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In 2022, a thousand-year flood devastated eastern Kentucky, killing 45 and leaving thousands homeless.
Troublesome Rising, from the University Press of Kentucky, compiles work from writers all over the region who were caught in the flood while attending the Appalachian Writer’s Workshop.
Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, an author from the Qualla Boundary, contributed to the anthology. Her recent interview, below, with Katie Myers of BPR News, has been edited for clarity and brevity.
KM: How do you remember that day, and how has writing helped you process it?
ASC: I've never had an experience close to being caught in that flood. I was visiting friends at the settlement school during the Writers Workshop week. I woke up very early. I had no idea anything was going on. Mandy, who was staying with us as well, had smelled the gasoline and had looked out a window and saw a boat going down the road when it shouldn’t be in the road. I mean, it was wild. We wanted to get off that mountain because you also worry about landslides, and part of the road, of the driveway had already broken away. It was just trying to figure out what was going on. There was no communication because cell service was down.
KM: The flood was so tragic, and it took so much and it destroyed so many communities, and it also struck this part of Kentucky, this part of Appalachia with a really strong literary history. What does it mean to be an Appalachian writer right now, in this political moment?
ASC: We can't talk about the flood without talking about climate. We can't talk about the flood without talking about coal mining and strip mining. Troublesome Rising is a collection of writers whose heart was at first broken that night into that morning. I think we've become so much more resolved, when you watched Eastern Kentucky basically dig themselves out.
KM: Because I'm a climate journalist, I'm always thinking about how to communicate about climate change in a way that they won't like, shut it down, right? Because it's hard, it's overwhelming. How did you and how can writers memorialize this kind of tragedy in a way that allows us to be fully human?
ASC: It seems appropriate for the people of this region to memorialize through action and activism …There was loss of life, and there is a moment where we have to reckon with that and never forget it, but that has to motivate us to make sure this doesn't happen again, or this doesn't happen other places.
It has been a constant battle for places like Eastern Kentucky to fight against the effects of extraction in whatever form that is, right? And for them, it's coal and the chopping off of mountaintops. Rain won't hold the way it holds in the Smoky Mountains. …Even though it could rain for three days here in Cherokee, North Carolina … I'm not so worried about a tiny creek, you know, rising up and taking out whole communities. I have to always remember that that's a possibility if we allow things like mountaintop removal and just be vigilant.
KM: You often write about your relationship to the mountains, to family, to home and to your identity as a member of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians, and I'm wondering how your identity and family history influence your experience of this flood and your interpretation of its consequences, and what can it teach rural communities in western North Carolina?
ASC: ...Eastern Kentucky is still Cherokee land. Part Shawnee, I don't want to discount other tribes as well, but I don't see those same borders. For me, it is a situation of this is all Cherokee land.
For generations, my family has fought to make sure that we take care of this land.
You know, in Eastern Kentucky, I was angry. I was angry at big business – what had led to this massive flooding; what a large segment of human beings who are not Cherokee or Indigenous came together to rebuild and to take care of people. So many people were working across political differences and even cultural differences to take care of people. And they love the land in the same way – they are fierce protectors of Appalachia in general. I saw so much of that in the people who came together in Eastern Kentucky to help each other during this disaster …
You kind of have in common … tribes and folks from Appalachia, probably some other areas in this country, is you cannot wait on the federal government to take care of you. You just can't sit back and think you know somebody's going to rescue you, because history tells us that's not going to happen.
It was overwhelming to witness people in pickup trucks coming around to where we're cleaning out houses. And the guys in pickup trucks have tetanus shots they're giving workers and they just know how to do this work, which is sad in some ways, because it means they've always had to do this work.
I am honored to be a part of this anthology, and I thought I was not going to cry. Mostly, I tear up when I think about how incredible the people of Eastern Kentucky are.
KM: Thank you so much for sharing all of that with me, and thank you so much for spending the time to talk with me here today.
ASC: Yeah, thank you.
Correction: This story has been updated to correct "University of Kentucky Press" to "University Press of Kentucky".
