A conversation with Sara Johnson Allen

Transcript from episode twenty three of the Good Folk podcast.

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SPENCER GEORGE: Anyone who knows the South today knows that it is a changing place. The North Carolina I remember from my childhood is not the North Carolina I call home today. Much of this is a good thing, some of it is not. It is always easier for us to look back on the past and imagine it is somewhere better. This is the basis of nostalgia and the basis of much of folklore work, which hinges on the preservation of the solely traditional.

As a folklorist, I spend a lot of time thinking about what traditions ought to be preserved, of what is worthy of carrying into the future. I'm most interested in looking forward and thinking about where we go from here. And as a writer, I'm most interested in myth-making, how the stories we tell impact how we see ourselves. We are in a moment in the South where so many of our myths have crumbled, many for good reason. But what we are not seeming to grapple with collectively is the fact that people need myths and stories to survive. They need something to believe in. And when the stories one has long told themselves about their relationship to home, to place, and to identity crumble—well, many people will cling to the first new story they can find. 

I see our essential work at Good Folk as a collective project to write new myths and stories into place, stories that are reflective of who we are, of what this place looks like and of where we go together. It must be a communal project, and it must hinge on the act of paying careful attention to the world around us, of seeing it up close. It requires recognizing all the changing and shifting stories around place, especially this one, and being open to the writing of a new story. 

Artists and writers are inherent mythmakers, but these days they are also documentarians, letting the world around them infuse itself into their work. This dual role of mythmaker and documentarian, perhaps best described as a citizen artist, is one of the key themes of this project and one of the key themes that will underline the third season of this podcast, which I am thrilled to welcome you to today in a conversation with writer Sara Johnson Allen about place, myth, identity, culture, home and how we grapple with the tenacity and nebulous nature of it all.

Sara Johnson Allen was raised (mostly) in North Carolina. Down Here We Come Up, winner of the Big Moose Prize from Black Lawrence Press, is her debut novel, released this month, and which I wholeheartedly recommend.

A recipient of the Marianne Russo Award for Emerging Writers by the Key West Literary Seminar, the Stockholm Writers Festival First Pages Prize, an artistic grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and MacDowell fellowships, her work has appeared in PANK Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Reckon Review among others.

When she is not teaching or shuttling her three kids around, she writes about place and how it shapes us.

None of us live in a vacuum; I believe that we are all influenced by place. But I also believe that we should consider more deeply the ways in which a place is also influenced by us— the roles and responsibilities we have in participating in the communities which we call home, and giving back to the communities that shape us. It’s a question I think I will spend the rest of my life pondering, but one thoroughly enjoyed diving into today. I hope you enjoy this conversation. 

SPENCER GEORGE: Yeah, it's actually funny, too, because I'm planning to get a Loblolly tattoo, and so I really related to that of the book with the pine tree tattoo. But, yeah, I think where I would love to just start—it looks like Vic has already gotten us started—is, in your own words, I would love to hear about where home is to you and what home meant in writing this book. 

SARA JOHNSON ALLEN: What was the second part of your question? 

SG: How did home influence this novel project? And feel free— you know, we'll do the whole bio at the beginning, but feel free to tell us a little bit about the project and kind of the journey and course of that, and then we'll go from there. 

SJA: Yes. Well, home is a very complicated and weighted issue for me because even when I was younger, we moved around, and I think a lot of people move around, but we kept moving up and down the same pipeline, sort of. So I was born in Durham, we lived in Raleigh until I was through fifth grade. Then we moved to upstate New York, and I was there from sixth to tenth [grade], but then I came back. So it was when I was in like eleventh and twelfth [grade]. 

I graduated from Enloe High School in Raleigh, went on to Guilford College in Greensboro, moved to Atlanta when I got my first job. I had no intention of leaving the South in any way until they closed down the Atlanta office I was working in, and we could either take a severance or move to Boston. And I remember looking at job postings in Boston, and I was like, no. And then I ended up going to Boston anyway. 

But in the meantime, my family—my mother is from Maryland, but her mother was from North Carolina, and my father's family is from the area that really this book sort of takes place in, around Wallace in eastern North Carolina. Very rural area. 

They left while I was in college and moved to Missouri. I moved around a lot, but even when I was still in North Carolina, they moved while I was in college, so there was always a lot of displacement. And then even before we moved to upstate New York, I lived in Raleigh, but my father's family and my grandmother lived in this eastern North Carolina rural area. So I understood that my family roots were very deep there. Like, I think in the early 1700s—I don't know the full history, but I think my ancestors came from Switzerland because they were trying to get rid of all the poor people and all the Baptists. Otherwise you had to stay in Switzerland, but they're like, bye Baptists. You're gone. So those are my people, like, going so far back. 

