The 47th annual Appalachian Writers’ Workshop in July at Hindman Settlement School attracted about 100 faculty, staff, guests and students. In 2022, the workshop was interrupted by catastrophic flash flooding that damaged five buildings on campus and also inundated the school's archives. The flooding killed 45 people in Kentucky. (Hindman Settlement School)

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Melissa Helton is the literary arts director at the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County in Southeastern Kentucky. She is the editor of “Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky,” published this September by the University Press of Kentucky. “Troublesome Rising” is an anthology of poetry, essays, fiction, and photography about the catastrophic flash flood that decimated the region in July of 2022. Charles Frazier, author of “Cold Mountain,” called it a “deeply moving collective record of devastation, loss, and resilience, beautifully wrought by a remarkable ensemble of Appalachian writers.”

Many of the authors were at the Settlement School during the flood, which hit midweek during the annual Appalachian Writers Workshop. Helton helps lead the workshop along with her other duties at the settlement school.

In light of the recent devastating floods caused by Hurricane Helene in the Southeast, and Hurricane Milton’s touchdown in Florida, many communities, including rural communities, face myriad challenges in the immediate aftermath and in the years to come.

I talked to Helton about the trauma a community experiences during a massive flooding event, learning to freeze soggy archives, and how stories don’t begin, or end, “when the water crashes into the house.”

Tracy Staley, The Daily Yonder: Congratulations on this anthology. You lived this experience and you continue to live the recovery. Now you’re in a position where you’re watching these other communities – including places where friends and even contributors to this anthology live – go through these devastating floods from Hurricane Helene. What have the past few weeks been like for you?

Melissa Helton: They haven’t been very easy. Even just getting online to check in on friends or just scrolling on Facebook, seeing the flood footage and seeing that these familiar images and familiar pleas for help and calls for donations and people trying to organize action and check in on people and reports about “Do they have electric yet?” and “Has so-and-so heard from so-and-so?”

I didn’t go through the flood itself. [Melissa was at her home in Leslie County, about an hour away, on the evening of the flood.] I wasn’t on the Hindman Settlement School campus, so I didn’t experience the water, but I experienced watching it online as I’m doing now. So it’s very retraumatizing in that way. It’s several days after the flood and that rescue and recovery is what I was most involved in, and I felt really guilty not getting involved already. And even just avoiding it when I see a post about it, just flicking past it, and I know everybody would be very understanding if you’ve been through a trauma, it’s like self-care. And people have sent me messages of love and support, but it’s been hard. And to be honest, I’ve avoided most of it.

DY: Can you tell us a little bit about the Settlement School?

MH: The Hindman Settlement School is a nonprofit, and we have four main programs. We were a boarding school from 1902 until the 1970s. And now our programs are food ways, traditional arts, dyslexia, tutoring, and literary work. We have online classes. We do a creative writing summer camp for high schoolers, but the Appalachian Writers Workshop is one of our longest standing traditions. We’re approaching our 50th anniversary and writers come from all over the country and stay on campus for a week and take classes and attend readings and be in community with each other. And so we had over 60 writers who were physically on campus during the flood itself. The writers stay in different dorms and housing throughout campus. And so some were directly in the water’s path and had to flee and their rooms were destroyed, and some of them were on higher ground, but about a dozen of them lost their vehicles. Everybody has some kind of trauma from it.

DY: So tell me about how the anthology came to be. How and when did you know that you wanted to collect this writing? It includes poems, stories, photographs, nonfiction, and fiction. How did you know that you wanted to do this anthology and what went into the thinking behind what you selected?

MH: Well, the Saturday after the flood, I got on a Zoom call with a lot of our writers and we were starting that first phase of organizing volunteers and organizing donations. Somebody joked, “When is the call for submissions going to be?” Because if you’ve got 60 writers going through this, it’s going to be a well-documented event. And beyond that, we have the Appalachian Writers Workshop, a huge community. And so we were kind of lightheartedly joking about that. The University Press of Kentucky asked me if I would be interested in doing an anthology. And so I immediately said yes. I knew this was important work. And because I hadn’t gone through the flood itself, my home wasn’t destroyed, my church wasn’t destroyed, my kid’s school wasn’t destroyed, my work was, but it was a slightly isolated trauma compared to a lot of my colleagues. I was happy to stand in and do that heavy lifting for our community, and it was a great honor. And so I started with a list which was agonizing, how do you select 30, 40, 50 writers and photographers when you have such a huge talented community?

