Bonnie Proudfoot was born a New Yorker: She worked as a taxi cab driver in college.
But she moved to Central Appalachia in her 20s, first to a homestead in West Virginia and later to Athens, Ohio.
Her new book of poetry, “Incomer,” explores what it was like to make the region her home through verse like this:
“Take a kid who grew up in a city, put her / next to a pond with a pole, and soon enough, / she will catch a fish and not know what to do / with it.”
Proudfoot joined the Ohio Newsroom to talk about her new book.
This interview was lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
On deciding to move to Appalachia
“I met a fellow in college whose family was from the Elkins, West Virginia area and it was just so compellingly beautiful. I think I was prepared for it a little bit. My parents had a home in Westchester County in a rural part of New York state and there was a lake and rolling hills and woods and so I loved that kind of terrain. So, when I had a chance to come down to West Virginia to live and experience what it was like in the rural part of the world, it felt to me like it was full of possibility. It felt like if you had some land, you could do anything. [It was] a blank canvas and all you had to do was paint in the details. Of course, I was to learn that it wasn't a blank canvas. I was moving to a place that had a rich history.”
On being an incomer in area exploited by outsiders
“You can come to Appalachia thinking you know it all and thinking you know what the region's like, or you can let the region speak to you. My ex-husband's family had been there for many, many generations, since the late 1700s. They were established. They knew how to live with the land and I wanted to learn. I was eager to see how people got by. And it was a culture that I had not been exposed to, from the music and all the beautiful Appalachian fiddle tunes to people who are homesteading and building their own log cabins from scratch, gardening, the Mother Earth News, all of that. It's like you take a deep breath of fresh air and you get to work, and you learn from others as you go.”
On the most challenging parts of the move
“I think it hit me slowly, and the book gets into that, that when people in your family begin to age — and my mom was ill, for example — how far away and isolated I was.
“And as far as homesteading goes, there's always not enough time and always not money. And settling down, having two children, and at the same time trying to make sure your animals are fed and your garden is still productive and the fences keep everybody where the fences are supposed to, I mean all of that is 12 full-time jobs. I began to feel so much awe and so much respect for the women, especially, who knew how to do all of these things and balance children, child-rearing and keeping the homestead going. It wasn't always easy.”
On what’s essential for outsiders to know about Central Appalachia
“That it's precious. The water is precious. The land is precious. You're in such direct one-to-one contact with the land, with the water, right? We had a dozer dig a well on our property. So we depended on the weather, depended on neighbors and depended on each other. The potential exists for that to be exploited and when it is, vulnerable people are vulnerable.”
An excerpt from Proudfoot’s book
