Reading, Writing, and Queer Survival: Affects, Matterings, and Literacies Across Appalachia

In Reading, Writing, and Queer Survival, queer Appalachian scholar Caleb Pendygraft offers a unique new materialist understanding of literacy and agency that argues “literacy isn't only a matter of reading and writing but of queer world-making” (69). While much queer theory and discussion of literacy production focus on human agency and interaction, Pendygraft questions how we engage with seemingly inanimate objects of differing scales, such as hospitals, water heaters, and tarot cards. However, he explains throughout the work, drawing somewhat from object-oriented ontology and material ecocriticism, that these objects are anything but inanimate, that they have agency and impact queer lives in many important ways. Thus, Pendygraft's “animate literacies” illustrate how humans form relationships with agential objects and how such entities inform queer ways of reading and interacting with the world through interconnection and expansiveness (xxi).Pendygraft frames this new way of understanding the intersections of literacy, queer emplacement and embodiment, and animacy through “a new analytic: metaphoric tracking” (xxi; emphasis in original). The book is comprised of a prologue and five chapters. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction, chapters 2, 3, and 4 each focus on a single interviewee, and chapter 5 bookends the text with Pendygraft's own story. By examining personal stories of queer identity revolving around four key themes (trauma, places, bodies, and spirituality), Pendygraft highlights relationships between these aspects of queer experiences and the animacies that his queer Appalachian storytelling subjects use to build their lives and worlds. For example, in chapter 3, he discusses how a closet functions both as a metaphor for queer acceptance (including self-acceptance) and belonging, represented in being in or out of “the closet.” Beyond the basic metaphor, though, he also considers how closets, in a very physical way, hide items that may animate one's life, such as the clothes one chooses to wear or photographs that evoke certain memories. Further, he explores how closets, as a metaphor for remaining hidden, can apply to much more than sexuality. Trauma responses, repressed spiritualities, and disenfranchisement from particular places are all examples of experiences that one may hide away as “skeletons in the closet.”Throughout the discussion of his interviewed subjects’ stories, Pendygraft, in upholding a major tenet of Appalachian scholarship, prioritizes storytelling both as a valuable methodology as well as a way to create and foster knowledge. Further, he states that “stories . . . are usually a matter of survival” (124). He goes on to explain that “stories make us,” not only the stories we tell ourselves or the stories others tell about us, but also how the construction of stories is literally how we build our worlds (124). Therefore, if Pendygraft's subjects are engaging in queer world-making on a variety of scales, it makes sense to prioritize stories as the subject of his analysis.While my description of Reading, Writing, and Queer Survival may sound overly abstract or theoretical, Pendygraft offers many concrete examples of the ideas contained within this book, so that the reader can clearly see the applicability of such as ideas as metaphoric tracking in real-world situations, beyond the classroom, conference, or ivory tower. He also provides excellent explanations of animacy, allowing readers to consider how we engage in world-building with the seemingly innocuous objects in our daily lives across the familiar landscapes of Appalachia.Another aspect of Pendygraft's work that I particularly enjoyed was its readability. Object-oriented philosophies, new materialist discussions, theories of queerness, and literacy scholarship can far too often be dense and legible only to readers and researchers in particular fields, sometimes by gatekeeping design. Pendygraft, in contrast, works to make his writing accessible to readers in a variety of fields and levels, from seasoned researchers to graduate students and even upper-level undergraduates studying queer theory, Appalachian studies, rhetoric and composition, and similar intersections. He is careful to define key terms and concepts, such as queer and literacy in a way that is helpful, yet does not talk down to the reader—which can be quite a tricky balance.The focus on literacy in Reading, Writing, and Queer Survival may, at first, lead potential readers to think the book belongs only in composition discussions. However, as I stated in the opening paragraph, Pendygraft's use of the literacy framework is broad—encompassing more than just reading and writing and moving into how we read and understand the world, particularly through animacies. In examining these literacies, though, Pendygraft stays true to his goal of “decenter[ing] humanistic models of literacy” in order to “push its [literacy's] ontological perspectives even further” (21). In pushing these previously held boundaries into new territory, he creates space for us to consider just how queer the world can be.Overall, Reading, Writing, and Queer Survival offers an important and unique way of viewing queerness, place, and the networked web of relations we build with diverse animacies. This work adds to recent queer Appalachian scholarship, such as Zane McNeill and Rebecca Scott's Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Ecologies for a Sustainable Future (University Press of Kentucky, 2024) and Hillery Glasby, Sherrie Gradin, and Rachael Ryerson's Storytelling in Queer Appalachia: Imagining and Writing the Unspeakable Other (West Virginia University Press, 2020), by engaging in research with, by, and for queer Appalachian people. Pendygraft's blend of storytelling as research and more traditional research methods is necessarily interdisciplinary and therefore extremely helpful for a variety of readers and fields. Not only does Pendygraft explore how objects aid, abet, and help build our literacy—he considers how we construct these worlds together.

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