And so I made a list of people that I thought could offer different experiences and perspectives, people who are on campus, people who weren’t, people like George Ella Lyon who have published 50 books to people like G. Acres and Shelley Jones, that this anthology was one of their first few publication credits. And some people immediately said, yes, some people said yes, but then had to say no later. It was just too traumatizing to write about. So there were people who I’d asked that didn’t end up in the book.

And then once I got that first wave of submissions in, I looked at what they were writing about and looked at the gaps of what I knew we needed to discuss in the anthology. So I asked Amelia Kirby to write a piece about mental health, and she did. I asked Elizabeth Lane Glass to write specifically about how natural disasters impact people with disabilities and how they disproportionately are more among the suffering and the dead when there’s a disaster like this. And so then that kind of gave us our skeleton for how this went. And people ask, can we write about fiction? And it was like absolutely, because you can humanize a tragedy through a character.

DY: I wanted to ask you about that. I read Savannah Sipple’s short story, “Ain’t No Grave: A Story,” about a queer woman who’s considering leaving eastern Kentucky to go live more openly in a larger town. The flood comes at the end of that piece. Many pieces are written about what happened during the flood or after, but her (fictional) story added this layer of understanding of the impact of the flood and how it upended things that people were doing or going to do. I was curious what drew you to that story and if you drew new insights from the pieces in the book.

MH: I really love that piece because it shows that in all these different ways before the moment happens, we’re all living these very individualized specific lives. And then we have this joint experience as the flood hits, and then what do we do and where do we go from there?

I think one of the great things about Savannah’s piece is that it talks about these other kind of metaphoric floods, like this idea of diaspora – that if you want to live authentically, you need to leave the region or you need to leave the region for education or for employment or for a better life, or that’s also one of these kinds of floods that are talked about throughout the anthology.

Personally, the flood changed my life completely. And it’s one of those moments that make you focus on not only your physical imminent survival, but also those bigger pictures of happiness and authenticity and what kind of life do I want to leave? And maybe this character decides to stay, maybe this character decides they still need to leave. And so I love the nuance that character and the story that she’s going through helps bring to this discussion. Because like you said, it’s not just about what happens once the water crashes into the house, but how we respond to that water crashing to the house is so predicated by everything that came before it.

DY: What’s recovery like now?

MH: It’s a cliche, but it’s a cliche because it’s true: recovery is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. Two years out, the Knott County Public Library just reopened its doors two weeks ago because they were completely flooded out. So it took two years to get the library reopened. Some of the businesses in buildings downtown are still boarded up. At the Hindman Settlement School, we had damage to about five buildings, and repairs are still ongoing as budget and personnel manpower allows because it’s expensive.

“Robert Gipe’s piece says this wasn’t a flood, it was a mining disaster. And many of our pieces in here, like George Ella Lyon’s poem, call out the human influence in these matters. “

We still don’t have offices. Our offices were on the ground floor of the building that was hit hardest. So we’re in these kind of makeshift cubicles in the middle of the Great Hall, which is where we usually have square dances and poetry readings and quilting classes. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks, we’ll be able to move into our new offices. We’re waiting for carpet to be installed. So it’s just when you have the amount of repairs that need to be done, things are prioritized. Like the James Still Learning Center where we have our dyslexia tutoring, the lobby was repaired immediately so that when kids come in, they can go upstairs to the classrooms that were not damaged. But if you go beyond the lobby, it’s still torn down to the studs. So it’s slow. I imagine there’s another year or multiple years before everything is finally repaired. Some things are never going to be repaired in town and in the counties that are flood affected.

DY: I know that saving the Settlement School’s archive was a significant piece of work because it was stored in the lower offices that were flooded.

MH: The archives were on the ground floor and they were put there because that was outside of the floodplain that was supposed to be safe, and obviously it wasn’t. So in the immediate rescue, Will Anderson, our executive director, asked me if I could take the lead on that. And I’m not an archivist. I do not know any of this stuff. And so I have a high school friend who had worked for the National Archives in D.C. and I called her that first morning and I was like, what do I do?

