What happens to reading and writing when place, emotion, and materiality are just as important as the ability to write or to engage with a text? Grounded in the field of literacy studies, Reading, Writing, and Queer Survival examines the significance of inanimate and other posthuman elements to LGBTQ+ Appalachians, establishing queer storytelling as a transformative methodology for thinking about multifaceted Appalachian identities and spaces. Readers are asked to consider narrative and literacy as forces in the world—changing, flowing, emerging from place, alive in their own way. While focusing on people and their experiences in the region, the book also illustrates the complex literacy practices that LGBTQ+ Appalachians take part in to make meaning and build connections. The resulting analysis challenges our understanding of agency, queerness, and human-centric definitions of literacy.
By including the stories of queer Appalachians—both the interview participants' and his own—Caleb Pendygraft has written an essential theoretical framework. Reading, Writing, and Queer Survival is a call to imagine a new future in which literacy is animate and dynamic.
