Shawna Kay Rodenberg on Appalachia, growing up in an end-times community & her memoir 'Kin'
Growing up in an end-times religious community, Shawna Kay Rodenberg renounced her earthly possessions and spoke in tongues. She dressed modestly, in long skirts and scratchy sweaters and could not wear pants. She was whipped for the smallest infraction, such as using a marker to underline passages in her Bible.
Rodenberg details her life in her new memoir “Kin,” starting in Seco, Kentucky, the region in Appalachia where her family has roots dating back 300 years. She narrates how the coal mines wreaked havoc on the community, how her father — restless, searching, and “red-eyed and mad with fear, following his tour of duty in Vietnam” — tried to escape through religion only to be pulled back again and again, how the tragedies and heartbreaks and the sins of previous generations seemed to repeat over and over.
“Kin” is an exquisite book. It’s not just another memoir of escape from religious fanaticism or poverty, like “Educated” or, God forbid, “Hillbilly Elegy.” It’s about learning to love, understand, and accept where you come from and all its complexities. Though toward the end of the book Rodenberg — a scared 20-year-old pregnant bride — does head East, she never really leaves those Kentucky mountains, to which she will return again and again. She never abandons her faith or her family, either.
I spoke with Rodenberg — who now lives in Indiana — for an article I did for the NY Post (it’s not as sensational as the headline makes it out to be). I initially planned the story to be about her relationship with Appalachia, but it ended up focussing on her experiences as a kid in The Body, the end-times Christian community her family belonged to when she was a child. Our conversation touched on so much more, however, so I’m sharing some of it here — edited for length and clarity.
Raquel Laneri: Your book was very different than what I expected. A lot of times you read these memoirs, and they're about escape — escape from Appalachia, or escape from a religious group. And your book is not really that.
Shawna Kay Rodenberg: Thank you, first of all, for noticing that. I think one of my greatest fears in writing [“Kin”] is that people would misunderstand what I was getting at by saying that I had left — that they would take that to mean that I was trying to talk about some kind of escape. But ultimately, I love the mountains. … It's a complicated place. It's not an easy place. But, you know, it's home, and it's still my identity. Obviously, with the pandemic, and quarantine, I wasn't able to travel much, but normally, I'm there every couple of months, and when my mom was ill, I was there every other week. So I feel very loyal to the place, and I don't think that will ever change.
It's an extraordinary place to grow up. … The degree of freedom that I had was, when we were living there to be outside and be feral. For example, I never really thought about what I looked like until I was almost in middle school — we were very much removed from social constructs of beauty. So I feel very fortunate in that way, to have grown up with those traditions and with that kind of freedom to just be outside in a very beautiful place. I mean, the mountains are incomparable.
Your book is not a straightforward memoir of your experiences: there are chapters that are from your mother's point of view, and your father’s, and you go into the history of your family and the history of Seco, Kentucky. I was wondering about your decision to do that.
It kind of started with this TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called “The Single Story.” And in it, she talks about the danger of starting in the middle of the story, and how when you remove sort of the history of a place, especially when that history is exploitative, that you do a disservice to the story itself. That really got me thinking about how so many Appalachia narratives start in the middle — with, for example, addiction to opiates — but with very little talk about all of the various factors, and not just pharma, that have like brought the place to that sort of crisis.
I had written in circles kind of around my stories for about a year and a half. … It just felt like I was starting in the middle. It felt like I couldn't really do my family justice by talking about how we lived on this end-times community without talking about all of the different moments that kind of led to that time, to that place. And so I started, of course, with the stories that my mom had told me the most frequently that seemed kind of like her origin story. And I felt like, those stories worked for the first half of my story until we got back to Kentucky, where it seemed, almost uncannily, like my father’s story kind of took over and mirrored my own.
It was my me trying to be fair, because parts of my story are a little fantastical, and they don't make a lot of sense unless you understand where everybody's coming from.
Your family went in and out of The Body [though the family left the group when Rodenberg was 10, they had periods where they were drawn to the religion again, dressing modestly and even going to conferences]. What was the most difficult thing about that? And why did they keep leaving and joining again?
I think, removing religion from the equation — because it's not all about religion — The Body offered us a way to connect to the world beyond the mountains. I don't want to be melodramatic, but in some ways, [Appalachia] feels like a country within our country, and when I encountered culture outside of it, I felt a little foreign and like I didn't know how to belong. … So that network of churches provides a sort of a structure for leaving your comfort zone. And it feels familiar because you are part of a church.
Yeah, you wrote in the book that it was nice going to these conventions as an adolescent because there was no pressure to have a boyfriend or dress cool.
Exactly. We all kind of had to live by the same rules. You didn’t have to explain to the other girls why you were wearing long dresses [instead of pants]. And we all were trying to navigate growing up and balancing being good with being free.
And so there was an immediate camaraderie, and in that way, I think my parents had a similar experience.
What was it about the church that kept making them leave?
I don't really know. If I just base it on my own experience, it has something to do with this trying to navigate faith [with] personal freedom and expression, which often feel like they are not not simpatico.
It’s that push and pull [between] tradition and freedom. It's a tight rope all the time, whether you're talking work, life, art — that balance of trying not to be swallowed up by tradition and losing your own personal freedom and expression, but then at the same time wanting to stay connected to it.
In the book you write about being sexually abused by an adult — an elder in The Body — when you were a kid. Did that make being in that community harder for you? Or were you able to compartmentalize the abuse from the religion?
I don't think I ever associated it necessarily with The Body, because as a young woman, that wasn't an isolated incident: that wasn't the only time that I encountered a [sexually] abusive adult. And I don't think that's a unique experience for a girl growing up in America. But I will say that my sexuality was complicated by my experiences with religion and my understanding of it.
How so?
I think that it had to do with being aware of the ways that I met a Christian ideal [of a woman] and the ways that I did not. The Proverbs 31 woman, who rises early: she's selfless, works all day, and she’s classy. She's what every man wants — she takes care of the home, and she raises the kids, and she still somehow manages to make money and make him look good. I definitely grew up with that ideal. And I think that complicated, the way that I thought about myself, because I was mouthy. I was distracted, self-involved. I was creative, but not in a way that served anybody.
I think so many girls grow up with those same expectations — whether it’s from the Bible or pop culture. I have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and I think about this all the time. Trying to raise someone without any sort of gendered expectations is really hard.
It's so, so hard. It's such a challenge to try to raise healthy girls. And I think it’s true everywhere, but I know it's true in America.
Earlier we were talking about Appalachia and all the incomplete narratives that come out of there. What is it that most people outside the region misunderstand or assume?
Well, for starters, the thing that bothers me the most is the way that people in the region are always underestimated. And there are lots of ways that you can underestimate people: you can underestimate them by not allowing them to make decisions for themselves or policies for themselves; you can underestimate them by convincing yourself they're quaint and one-dimensional.
The people I grew up with are some of the more complicated people that I've met in all the places that I've lived since, because they have such such a difficult road to toe between the past and a future that is so uncertain — economically and industrially so uncertain. They're dealing with a century of exploitation, capitalist exploitation in the extreme. Yet so many representations of Appalachians in the media underestimate them. Even some of my more progressive liberal friends still feel very comfortable making jokes about about hillbillies — even in my presence. They think they're being clever and cosmopolitan, and it really just shows a real lack of understanding.
Is there anything else you want to add about your book?
In some ways, my story is unique. But in in other ways, it's not. More than anything, I hope people will see it as an American story.