But when we would go visit, I understood I didn’t really belong there. Because my father left, went to college, and he never really went back. So I would go there, and even though I must have had a Southern accent before I moved to upstate New York, the Southern accents of my family were so much stronger. The kind of schools they went to were so different. The landscape was so different. 

And so I always kind of never felt quite at home anywhere, which sounds sadder than it is. It's just sort of like trying to figure out, do I belong? And then my uncle would make jokes like, oh, but you guys are the city slickers. I think I told this story in a different article, but I remember we would work in his turkey houses when we were pretty young, in a way that he'd like, pay us some money when we were visiting. And I guess this is not every child's experience, but I'm like picking up dead turkeys, whatever, and I remember him saying, go round yonder, get my eyeglasses. I remember saying this in another interview, but it's like this moment stuck with me, and I couldn't understand what he was saying. And it was really horrifying to me that I couldn't speak his language because I was on the actual land where my family was from for 300 years, and I didn't even belong there. And it was obvious.

So I got really into this idea of home and where you belong, and do you belong because your family has lived there forever? Do you belong because you own the deed to the land? And in the case of my not-rich family, they were still white with the capability to own even poor dirt farms, as they're called. But they could own that property where other populations couldn't. But then that land changed over time as industrial farming and corporate farming came in. I remember when the turkey houses went in, and then I remember when the hog houses went in, which if you're from North Carolina, you probably heard a lot about the environmental impact of industrial hog farming. This is a very long answer to your question, but I think it all connects. I remember them building the hog houses, and I remember them digging the lagoon, which is eventually where all the hog waste goes. And before the hogs were there, we swam in that lagoon. I remember I loved that land, but years later, you're not going to swim in anything anywhere there anymore. You're not going to touch the soil much when you walk by it. It just changed a lot. Everything changed, which is what happens as you grow, I guess. So I struggle with that a lot. 

And then in the meantime, I've lived in Boston now probably longer than I lived for a single stint in North Carolina. So what does that mean when you don't even live in the place that you think of as your origin? And then you come back to a place, but you're like, I don't belong here. 

There's weird cultural things that happen to me all the time that tell me I don't really belong in the North either. So I'm conflicted about home, which is why I guess I wrote a book about it. 

SG: I relate to everything you were saying. I was just thinking like, wow, I can relate so, so deeply to that. I am in a similar experience, but my family's from the mountains of North Carolina. My mom was the first person to really leave North Carolina. My grandma was the first person to really leave Appalachia. I’m like you. I don't have a Southern accent necessarily, but I did much more as a child. My mom has a much deeper accent than me and my grandparents have very deep Appalachian accents, as does the rest of my extended family. 

I can understand exactly the experience you're talking about, where technically I was born in San Francisco. It's just where my family happened to be living at the time. But the rest of my family is from North Carolina. North and South Carolina have always been home even if they didn't really feel like home when I was growing up here. I just knew that that is kind of where my family was from. Then I went to New York thinking I would just find and make a new home and realized I don't really fit in there either. But then having the experience of coming back to North Carolina also feeling like, hm, this is not home, in the way that these are my people, but I am now to them kind of an outsider who's gone somewhere else. 

I think this is a really common experience in a lot of ways for people, especially in this region where so much of being a Southerner today is about the idea that if you want opportunity, you have to leave. And I really hate that perception. I don't think it's entirely true, but I also recognize that for many people it has been true. And at least in my family, I can understand that I have a lot of opportunities that other people in my family did not because my mom left North Carolina. But it's such a complicated way to approach it. 

I thought you did a really wonderful job of that in the book, which is Down Here We Come Up, and we're of course going to talk about it, but I think we have had similar journeys with [home] and I think many people in the South feel that way. I was writing about it in the newsletter this week about how there's something about coming back and saying, I'm going to forge a home in this place that might not even really want me here. 

But I think sometimes you can choose your home in that sense of saying, and this is where I want to be and I'm going to. I think I titled [that post] something like, making a home at all costs and against all the odds, which is actually very much the journey of Kate in the novel. And of course, for those who haven't read it, I don't want to give too much away. But I think we see that progression for her as well, of trying to figure out this feeling of, I've left home and I've come back to home and it's still not quite the place [I thought], and where am I going to go to really have that feeling [of home]? But also thinking about home as something that you care with you throughout everywhere you go. And I think the South can be thought of that way, too, of that kind of ancestral piece of it as well. 

