An Appalachian Heritage Interview With Sonja Livingston

In essayist Sonja Livingston’s latest collection Ladies Night at the Dreamland (University of Georgia Press), the Appalachian native of western New York explores the lives of historical women—famous, notorious, and invented—and in many ways her own life and understanding of herself. Through re-imaginings of figures like Virginia Dare (“Dare”), Luna Fugate (“Blue Kentucky Girl”), and Alice Mitchell and Freda Ward, two young women in Memphis who fell in love and attempted to elope (“Mad Love: The Ballad of Fred and Allie”), Livingston confronts and explores the often difficult to navigate invisible spaces between existences—love and cultural acceptance, race, immigration, and the tension of home and away, and geography.

Appalachian Heritage interviewed Sonja Livingston during a two-week email exchange about her body of work, her latest collection and the themes of raising the veil of hidden experiences and geographical identity. Louisville-based writer and editor Beth Newberry conducted the interview with Livingston who was in Cork, Ireland, teaching a month-long nonfiction workshop with the University of New Orleans. The interview has been edited for length.

BETH NEWBERRY:

You are in Ireland this summer—what took you there? Do any of the landscapes you’ve seen there remind you of the places you call home?

SONJA LIVINGSTON:

I’ve been in Cork and the surrounding towns in western Ireland, seeing lots of green pastures and jagged coastline and sea. The interior landscape reminds me of Kentucky, all the green hills broken by old barns and grazing cattle. But while I feel very much at home in Kentucky, it isn’t my home. In fact, Ireland doesn’t remind me necessarily of any home I’ve ever had, but does it feel familiar. People talk about connecting to certain landscapes and ancestral memory and all that, but I tend to be cynical. But then I descended in Ireland for the first time and found myself surrounded by the patchwork of fields and [I] choked up right there on the plane. Something about the place is special. Not only the fields and cliffs, but the cadence of the language, the music, the history—even the poverty and struggle. I’ve been fortunate to travel many places, but Ireland is where I want to return to again and again.

BN:

I’d like to talk a bit about your piece “Blue Kentucky Girl” which is in your new book Ladies Night at the Dreamland, but was also published in Appalachian Heritage [Summer 2014 issue]. It’s a captivating piece that is lyrical, personal and interactive with history. I actually read it for the first time when I was on Troublesome Creek—a place mentioned in the essay—in Hindman, Kentucky, at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. Your storytelling about Luna [one the “Blue Fugates”], her life and family was very intuitive, detailed and avoided stereotypes and judgments often associated with this story of the region. Have you spent time in eastern Kentucky or in tight-knit rural or Appalachian communities?

SL:

Thank you! In terms of avoiding stereotypes, I think the job of the writer—especially the nonfiction writer—is to get to the place beyond easy categories and judgments. The desire to show people and places that are often hidden or misunderstood drives a great deal of my writing. As someone who grew up in a family and setting that are very easily judged (often harshly and incorrectly) I’m especially sensitive to those things, the wrong they do, and the ways they falsely divide us.

I spent my childhood in rural portions of western New York, in parts of the state which some have called Appalachia. I’ve described it as the place where northern tip of Appalachia meets up with the easternmost notch of the Rust Belt. I’m not sure how or where the region fits exactly, except to say

Sonja Livingston

that the culture of rural West Virginia and eastern Kentucky do feel familiar. My mother grew up in the mountains of New Hampshire. We...