Hi Folks,

Long time no see. It’s been a busy few months wrapping up my first year of my PhD, traveling across the South, and kicking off an undergraduate research program I’m mentoring this summer. There’s been a lot to say and not quite the words yet to say it. I’ve been mostly offline, both here and social media, focusing on live events, in-person community building, and lots of in-depth research time. As you might have guessed, Good Folk is going through some changes—stay tuned for a newsletter post that outlines more in depth some of where I am with this project these days. Good Folk is not going away, but the format of this newsletter will be shifting up a bit!

As we make that shift, I want to take a second to express gratitude for all of the amazing podcast guests we’ve been lucky to feature. It’s been an honor to facilitate these conversations and this project would be nowhere without the community that has gathered around it.

And now, let me introduce you to someone who is very much Good Folk: Rosa Castellano. Rosa is a poet and educator born and raised in Tampa, Florida, and currently based in Richmond, Virginia. Her work is deeply rooted in storytelling, language, and the exploration of identity and place. With a passion for both writing and teaching, she actively contributes to the Richmond literary community, fostering creativity and engagement among fellow poets and aspiring writers. Rosa was a finalist for Cave Canem’s Starshine and Clay Fellowship and is the co-founder of the Richmond Poetry Festival, a platform that celebrates poetry and brings together Richmond’s diverse writing community.

Her poetry has been featured or is forthcoming from RHINO Poetry, Diode, Passages North, Nimrod, The Ninth Letter, and Poetry Northwest, among others. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her highly anticipated debut poetry collection, All is the Telling, was recently released from Diode Editions.

All is the Telling is a compelling, transformative collection bridging the personal and political with an emotional intensity that lingers long after the final page. The text invites readers to reflect on their own lives as they are drawn into the intricate web of memory, identity, and survival, grounding in the immediacy of lived experience and stretching outward to echo the broader struggles of our time.

This conversation dives deeper into All is the Telling, as well as Rosa’s broader career path as a poet. Jumping from Florida to Virginia, we unpack various portrayals of the South, echoing my favorite reminder that the South is nowhere near a monolith. This is an episode for Southerners, poets, and artists of all kinds. Thank you to Rosa for joining us, and to all of you for listening.

Happy Friday Folks,

Do you ever cross paths with people and it feels that there is a level of synergy there that feels rare and important? I had this feeling when, a few months back, a message dropped into my Substack inbox. This message came from a writer named Jessie, and it affirmed why I love doing the work we do at Good Folk—even though, yes, I’m aware I’ve been absent for a bit. Blame the PhD (pleased to report I have finished my first semester!), and expect some longer newsletters with life updates soon.

I knew immediately that I wanted to have a longer conversation with Jessie, and that it was a conversation our listeners would benefit from. Jessie and I proceeded to chat over email, and then Instagram, for the next few months, and finally, I am pleased to welcome them to Good Folk for a conversation on legacy, family, roots, and the South.

Jessie McCarty is a Southern, Irish-American writer in Chicago. They have been published in The Minnesota Review, The Documentarian, Don’t Submit Lit, Thick Press, and more. They write the newsletter Poetic Classifications on Substack. Pretty Punks & Other Poems (formerly Yeats Fever), is forthcoming. Previous collections include The Bovine Huff (Track and Field Studios, 2021) and Our Fairy Diary. Their research has been published as chapbooks for the following theatrical productions: The Sarcoma Cycle (2024), F*****s and Their Friends Between Revolutions: A Homo-Turgy (2024), and Perforated Play (2022).

I love this conversation. Jessie and I unpack the complications of being a Southerner working from afar, what it means to tap into family legacies that aren’t always immediate and readily accessible, and the importance of understanding roots and lineage in approaching your relationship to home and place. It’s conversations like these that make me proud to be Southern and Appalachian and in community with so many people who share a vision for this region that is rooted in love and care and, most of all, hope.

Thank you to Jessie for joining us, and thank you to our listeners for continuing to tune in. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

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Hello folks,

It feels like it has been a while since I have spoken to you all here, and I apologize for that. With a combination of work travel, various due dates, and the general state of the world, we’ve fallen behind.

But I’m excited to be back here with you, and to bring you a conversation that touches on some particularly relevant themes: how to find hope at the end of the world, how to build community through difficult times, the importance of looking to one another and rooting in our relationships. It is also a conversation about the power of poetry to grasp some of these difficult topics, and the way that leaning in to art offers us new ways of seeing the world. I—as I imagine many of you are—have found myself especially needing those new ways of seeing the last few months.