And I think—this is not true for me when I go home. When I go home to North Carolina, I'm like, oh, let me eat all the food. [Laughs]. There's a lot of good positive things. Like, there's some conflict. But what I kind of wanted to do with Kate was— like, her home is unsafe. The main character of this book, [Kate], she, kind of via her twin brother, escapes up to Boston because he gets into Harvard. Like, he is really smart and gets into Harvard, and they're twins. But I love this idea of, isn't home supposed to be safe? So she goes to this place in Cambridge and outside of Boston and has access to untold privilege. And it's safer and it's better because she came from a violent, poor household, but it's also not home because that is a lie of who she is. And it's actually not particularly safe for her, although it's safer for her brother. 

So then I liked this idea that what if where you belong is dangerous? Or what if where you belong—I'm quoting, I guess—what if where you belong is not societally accepted or accepted by society? Or what if it involves illegal operations? And I love this parallel between—I don't want to give too much away about the book—but there are a lot of people trying to do illegal things. And it’s— you know, it’s illegal. However, when we refer to the people who founded New England, a lot of them were doing things that were at the time legal but deeply immoral. So I wanted to play with that idea of home. What if you're most comfortable in a place that's not good for you or that is doing bad things, I guess. 

SG: And I think it's such a good tension to raise in this particular moment in the South, where the South has the largest population of LGBTQ+ people and at the same time is taking active measures of legislation and policy that are making it unsafe for a lot of communities. I think so many people feel that tension where this is a place that is comfortable and familiar, and it is also a place that does not necessarily want me here. It is not safe for me to be here. And so in order to find my own personal safety, I have to leave my home. 

When I talk to people about Southern Studies and so much about this project, it's grappling with that tension and trying to understand that it's really easy to say in theory, well, everyone who can leave the South should just up and leave the South, right? There's better opportunity, there's new places to go. You'll find that sense of safety. But to sum it all up, there's something to be said in that tension and that space to explore, that Southern literature, to me, has not grappled with often. 

Growing up, I felt really conflicted about my relationship to place and my relationship to home. And I say this as someone who grew up in a white, middle class family who had a fair amount of opportunities and still felt like I had to leave this place to do better or that the opportunities that my family had gotten, this kind of upward progression, that if I didn't also leave, I was failing them somehow. Which is so hilarious because this entire time, all my family ever wanted was for me to come back home. 

Again, you do a really good job exploring this tension in the novel of this underlying pressure that in order to make it, you have to leave your home. But then not really quite knowing where that is. 

It's a tension that I think Southern literature, which is so rooted in landscape, has not dealt with in a long time. I have been on search the last few years for stories that do grapple with that tension and that are not afraid of it and that live in it and that say home can be both things. It can be a sense of safety and a place of comfort, and it can also be something that you do have to leave sometimes. 

I run this podcast, and we talk so much about home and about coming back, but I also want to recognize it's not for everyone to come back. Some people's journey will take them other places, and it doesn't make you any less of a Southerner. It doesn't make you any less rooted in place. It’s just that things move and change around. So that's a lot of thoughts there, but I think you did a really great job with all of this to sum it all up. [Laughs]

SJA: Well, thank you. I think Southerners are really interested in stark juxtaposition, in our music, and in our… I don't know, there's something like we want to examine polar opposites of different issues. And I think it's interesting what you were saying about political issues because there are moments where I'm like, okay, I'm just going to move back here. I'm going to come back here because I have friends here. The arts community is amazing all over North Carolina. But I have friends in Durham and Raleigh, and they're living their arts life, right? So I'm also often like, I'm going to come back here. Then I'm like, wait a second, I need to check my legislation in my head. Is it safe for me to come back here? I don't want to say anything too much here, but things like, can my daughter get appropriate health care as a woman in ten years? And that stops me. 

But I don't mean that that stops me from moving back, but what I want to say is sometimes I'm like, okay, I have to acknowledge the really awful, violent, racist, terrible history in the South. It's bad. The legislation's bad. Gerrymandering's bad. All these things that I've watched happen even since I left, although they were always there. But something I have found in living in other places, particularly the North, is that they're still here. 

Where I live, north of Boston, I know many, many Trump supporters. I know many, many people who have very, very different ideas than I do. And I have to say that when I was actually with friends in Durham, they're like, we don't understand what you mean. I'm like, what do you mean you don't understand what I mean? Like, in Boston, in New York—I can't speak for New York—but I guess oftentimes because I don't have a Southern accent, people will say things to me about the South, particularly around racism. Oh, it's so racist. It's so racist. Like oh, yeah. Totally, 100%. But it’s also extremely racist here, extremely racist everywhere. 

One thing, and I'm not an expert on this, so I'm hesitant to even say it, but one experience I had growing up in the South,  and even when I go back, is there may be racism—let's just assume every human is racist—but you are with each other. You are crossing each other's paths in a way that sometimes does not happen where I live now. And that's something I just think is really interesting, because the South does have a bad reputation, as it should for difficult issues. I'm nervous about saying some of this stuff, but evangelical Christians that tend to push agendas, if it's not them, it's other churches and other religions. But I guess I just see it everywhere. It's not like I came to some utopia and there wasn't that. It was still here. It was still there, if that makes sense. 

