A conversation with Matthew Ferrence

Transcript from episode thirty one of the Good Folk Podcast

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SPENCER GEORGE: Hello folks, my name is Spencer George and you're listening to the Good Folk podcast. After a summer spent off grid in the wilds of Alaska, I'm thrilled to be back to this space and to welcome you to season three of Good Folk. We've had a few changes around here lately. Our wonderful podcast producer, Victoria Landers, has recently taken charge of ArtistYear's North Carolina cohort and will be focusing on that. Congratulations to Vic. In their stead, I'm thrilled to have Brennan Jones join the team as our new audio producer. If you are listening to this and enjoying the sound of crisp, clear audio, you have Brennan and my brand new SSL2 interface to thank.

In a very timely conversation, we kick off season three today with the writer Matthew Ferrence for a chat on rural authenticity, democratic politics in red places, the necessity of the arts to imagine rurality beyond, as Matt puts it well, “destinies of decline”, and of course, the Harris-Walz Realtree hat, which comes with all kinds of folklore behind it.

Matthew lives and writes at the confluence of Appalachia and the Rust Belt. With his newest book, I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me: Essays on Rural Political Decay, he has completed a trilogy (of sorts) focused on rural Appalachian identity and political narrative. His other two books are Appalachian North and All-American Redneck. He teaches creative writing at Allegheny College in northwestern Pennsylvania. 

Does the Democratic Party genuinely care about rural America, or do they turn to it only when it can help them win an election? Can the arts help us build a common value system? Who is allowed to lay claim to rural identity, and should it really matter where you are from originally, so long as you care about the place you now call home? These are just some of the questions we discuss in today's episode. I hope you enjoy this conversation. 

SPENCER GEORGE: Matt, thank you so much for being here with us today. I'm super excited to chat with you and delve into this book and your work and your political career and all the things. My first question for you just getting started is where are you coming to us from and where is home to you?

MATTHEW FERRENCE: Yeah, so I'm in northwestern Pennsylvania in the small city of Meadville, population about 12,000, which is in that little extra rectangle at the top of Pennsylvania by Lake Erie. And I grew up about two hours south of here in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, which is shaped exactly like the state. It's part of the old coal fields of western Pennsylvania. Grew up on a farm down there. So I've lived almost all of my life kind of within that. Oh, and I'm at Allegheny College. That's where I literally am right now, a small liberal arts college in Meadville.

SG: I've actually never been to Pennsylvania, amazingly enough. So if you were to describe Pennsylvania to outsiders and to some of our listeners who might also not have been to Pennsylvania, how would you describe it as a place?

MF: Yeah, it’s a really interesting state because you have in this corner—I always think of things kind of in terms of geology, which is kind of weird, but this is a part of the state where the glaciers had come down and scoured it out. So it's relatively flat and kind of Ohio-like. And then sort of politically and economically, it's part of the Rust Belt. And then farther down, the mountains start getting bigger, and it’s actually a dissected plateau in Pittsburgh. 

So you have a really rural, very Appalachian feel, even though a lot of people like myself until I was about 30 years old, didn't realize that we were living in Appalachia. That's the Western half of the state. Then central Pennsylvania, you go over the Allegheny front. I told you there'd be a lot of geology. You have the rolling farmlands of Amish country in Lancaster. And then down in the corner in the southeast, you have Philadelphia. So we are part of the East Coast megalopolis with Philadelphia, stretching all the way up New York and Boston. We're very mid-Atlantic on that side of the state. 

And then we’re the Appalachian gateway to the Midwest on the Western part of the state. So we've got rural. We've got international. We border on Canada. We've got what I said, rural, Canada, urban, farming, mining, fracking, lots of film and arts work. So we kind of have everything and a lot of trees.

SG: It's kind of a perfect answer because one thing I wanted to make sure to touch base on just for our listeners is, you know, we're primarily a podcast about the American South. And so people might be listening, thinking Pennsylvania, why? 

It's really important to me to talk about Appalachia. I focus mostly on southern Appalachia, which is where my family is from. But Appalachia is not just the South. And there’s this association—kind of to what you said—of Appalachia being rural and Southern. Plenty of people think of Appalachia and what they're thinking of is not even actually in Appalachia.

MF: I think it's really important to touch on that, and I'm really glad you brought that up. Yeah. Can I say just a little bit more about it? There's so many different definitions of Appalachia and some of them are hotly contested, often hotly contested outside of the region, but the official congressional designation of the ARC has always included Pennsylvania. In fact, the governor of Pennsylvania was on that commission in the sixties. 

