A Seat on the Porch: A Review of TROUBLESOME RISING: A THOUSAND-YEAR FLOOD IN EASTERN KENTUCKY
- elichvar
- Apr 11
- 7 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
Melissa Helton, editor
Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky
Fireside Industries, imprint of The University Press of Kentucky / September 2024 / 328 pp / $30.00 paperback
Reviewed by Angie Mimms / April 2025
Every summer on the banks of Troublesome Creek in eastern Kentucky, writers come to the historic Hindman Settlement School. They come to teach, study, write, and read for a week at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, a decades-old literary tradition that—with the early work and support of writers including James Still, Al Stewart, Harriette Arnow, and Jim Wayne Miller—has grown to attract writers from across the region and the country. It is a storied gathering in a beloved place.
That gathering was cut short in its forty-fifth year, in the early hours of July 28, 2022, a Thursday. Rains churned Troublesome, usually just inches deep, into raging waters that overtook Hindman and sent workshop participants scrambling in darkness for safety. Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky recalls the disaster, which killed more than forty people in the region and destroyed homes, businesses, vehicles, and livelihoods. Editor Melissa Helton has given writers who were there that night, as well as other writers associated with the workshop, a place to share their stories. The result is a probing, deeply felt anthology of poetry and prose by people who love a place and mourn its devastation.
When the creek breached its banks that rumbling night, I was on campus in the first-floor back bedroom of the house that would become a refuge for writers who had evacuated from flooding rooms or apartments in danger of sliding. In my years at the workshop, I’ve been in classes and readings with many of the anthology’s contributors. We’ve shared cornbread, tomato pie, dish duty, and the sacred tradition of porch sitting.
Opening Troublesome Rising is like pulling up a seat on the porch. You visit with George Ella Lyon, Wendell Berry, and Silas House. You hear Nikki Giovanni, Lee Smith, and Marc Harshman. Robert Gipe, Frank X Walker, Neema Avashia, and Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle are here. In all, sixty-one artists contributed. Some lived through the flood, some helped with the recovery, and some watched—and fought for the region—from afar. All of them find connection in Hindman. To sit with them is to hear the stories, outrage, trauma, and hope, to be swept up in fierce, gentle, urgent, waiting words, to pause quietly with a photo or revelation, to be moved to act.
While the anthology grew out of the July 2022 flood, the writing expands beyond that night to include other places and times. It reaches into the past, glimpses the future, questions, warns, laments, and seeks healing. It calls out marginalization, climate change, and extractive industry. It honors the Earth’s forces. All the while, the writers do what writers do, as Leatha Kendrick writes in her essay “Invisible, Essential,” “grope for language to do justice to our dearest things.” Devotion to the workshop, the land, and its people urges the writers on. Helton, literary arts director at the settlement school, writes in her introduction, “We knew we would rise up and tell the tale with our fragments.”
Those fragments come from writers who reflect the diversity of Appalachian voices, so often stereotyped in our wider culture. They comprise a range of races, ages, abilities, genders, and sexual orientations. Affrilachian, Indigenous, queer, disabled. Well-known and emerging. Writers born and raised in Appalachia; who moved there later in life; who’ve left; who’ve returned; who are connected by family, friends, or simply their love for the region and writing community.
Before we read their words, Helton builds her introduction, meshing personal storytelling, heart, and insight with fact after fact regarding rainfall, flooding, death toll, destruction, recovery, and settlement school history. “I hope this collection helps the community metabolize some of the trauma,” she writes. Helton selected and ordered the seventy-one writings—as well as twenty-three photographs of the flooding, aftermath, and recovery—so that they speak to and echo each other. The book contains a prologue, an epilogue, and four sections that take their titles from pieces in the book. While time frames often overlap, the writings are ordered according to their main focus regarding the flood: before, during, after, and recovery. The book’s structure reflects the editor’s care for readers. We know we’ll encounter catastrophe. With an intentional mix of story, poem, and essay, Helton gives us time to prepare and, afterward, to reflect.
The prologue, Sonja Livingston’s short story “Noah’s Wife,” hauntingly foreshadows the flood. As rain falls and the never-named woman prepares to enter the ark, she gently warns a sister she will leave behind: Let your child sleep with you tonight. The piece pairs well with the epilogue, Nickole Brown’s breathtaking lyric essay “Rise,” to create powerful bookends. Brown, one of the people who alerted me and my housemates about the rising waters that night, threads memories of the flood with meditations on waters, trees, evacuation, and climate change. “What happens,” she writes, “when you cock your head to the side and listen to what this earth—and its waters—has to say?”
The first section, titled “The Map Keeps Changing,” creates suspense as it opens with Jesse Graves’s poem about family lexicon, “Hanktum”:
What do people call a fearsome storm, one that
moves in from the northwest and builds
in layers of darkening clouds, if not a hanktum?
Lightning strikes, and none can say its true name.
