hillbilly elegy.

>> good evening, everyone and thank you all for joining us tonight. on behalf of carmichael's bookstore, i am delighted to welcome you all to tonight's events, if we could take a moment before we began to silence our phones, i would appreciate that. tonight we are joined by cassie chambers whose honored her child hood in appalachia and the strong women who raised her preacher went on to earn a degree from harvard law and has worked extensively with domestic violence survivors in kentucky. she lives with her husband. please join me in giving a warm welcome to cassie. [applause] >> thank you all, first off i want to thank everyone for being here and coming out in the rain on a cold night, mean so much to have everyone from all the

different stages in my life, it is wonderful to see you all here. i wanted to carmichael's for hosting this event, please, carmichael so, so much for this community, please purchase books if you want to have independent bookstores and use our dollars to do that. please at the end of tonight i would appreciate if you would purchase your book and i would sign them at the signing table after this wrapped up. so what i want to do tonight, i am going to read some experts and tell why i wrote this book, what inspired me too write it, the writing process and give you an overview of how this book came to be and how it came into the world. after that i will have time for questions into anything on your mind i would love to hear from you all, this is a discussion in a dialogue and i look forward to hearing your thoughts on the book and the subject matter and anything that you have on your mind. so the first part that i want to read comes from the introduction, when i'm talking

about the county, this is in kentucky which is one of the poorest counties in all of america, it's in deep appalachia, a small county of about 4500 people, one of the highest poverty rate in america. it is hard for me too know which part of the county i should show the rest of the world. presenting the broken, falling in places helps people understand the extent of the poverty, i do want them to know how deep it goes. maybe if they understand it, they can help fix it. but i also don't want them to think that this property is all that exist in appalachia, the eastern kentucky is hopeless, broken, dirty, that is not what i see when i look at this place that i love. around the square and continue driving. along the way some of the lawns are scattered with what appears

to be junk, old car parts, refrigerators, children's toys. but i know for some people the piles of seemingly useful stuff serve a purpose and an entrepreneurial one at best. people here don't make make a g however, they can organizing yard sales, they collect anything of possible value because they never know what will come in handy, if nothing else they can sell the junk in a nearby town for $50 a truckload. there always thinking of ways to earn money, help a neighbor, provide for their family. there is drive, creativity, effort and unexpected places. in some people look at the image with asses sense of disgust, the on camp humans living in unkempt homes, others view it with a sense of pity. those poor people trapped and

awful circumstances. i look at it with a sense of respect. to remember how hard they are working to survive in the overlooked corner of the world that they call home. the last field deals the truth to me even if the categories outsiders want to create. for me there is hope in this. of the people who find creative ways to exist in a community that was systematically marginalized. men and women who take care of each other even when outside world does not take care of them. and people who broke their bodies in tobacco fields, coal mines to make a living in the only community they had ever known. we do not take the time to see it, the hope and the poverty, the spark against the backdrop. the grit in the mountain i have come to know that great wall, that fire that feel fuel so many

women in rural kentucky. i see every day in my clients, women in the midst of a crisis, doing what it takes to keep themselves and their children safe. once i recognize that, i saw the effects everywhere, the way it shaped people, families, communities, the way it has shaped me. of course, not everything in the county is exceptional. exceptionally horrible, exceptionally virtuous, exceptionally whatever we wanted to be. in any way it is ordinary. for normal people living normal lives. these lives take a different shape than other places but the basic themes are the same. people care about love, community, family. a bout a mile outside of town is a narrow gravel road that drops dramatically over the side of the hill plunging steeply into it below.

it is called cow creek, issues its name with a stream that cuts through. a few hundred yards further about the bottom. a small flock space enclosed by rolling hills. on the top of the hill is a farmhouse looking out onto the field below. it resembles an elderly woman leaning into itself folding around and never weakening structure. it is gray now, it's worn and faded but there are hints of the white and green at once war. there is a strength in his brokenness. it has withstood whether, time and family. it is banking now, resting, watching, waiting as each new day cascades. this feels like home and if you like family, there are women's stories here, stories of resilience, love and strength. this community knows them well

