Excerpt from Appalachian Kid

"This may come as news to some, but most of us (West Virginians) aren’t toothless, shoeless, unintelligent, uneducated, inbred, or backward. Though outsiders would rather have us identify with their cartoonish projections of mountain dwellers lying against a tree stump wearing tattered “clam digger” blue jeans complete with suspenders clinging on for dear life, sporting a scraggly beard, packing a relic of a musket, smoking a corncob pipe, and donning a straw hat to cap this ensemble of misunderstandings. Stereotypical imagery would have our indigenous hillbilly taking a swig of moonshine from a brown ceramic jug. (Come on! Everyone knows that “white lightning” comes served in a mason jar.) Adding to that, we are sketched as sitting on the ground because the rest of the country thinks we “don’t have no porches to sit on.” The helicopter viewpoint is that we are not seen positively by our fellow Americans. Everywhere we go, people let us know–what did we do to deserve that?"

-- John Boyle, author

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