For a broader view, Bernard Clay reaches back with his poem “they freaks of nature,” to imagine what precolonial Indigenous people and ancient mountains would say if asked about floods:
those mountains
would chuckle and say
“we haven’t seen anything like this
since we were ocean bottom
during the devonian age”
The first section's strong essays also provide varied perspectives and much to think about. For instance, Amelia Kirby writes about the flood’s impact on mental health in “Collective Healing.” She considers “layers of historical traumas and harms” in Eastern Kentucky and what we can learn as “fresh harms gather us closer to shared pain across the world.”
The tension rises in the second section, titled “Water’s Dark Body,” with Marianne Worthington’s “Rise and Fall: A Sonnet.” She writes, “More than just an argument with the rain, / no, this creek was a broiling fracas.” It “raised up its liquid fists.” It “sank brown teeth.” Kari Gunter-Seymour, in “Coal+iron+natural gas,” describes anxiety triggered by approaching flood waters and despair at feelings of invisibility, expendability. She leaves us with “wonder what’s the longest I’ve ever / held my breath under water.”
The first detailed personal account of the flood comes from Carter Sickels’s essay, “Troublesome Rising,” which tells of powerful water, loss of electricity, drowned vehicles, a shrieking building alarm. Smells permeate. Fear builds. Morning brings disorientation “as we tried to grasp what we were seeing, how geography had shifted overnight.” I’ve not been able to write about the flood myself, because of associations I have with other things going on in my life at the time. One reasons I read this book was to fill in gaps in my memory, and Sickels’s essay is one that takes me right back to that time and place.
The second section roils with urgency, disbelief, and loss. Robert Gipe’s quick-moving, brilliant “Wall of Water: A Story” calls out overflowing coal mine ponds, his main character offering: “This is about the least surprising thing in the world. Bitter harvest of a hundred years of a man getting rich giving no thought to tomorrow or the people who live there.” Among the section’s memorable essays is Mandi Fugate Sheffel’s “What Water Can’t Erase.” Sheffel’s strong voice addresses mountaintop removal, previous floods, response, recovery, addiction, and the loss of vital historical archives.
The third section, “These Sunken, Unpeopled Streets,” devotes itself to processing tragedy. Bernard Clay and Frank X Walker both commemorate a beloved Isom grocery store destroyed by flooding. Clay’s poem is “elegy for an eastern kentucky grocery.” Walker’s “Elvis” is a tribute to the owner created with references from the legendary singer’s “Kentucky Rain.” In George Ella Lyon’s poem “Don’t Tell Me,” the speaker rejects blaming rain or Troublesome for the disaster. Rather, fault lies with “blowing up mountains for coal” and people “greedy for ease and power who’ll / heat the seas till the whole planet boils.”
Lyon’s poem echoes Leah Hampton. “Why make adversaries of the elements?” Hampton asks as she pulls the camera back for a wider angle in the essay “Absence and Elements, a Prayer.” She hears of the flooding while in Idaho documenting Pacific Northwest wildfires and writes that “the land is not at fault when it burns or drowns us. Ultimately, our misuse of the land and our absence of a social safety net are to blame.” The main character in Savannah Sipple’s “Ain’t No Grave: A Story” provides a safety net when she returns from college to care for her granny. About a queer young woman tied to the mountains yet longing to leave, the story offers a glimpse into a human heart when flooding shatters life plans.
The final section, “There Is Nothing Untouched,” celebrates resilience and post-flood efforts: effort after monumental effort to help people recover, to feed them, to educate outsiders about the needs, to restore the settlement school’s precious archives, to do something as simple as bake a pie. Writers consider who gets saved in disasters and what gets salvaged from the muck. This section is a gift, unwrapped to reveal the writers’ spirits, yearnings, sadness, and hope. Enhanced by Helton’s masterful editorial choices, the images and stories deepen as the pieces progress.
One of the section’s more powerful pieces is Jim Minick’s essay “After the Flood, After the Tornado, and Before the Next.” Author of Without Warning: The Tornado of Udall, Kansas, Minick connects the flood’s devastation with that of the 1955 F5 tornado that destroyed Udall and killed eighty-two people. He tells of Mayor Earl “Toots” Rowe, his determination to rebuild, his successful persistence. Minick asks what stories are we creating “to carry us forward through the great upheaval called the climate crisis?” Stories of hope, he says, require more work than stories of doom. “And this work, based on compassion and justice and focused on what’s good in the moment, might save us.”
Compassion and justice. Can we find them sharing stories on a porch? Can we nurture them as we work to heal and protect? I’ve lived only on the edges of these mountains, but the region’s generous writers have welcomed me on the porch, have taught and encouraged me. I’m filled with gratitude but also a new sorrow because, as I write, the region is again experiencing flooding, death, destruction, and suffering. We all are connected by water. We all must envision a better tomorrow. This anthology—one of the things that’s good in the moment—is an important contribution toward those efforts.
Angie Mimms is a former journalist and holds an MFA from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, Still: The Journal, and The Courier Journal, and is forthcoming in These Mosaics: poems from a yearlong writing challenge.