Neema Avashia was born and raised in southern West Virginia to parents who immigrated to the United States from India. Her essay collection, Another Appalachia, attempts to reconcile her nostalgia for the place she grew up with the troubling realities of unemployment and addiction that confront the state today, while exploring how the lessons she learned in childhood continue to shape her identity in the present.
Avashia has been a history and Civics teacher in the Boston Public Schools since 2003, and often writes opinion pieces and commentary regarding her experiences as an educator. Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Catapult, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere.
EB: I am biased here because I already know a bit about how this collection of essays came to be, since I got to see so many of them in our GrubStreet classes together, but can you explain the origin story of Another Appalachia?
NA: I stopped writing for a long time after undergrad. In becoming a middle school teacher and doing the intense amount of work associated with that, there was a long period in my life where I wasn’t writing in any kind of consistent way. Then around the time of the 2016 election and the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, I started hearing all these liberal New England people saying, “I just read this amazing book about Appalachia, you have to read it.” So, I went and got it and read it and I thought, this is the most horrible book I’ve ever read in my life. I didn’t recognize the place he claimed he was from—the same place I am from. I didn’t recognize the place. I didn’t recognize the people. He was putting blame in all the wrong places. How are you going to blame individual people for what are clearly issues of corporate greed? But it was so fascinating to watch how quick people were to scoop up that up as a way to explain why people in Appalachia vote the way they do, and to justify how, in the wake of the 2016 election, Appalachia became the whipping boy for the nation. Those people elected Trump; those people are the reason why we are where we are right now. It was really painful and really felt like a misrepresentation of where I grew up and the people who I knew.
I began to feel like I had to fight this narrative and share my particular experience of Appalachia. I grew up in an area dominated by the chemical industry, in this very small Indian community, as I tried to figure out my identity around race and gender and sexuality. The idea that someone like me would be from West Virginia is just not something people have a vision of, yet there are lots of queer people in Appalachia. There are lots of Black and Brown people in Appalachia. There are lots of radical and leftist people in Appalachia! But none of those people were being seen. So I decided that I didn’t want to exactly write a counter to Hillbilly Elegy, but more that I wanted to contribute another story to the narrative about that place and push the ideas about what is Appalachia and who lives there. I wanted to help people develop a more nuanced understanding of the place.
EB: That’s great. I don’t think I realized that Hillbilly Elegy directly got you to start writing these essays. That book is terrible. It’s so reductionist—and I’m so glad that is exactly the opposite of what you are doing in Another Appalachia.
NA: I’ve made a really concerted effort in my life to go to the parts of America that other people don’t go to. I’ve spent time in the Mississippi Delta. I’ve spent time on Native American reservations. I feel like you can’t talk about a place or make assumptions about a place unless you’ve been there, and it really bothered me that all these people who had never set foot in West Virginia had decided all these things about my home.
Also, the guy who wrote that is now running for Senate? That was what the book was all about—not trying to explain Appalachia, but about putting a political stake in the ground.
EB: So obviously Hillbilly Elegy inspired you, in a way. Who were other writers who influenced this collection?
NA: In the context of Appalachian writing, there are so many amazing writers who are queer or Black or Brown, like Silas House and Crystal Wilkinson. bell hooks is an Appalachian writer! She’s from Kentucky!
There’s a long tradition of people from Appalachia telling stories that counter the mainstream narrative, and so I feel like this book is my attempt to enter that conversation with some of those folks. And I feel like the more I learn about Appalachian literature, the more I’m surprised by how my book fits into that conversation. A really great Appalachian writer, Ann Pancake, told me recently that she was talking about how much of a role place plays in Appalachian literature—that place is a character. That’s very true in my writing, and I didn’t necessarily understand that that was because of traditions that I was subconsciously thinking about or that were related to the place where I grew up.
I also read a lot of other South Asian writers. I loved Good Talk by Mira Jacob. That was the first time I saw a South Asian writer confront race head on. I feel like not as many South Asian writers write nonfiction, and I loved how after reading that book I felt like, we can do this, we can have difficult conversations in our writing. Also Sejal Shah‘s essay collection, This is One Way to Dance. Her use of lyric forms to explore questions of identity and belonging really affirmed some of the choices I was making with my book. As did the fact that it came out from another university press: University of Georgia.
EB: Good Talk was amazing! Also, “Pancake” is an incredible last name.
NA: Do you know the writer Breece D’J Pancake? He’s an Appalachian short story writer who passed away about 30 years ago. His collection is phenomenal. So “Pancake” is a last name that has some literary weight in West Virginia.
EB: Speaking of place as a character—did you have to go back to West Virginia to do research for these essays? What was your research and writing process like for Another Appalachia?
NA: It depends on the essay. For example, “Chemical Bonds” is the most researched of the essays. My dad, like me, also likes to write op-eds, so there were a lot of his old essays and newspaper articles about the company he worked for in West Virginia to go through. I really wanted to make sure I had the facts right.
For other essays, the research was more having conversations—like going to my mom and asking what a particular song meant to her, or talking to my sister about different things. Often when a big event happened when I was younger, I’d clearly remember the feelings around the event, but wouldn’t have all the facts.
EB: Which essay was the easiest to write, and which was the hardest?
NA: The hardest one was probably “Chemical Bonds”. That one took a really long time to figure out what the essay was really about. You know Vivian Gornik’s The Situation and the Story? I knew what the situation was: my father had to return to the country he is from, representing the company he worked for, to handle a crisis after a chemical plant leak killed thousands of people. But what was the story? What were its implications for me?