So Pennsylvania has always been part of that conversation. And even way back, and I'm forgetting the name of the author, when he was talking about the Southern Highlands, correct me if you can remember, but he referenced the Alleghenies as also needing to be part of this conversation culturally. 

One of the things I've long been interested in and wrote about in my prior book was what it means to be from north of the Mason-Dixon line, but also part of Appalachia when you don't know it. And sometimes you get excluded from everybody because everyone knows you're from the country if they're up in the north and the east and then farther south. Like, do you really count as Appalachian? So it's really complicated and ultimately rewarding to think about.

SG: Just the boundaries of Appalachia and what we think of with the ARC commission are super complicated. And I'm so glad to actually be starting with this conversation because I've been seeing it brought up a ton with JD Vance, which is particularly timely. And I'm sure we will get into that further on in this conversation.

MF: JD who?

SG: [Laughs]. Thank you. But JD Vance not even technically being from Appalachia and the borders of the Appalachian Regional Commission and what they define it as. And then simultaneously, I'm here in North Carolina. Winston-Salem still falls in what the ARC defines as Appalachia. How you think about these places and these borderlands become so important to the cultural conversation about contemporary Appalachian politics, culture, arts, identity, and what we think of as home. 

It comes up to me all the time in so many conversations because someone like a JD Vance has now become incredibly representative externally to the region, particularly to people in urban areas. And most of us are like, you're not even actually from here. I mean, as Andy Beshar says so well, he ain't even from here. But I think about it a lot with places in states like New York and states like Pennsylvania, where you've got some super urban metropolises and then a ton of rural farmland.

The qualifier we make on this podcast is that we are a podcast about, you know, the American South and rural America, which I think are overlapping. It's a bit of a Venn diagram, but the two are certainly not synonymous. And a lot of what I'm always trying to qualify is that rural and Southern are not necessarily the same thing. And vice versa.

MF: Right. Agreed.

SG: So there's my spiel. And here Matt is coming to us from Pennsylvania, but is very much part of the conversation about rural America and rural politics. So with that being said, because I have mentioned that you are involved in politics quite a bit throughout this conversation, tell me a little bit more about how you became involved in that world. And I'd love to hear you touch on your new book a little bit within that.

MF: Yeah, absolutely. So as I mentioned before, I've lived most of my life in western Pennsylvania. And the county where I grew up in was post-coal struggling. And the county where I live in now is post-industrial struggling. Both are familiar to lots of places all over rural America, particularly in what we think of as Appalachia—suffering from abandonment. And it's always frustrated me politically that we don't ever seem to make any progress. 

But my initial reason for running for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives—and for brief context, Pennsylvania has, I think it's the second largest legislature in the country. It has a massive house plus a Congress, and it's a professional full-time legislature, second highest also. I think the annual salaries are now something like $100,000 for state legislators, which I'm actually okay with if they're working hard. 

So in 2018, our current and still state representative was talking—and he's in the GOP, which is always the case in places where I've lived—was talking with his cohort in Harrisburg about how to save money for Pennsylvania and to cut the budget, because that's what they want. And he said, I think we should stop giving financial aid to students who study, quote, “poetry or other pre-Walmart majors”, which I did not appreciate. And then when other people expressed a lack of appreciation for a rude insult to what I do, I teach creative writing, he said, people made it seem like I was criticizing Walmart. So he apologized to Walmart. 

And I was walking to work thinking about that in 2018, two weeks before the election, and I just remember I had almost gotten to the building and I said, that fucker is running unopposed again. Because no one even runs against him. And so I ran a two-week write-in campaign and got like 1% of the vote in two weeks. The deal I made was if I got a decent number of votes, I would run for real in 2020. And I counted that as decent. So the day after the election, I started working on getting on the ballot for 2020. So I became the Democratic nominee.

In previous years—he was first elected in 2005, if I recall correctly—there had only been two other challengers on the Democratic side. But going back to the message on poetry, obviously, it's directly insulting. And part of that message is broader and conceptual: that if you are from a rural place or a struggling place—a third of the people in my city live below the poverty line—that line says you're not allowed to have a horizon of dreams. That might be an overly poetic way to put it, but it collapses the individual vision to the utility of an economy defined from the outside. And as someone who has studied and written about Appalachia for a long time now, it’s like, well, that's what's been happening forever.

Not only was I petty and angry about what he said, I was politically motivated and angry about what that really meant for the emptiness of his and others on the platform level. I ran on the idea that, first of all, everyone deserves the capacity to dream and choose their own pathway, regardless of where they're from or how much money they grew up with, but also that there are government actions that could help. For me, having a brain tumor figures in here in some ways, that gave me a front row seat to how expensive it is to just wind up sick in the United States. Single payer health care is a game changer in high poverty areas, both rural and urban. Environmental protection should be really important to farmers, is important to farmers. And education is actually what those dreams are built of. So I ran on that platform and lost 65-35, which was exactly what you would expect based on party registration.

