Swoony Sunday: On Coming Home, Healing, and a Queer Appalachian Creative Pilgrimage
The book tour for my queer Appalachian romance novel was unexpectedly healing, giving me hope for the future of West Virginia.
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As I’ve written here and elsewhere, writing my queer Appalachian rom-com, Country Road Romance, has been a particularly healing experience for me. After spending the better part of my adulthood running from my roots in West Virginia, I’ve come back home, spiritually and emotionally if not physically. As part of a little book tour I’ve organized, I’ve begun traversing the state, starting out with my home territory of the Northern Panhandle and making my way down the Ohio River to such towns as Parkersburg and Huntington.
It’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve been blown away by the amount of support I’ve received from practically every bookshop that I’ve visited. Whether in Parkersburg, Huntington, Barboursville, Shepherdstown, or Ashland, Kentucky, the enthusiasm for Jared and Charlie’s story has been so humbling. For this little queer kid from rural Appalachia, the fact that my gay romance has been welcomed by indie bookshops large and small–and even by local Barnes & Noble stores–has filled my heart with joy. It has also reminded me that things really are getting better, that there are little oases of joy and solidarity and literary pleasure, even in the unlikeliest of places.
I’ve written here before about the invaluable role that indie bookshops play in the success of an indie book, and I just want to add onto that by saying that I feel exhilarated and enlivened by my encounters with small bookstores and their clientele throughout West Virginia. I have to admit that I went into this leg of my book tour with no idea what to expect, whether I would manage to sell any books at all or whether Country Road Romance would fall flat on its face like so many other indie books before it. To my delight and surprise, however, I’ve been met with universal acceptance, love, and enthusiasm not just by various indie bookstores but also by the people who shop at them. Reader, I will tell you that my heart is full as a result of these wonderful encounters, whether it’s the little old lady who bought my book on the streets of Parkersburg, the fantastic group of enthusiastic readers I met in Barboursville, or the Presbyterian minister and fellow Marshall alum who I spoke with in the smothering heat of a Shepherdstown summer afternoon.
One of the highlights of this trip has been going back to the campus of Marshall University. Though I earned my graduate degree at Syracuse University, this campus just a few streets from the Ohio River has always had a piece of my heart. This was the place where I first came out and started living as an openly gay man, where I forged friendships that endure to this day, where I laid the foundations for the writer and critic that I would one day become. Going back there was a communion of sorts with the past and the present and the future,
It’s also one of the most beautiful campuses I’ve ever seen. When I walked back onto that quad, I was reminded of why Marshall University will always be so key to who I am as a person. It is, in some ways, the very ideal of what a university should look like, with its quad and its brick buildings and its abundant greenery. Even after almost two decades, it still feels almost the same to me, and there’s a unique magic to that, just as there’s a powerful mystic and even spiritual power around the Memorial Fountain that remains the centerpiece of Marshall’s campus.
Standing in front of the Memorial Fountain–as my character Jared does at one of the key scenes in the book–took me back to my very first days at Marshall University, when I was still trying to figure myself out: who I was, what I wanted, what my future might look like. From the day that I stepped onto Marshall’s campus something there was something about that piece of sculpture that drew me in, even though I wasn’t even a thought in my parents’ minds when it was dedicated. This is something I tried to capture in Country Road Romance and, if you’ve read the book, you know that for Jared coming back to the Fountain as a gay man verging on middle age is a very different experience than it was when he was younger.
It turns out that the same is true for me. There are times when I wish I could go back in time and tell that little baby gay that someday he was going to write a queer love story that drew on his own experiences and that that love story would be received by the very community for whom he wrote the story. I wish I could go back and tell him that someday he’d be able to fit his identity as an Appalachian and his identity as a queer man together in a way that feels life-affirming and powerful. Since I can’t go back in time, however, I’ve learned to be at peace with who I am and with the knowledge that those fraught early-2000s experiences made me who I am today.
While my next several Appalachian romances take place in other parts of West Virginia, something about being in Huntington got the creative juices flowing again. There’s so much rich history in this little city by the Ohio River, and such a vibrant and growing queer and creative community, that I feel that there are more stories to tell, more queer romances that need to be written. I’ve already got the seeds of a few ideas starting to develop and, while these probably won’t see the light of day until 2027 at the earliest, it’s very exciting to feel the fizzing of the creative juices going on unabated.
Bringing home has reminded me–yet again–of how important and revitalizing it can be to return to your roots, to find those things about your home that you might not have been able or willing to see before. For so long I ran away from being a queer Appalachian but, as a result of this creative pilgrimage, I now feel more prepared and excited than ever to share my stories with the world.
If you’d like to order a copy of Country Road Romance, here are some places to do so (please order from an indie bookstore or directly from me if you can!)
The Buzzed Word (MD)
Romance-Landia (MD)
Capricho’s Books (MD)
Booktenders (WV)
The Inner Geek (WV)
Four Seasons Books (WV)
Love Stories OKC (OK)
Signed copies are also available on my website.