recalls the life of a stepfather, an associate of teamster jimmy hoffa. enjoy book tv now and over the weekend on c-span2. >> c-span has round the clock coverage of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic available at c-span.org/coronavirus, watch white house briefings, updates from state officials, track the spread throughout the u.s. and the world with interactive maps. watch on demand anytime, unfiltered at c-span.org/coronavir c-span.org/coronavirus. [inaudible conversations] okay. good evening, everyone, and thank you all for joining us tonight. on behalf of carmichael's

bookstore i'm honored to welcome to you this event. if we could take a moment before we begin and silence our phones, i'd greatly appreciate that. tonight we are joined by cassie chambers whose debut memoir "hill women" honors her childhood in appalachia and the women who raised her. and she went to harvard law and works with domestic violence in kentucky she currently lives in louisville with her husband. please join me if giving a warm welcome to cassie. [applause] >> thank you all. first off, i just want to thank everyone for being here and coming out in the cold rain, and it means so much for me to see people from different stages of my life and carmichaels from this event. please, please, please,

purchase books, if we want to have independent book stores, let's support them and use our dollars to do that. and please at the end of the night if you would purchase your book and i will be signing them after this wraps up. so what i want to do tonight is i want to-- i'm going to read some excerpts of hill women and talk a little about why i wrote this book, what inspired me to write it. the writing process. and give you all a little overview how this book came to be and how it came into the world. and after that i will time for questions and so, please, anything that is on your mind, i would love to hear from you all. i see this is a discussion and a dialog and i look forward to here your thoughts on the book and the subject matter and anything that you have on your minds. so the first part that i want to read comes from the introduction, when i am talking about the county. so this is set in alesly county, kentucky, one of the poorest counties in all of america, it's sort of in deep

appalachia, a small county about 4500 people, one of the highest poverty rates in america. it's hard for me to 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 and 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 poverty is all that exists in appalachia, to see eastern kentucky as hopeless, broken, dirty. that's not what i see when i look at this place that i love. i round the square and continue driving. along the way some of the lawns are scattered with what appears to be junk, old car parts, refrigerato refrigerators, childrens' toys, but i know that for some people, the piles of seemingly

useless stuff serve a purpose and an entrepreneurial one at that. people here make a living however they can, selling old car parts, repairing refrigerator refrigerators, 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. always thinking of ways to earn money, help a neighbor, provide for their family. their drive, creativity, effort in unexpected places. some people look at this image of poverty with a sense of disgust. they see unkempt humans living in unkempt homes. others view it with a sense of pity. those poor people, trapped in such awful circumstances. i try to look at it with a sense of respect, to remember how hard they are working to survive in the overlooked corner of the world they call

home. that last few of county remains the truest to me, even though the other view is more what outsiders want to create. for me there's hope in the spirit of the people who find creative ways to exist in a community that has been syst systematically marginalized even when the outside world doesn't take care of them and people who broke their bodies in tobacco fields and coal mines to make a living in the only community they have ever known. we don't take the time to see it, the hope and the poverty, the spark against the dreary back drop, the grit in the mountain women. i've come to know that grit well, that fire that fuels so many women in rural kentuckiment i see it 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 recognized it, i saw its

effects everywhere. the way it had shaped people, families, communities. the way it has shaped me. of course, not everything in the county is exceptional, exceptionally horrible, exceptionally virtues, exceptionally whatever we want it to be and any way that's ordinary for normal people living normal lives, these lives take a different shape in arc than they do in other places, but the basic themes are the same. people care about love, community, family. about a mile outside of town is a narrow gravel road that drops dramatically offer the side of a hill, plunging steeply into the holler below. it's cal creek, shares its name with the stream that runs through it. a few hundred yards later i'm at the bottom of the valley, a

small, flatten closed space by rolling hills. on top of one of the hills is a farmhouse looking out onto the fields below, it resembles an elderly woman leaning into itself, folding around an ever weakening structure. it's gray how, the worn boards gray, and there's a strength in its brokenness, it has withstood weather, time, and families. it is vacant now, resting, watching, waiting, as each new day cascades into cal creek. this holler feels like home and this house feels like family. there are women's stories here, stories of resilience, love, and strength. this community knows them well, but their echo hasn't reached far enough into the outside world. instead, these tales have

ricochetted within the mountains, growing more faint with time. i want to tell these stories because they matter, because i'm afraid they will be forgotten. because they have the power to make this community visible. as i stopped by vehicle and walk toward the house, the memories wash over me like the sunlight on the mountain hills. and so, this introduction, i think, says a lot about why i wrote "hill women" and how i see it being in conversation with some other depictions about appalachia that we see being really popular both in recent years and presently. around 2016 it became -- there were a lot of things being written about appalachia and a lot of people were depicting the problems there and of course, these were problems i was aware of, problems that i saw, problems that i was familiar with, but what i wasn't hearing a lot about was the hope and the way that people are coping with those problems and the creative solutions and the strength of communities that are addressing

