, and this problem lies at the heart of Abby Retz’s research. In her own terms, traditional scholarship has left these cultural features as an “understudied area,” one that constitutes “the role of self-healing practices in Appalachian migration families and communities” (This quotation is from her own research prospectus).

Abby’s work begins in many ways with her own life growing up with a rural grandmother and great-grandmother who healed the sick from the family garden and the kitchen pantry. Healing practices and folk medicine came into existence with the steady development of the Appalachian and other rural people themselves. Using indigenous plants and herbs, people learned to create medicines and ways of healing that grew independently of traditional medicine. I asked Abby if she could give me an example, and she drew from her own life. She told that “when I had a cough, my great grandmother would start pulling things out of the cabinet to whip up some kind of medicine. She made a strong-tasting syrup from things like elderberry syrup, honey, and molasses.” Abby continued by explaining that the medicines her grandmother and great-grandmother made were quite specific. A dry cough was treated differently than a congested cough. These things may not have met with the approval of the family doctor, as she explains in her own article, but they were the ways of her home with the traditions that surrounded her. What emerges from these experiences is the ways mountain healing was attuned to both the kinds of things that were used as medicine and the ways people learned to read the human body itself.

Abby told me that she has assembled a collection of real-life examples from which to begin her work. The multiple cases and examples lead her to her understanding of traditional folk medicine as something that is not reducible to a single idea. This last insight compels her to resist another pole of common misunderstandings which we might call the pop culture approach to folk healing and folk medicine. Pop culture has a way of reducing everything to a shallow image of the reality of things, and this is another area Abby resists. As she explains: “There are serious nuances to these practices that should not be allowed to be infantilized.” She continues, “Traditional healing and folk medicine are practices of peoples’ lives, and my research involves taking a step back to examine how and why people are holding onto these things.” I suppose the upshot of this is that Abby’s work is quite serious, and should not be mistaken for the kind of thing you find in mass market pop spirituality and self-help books.

The overall project is one that approaches Appalachian healing as part of the migrant experience. The project involves, in her words, “practices as features of culture as much as medicine. The focal point is identity and how that shapes the perception of these practices.” In terms of how this bears down on the urban Appalachian experience, Abby’s work takes into consideration the migrant experience in general which, of course, includes urban Appalachian life. It seems likely that the overall field of Appalachian Studies stands to gain from a scholar such as Abby Retz. Her approach to her work is a combination of personal experiences that are rich, varied, and complex and an intellectual rigor that is just as fine-tuned and far-reaching. Abby is working with the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition’s Research Committee, and we feel lucky to have her. I have no doubt that a book will one day be forthcoming, and I cannot wait to read it.

If you’re interested in sharing your family’s healing practices or know someone who might be, please contact Abby directly at [email protected].

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, published by Iff Books. He is also the author of Collected Apoems, forthcoming from LJMcD Communications and the awaiting of awaiting: a novella, with 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.