but the echo has not reached far enough into the outside world. instead, these have ricochet within the mountains, growing more faint with time. i want to tell these stories because they matter because i am afraid they will be forgotten and because they have the power to make this community visible. as i stop my vehicle and walked towards the house, the memories washed over me like the sunlight on them on hill. and so this introduction says a lot about why we road and how it's in conversation with other depictions of appalachia as we see it being popular in recent years and presently. around 2016 there was a lot of things being written about appalachia and a lot of people depicting the problem. and these were problems i was aware of and i saw and familiar

with. but what i was not hearing a lot about was the hope in the way that people are coping with the problems in a creative solution in the strength of communities that are addressing the problems and addressing them well. i wrote this book in large part to tell his side of the story and show there is hope in the communities that they talk about so often. and there is strength in communities that struggle. i had always known this and been aware of these virtues and the way the struggling communities have so much to offer, it was not until i began seeing the other pre-trails and other books, movies, films in the story of the community and the story of my family was noteworthy. when you grow up this way and it is your life story, you don't know it's something that anybody else would be interested in.

all the sudden the stories came out about people who came from the back into poverty and appalachia and went to the halls of the ivy league and somehow that was a journey that was worth talking about. there was lessons to take away from that. i look for people telling the stories that had similar plot point to my own life story. and from the outside that is what my life look like, that's what the story of my family's life look like. it looks like being born in a trailer to two young parents who cannot afford to run air conditioning and then going on to the opportunity to earn a degree from harvard law school. the way i thought about those was very different from what i was reading about, everything that i have every opportunity that i had is because of my community and the people that shape me and informed me, or talk about this book a lot, in some ways we all know about the pull yourself up by the bootstraps, pull yourself out of poverty, go and get an ivy league degree, for me the take away for my story is only reason

i was able to do that and had any boost at all is not because of my immediate family and immediate community but a generation that came before me and how the women in my family each tried to do something better for the next generation and build something better for the women that came after them. that is really at its core what "hill women" is all about, it is about women in the ways that they work to make their communities better and make their families better and do better for the people that come after them. >> just to give you a context and a flavor for "hill women" and the stories that are in it, it starts off with my grandmother, i called my grandmother granny, she had a third grade education and she was born into extreme poverty, poverty so bad that her blankets used to freeze at night because her house was so cold and they cannot afford any way to heat it. she never got to play or go to the movies or who never went out to eat her restaurant or had toys. she lived a life that was hard

and she was treated like an adult from the time she was a child. in more than anything, even though she had not had the opportunity to get an education and she did not have the ability to understand what getting an education meant. she wanted her children to be able to do better than she had done. and to go further than she had been able to go. so she had seven children, the sixth of which was my mom and she pushed my mom from the time my mom was born to graduate high school, get an education and because of that and because of my mom's sister ruth who also encouraged her to get a degree, my mom became the first in her family to graduate high school and went on to graduate college. she went to break college which many in the room are familiar with, it was a wonderful place that allowed her to get a free education which was something her family did not have the money for her to be able to go to school to pay tuition and quite frankly if she had to go into debt that was not something

that people did so she would've had the chance to get her degree if she had the employees. >> my mom coming from that background saw the way the education changed her life, the way it made the world smaller and open doors for her. for her, she felt that she had came so far from the holler in kentucky that nobody left to being able to go to college where she felt like she could learn about ideas in the world and had her horizons broadened. and she raised me too believe there was nothing that i was not capable of doing. she had come so far that she believed i had the ability to do anything in the world that i

wanted to do. and so because my mom and instilled in me from a very young age to get an education, experience the world, take chances because she had taken chances, i was able to go on and earn a scholarship to yell college and graduate from harvard law school. in the book talks about, i believe when you're a person of three generations that have worked to give opportunities to, all the effort and care has gone into making you who you are, you're under no obligation to pay forward, i returned to kentucky and i came back and i worked with low-income women in domestic violence situations trying to provide other families another women's with the same opportunities i was been provided by my family. so i have another excerpt that i want to read from the book that plays on that theme, it is about my mother going to college. >> when i was five, my mother graduated from college. i remember getting a new dress for the occasion. the first diet owned that that was not paid c. it had lace trim and a delicate flower. my mother bought me a child size

graduation cap and gown and let me walk with her in the processional. we are graduating i told my family as we walked past them down the aisle. i did not know then how true that statement was. how by graduating with her degree my mother changed both of our lives. how the value she had come to place on education would seep into my core and carry me beyond the hills of appalachia, how her ability to understand herself and her family would set me up for success. the day after the graduation ceremony, the local newspaper ran a picture of the two of us. my mother and me, standing side-by-side. eyes focus forward, graduating to the next phase of our life. and so the last thing that i want to talk about about the book and then i would like to hear your thoughts and questions and have a conversation about