these problems and addressing them well. and so i wrote this book in large part to tell that side of the story, to show that there really is hope in these communities that people talk about the problems so often, that there is hope in offerty and there is strength in communities that struggle. you know, i had always known this, i had always been aware of these virtues of appalachia and the way that struggling communities have so much to offer, but it wasn't until i began seeing these other portrayals, these other books, movies, films that i realized that something about the story of this community and the story of my family was noteworthy. because i think when you grow up in this way and this is your life story, you don't know that it's something that anybody else would be interested in and all of a sudden these stories started coming out people came from the background of appalachia and went through the halls of the ivy league and somehow that was a journey worth talking about and there were lessons to talk away from that and i look at people

telling the stories, stories in very many ways had similar plot points to my own life story and i realized from the outside that's what my life looks like and that's what the story of my family's life looks like. it looks like a story of being born in a trailer to two young parents who couldn't afford to run the air conditioning and going on to have the opportunity to earn an agree from yale and harvard law school. the way i was reading about and everything i had and the opportunity was because of my community and the people that shaped me and formed me. so i talk about this book a lot as i call it the anti-boot strap narrative. in some ways we know about the pull yourself up by boot strap narrative and get out of poverty and go and get an ivy league degree. the only reason i had boots at all was not just because of my immediate family and immediate community, but the generations that came before me and the

women in my family each tried to do something better to the next generation and build for the women that came after them. and that's really at its core what "hill women" is about, and the way they work to make their families better and communities better and do a lit bit better for the people that came after them. just to give you all a context and flavor for "hill women" and the stories in it. it starts off with my grandmother. my grandmother, i called her granny, had a third grade education and she was born into extreme poverty, poverty so bad that her blankets use today freeze at night because her house was so cold and they couldn't afford any way to heat it. she never got to play, never got to go to the movie, never went out to eat or went to the restaurant or even had toys. she was treated like an adult from the time she was a child. more than anything even though she hadn't had the opportunity

to get an education and didn't have the ability to understand what an education meant. she wanted her children to be able to do better than she had done and 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, go 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 bria college which many of you in the room are familiar with, which many of you in the room are nodding and allowed her a free education. something that her family didn't have the money for her to be able to go to school, to pay tuition. and frankly if she had to go into debt that's not something people did, she wouldn't had an a chance to get a degree if she had the barriers in place. and my mom coming from that

background saw the way that education changed her life, the way it made the world smaller, the way it opened doors for her, for her, she felt like she had come so far from that holler in kentucky that nobody left, to being able to go to bria college where she felt like she could learn about ideas and about the world and just have her horizons broadened that she raised me to believe that there was nothing that i wasn't capable of doing because she had come so far that she believed that i had the ability to do anything in the world that i wanted to. and so because my mom instilled in me from a very early age how important it was to go and get an education, experience the world, take chances, because she had taken chances, i was able to go on and earn a scholarship to yale college and graduate from harvard law school. and then, the book talks about how, you know, i believe that when you are the person that three generations have worked to give opportunities to, all of this effort and care has gone into making you who you

are, you're under an obligation to pay it forward and so, i returned to kentucky and i came back and i tried-- and i worked with low income women in domestic violence situations, trying to provide other families and other women with the same opportunities i had been provided by my family. and so, i have another excerpt that i want to read from the book that sort of plays on that theme and it is about my mother going to college. and when i was five, my mother graduated from college. i remember getting a new dress for the occasion. the first i'd owned that was that fancy. it had lace trim and a delicate flower print. my mother bought me a child sized graduation cap and gown and let me walk with her in the processi

processional. we're graduating i told my family as we walked down the aisle. i never knew 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 far beyond the hills of appalachia. how her ability to better 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 focused forward, graduating to the next phase of our lives. and so, the last thing that i want to talk about about the book and then i would love to hear your thoughts and questions, and have a conversation about appalachia and depictions of appalachia and ways to move forward in the region and ways to think about rural poverty and how it's different from urban poverty,

and community and education and all of these things. the last thing i want to talk about a little bit is my work paying it forward. because like i said, i believe when your community gives you opportunities, it is incumbent upon you to pay those opportunities forward. for me it took the form of starting my career at the legal aid society and working with women in a state of crisis who 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 counties, sort of surrounding louisville. every town that touched louisville and one over. i call myself a one-woman travelling law firm. i had a printer in the back much my car and a laptop and met clients at subways and gas stations and public libraries and got good at figuring out to get people to print things when they didn't have access to technology and e-mail things when they didn't have an e-mail address and i have a lot of 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 because my experience working in rural kentucky and in eastern kentucky showed me that there are a lot of barriers that exist in places that we don't necessarily see them. when i was working in the civil justice system, i saw the way there were a lot of financial barriers that stopped women from being able to fully access the court system and keep themselves and their families safe. we talk about this a lot in the criminal law confection, a lot of people hear you have the right to an attorney, and if you can't afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. people don't realize you have the same right in the civil law context. when i was working with these women trying to get custody orders or protective orders, they didn't necessarily have a right to get an attorney so-and-so, i was representing them for free and sometime-- that was certainly helpful, but it wasn't always enough. a lot of times there are fees to pay for things. like having an attorney

