The Haint: A Brief Introduction
By: Michelle Hogmire
I found out I got into an Ivy League grad school writing program while standing in the driveway outside my ex-mother-in-law’s trailer. I was in Inwood, West Virginia. My advisor, who called with the news, seemed surprised that I sobbed so audibly over the phone. I hung up, walked inside the trailer, and explained why I was crying. Everyone around me packed bowls and cracked open beers in celebration. But I already felt high. Even higher than the One-Legged Mike who stayed at my ex-mother-in-law’s, recuperating from losing his limb to diabetes during an extended stay at the Eastern Regional Jail.
I was high on the feeling of proving everybody wrong.
I only met my advisor once, in a shitty New York City campus café; he offered to buy me coffee, but I’d already purchased my own. When he learned my place of origin, he leaned in, said, “How West Virginia are we talking?” then told me a story about a rural girl previously accepted, a Kansan who stuffed her hand up a cow’s ass, which — according to him — made her stand out from the crowd, different. What he maybe meant was marketable, good for the school and the program’s image. Look, we accept country people, and we teach them how to write real good! My advisor said, “The point of going to school here isn’t for you to get out and write some autobiographical exposé about how this place sucks.”
I never asked to meet with him again.
During my thesis workshop, a student from California asked why I write about the difference between the North and the South. “A distinction no one’s cared about since the Civil War,” she wrote in her comments about my draft. After class, I took shots even though I don’t do shots. I racked up a tab well over $100 with a friend, then so violently vomited in another bar’s bathroom that my septum ring ejected from my nose. Afterwards, I unhealthily justified this behavior as an appropriate Appalachian response. You want to try to hurt me? Buddy, you’ll never cause me more pain than I inflict on myself. Here, let me show you how to do it right.
As my friends the Talking Heads say, “How did I get here?” So, let’s do this right, the Southern way. Let’s go back to the past.
I grew up in the tiny village of Gerrardstown, West Virginia — with no stoplights and a single corner store. The closest library, managed by a kind woman named Mrs. Coe, operated out of a trailer. Once I read everything in Mrs. Coe’s collection, I moved on to the public library in the neighboring city of Martinsburg. My mom let me check out six books a week, and by third grade, I was testing beyond a high school reading level. Of course, this kind of obsession means I wanted to be a writer. After Mrs. Coe died and her trailer sat and rotted in the lot, overtaken by trees and bushes. My ex-mother-in-law’s trailer was a half of a mile down the road. Today, they’re both memories covered in pavement by the great Inwood bypass. I wish that was a joke. In Appalachia, everything is like this. Funny, ironic, but also a bit painful.
The co-founder of The Haint and I have been rabble-rousing best friends since sixth grade. In eighth grade, our middle school principal forbade “boys” from wearing makeup, skirts, or dresses to school. My co-founder and I wrote up an angry pamphlet, passed it around, and staged a sit-in. We made it into the local newspaper. The principal changed his mind and started wearing rainbow-striped suspenders like he’d been riding the gay train all his life. I didn’t wear makeup, skirts, or dresses, but my friends who did got a little more comfortable. I learned two things from this incident: just because oppression doesn’t impact you personally doesn’t excuse you from fighting it. And determined Appalachians can change “the rules”.
Let’s go forward, because nothing where I’m from ever feels linear. A story unfolds like the layers of an onion before it’s fried for supper.
In 2017, the year after I finish grad school, Margaret Talbot published an article in the New Yorker called “The Addicts Next Door,” about a town in the heart of the opioid epidemic. The piece is about Martinsburg. It was your typical media fare — a resilent, conservative people facing a challenge that is implied to be of their own moral failings. Just like every flood, every mine collapse, every toxic chemical leak into the water supply; the national media parachutes in, takes a snap shot and waves their blurry Polaroid as the truth around the world.
As far as I know, the New Yorker only mentioned Gerrardstown once, in an article about Tough Mudder Competitions, but they misspelled it as “Gerardstown.” I could’ve written a letter to the editor, complaining, but what would be the point? I’d still lose friends and get blamed for Trump’s election, because of my home state, even though more people voted for him on Long Island.
In the present, the co-founder of The Haint and I talk on the phone at least once a week. We start with the classic Southern pleasantries and catching-up (“How’s your mom and them?”) before moving on to official business. He always updates me on mutual acquaintances from back home, tells me who is in jail and who is dead. I’m only 28 years old, but a week rarely goes by without a mugshot or an obituary notice. In other words, we’re out of time to waste, and Appalachians never had any of their own time to begin with.
I’m done explaining where I’m from to other people. Done with the poverty porn news stories, where some city reporter takes photos of dirty kids with no shoes. Done with people forgetting the radical history of the place where I was raised: Matewan, Blair Mountain, Bloody Harlan, John Brown’s Raid. Done with people ignoring how that progressive community spirit has never gone away, but lives on in today’s teachers’ strikes and pipeline tree-sits. But most of all, I’m done feeling ashamed about where I’m from. I’ve felt that way for most of my life. Now’s the time to make that right.
Even though I now live in the Chicago suburbs, I’m lucky enough to have a Southern therapist who understands my incessant perfectionism — that ingrained feeling that because I’m Appalachian, I’ll always be perceived as stupid and never good enough. “I could win the Nobel Prize,” I tell her, “and I still wouldn’t feel right about myself.” She encourages me to break everything down into small pieces, concentrate on the present, on three things a day. “That’s your biscuit,” she says, “focus on that. Everything else is just gravy.”
I got my first tattoo at age 18. It’s a line from Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted: “Every Story is a Ghost.” Stories stick around, they don’t leave you alone, they change things. Appalachians are rarely given the choice to tell their own stories, to control the narrative. If we were telling the tale, we wouldn’t say “ghost.” We’d say “haint.” While we tell the tales to one another — what family doesn’t have a legend — those outside the region have done a fine job at hanging their hat on us. Toothless hillbillies clinging onto King Coal and mindlessly voting for Donald Trump — even though few in the professional media put it like that, one needn’t read too hard between the lines to see it.
Built by and for Appalachians, The Haint is an alternative leftist digital media project dedicated to the idea that news reporting, commentary, and personal stories are not products for idle consumption, but catalysts for grassroots organization, community activism, and meaningful change in our region. It’s the present — the biscuit — but also the future. If we start now, we can look forward to a lot of gravy.