appalachia and ways to move forward in the region and think about world poverty and how is different than urban poverty and education in all of these things, the last thing i want to talk about a little bit is my work paying it forward, i believe when your community gives you opportunities it's a comment to pay those opportunities forward. so that took the form of starting my career at the legal aid society in working with women in the state of crisis were dealing with safety issues, trying to keep themselves and their children safe and trying to protect themselves and their families. and i worked in rural county surrounding and i call myself a one woman traveling law firm, i had a printer in the back of my car in the laptop and i met clients as subways and gas stations and public labors and i got very good figuring out how to get people to. things when they did not have access to technology an e-mail things with they did not have an

e-mail address and i have a really fond memories from life on the road. but in this work, one of the things that was important to me was to find tangible ways to make the system better. my experience working in rural kentucky in eastern kentucky showed me there's a lot of barriers that exist in places that we don't necessarily see you then. when i was working in the civil justice system, i saw the way that there was a lot of financial barriers that stop women from being in the court system and keep them in their families safe. we talk about this in the criminal context, a lot of people say you have the right to an attorney, if you can't afford 11 will be provided. people don't realize you have the same right in the civil law. when i was working with these women trying to get custody orders or tried to get protective orders they did not necessarily have a right to get an attorney. so i was representing them for

free and that was certainly helpful but not always enough because a lot of times there are fees that you have to pay like having an attorney appointed for your children, commissioners where you had to pay an hourly fee to have your case heard, there was all these little fees that add up. and one of the things that i noticed that there was a law on the books that required women or anyone if they wanted to divorce and abusive partner and that partner was in jail for assaulting them, the law required that the person be appointed an attorney. which in itself is not a bad thing, i feel that people should have representation and they should have a lawyer to make sure their interests are represented. the problem with the law, who had to pay for that attorney, in these situations, the person seeking the divorce, normally the person who had been the

abuse and the person was in jail for abusing them, it was that person in that victim, that survivor who got stuck with the legal bill. and i saw time and again, how this made women feel like the court system was working for their abuser and it made them feel victimized by the legal system and hesitate to use the legal system to get the kind of help and relief that they needed, they saw as a place that did not protect their interest and did not have anything to help them. and so i decided to work with one of my clients, a woman named jeanette to be able to address this problem. i believe strongly in a client driven solution and partying with people who experienced the problem the most to find solutions together. so i went to read an excerpt from the latter part of the book where am talking about jeanette and work together.

jeanette and i did together -- it started off with me saying jeanette can i tell your story, can i use your story as a way to make the system better. and jeanette had a pretty dramatic story. she had experienced violence and abuse for a number of years at the hands of her husband, one night he came home and he was intoxicated, he insulted her, fired a pistol at her and the bullet ripped through her clothing and the clothing is still in police custody. so her husband ended up going to jail and jeanette filed for divorce and her attorney was charged with helping her navigate through the divorce it was me asking jeanette if i can use her story, the fact that whenever she tried to get the divorce, she got stuck with the legal bill so that he can have a lawyer even though i was representing her for free because she cannot afford an

attorney. every time that i asked the survivor, can i tell your story to make things better for other people, the person has said yes, absolutely if my story can help someone, use it. the fact that she had to pay for her incarcerated husband to have an attorney although she could not forward, that is something she wanted to tell the world and use that to make a change. so i wrote an op-ed and i started to tell her story and it started to get attention and lawmakers filed a bill and then at that point, jeanette said i am okay telling my story myself. i want to use my face in my na name, i want to carry the torch because i'm not ashamed, i'm not embarrassed, i'm not afraid and i want to make the system better myself, so jeanette and i had a conversation about how she could get involved in how she could do that in one of the most powerful things i've ever seen is jeanette deciding to testify in front of the kentucky general assembly and go on the news

media until anyone and everyone that would listen about her story and her experience and white and mattered and why things needed to change. as a result of that, a bill passed through the kentucky general assembly and was signed into law by the governor and it was called jeanette law and named after her. to this day she will tell you that it's a thing she is most proud of in the world and i am so proud to have been able to watch her to transform a system that took advantage of her. . . .

