Thread by @birdundrstander

It's time for the last live-tweet of the day! I'm at the @WCMSU staff meeting, where we have guest panelists here to talk with us about #queer #appalachia, and the Englishes and stories our students bring to us from rural areas. Leggggo! #WCMSU

@WCMSU First up: @michiganstateu's own Hillary Glasby. She's opening by sharing her history and background; though she's not *from* #Appalachia, she lived in Appalachia for some time. Glasby's talking about the ways in which q#ueerness can be made invisible in Appalachia.

@WCMSU @michiganstateu Her interest in this project: part wanting to make visible the queerness that exists in rural and Appalachian spaces. The prevalent idea is still "If you're queer and in Appalachia you have to leave," but not everyone leaves. How can we honor the stories of who's still there?

@WCMSU @michiganstateu Caleb Pendygraft's on deck now, sharing a bit about his background as a queer person from Kentucky. His partner is an Appalachain transplant, too. The two co-wrote a chapter in "Storytelling in Queer Appalachia: Imagining and Writing the Unspeakable Other" (edited collection)

@WCMSU @michiganstateu Pendygraft shares an anecdote about embodiment -- a time he and his partner's embodiment didn't seem very "Appalachian," but instead looked more "west coast," which read as "queer" to a hostile group at a bar. They were run out. This experience transformed into the book chapter.

@WCMSU @michiganstateu How do things like intergenerational poverty, queerness / passing, community, and identity intersect with writing?

Let's talk about it. And tell me, Twitter friends, how have these things touched your life? #WCMSU

@WCMSU @michiganstateu Pendygraft: "One misconception is that Appalachian is equivalent to rural or to southern. These things aren't necessarily true."

@WCMSU @michiganstateu "If we have to survive in places where we aren't safe, we have to find ways to do it. Appalachian queers are some of the bravest people I know, because we had to be." #WCMSU

@WCMSU @michiganstateu Pendygraft: "It's not just storytelling -- telling what happened -- it's weaving together language and identity with academic prose. That's how we can dissemble cishet, white, academic patriarchy. How we subvert." #WCMSU

@WCMSU @michiganstateu Pendygraft is talking about how to pronounce "Appalachia." I am FROM Appalachia... and I remember being told I pronounced it wrong. And I believed fully that I must have been wrong. And now I'm thinking about how someone made me think I was wrong ABOUT MYSELF. Colonialism. Ugh.

@WCMSU @michiganstateu I'm sitting with that, for a minute. That someone told me I was wrong about my own home & community, and that I believed it.

Wow. Alright. Well.

Just when you think you're settled into yourself, you realize a thing.

@WCMSU @michiganstateu PS the tea on pronouncing Appalachia is that both pronunciations (Apple-ay-shuh and Apple-atch-uh) are both correct depending on where you're from. It's inflection & dialect.

AND SOMEONE TOLD ME I WAS WRONG.
I'm mad now.

TBH and TBVulnerable, I'm sad and upset.

@WCMSU @michiganstateu It's sparking, for me, similar (but not the same) conversations w. Latin American friends of mine who, though queer, reject being called "Latinex," bc they feel the word was created outside both their language & their community by colonizing linguists/liberation-through-control.

@WCMSU @michiganstateu Have you ever had somebody critique your language, pronunciation, community, or identity from outside it? Did you KNOW it was happening as it happened?

I don't mean "boys shouldn't cry."

I mean someone telling you that you pronounce your hometown's name wrong, etc.