We were able to buy some deep freezers to freeze them to stop the mold growth. (Other organizations) held our frozen archives, and we finally repatriated those things back to campus. Sarah Insalaco is [now] our flood recovery archivist, and she leads volunteer weekends and she’s been taking chunks of frozen archive materials, books and photos and folders of papers and documents out of these big chest freezers and defrosting them one chunk at a time, and then volunteers lay them out and clean them and restore them. [Before the flood] we didn’t have an archivist. We don’t even really at this point know what we have and what was lost.

DY: How is the local community?

MH: I think we still have a lot of nervousness and trauma on days of big storms. People go out more than they did before to check their creek. I know people that when it’s raining, they’ll get stuff off the floor or they fill that nervous impulse to pack a go-bag, get your documents and all your emergency stuff together, so that if you have to flee, you can.

I think if we look at Lee Smith’s piece in the collection, she talks about the flooding in Grundy, Virginia where she was growing up. You can see that legacy of how the flood affects our community, that it’s this reoccurring thing. And as we know, it’s increasing in severity here. When we look at how Mandi Fugate Sheffel’s piece asks “when is a hundred year flood not a hundred year flood, if you’ve experienced four hundred- or thousand-year floods in your lifetime?” We need to reclassify how we’re thinking about these things because they’re coming more and more frequently. And that gets ingrained. And we say it as a joke, it’s like “Oh, are you going to be on time for the party? Well, Lord willing, and the creek don’t rise.” We say it as a colloquial kind of expression of if things go according to plan, I’ll be there on time. But I think that as these get more deadly and more devastating, I think how we talk about them needs to shift and probably will.

DY: A lot of the essays in the book touch on climate change and climate justice. Have you learned anything about climate change, or climate justice, that you didn’t realize before?

MH: I don’t come from the mountains. I grew up in the Great Lakes region of Ohio where we don’t experience this kind of flooding, but my bachelor’s degree is in environmental studies, and so I’m always thinking about the context of how humans impact nature and nature impacts humans. And that’s one of the things that I wanted to say in the introduction that we can demonize nature, but it was just mathematics, how much rainfall came in how much of a timespan. And when you look at the areas that are hardest hit, there are also areas that have a lot of logging, that have a lot of strip mining, that have mountaintop removal. There was nowhere for the water to go except into these creeks. And the creeks are often very shallow because of sediment runoff, and so there’s nowhere for the water to go but up.

Robert Gipe’s piece says this wasn’t a flood, it was a mining disaster. And many of our pieces in here, like George Ella Lyon’s poem, call out the human influence in these matters.

The poem says, if you find a piece of mirror, clean the mud off it and look at yourself because this is the reason why we’ve had this terrible flood, the human influence in it. And so climate change and environmental issues, especially in regions that have made their money and made a lot of their cultural identity off of extractive industries like coal mining, it’s a very politicized, very touchy topic, but I fully let my writers in the anthology say what they needed to say.

DY: Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, who is an author who was at Hindman during the flood and also lives near Asheville, North Carolina, [has been] experiencing this current flooding. She wrote in a piece in The Atlantic about how she thought being there near Asheville meant she was out of danger for this kind of flooding because that land hasn’t been extracted in the way that the land in Eastern Kentucky has.

MH: Yeah. One of the most heartbreaking things about watching this is watching folks like Annette and Nickole Brown and some of our writers in Eastern Kentucky and Virginia who went through the flood with us. And here they are 26 months later going through it again. And it was one thing for them to go through it on campus away from home. It was a spiritual home, a creative home. A lot of people talk about it that way in the book, but now they’re going through it in their actual homes, and especially heartbroken for folks like Annette who are going through it again. And that’s that issue. So here’s a thousand year flood and here’s a 30,000 year flood and it’s 26 months apart, and they’re having to suffer it again in new and extra terrible ways in their home now.

DY: I wonder if you have any advice or anything that you would say to anyone who’s living [in other flooded areas] who is going to be in this kind of recovery mode for the next few years or longer?

MH: That’s a big question. You don’t want to give any kind of thing that would come across as being trite or flippant or dismissive. It’ll get better. I mean, it will, but in some ways it won’t. So I guess all I can say to the people and the families, the businesses, the schools, the communities, is just to say that I see you and I love you.

This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.