SG: I just want to say first, from one creative writing teacher to another, that I love your platform and it sounds excellent to me. I think one of the things that was coming to mind as you were speaking is this sort of implicit assumption that the arts are not necessary or meaningful or important in rural areas because the arts are a luxury. And we see this so much, both in the cultural conversation and politically. 

In my mind and in much of this podcast, it comes out in the way that we see arts then becoming relegated to urban spaces, because these are spaces where people might have their needs a little bit more met. Not always, but sometimes. And so arts can then thrive because we have X, Y, and Z ticked off. We're in a rural space. We're still fighting for so many of those things first and foremost. And I don't think that's true. The more research I do and the more artists I talk to and the more we run this project, the more I am uncovering that arts have not only long existed in rural areas, but they have especially thrived in rural areas. And to create the capacity to imagine a better world and imagine a better future is the revolutionary power of why we do this.

MF: Yeah, right. Exactly. And I mean, I don't think it's an accident that people who don't want the stacking of the world to shift don't support artists because artists are the ones who are offering a different vision. I never liked doing the argument this way, but I'm going to mention it also,

even if you take as necessary the conversation about economy and dollars, the arts economy is huge. And I should have done a quick research before I came on here because I knew what it was specifically because I ran on it. But the arts economy in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is as large as some of the big ones you would think of. I think transportation was one that has a similar GDP. And so even the conversation, the neoliberal conversation, that the arts aren't valuable is wrong. I think you and I are saying they're even more valuable than that. We're not so interested in the neoliberal explanation. We're interested in the human possibility. 

And on top of that, in rural places you're struggling for population growth. There are some great places—Detroit has done this, and one of the small towns near us, Oil City, Pennsylvania, where the oil industry of America was born, has done it—is offering actual incentives to young artists to buy very inexpensive homes, renovate them, and establish themselves into the community. There's great potential in the arts as part of the revitalization of rural America. And I think we see that the farther south in you Appalachia go, I actually think you see more of that vibrancy up front and the power of the artists and the art supporters to think about that as community work.

SG: As a southern Appalachian artist, I'm inclined to agree with that idea because it was sort of the founding of Good Folk [laughs]. But it's what I always say. My partner is from Michigan. And whenever we do the drive through Ohio into Michigan, I look around and I'm like, what if artists were here in these spaces? 

MF: Yeah.

SG: To me, it just makes so much sense. You know, arts bring jobs, but arts also bring community, which is one of the biggest things we're seeing happen in kind of rural America and particularly in small towns where people might be less inclined to go to church or go to community spaces or even school post-pandemic, where there's now hybrid learning and virtual learning. People are desperate to find community and to figure out this sense of common identity. I might be biased, but I think the arts are a great way to do that.

MF: Just last weekend—so I'm also a musician, a deeply Appalachian jazz musician. 

SG: You will have to send us some of that music because, wow.

MF: Yeah. But then I was playing, actually, I was in the backup horn section of a rock band playing for a community group that does a monthly summer outdoor concert. And it was Garlic Fest. And so part of it was a potluck for people bringing in their best garlic dish. And there was a vote on who would win. And you just look around this green space, a new green space that was built from knocking down a derelict building in town, creating a stage and a place for the community to gather. 

And I remember being up there on the stage thinking, why are the people who are the angriest, which right now tends to be the GOP in places like this, why do they fear this? Because people are just having a good time hanging out in space, listening to music, enjoying garlic. Vampires were far away that night [laughs]. That's the kind of thing that does create a connection. And you've got a lot of different cross sections of humans who get to commune together and eat together and listen. And yeah, that means a lot.

SG: It's all folklore work, which is my other hat that I wear. So I completely agree. And I feel really strongly about that. The other thing I think feels really important to me is the question of: how do you create arts-based communities that are rooted in the community and not in outsiders coming in?

I think a lot about here up in the mountains, and particularly in the area around Atlanta, we do have a film industry. And The Hunger Games is the example that I always bring up to people because anyone who's seen it will recognize pretty clearly that District 12 is very much based on Appalachia. They actually came to North Carolina and filmed the parts for Appalachia in the mountains up here. But, you know, they're bringing in outside film communities rather than necessarily employing locals. You could go be an extra, but you're not going to get a PA job if you're just someone who lives in this town. 

