Inside Appalachia

This week, Karly Hartzman of Asheville indie rock band Wednesday, talks about songwriting, place and spending a lot of time with a band on tour. 

We also meet Emily Jones Hudson, who started a workshop to try and reinvigorate quilting in her community in Kentucky. 

Also, we check in with the Alabama Astronaut and learn about a uniquely Appalachian form of art – religious music heard only in snake-handling churches. 

This week, we head to the woods and take a master class in foraging for wild mushrooms.

We also break bread and talk soul food with Xavier Oglesby, who is passing on generations of kitchen wisdom to his niece, Brooklynn.

And we’ll hear about old-time music legend Aunt Jeannie Wilson. A marker has been set near the place where people used to hear her play.

These stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.

We'll meet a man who makes wooden turkey calls, but these aren’t just any turkey calls. Painter Brian Aliff doesn’t call himself an artist, but he intricately paints his turkey calls, which are now collectors’ items.

We'll also meet people who make wooden paddles by hand and custom-decorate each one, and a man who repairs cuckoo clocks.

Finally, we’ll travel to some of the most beautiful spots in Appalachia to find wildflowers, like Dolly Sods and the Canaan Valley of West Virginia. And we wonder — are these areas becoming too popular?

These stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.

Just in time for Halloween, we have a suite of spooky tales to make your skin crawl. We talk science fiction with Roanoke, Virginia-based writer and publisher Mike Allen, hear tales of the supernatural and learn about spiritualists coming to West Virginia. You’ll hear these stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.

Can the internet rebuild Appalachia? We ask sci-fi novelist and tech writer Cory Doctorow.  

Also, fish fries have been a staple in Charleston, West Virginia’s Black community for generations. We learn more about them.

And, hop on board the Cass Scenic Railroad for a visit with the people who keep the steam trains running.

You’ll hear these stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.

This week, Rae Garringer felt isolated growing up and thought they were the only queer person in a small town. But they learned otherwise. Now they are collecting and sharing the stories of rural LGBTQ people from across the country.

Also, surface mining changes the landscape in a way that makes flooding worse. And there’s no easy fix. 

And we meet an Appalachian village witch, who wonders: How come we don’t hear about more female cryptids? Why isn’t there a Mothwoman?

You’ll hear these stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.

Black lung disease is back. In fact, it never went away. Now, younger and younger miners are living with a particularly nasty form of black lung disease. 

Regulators and the coal industry have known about the problem for decades — but they’ve been slow to respond. 

One reporter asks, “What would happen if thousands of workers in any other industry got sick and died just because of where they worked?” 

This week, we’re talking about the black lung epidemic, Inside Appalachia.

This week, a Pittsburgh artist channels the Steel City’s mythology and struggles — into tarot cards.

Western North Carolina author Ron Rash shares his thoughts on writing about Appalachians.

And we hear about efforts in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to return a young bald eagle to the wild.

These stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.

Appalachians are often called mountaineers — but are they also "pioneers?" A new documentary reckons with what it means… to be a pioneer.

In Michigan, an Appalachian mountain man competes in a championship tournament, for skipping stones — and we wade into a mountain wetland to search for one of the region’s most elusive creatures. 

You’ll hear these stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.

This week, we’re revisiting our episode “What Is Appalachia?” from December 2021. Appalachia connects mountainous parts of the South, the Midwest, the Rust belt and even the Northeast. The Appalachian Regional Commission defined the boundaries for Appalachia in 1965 with the creation of the Appalachian Regional Commision, a part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. It was legislation that sought to expand social welfare, and some localities were eager for the money, while others resisted the designation. The boundaries and definition of Appalachia can now only be changed by an act of Congress.

Politically, Appalachia encompasses 423 counties across 13 states — and West Virginia’s the only state entirely inside the region.

That leaves so much room for geographic and cultural variation, as well as many different views on what Appalachia really is. 

For Inside Appalachia, we turned our entire episode over to the question, “What is Appalachia?” With stories from Mississippi to Pittsburgh, we asked people across our region whether they consider themselves to be Appalachian.