appointed for your children and the commissioner systems, sometimes you have to pay hourly fees to have your case heard on the docket and all of these little fees that add up. and one of the things that i noticed was that there was a law on the books that required women-- or anyone, if they wanted to divorce an abusive partner and that partner was in jail for assaulting them, the law required that that person be appointed an attorney, which in itself isn't a bad thing, i believe that people should have representation and if they're incarcerated they should have a lawyer to be represented. and the problem was who had the paper and the person seeking the divorce, normally the person who had been the victim of the abuse and the person was in jail for abusing them, it was that person, that victim, that survivor who got stuck with the legal bill for that and i saw time and again how this made women feel like the

court system was working for their abuser instead of them and it made them feel revictimized for the legal system and hesitant to use the legal system to get the help and release they needed. they saw it as a place that didn't protect their interest that didn't have anything to help them. ... 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 where i'm talking about jeanette and our work together. so what jeanette and i did together is, it started off with me saying can i tell your story? can a user story as a way to try

to make the system better? jeanette had w a pretty dramatic story. she had experienced violence and abuse for a number of years at the hands of her then husband. one night he came home. he was intoxicated. he assaulted her. he fired a pistol at her and the bullet ripped through her clothing, and are a clothes to this day are still in police custody. so her husband ended up going to jail and jeanette filed for divorce. i was her attorney charged with helping her neck navigate through that divorce process. at first it wasiv just me asking if i could user story, the fact whenever she tried to get this divorce she got stuck with the legal bill so that he could have a lawyer even though i was representing her for free because she couldn't afford an attorney. and every time that i passed a survivor can i tell your story to try to make things better for other people? the person said yes absolutely if my stricken help someone, use

it. the fact jeanette had to pay for incarcerated husband have an attorney although she couldn't afford one that was something she wanted to tell the world and she will useng that as a way to make a change. 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. . . . these a reminder that people have been victimized, by a spouse or an unjust system, are nonetheless powerful. some people portrayed survivors of domestic violence as week. some people portrayed the women in appalachia as the same way.

i think her 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 ability forward to it all of your questions. get out what you think car michael's for hostingca this evt number please, please my books and support your local bookstores. they do amazing, amazing work. with that i will go ahead and open it up for questions. there's a microphone here at an oath to make sure we're capturing the audio they ask that you speak into the microphone if you have a question. [applause] any questions?

>> i'm also from kentucky. i'm also an attorney. one of the book should talk but is "hillbilly elegy." >> you got it. [laughing] >> i would like to hear your thoughts in reaction to that. because i also had a similar negative reaction to it because i had a great time going up in eastern kentucky. i was lucky and was not in the poorest county and it was a wonderful place to grow up at that time. the other thing i would ask is how do you pronounce vienna sausages? >> vienna? >> well, lisa mechanic we pronounce them by jena sausages. [laughing] >> that's a new one to me. i will take that. >> i'm for morgan county. >> that is good to know. but yes just to touch on that. one of the books i think gained a lot of attention in the can

with the rest of the one about appalachia was "hillbilly elegy elegy." while you always think it is good for people i to tell their personal story i do think that book talks about appalachia in a way that is unhelpful. it focuses on the problems. focuses on problems in people and it doesn't acknowledge the ways that systems that marginalize people over time and our heart people really if these marginalized liberties at how much honor there is and that in order to run in a community that is the marginalize overtime. so that was really one of the driving forces behind writing "hill women" was putting something out there in the world that shows what a think is the truth of appalachia and shows a positive appalachia and something that focuses on women. my experiences women in these committees take on leadership roles. they are and acknowledged sometimes but the naked difference in the community and in the larger world and i think this is a book i hope it is a

book that elevates women's voices and tells women stories. thank you forls the question. >> any other questions? i see someone in the back. >> let me take hers and then i will give you, sharon. 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 >> so i hearing that our time

has left and we're out of time. thank you all again for coming tonight. it is so great to have you all here. thank you to my agent, cheney, who came in from new york and my editor emily for making the trip down. i was lucky to have an amazing team of women supporting me in this project. thank you get you carmichael's for hosting. i will be over signing books so please, please, please buy a book. thank you for being here. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> you you are watching a specil edition of booktv airing now during the week on members of congress are working in the district because of the coronavirus pandemic. tonight a look at crime.

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