oh as you portray survivors of domestic violence as weak. some people portray the women in appalachia as the same way. i think the story illustrates the opposite. when given the right tools, support and environment, these women are capable of changing the world. and so with that, i will conclude my reading part of the night and i really look forward to hearing your questions. again i want to thank carmichael's for hosting this event and please, buy books and support your local bookstores. they do amazing work. and with that i will go ahead and open up to questions. there is a microphone at the i/o and i know to make sure we are capturing the audio, they ask that you speak into the microphone is the question. [applause]

>> any questions? okay. >> [inaudible] i think one of the books you are talking about is hillbilliology. >> you got it. [laughter] >> i would like your thoughts and reactions to that, because i had a similar negative reaction to it. i had a hard time growing up in eastern kentucky. i was lucky and was not in the first county and it was a wonderful place to grow up at that time. the other thing i want to ask is how do you pronounce v-i-e-n-n-a sausages? [laughter] >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> that's different. that is good to know.

but yes, just to touch on that, one of the books again a lot of attention and became what the tf the world knew about appalachia was hillbilliology and while i always think it is good for people to tell their personal stories, i do think that a book talks about appalachia in a way that is fun helpful and focuses on the problems and people and it doesn't acknowledge the way the people are working in these marginalized communities and how much honor there is. that is one of the driving forces is trying to put something out there in the world of shows the true view and something that focuses on women they are an acknowledged

leadership roles sometimes, but they make a difference in the community and in the larger world and i think that this is a book i hope it is a book that elevates the voice voices and ts women's stories. thank you for the question. >> any other questions? >> i see someone in the back. let me take this one and then i will get to you. i was wondering if you can tell us what it was like to write about the family and if they were going to read it and people who knew or didn't know your family were going to read it and i guess that's all. [laughter] thank you for the questions. for those of you that might not be able to hear the question, the process of writing the memoir and people that are going to read the book. so, to write a memoir it is a

really interesting process we need to understand you and how your brain works i hope you'll stick around to meet her and i am glad that she came down. one of the things she did allah is asking questions. what is underneath the surface of what you understand the world and your story. to get at a deeper level into the sort of systemic issues and the real value in any story. it didn't occur to me until i got close to publication that

people actually read the book and i was faced with the prospect of driving down with finished copies saying i like the way that you are portrayed which is quite an experience. i got some advice from someone at the outset that said you will never regret being generous in your portrayals of people and at the time that didn't necessarily make us. to be generou generous in the ps because the way you write about them on the page lives forever and you can't take it back. i think we have a question over here.

>> to talk about the process of writing the book, i was lucky that this book didn't actually take all that long to write because when you are writing about the story, you already know it. you've heard the family tales. there's a lot of sitting down. i did a lot of interviews with family members and i said i've always heard you tell that story about granny getting area at 15, but what else can you tell me about that. that is one of the things about writing a memoir in the account sometimes people will be like she had a brown wedding dress, no, it was blue and at the end of the day, she had a blue wedding dress and i'm not sure, it might have been browned. but it was fun to be able to sit down and talk to relatives about their memories and my mom was

involved sitting down talking with me and sharing her memories and her life story and i think in a lot of ways was lucky to have the opportunity to have those conversations because a lot of us don't have the chance to sit down with our relatives and tell them how much we admire and have taken away from their story so i feel grateful to have had that opportunity. >> congratulations on your book. i wondered you went off to yale and harvard are a and then came back and landed in louisville which many people in eastern kentucky barely even considered to be kentucky. so, tell me how did that wind up

being your decision. you could have gone someplace out there so tell us that process. >> i fell in love when i was a law student and had the opportunity to spend some summers here. and i always tell folks what i love is that it's big enough to have everything you need and small enough to actually use it. [laughter] it's true you can get a seat at a coffee shop or a nice restaurant you can go in so for me i have gone and lived in cities and i think there's so much value and one of the things i'm really interested in is this whole idea of the divide because i think people are people that we have more in common than we have that divides us. but i loved living in cities because i loved the unique and interesting things that happened. kentucky was always home and felt like home. i fell in love with louisville and i thought that this was a place i could land and make a

difference so i moved here and started doing the work that i was doing and met my husband at first question was will you marry me and at the second was can we live in the highlands of louisville, so i am lost in and at the end of the day i enjoy having the opportunity to talk about how we can bring rural and urban areas together because i think that is a perspective i have seen both sides and i enjoy having the opportunity to sort of talk to folks in rural areas. thank you for the question. >> along the lines of the rural and urban having so much in common, what is the thread between the rubble and urban

poverty but? >> that is a really interesting question. the truth is i think that the rural and urban poverty do look quite different. i think that they are both significant problems coming and we need to have the resources available to address those. but there are unique challenges around the local poverty. one thing i noticed in particular is in the cities and for example in louisville there are a lot of organizations that provide social services and they are supposed to provide social services for an entire multicounty area and get for my very low-income clients they might not have reliable transportation to drive the hour and a half.