So the other path that I see that can bring this forward is if you are an arts organization wanting to come and work in a rural place, don't just bring everybody from Hollywood and call it a day. Find ways to invest in the community and employ people and get to know them and understand, what does this community actually want? What do they actually need? What is important to them? And not just going, well, here's my idea as an outsider. I always say that film sets should have contract folklorists on them. So if anyone is listening and wants a contract folklorist, please hit me up because I would be happy to do it.

MF: Yeah, good plug. No, but I think that's absolutely right. Like, don't just come and use the space, use what's happening. And I'm thinking of Pittsburgh, which also has a fairly solid film industry. The city of Pittsburgh does have a film office that's doing that work. But again, now we're creating that rural urban divide.

Pittsburgh's a small city, but it's still a city. And so if someone wants to film even in Erie, which is about 45 minutes north, they don't have that kind of resource established to create those connections. I think it's a great idea. Huge. And there's a lot of beautiful things to put on film.

SG: Yes, absolutely. And I want to go back a little bit because we were talking about your book and your political career, and now we've gone down a bit of a tangent, but it does connect in that one of the things that struck me, both in you speaking now and in the very first essay in your book, which I have right here. It is called I Hate It Here, Please Vote for Me: Essays on Rural Political Decay, which, you know, what a great... kind of qualifier in your title, rural political decay. We're seeing that in real time. 

You mentioned that, you know, you might have lost this race, but there were still people who voted for you. It's not like you went out and had no one there. And I want to talk a little bit about this kind of rural erasure, which is what we see in that rural urban divide when you have film teams come in and say, this is what we think of rural Appalachia rather than actually talk to people.

There's a quote in your book that says: “We pay the price of abandonment in rural America. I want you to understand that you pay those prices even if you don’t live here, or actually care about here. The easiest thing to do is ignore rural Americans, or make jokes about us, or hate us for delivering the bullshit politicians we deliver to state and federal legislatures. Ignoring, hating, and ridiculing us is, of course, how the bullshit politicians stay in power. As a nation, we aren’t going to get anything other than what we’ve been getting until we recognize a hard, painful truth that I hope you can hear as a call to action, and not just as another installment of rural literary cliché. The ragged rough bullshit politics of rural America delineate our abandonment and its costs.”

That quote struck me so deeply that... Everyone pays the price, even if you think you don't. You can live in Hollywood, you can never leave it. You can say, I would never move to a red state. I would never move to a red town. That's not my community. It doesn't matter to me. And you still pay that price. Talk to me a little bit more about this quote and kind of what your thought was in this essay,because I think it's a really important point to make.

MF: Yeah, and I'm going to start, I think, local and then move it more national. So one of the things that I think about a lot first of all, is it sucks to lose so badly, right? When you're like, Hey, uh, do you like me neighbors? And 65% of them say, no, you are Stalin, which they literally did, which is kind of weird. But even though I lost 65-35, this House district is, as all House districts in Pennsylvania are, still 66,000 people. So 12,000 people voted for me, even though I got blown out, which means there are 12,000 people in this one district in Pennsylvania who have been rendered as a zero. It's just a red wash vote. 

So that's the first arm. And then the second, as we move up the layers, is that in the national conversation, if you don't like the right-wing MAGA thing that is holding America captive these days, there's a likelihood to blame places like where I live to say that it's your fault. You guys keep voting against your best interests, which might actually be true. But that's just it's the aspersion that is cast. And that is ignoring, again, the 12000 people that voted against it. And at the same time, ignoring that the margins for a lot of the elections wind up happening in the suburbs. And so rural people who are struggling in very real ways also get to be the scapegoat. 

So then when you have, say, a president or a congressperson or whomever in power and you live in whatever the imaginary perfect blue city, left-lefty place is and you're mad because things are happening or Roe v. Wade is overturned and you're angry about that, part of that is because the Democratic Party at the national level is not in rural spaces. And that when it comes time for elections, they—maybe we'll talk about John Fetterman here in a second. But they're not there because strategically we're useless. And that has national ramifications for policy. And it has national ramifications for stories. One of the things that I talk about, write about, think about all the time is that lots of people say they vote for issues and nobody does. Almost nobody does. They vote for stories.

