Appalachia North: A Memoir by Matthew Ferrence (review)

Matthew Ferrence, a professor of creative writing at Allegheny College in northwestern Pennsylvania, has written a wonderful memoir exploring his experience as a northern Appalachian. Ferrence is frank in recognizing the complexities of his own multiple identities, and in acknowledging the difficulty of seeing through an Appalachia lens in a region whose residents often reject a label they associate with ignorant and impoverished "others." While exploring the incongruity of his regional identity, he was handed new complications to integrate into his personal identity when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and faced surgery and radiation treatment. Given the location of the tumor, his medical team was unable to remove it but believed that they had stopped it from growing, leaving him with the contradiction of having been "cured" but still carrying the tumor around in his brain. This memoir is all about identity on multiple scales, and the author does an exceptional job of allowing the reader to see his own struggles while relating them to larger themes in Appalachian studies.

Ferrence writes that "it is not the mountain I love it is the perspective" (65). He maintains that perspective as an observer, evaluating and labeling and identifying, throughout the book. Along the way he references a range of commentators who have written about the region, from John C. Campbell and Horace Kephart to Tawni O'Dell and J. D. Vance. He recognizes the historical contexts in which the earliest articulations of Appalachian identity were produced, but he is honest in his frustration with contemporary writers. Vance gets a brief, but brutal, evaluation. Hillbilly Elegy, he writes, "is essentially a conservative wet dream," and a "shallow characterization of the region" (181).

O'Dell, who is from the same county where Ferrence was raised in western Pennsylvania, comes in for more intense scrutiny. Back Roads, O'Dell's book located in a fictionalized version of Indiana, Pennsylvania, draws his particular ire. He criticizes her for "being complicit in the degradation of Appalachia or, at the very least … trading on the currency of local trope" (188). His resentment of O'Dell's portrayal of Indiana seems to be aggravated by what he represents as her privilege; he makes a point of mentioning that her father was a financier who retired with a package worth over a million dollars. Like O'Dell, Ferrence was raised by financially secure parents. His father was a university professor and his mother a teacher. His childhood friends came from educated families and from a diversity of ethnic and racial backgrounds. In a thoughtful essay entitled "Learning to Say Appalachia," he describes the contradictions associated with the two most common pronunciations of the word Appalachia and comments on "the strange inversion of exile [that] happens when you grow up pronouncing your region the way the outsiders do" (111). While struggling with that dilemma, he notes that it was his educated mother who insisted that "her children spoke well" (117). As happens often in the book, Ferrence is forced to recognize that the personal identity given him by his educated parents, who moved to Appalachian Pennsylvania as a married couple, undermines his easy embrace of a stereotypical Appalachian identity.

The most exciting section of this book expresses the author's desire to reconsider Appalachia by extending regional definitions northward. His call to do this is rooted in geology and geography, and he does an excellent job of introducing the uninitiated into the geological processes that created the mountains. As he makes clear, the Appalachians extend well beyond the Appalachian Regional Commission's boundaries, and we would all be better served to take a broader view. "Journey to Canappalachia" includes a beautifully written plea to reassess the established maps that define Appalachia, to reconsider the "lines [that] signal nothing but imaginary separation points, false demarcations" (231). Ferrence, having survived his medical crisis and made peace with his struggle to negotiate his own Appalachian identity, writes that "I choose now to see confluences of the region and mountain range that carry...