Please welcome to Good Folk poet and translator Ruben Quesada. Ruben is the editor of the award-winning anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. His poetry and criticism appear in The New York Times Magazine, Best American Poetry, The Believer, Harvard Review and elsewhere. His recent collection of poetry, Brutal Companion, which released just last month and which we at Good Folk highly recommend, won the Barrow Street Editors Prize.

Thank you to Ruben for joining us and for such a meaningful conversation. I hope you enjoy.

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Happy Monday Folks,

I’ve written and rewritten this intro a number of times and I find I’m still not quite sure what to say. We recorded this episode just about two weeks before Hurricane Helene struck Western North Carolina—a region my family has called home for many generations—and left disastrous floodwaters in its wake. At the time I’m recording this—almost two weeks after the storm—many folks are still without water and power. Many roads are still closed. Many communities are just now being reached.

In Florida, already hit by Helene, Hurricane Milton followed, giving folks hardly a moment to catch their breath. The damage goes on and on and on, a seemingly endless cycle. How do we rebuild when the world has become a series of repetitive disasters? Where is there space to catch our breath?

In this moment, I find myself inspired by the outpouring of community support that we are seeing in the mountains. Our team at Good Folk is all based these days in Central North Carolina, a few hours from the flooding, and even here, nearly every single business and organization is working to support our neighbors in the Western part of the state. Everywhere I go there is a supply drive, a fundraiser, a team ready and mobilized to help.

Here at Good Folk, we recently kicked off our new folk music series with WXYC and Fatwood, Landmarks, and raised nearly $500 in donations that were directly redistributed to mutual aid orgs and individuals working on the ground. Community support appears in so many different ways; this is the core of what we believe here, and I feel grateful to be in community with so many folks of a similar mind.

So let me introduce you to Jared Sullivan, one of those folks and today’s guest. Jared is a writer based in Franklin, Tennessee. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Time, Garden & Gun, and USA Today, among other outlets. He was formerly an editor for Men’s Journal and Field and Stream.

Jared’s new book, Valley So Low: One Lawyer's Fight for Justice in the Wake of America's Great Coal Catastrophe, is a riveting courtroom drama about the victims of one of the largest environmental disasters in U.S. history—and the country lawyer determined to challenge the notion that, in America, justice can be bought.

For more than fifty years, a power plant in the small town of Kingston, Tennessee,  burned fourteen thousand tons of coal a day, gradually creating a mountain of ashen waste sixty feet high and covering eighty-four acres, contained only by an earthen embankment. In 2008, just before Christmas, that embankment broke, unleashing a lethal wave of coal sludge that covered three hundred acres, damaged nearly thirty homes, and precipitated a cleanup effort that would cost more than a billion dollars—and the lives of more than fifty cleanup workers who inhaled the toxins it released.

Jim Scott, a local personal-injury lawyer, agreed to represent the workers after they began to fall ill. That meant doing legal battle against the Tennessee Valley Authority,  TVA, a colossal, federally owned power company that had once been a famous cornerstone of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Scott and his hastily assembled team gathered extensive evidence of malfeasance; threats against workers; retaliatory firings; disregarded safety precautions; and test results, either hidden or altered, that would have revealed harmful concentrations of arsenic, lead, and radioactive materials at the cleanup site.

At every stage, Scott—outmanned and nearly broke—had to overcome legal hurdles constructed by TVA and the firm it hired to help execute the cleanup. He grew especially close to one of the victims, whose swift decline only intensified his hunger for justice. As the incriminating evidence mounted, the workers seemed to have everything on their side, including the truth—and yet, was it all enough to prevail?

The lawsuit that Scott pursued on the workers’ behalf was about their illnesses, no doubt. But it was also about whether blue-collar employees could beat the C-suite; if self-described “hillbilly lawyers” could beat elite corporate defense attorneys; and whether strong evidence could beat fat pocketbooks. With suspense and rich detail, Jared’s account lays bare the casual brutality of the American justice system, and calls into question whether—and how—the federal government has failed its people.

It’s a timely book for a region that is once again in the throes of environmental disaster, and a timely conversation. These are questions that I am thinking about heavily lately, and questions pertinent to the current state of Appalachia and the American South. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

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Hello Folks, and happy Friday,

I write to you from the edges of Hurricane Helene, which is currently moving over Western North Carolina and the Appalachian Mountains that have been home to my family for generations. I spent my teenage years on the South Carolina coast, and I am thinking today of all the communities that never planned for the type of flooding those of us on the coast know well.

