This Side of the Mountain Sidney Saylor Farr When I was growing up at Stoney Fork in Bell County, Kentucky, I never heard the word "Appalachian' It came as a shock when I discovered I was an Appalachian . This was after I moved to Indianapolis , Indiana, in 1960, and then, while trying to make it back home, I stopped over in Berea, Kentucky, and 11 have been here ever since. In 1964 I was hired to work as associate editor of Mountain Life & Work, a quarterly magazine published by the Council of the Southern Mountains. I was plunged into the War on Poverty, and heard people in Eastern Kentucky referred to as Appalachian people. As the Appalachian Volunteers, VISTA workers, Community Action people, and various others came flocking into the area, dedicated to the idea of correcting conditions and in general helping "economically deprived" people to achieve a better life style, I began to hear that my people were victims of outside interests, environmental despoilers , politicians, and school officials. All of the people who came in to work the War on Poverty soon found that to diagnose the needs was one thing but to fill those needs on an ongoing basis was quite another. The media had a grand time in showing the area and its people to the rest of the country. They wrote newspaper stories, did documentaries, had TV programs , made movies, and, on the whole, despite good intentions perhaps, exploited the region and set up stereotypes as surely as did the early writers from outside the region. Something needed to be done to offset some of the things that were being said about Appalachian people. Albert Stewart saw the need and created a way to meet it early in the 1970s. He wrote a proposal to the National Endowment for the Arts and Alice Lloyd College, in Knott County, to jointly sponsor a literary magazine of the Southern Appalachian Region. His proposal brought a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for the Surpose of founding such a journal, tewart taught in the English Department at Alice Lloyd, so the College gave him space, equipment, and student help in the project. Appalachian Heritage eas born and the first issue was published in the winter of 1973. In this issue, Stewart wrote a statement entitled "What It's All About." The philosophy expressed here is still the basic premise for Appalachian Heritage today. What It's All About Appalachian Heritage is about the people of Southern Appalachia and the land they cling to. It is about the land that limits their vision to narrow sky-space and near earth —and imprisons them (the hill-haunted) with a deep, buried sense of place and home—and shapes them individually to its contours—and often haunts their dreams with irrational beauty and longing —when they are away. It is about those who live so far back in the hollows they have to break daylight with a club, use hoot owls for alarm clocks and possums for watchdogs. It is about those who have moved out along the new highways in little scatterings of helter-skelter suburbias—and those who live in a half-way land of modern conveniences and old customs. It is about those who live in little mining camps with old place names and under the shadow of coal tipples and slag piles. It is about those who have moved up to splendid, electrically-heated homes— sterilized, insulated, insured against time, weather, and accidents. It is about squatty, little county-seat towns where power and control gather to act out—as elsewhere—sad versions of the American Dream. And it is about the old, the new, the changing Appalachia—even the future if anyone is able to predict from, or modify, present trends. But most of all, it is about individuals and their humanity; for the typical mountaineer does not exist, and never has. The people of Appalachia have shared in their individual ways, and many still do, a heritage of customs, attitudes, and manners that have come to be known as the Appalachian life-style. To present this 12 humanness and this life- style is a central...