We are allowing stories to consume the beautiful, complex realities of rural America and make them just all the stereotypes you want to put there. And then that's what we get in the elections. And I'll just quickly say on John Fetterman, because I have the fire going right now, but one of the moments that struck me the hardest in the election was when we were getting close to the primary. There was no other Democrat running in the county at the state level. And there was a woman running as the only Democrat at the federal level for the U.S. House, so we attended the spring breakfast, which is the rally. Let's get the troops together and get a little bit of excitement headed into the primaries, headed into the general. And John Fetterman, who was lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania at the time, showed up. Big deal. That's pretty cool. He spoke to the crowd and didn't introduce himself to me, which was weird. And then he told the crowd, you know, you can't win in Crawford County, so your job is to go out and get a couple more votes for Joe Biden. And then because this district also includes Erie County, which is a Democratic leaning county, I also headed up the interstate afterwards to their spring breakfast, as did John Fetterman, who said Erie County is a bellwether for the nation, we need to elect every Democrat on this ballot. which meant in my town, I was cannon fodder. But if I drove a half hour north, I suddenly was someone that the party cared about and needed to be elected. 

I was very angry, as you might imagine, because that sucks. And then I got a little bit angrier when I realized he was not wrong strategically. And that's the real problem, is that we're not investing in the conversations in places like Crawford County and throughout rural America, wherever it is, so that when it comes to election time, yeah, statistically we don't matter because we haven't been doing the work between the elections or the work non-politically, like the art stuff we were talking about, to help people see behind the bullshit of the narratives that dominate. To say, you know, artists are worthless. Well, they're not. Or that Democrats are all Stalin. I'm pretty sure that history backs me up on that one. I don't think that's true. So, yeah, that's kind of how all of that works. And that that's endlessly frustrating. I don't have great immediate answers for it. But if we start paying attention in places that aren't rural America to that problem, that can make a big difference. Investments could be done differently.

SG: Absolutely, because the arts are underfunded everywhere, particularly in rural America. But it's not—well, you mentioned the phrase this kind of like perfect blue haven urban area. And I think that's also a dream that doesn't exist either. And the more we unpack that myth, the more we can unpack the myth behind it and get deeper and deeper into this kind of pitfall of rural America.

MF: Yeah, you know, and I'll throw out this—a suggestion I'll have is that sometimes I wrote for a newspaper for a little bit, small town newspaper, which is a great job for young writers. You get to see what's happening. You get to write in so many different ways. But small town newspapers for a long time have been beholden to… in my case, I mean, this was a few years ago, like around 2000, but at the time beholden to car dealers, because that's who buys most of the ads. 

And now it's even harder. If somebody with a lot of money wanted to change the political landscape and the social landscape of rural America, they would invest in newspapers, not to make them lefty newspapers necessarily, just like give them the check, let them be journalists, let them cover local things so that people in small towns and rural spaces had a way to communicate with each other in a bigger way. That would make a huge difference in disrupting the national narratives that cause somebody to vote in a way that is not helpful at the local level. And then we can build from the ground up that way. So if you have a billion dollars, buy a couple of newspapers.

SG: My mom's first job was as a college reporter for the Mount Airy local newspaper, so I completely agree. I can see the direct thread from her to me in that. And I think, by extension, it's what I'm always saying to people, particularly in rural communities, but it’s that everybody cares about who they're going to vote for in the presidential election. This is the conversation. And of course, we're going to talk about this in a minute because it would be so untimely not to. But you’ve got to know who you're voting for in local elections too. People are not invested in local politics in nearly the same way. 

Another point you made in your book that I completely resonated with is that most of the people who are making the decisions that impact your day-to-day life are people on a local political level. And if you're just voting down the board, down your ticket and down your party, you don't always know what those people's policies are. To what you said, people don't really necessarily vote for policy in the way that maybe we should be thinking about. 

MF: Yeah. Yeah.

SG: With that, I want to, of course, talk a little bit about what we're seeing happen in real time. I don't know how you feel about this, and I'm dying to know. I have been fascinated to see the Democratic Party suddenly shift in the last three weeks to care about rural America. The camo hat for the Harris-Waltz campaign, we have to talk about it. I think Tim Walz coming onto this ticket, to me, was a very strategic play for the Democratic Party in realizing maybe we should pay attention to rural America, and maybe we need a candidate who can appeal to rural America. I have been thinking for weeks, I've been telling everyone, I was like, I'm talking to Matthew Ferrence, I've got to ask him what he thinks of Tim Walz on the Harris ticket. 

Let's start with the camo hat, which I am fascinated by because anyone who's spent time in rural America knows that camo is the symbol now of rural America. Now we've got the Democratic Party, not only reclaiming that, but also to people who don't know, the hat is a riff on a Chappell Roan hat, who is a breakout pop star this year. And the hat says Midwest Princess and they've used the same font and everything. So let's start with the camo hat. What do you think?

MF: Well, I think it's amazing, and I have to further specify, it's Realtree camo, which is a really specific marker.

SG: I think our listenership will know the difference as well between Realtree camo, but it's a very specific marker.