you might have a couple of people here and 3 miles away and it is just more diffuse. but that isn't to say i don't think that the take away from that is you have to have different strategies on targeting those. it's not to say they are not competing with one another or it is a pressing concern in the other. >> [inaudible] we went to these orders and at the time i renumber the conversation claimed it was going to happen in these areas [inaudible] and even the areas contiguous to

these areas you could rural kentucky and there is a great discussion that says they are expanding. so what happens if you take ten, 12, 15 hours to get to the judge signing the order. what happens? >> the question for those of you that couldn't hear is about in rural county they don't have wifi access and might still have paper protective orders as opposed to electronic orders and there is lack of time. i will say i've had clients and i've had to call police on behalf of clients because there's been a safety threat and they haven't been able to get the police in quickly enough.

the answer is when there is a delay in providing people with safety services, bad things happen and they shouldn't have been and we should do whatever it takes to make sure that doesn't happen. the point about wifi access more generally is a good point. we live in a world where we talk about access to the internet and access to wifi as a fundamental right. it's something that connects us all and something we need to participate in the society and i have relatives who to this day have never used a computer. would you like to come to my wedding in louisville i would love to have two that they don't know how to get there. they don't have gps. you know, some of them haven't used parking their garages. i was telling people when my husband was asking why a singular family coming to

kentucky, it might as well be in taiwan. they don't know, they don't have the ability, they don't have the phones and the gps to navigate, and i think that is something that a lot of people still find shocking in this day and age the sort of disparity that exists in access to technology and access to information about how to use the technology i think it is important when we are talking about visa poverty areas to cut about how we teach young people to be able to use the technology in the future because i think that is what helps them connect to the larger world and also to job opportunities and economic opportunities that come from being able to connect to the world. >> is? >> can you point to any policy positions?

i talk about what specifically were the policies that i think played a role in that and in the book i talk about how my family received food stamps and we got assistance on medical expenses. i went to a public school and played in public parks. i went to public libraries because at the beginning i was talking about being one to two young parents who couldn't run their air conditioning. my family took advantage of those and had those been missing i wouldn't be where i was today. our lives would have looked different and had i not had the

opportunity to go to public school and get a good education, my life would have looked very different. so i believe that we have to make sure we have policies in place that are making sure every child has the same opportunities i had to grow and thrive. >> i work in education including dropout prevention and re- engagement is a sometimes we hear that particularly in the rural parts of the state there may be a fear of families and they may leave the community if we are going to go out to higher ed and they don't come back into there is a loss. and whether that is true in some cases what is the best way to address those complicated things

my mom experienced about when she wanted to be able to go to college and get an education. she didn't want my mom to leave for the same reason. families take care of their children. children stay close to their families why would you go away. do you think i can't provide a good life for you here. it was about 50 miles but never had a driver's license and rarely left the county, might as well have been a completely different country. i think to some extent that is getting left him as people see the way that education changes their communities, and a lot of people i think there is a focus now doing sort of what i did, getting education and returning and making a difference that you

come from and i know that there are programs to help bring people back to the communities. with the drive to get the education and sometimes the drive is big problems in the communities they want to come back and sold solve, so i think there's certainly still work to be done. i have heard young children say college isn't for me, high school isn't for me, i'm going to grow up you never going to leave sometimes they feel their world is limited. i certainly understand the value of home and family, and i think people can make good legitimate choices to stay near home and families. i just hope for the world where every child feels they have the choice to choose some thing else but that is what they want.

ibm hearing that our time has left debate collapsed. thank you all again for coming tonight is so great to have you here. thank you to my age and who came from new york i was lucky to have a team of amazing women supporting me in the project thank you for hosting. i will be over signing books so please come support carmichael's and thank you all for being here. ask a [applause]