Southern Storytellers

[gentle piano music] They're a little bit more bitter than store bought, but they also don't cost you nothing.

[laughs] We're surrounded in 'em.

I don't know where that dog ran off to.

[gentle piano music] Charlie!

[David laughs] [whistles] Charlie.

Hey.

- Join me in giving a welcome to author, David Joy.

[audience applauds] - And so I was gonna read a little bit from this essay and it was called "One Place Misunderstood," which is a reference to that Eudora Welty line that one place understood helps us understand all places better.

When I sit down to begin a story, the canvas isn't blank in that there is already a place.

There are already mountains and streams and buildings and roads, so that when a character finally arises, that character claws himself from the ground, that place for me is Jackson County, North Carolina.

I got green and I got blues And every day there's a little less difference Between the two [David] Jackson County, North Carolina is not the coal fields of Kentucky or West Virginia.

Coal isn't destroying our mountaintops.

Ours are threatened by unrestricted land development.

There are millionaires hitting golf balls on Tom Fazzio designed golf courses just over ridge line from people surviving off of mayonnaise sandwiches.

[soft country music] I can give you a singular image of Jackson County's landscape.

Drawing a singular image of our people, that's where things get difficult or rather impossible.

There are hardworking people and there are deadbeats.

There are God-fearing people and godless.

All of this is true.

All of this is within Jackson County.

Come here and I will show it to you.

[water flows] Got it.

[laughs] [water flows] So, that fish right there... genetically has been here since the last ice age.

They actually differ on a subspecies level from all other brook trout.

I mean, it's very much a Southern Appalachian thing.

[water flows] Look at that little baby, old ring neck snake.

See him?

That's a ring neck.

They won't hurt nothin'.

So, like a deer, typically, he, he rubs a cedar tree.

It's like you see that cedar just through there, right there, typically, so when I'm walking through the woods, that's what I'm looking for because a deer should have hit that.

But he didn't hit it.

He hit this tree.

This is birch.

It's wild to me that he, that close to a cedar tree, he should've hit the cedar tree, so it's one of them things where you can always think you know what's going on, but not exactly.

[gentle music] I think what I want people to recognize about the South is that it is a very, very complex place.

It's full of a whole lot of beauty.

It's full of a whole lot of bad things, as well.

And it's all of those things and I don't wanna lose a bit of it.

You know, as a writer, I... all I see is gray.

You know, that's the, most people only wanna see black and white and I don't care for it at all.

All I see is gray and to me, that's about the prettiest color I know.