Other essays that were also stickier or harder were the ones that involve interrogating what I’ve learned—mainly family and cultural messages—like “Shame, Shame”. “The Blue-Red Divide” was also really hard. It’s about my relationship with a man who was like my adopted grandfather growing up, and how over the course of time his politics have become much more conservative and visible, and trying to understand how he can both love me and my parents, and also post things on social media that are anti-immigrant.
EB: Oof.
NA: The easiest one was probably “Be Like Wilt”—sweet and short about a basketball coach I had. It was an essay filled with love, and so it was easy to write for that reason.
EB: How did you decide the order of the essays?
NA: The academic press system involves having two readers who go through the whole manuscript and give feedback, and then you make adjustments based on that, before the manuscript goes to the board for final approval. One reader suggested making sections—dividing things up based on when I was in West Virginia and when I was in Boston. But the essays were not that clear cut, and not easily divided up in that way. In the end, we landed on a more chronological order.
EB: I feel like I always overcomplicate things, and sometimes the most straightforward thing—like chronological order—is what ends up making the most sense. But you always have to try a bunch of different things first to get there.
NA: Right.
EB: Feel free to speak about writing Another Appalachia in particular or writing nonfiction in general—but what do you think is the most challenging part of writing nonfiction? And what do you think is the most rewarding?
NA: The most challenging part is making sure I am the most implicated person in my writing all the time. I think that is the most important thing, and it is the thing that takes the most time and work. It’s so much easier to write and be like here are all the things everyone else was doing wrong and I was just an innocent bystander. Maybe that’s the first way you tell it, to get it down on the page, but that’s not the point. The point isn’t about anybody else. The point is about me, and I need to make sure that that’s the thing that I’m doing the most work around: implicating myself while holding anybody else I’m writing about with a lot of empathy. We have to hold ourselves with a lot of empathy, too.
EB: So true.
NA: The most rewarding part has been getting emails and messages from people who say, I’d never read anything about Appalachia that resonated with me before or this helped me understand something about my own identity or my family is the same way. There is a younger woman who grew up in the same community as me—not at the same time, so I didn’t know her—but she said that “Chemical Bonds” made her understand something about her relationship with her parents. Especially for folks who are trying to parse intersectional identities and trying to figure out the answer to the question: What does it mean to live at the intersections?––it’s very hard to do that without models. I feel like that is always my goal with my writing: if I go first, if I make my struggles visible, it might help the road get easier for someone else.
EB: That’s my favorite thing about nonfiction, too. The connections that it makes between people.
NA: I’ve been thinking about this a lot with all of the critical race theory backlash right now, and people banning books by queer writers and people of color. If you were a person who grew up without having a book that reflected you clearly, you know how important it is for young people to have access to books that represent the full range of their identities. If you were a person who found yourself in a book, after struggling to see yourself in the world around you, you know what that book meant to you. In either case you’d never take books that have such power away from someone else. We all need these connections, and the fact that in 30 states, legislators have moved to take away books that help young people make those connections feels profoundly cruel.
EB: I know you’re also a middle school teacher—how do you think being a teacher affects your writing style?
NA: I’ve been teaching middle school for twenty years, and clarity is the most important thing you can have as a teacher. How do you take really complicated ideas and use examples and illustrations and metaphor and analogy to make sure that, by the end of the class, students walk away with the thing that you intended for them to walk away with? For better or worse I am a pretty straightforward writer. I exhibit the same kind of clarity I do as a teacher; I don’t leave things up for interpretation. If I want you to understand something, you’re going to understand it. I don’t like to leave people in the weeds.
Also, working with young people in the throes of identity formation has made me want to be really transparent in my writing about the things that are hard. We’re all going to hit hard things in our lives, and those hard things can be a little bit easier if you have guideposts and folks who can say, I was there too, and here’s how I handled it.
EB: So obviously you have a great community in your classroom with your students and with your readers, but who else makes up your writing community?
NA: There’s no way in hell would I have written this book without GrubStreet. I needed assignments and deadlines—being a full-time public school middle school teacher, I just would never have done it. I needed structure, community, and accountability. I took at least six GrubStreet classes while writing this book, and they ensured I was constantly generating work and revising work.
I also attended the Kenyon Writers Workshop—first as a student in 2017 and then as a fellow in 2018, and then as a student again in 2021. It’s so helpful just being in the middle of Ohio for a week where all you have to worry about is writing. Every day you generate new work and share work out loud.
The Appalachian Writers’ Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky is also a powerful writing space, and there I was able to connect to a whole community of Appalachian writers. Living in Boston, I don’t get to have those same connections as writers who are still living in Appalachia.
I’m also close to two of my professors from college who are my cheerleading squad. I have a group text with both of them, and the whole thing is just them gassing me up all the time.
EB: I am so glad you have that because it is so easy to get down on yourself when writing. You really need to have those personal cheerleaders.
NA: I’ve also had a really great and supportive experience publishing with a university press. The level of care they’ve taken when reading the manuscript and when designing the cover—that is one of my own family photos on the front!—and even the title, too.
EB: Right, I remember your book was originally going to be called A Hindu Hillbilly Elegy.
NA: Yes, and they said they thought it would be a mistake to tie up the whole identity of my book with this other controversial book. They said my book was so much more than just a “clapback to Hillbilly Elegy” and I’m so glad they recognized that. They were able to think bigger than just what is going to be a sexy title that will sell and more what’s the most honest representation of your book?
EB: I also love that you are being published by West Virginia University Press. It’s like your whole home state is rallying behind you.
NA: Yes!
EB: Well, this is all so great and I am so excited Another Appalachia will be out in the world! Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow “non-man”?
NA: From Appalachian writer bell hooks: “Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power—not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.”