SG: It makes complete sense. I was just going to say that I'm so glad to hear you say that, because I say it to people all the time. There's something about the South that inherently means community. Even though people might disagree, there are deeper ties to community and to the way that people interact with each other here than anywhere else I've ever lived. And I've lived a lot of places. 

I think people who are not from here do not understand that. It becomes easy to look at the news headlines and to look at the media and the stories that are told about this place and scapegoat and stereotype it in a way that allows other people to then people in other places to then absolve themselves of any guilt and say, well, if you're a good person, you'll just leave. And it's been really interesting to me. 

I saw recently that Massachusetts has billboards now in Florida essentially saying, don't like it here? Come to Massachusetts. And to me, I'm like, I wish people would… it’s just like, that's not useful in Florida right now, this kind of expat culture. What is more useful would be taking the money that you spend on the billboard and funding local LGBT organizations. Having it go to the people who are staying on the ground to do the work, which is, again, not for everybody. But there is something that I've never been able to put it into words, but the way in which communities, even if they disagree, interact and are—often by need and by consequence—pushed together in ways here. 

I lived in Manhattan, which is such a melting pot of cultures from around the world, and yet it was also so easy to only hang out with people who looked like me, who came from my socioeconomic status, and to kind of just stay in my little neighborhood academic bubble and not actually venture out. And I'll talk to friends in New York now, and they're like, well, I don't want to go to the Bronx, the Bronx is unsafe. It's like, you have so many different people and places around you, but if you're not making effort to connect with them, then it's just as easy to silo yourself into a world where it's only people who look like you and think like you and agree with you. I think the Internet makes this so much worse too. But I'm really glad to hear you bring it up because I try to raise it a lot in this podcast and I never quite know how to put it into words, and I think it's something that many people have experienced, but it's a difficult thing to articulate. 

SJA: Yeah, I agree. And I think it's hard because I think whenever I find myself defending the South, I don't want it to ever be perceived that I'm defending the parts of the South that are clearly wrong. And for a while—I would say that I used to be able to say this, I don't think this was true in this most recent trip—but I used to be able to say, I've seen in my life more Confederate flags in rural Maine than I ever saw growing up in North Carolina. This most recent trip, I think I saw more Confederate flags. 

But again, when I say I want to defend the place I'm from, what I mean is when we cross a certain line into the South, or this year we flew, we get off the airplane, my little New England children are like, why is everyone talking to us? I'm like, yeah, that's what happens. You look in someone's eye, you might never want to have dinner, maybe you’ll never go to their house, but you will acknowledge them. You will have some sort of interaction when they're talking to you.

I'm trying to talk about just the way the general community works. But I think I'm always afraid people are going to think I'm like, may the South rise again, or like I'm saying something deeply racist. But again, I'm not an expert. I'm so excited to hear about the [folklore] program you're exploring and that there are programs out there doing that. 

I know in my bones that there's this juxtaposition in the South, probably because of the violent history. Like, these really rich communities and also communities that destroyed people, took their property, took their homes, took their lives, took their bodies. So we're always grappling with that. And there are people way smarter than me talking about that or who have more experience talking about that. But I did want to kind of talk about that challenge, like in that book. I wanted to be like, the land is beautiful, the land is poisoned. The woman is living in this falling apart bungalow, but she owns it. That's a huge deal. It's a sharecropper house, but she lives there. No one in theory is going to take it away. So just those juxtapositions. 

SG: And I think it's kind of breaking down juxtaposition and putting things up close. I had someone not long ago tell me, you're kind of a Southern apologist. And I had to say, hold on, that's not at all what I'm trying to be or the work that I want to do. I think where I feel really strongly about this project and about the role of literature and storytelling and art is seeing the South up close as it is, right? Looking around and paying attention and saying, we're not not acknowledging that some really horrible things have happened here and continue to happen, and it is a place of a lot of trauma and pain and suffering. That being said, there's also joy and connection and community. 

I think the way stories have been told about the South for a long time are only focusing on one, and you have to be able to have both. You have to hold that juxtaposition. And for me, that interest is often in Southern Gothic literature, which I think inherently just enables us to break down binaries and really see things as both kind of beautiful and grotesque all at once. 

But the push that I would like to see right now in kind of the approach to Southern art and literature is to be able to see things up close and to encourage people to pay more attention. It's not saying, we're only going to look one way, we're only going to look the other way. I think it's really encouraging people to start thinking about place and about culture and community—and this is a lot of the work I do as a folklorist—but to think beyond a binary and to see things in their entirety, as nice and difficult as that is. To see both in an equal measure.