I am staring out my windows at the rain pouring down in wild sheets and listening to Peter Stone, today’s guest, sing against a melodic guitar. It feels like a perfect soundtrack for this weather and a gentle reminder to never take anything as a given—and to find comfort in the continual shifting.

Today’s conversation is one about worship: what altars we find ourselves at, the different places we choose to spread our devotion. For many listeners of this podcast—myself included—that altar connects deeply to place. What is home but a sacred thing? And like many sacred things, where does worship fall on the line between love and hate? These are the questions I am still working through; but I know that I will always fall at the altar of a pine tree, an oak lined path, the swirl of a raging storm.

Others, like today’s guest, musician Peter Stone, find altars in different, more ephemeral, places: a sea breeze, a relationship, a deep green pool. Things that can be found in a variety of places. But both Peter and I believe in the worship of the everyday—of the importance of seeking out the transcendent all around us.

This is a conversation about love and belief and artistry and boredom. It is about how to find transcendence in the practice, how to look for meaning in the drudgery of artistic creation. How to parse out your own voice among the many. These are not simple tasks, and there is much to be said about creative practice. Let this conversation serve not as a guide but as an invitation to explore the deep space within.

Peter Stone is an independent musician and a writer of songs that are equal parts intimate and cinematic, energetic and evocative, familiar and haunted.  It’s easy to imagine any of Peter’s songs playing over the final shot of a film about love and loss, giving your tears just enough time to dry while the credits roll before you leave the theater.  With a voice like warm evening sunlight creeping in through a ranch homestead’s western windows, it does not come as a surprise that they have lived all across the United States, and recently here in our own North Carolina, acquiring dust and stories along the road.

Thank you to Peter for sharing some of those stories with us here today. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

North Carolina Folks: Join us on October 6th (next weekend!) for the first iteration of LANDMARKS, a live folk music series in collaboration with WXYC and Fatwood. We’ll be hanging out with Nathan Bowles of the Nathan Bowles trio for a special solo acoustic set on a lovely fall evening. Learn more and reserve your spot!

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Hello Folks and welcome to Season 3 (!) of the Good Folk Podcast,

After our summer hiatus, it’s great to be back in this space, with a lineup of conversations for our fall season. Today, we kick off with writer Matthew Ferrence for a chat on Appalachia, rurality, authenticity, the role of the arts in shaping rural identity, and, of course, the Democratic party’s recent interest in embracing rural communities, perhaps seen most clearly with the Harris/Walz Realtree hat, which sold out within 30 minutes and which is already being duped on Etsy, eBay, and Amazon (and which Cody Cook-Parrott wrote about in their newsletter, Monday Monday).

Matthew lives and writes at the confluence of Appalachia and the Rust Belt. With his newest book, I Hate It Here, Please Vote For Me: Essays on Rural Political Decacy, he has completed a trilogy (of sorts) focused on rural Appalachian identity and political narrative. His other two books are Appalachia North and All-American Redneck. He teaches creative writing at Allegheny College in northwestern Pennsylvania.

Does the Democratic party genuinely care about rural America or do they turn to it only when it can help them win an election? Can the arts help us build a common value system? Who is allowed to lay claim to rural identity—and should it really matter where you are from originally, so long as you care about the place you now call home? These are just some of the questions we discuss in today’s episode. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

GOOD FOLK is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Hello folks,

Though I am currently off the grid until June 30th, I am thrilled to drop in with a special podcast episode with South Carolina author Mindy Friddle, whose newest book, Her Best Self, released just last week.

One thing I have learned in studying the South is that it’s always changing, always becoming. It travels across time, evoking both past and future all at once. I’ve spent a lot of time in small Southern towns the last few years, and I often feel there is no better setting through which to explore this strange sense of temporality we have here, and as well, to explore what it means to people to be a southerner. As I always say, the south is not a monolith; there are as many different types of southerners as there are landscapes here—and trust me, there are plenty.

Today’s conversation has me thinking about what it means to be a Southern woman. Growing up, my idea of womanhood here was to be tough and biting, to be bold and feisty, to take no s**t from anyone and especially not from a man. This is one version of the southern woman; other versions paint her as meek and soft spoken, gentle and kind. Still others paint her as the wife, the mother, the caretaker. In this conversation with Mindy, we explore the changing role of the Southern woman, the expectations a place can subscribe unto a person, and the way community is built both within and beyond a region.

