What aspects of your cultural heritage are you most proud of or interested in?
“American” has always felt too broad to me, too empty of texture. It is not a culture. My heritage is not a flag—it’s a table, a song, a mountain, a myth. I am shaped by places, not abstractions: the bayous and rice fields of Louisiana, the ridgelines and hollers of Appalachia, the coal towns and winding rivers of West Virginia.
From Louisiana, I carry the blood and memory of the first Cajuns, exiled from Acadia and replanted in southern soil. That history lingers in our food, where rice is not just a staple but a foundation—gumbo, jambalaya, étouffée. Food there is more than sustenance; it is survival and celebration, a way of binding family and neighbors together through storms and scarcity. When I eat those meals, I feel the endurance of a people who turned displacement into belonging.
From Appalachia, I carry a different inheritance. Rugged, yes, but also collective—a strange paradox where fierce individuality thrives alongside deep communal bonds. The land itself writes its character on you: mountains that both shelter and hem you in, valleys that keep secrets, stories told by firelight to make sense of a hard world. West Virginia sharpened this in me, gave me a cadence that is half lament and half hymn, an instinct to distrust power but cling to people. The folklore—tales of ghosts, witches, and strange creatures—was never just entertainment. It was wisdom wrapped in story, warnings and longings made bearable through myth.
These two roots—Cajun and Appalachian—may seem far apart, but together they’ve given me a reverence for story, song, and survival. They’ve taught me that heritage is not pride in the abstract, but in the ordinary: in food passed down through generations, in the music that carries both sorrow and joy, in the myths that remind us we are never the first to struggle.
That inheritance shapes my writing, too. The Gothic weight of loss, the poetry of landscapes, the whisper of myth—they all trace back to Cajun resilience and Appalachian imagination. When I write of Ireland, or of exile, or of haunted places, I am carrying forward the voices of my own people, translating their endurance into stories that I hope reach beyond me. My heritage does not just live in my blood; it lives in every word I put to page.
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