Mindy Friddle is author of the recently released novel Her Best Self, as well as Secret Keepers (winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction). The Garden Angel, her first novel and SIBA bestseller was selected for Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers. The South Carolina Arts Commission awarded Mindy a prose fellowship, and she has twice won the state’s Fiction Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson and lives on Edisto Island, South Carolina—a place our regular listeners will know is close to my own heart, being just South of Charleston, a city I’ve grown to call home over the last decade.

I hope you enjoy this conversation. Thanks as well for bearing with our pause these last few months; it’s great to be back with you.

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Folks, today I am thrilled to introduce you to of MycoLore in a very fun Good Folk x Folkwise crossover.

Daisy is a folklorist, cryptozoologist (and legend scholar), eco-philosopher, mycologist, and collective-joy-enthusiast. They're the current director of WiseFolk Productions, producers of the YouTube and Twitch streaming channel Folkwise, which explores the study of tradition non-traditionally through digital content creation, public education, and direct community engagement.

Daisy is also a PhD Candidate at The Ohio State University Comparative Studies Department, studying community, metaphor, and how knowledge forms in everyday life in community with more than humans. They're interested in questions about community formation, systems thinking, and more-than-human community members contributions to the transmission of everyday knowledge.

Daisy collaborates with other folklore-related organizations on outreach and impact projects, including the Western States Folklore Society and American Folklore Society, and is the current digital storytelling editor for the Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network, also known as Liken.

There is so much we can learn when we learn in community, and when we broaden our ideas of what community is. This is a conversation about the importance of a field like folklore, the necessity of community relationships, the need for mutual reciprocity to the landscapes we call home, and the vision of widening our understanding of the futures that are possible.

There is another world out there if only we are willing to look for it. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

Thanks as well to Daisy and Dom for hosting me over on Folkwise to talk environmental folklore, Southern culture and Southern futures, and the importance of creative work in the field of folklore—you can catch up on that episode here.

Happy Wednesday Folks,

I’m thrilled to be back with the podcast for the new year and to introduce you today to Adam Perez, someone we have long been hoping to get on this podcast. I first met Adam when we were both teaching in rural North Carolina schools and we bonded over our similar frustrations with media portrayals of Appalachian culture, our complicated relationships to home, and our belief that art is a path forward for progressive change in rural places. Adam casts a lens on Appalachia that feels close to the place I hold in my childhood memories: beautiful even when haunted by the ghosts of its past.

Adam defines himself as a photographic artist based in Greensboro, North Carolina. His work has centered around the heart of Appalachia and Southern rural communities, seeking to uncover his own roots and connections to the vast historical region he explores its storied but often heavily obscured past.

By continuing an artistic process he started while photographing and participating in the 2019 Harlan County coal miners' protest, Adam has grown closer to understanding himself and the deep well of emotion he carries for the places he calls home.

This is a conversation about art and culture, about place and regionality, and about the drive for self-definition. It’s also about the importance of connection and the role of community in shaping Southern futures—something that benefits all of us, no matter where in America you live. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

Angela Eastman is a very cool person. I truly don’t know how to say it any other way. She lives a life that many of us dream of, or at least I do: one connected to nature, to craft, to teaching, and creative practice.

As soon as I encountered Angela’s work, I knew I was going to be a fan. And I was right. This is a conversation about many of my favorite topics: the distinction of art versus craft, learning to find our role as creative practitioners in natural systems, the importance of care in our artistic practice, why we need good teachers across all fields.

It is also a conversation that challenges the things we assume are true, asking us to look at alternate pathways to challenges such as invasive species, increasing material consumption, and the industrialization of fields we have traditionally labeled as craft. It is a conversation that asks you to pay attention to the world around you and let the path take you where it may, and I could not have left more inspired and energized.

Angela Eastman is an artist and teacher from Hillsborough, North Carolina. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art and completed the Core Fellowship program at Penland School of Crafts.

She has participated in numerous residencies, including at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (ME), the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts (GA), MASS MoCA (MA), Vermont Studio Center (VT), Sitka Center for Art and Ecology (OR), and SIM and Nes residencies in Iceland. Angela is currently the Artist-in-Residence at the John C Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC, and is focusing on basketweaving with invasive vines.

In addition to sculptural work, Angela creates jewelry, baskets, metalwork, and ceramics through her design business Flag Mountain Studio. Angela also teaches art workshops to adults and youth. She is an advocate for craft education as a vital component of understanding the material world we live in.

Art is one of the many—though I posit our best—ways to understand that world. I find myself now looking closer and looking deeper. I hope this conversation challenges you to do the same.

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