Liz Carey: 

That idea of this big, huge monster-type thing coming out of the swamps and I think we all have this thing in us that wants to believe that there are things that we don’t know about out there. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Well, Liz Carey, it’s so good to have you here on Everywhere Radio. 

Liz Carey: 

It’s great to be here. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Thanks for saying yes. How are you today? 

Liz Carey: 

It’s chilly out in Kentucky, so walking the dog in 36-degree weather was like, “Oh.” And we were just complaining about the heat not too long ago, right? 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Yeah. That sounds wonderful. The weather has changed here too, in East Tennessee, and I’m looking out my window right now and the leaves are orange and red and they’re really turning. I love the fall. 

Liz Carey: 

Yeah. It’s my favorite season. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

And where are you calling from today? 

Liz Carey: 

I’m calling from Lexington, Kentucky. So I’m originally from Versailles, which is about a half an hour away from here, my family is from Ashland and Louisa. Both of those are in Eastern Kentucky. Louisa’s just a little town way out in the middle of nowhere. My dad grew up on the first split-level farm, so it’s the farm with the split-level barn, supposedly the first split-level barn in Kentucky. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s what everybody says. So family histories in the South tend to be a little exaggerated. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Well, speaking of exaggerations, part of the reason I was really excited to have you on the podcast was to talk about your new book, Rural Monsters, Myths and Legends, but also, I wanted to talk to you about the other exaggerations of our lives and how we find our roots and where we plant ourselves and I know you’re, like you said, you’re in Lexington, Central Kentucky, and before we talk about your book, I wanted to make sure our listeners know about you a little bit more so they can have a greater appreciation of this work. So I wondered if you would tell me a little bit more about how you came to be a writer and how your connection to Kentucky and your family and those exaggerated tales maybe have influenced your career so far. 

Liz Carey: 

Right. So I grew up in Versailles, Kentucky. It’s a small town. There’s probably only 20,000 people there. It’s about a half hour outside of Lexington, so it’s metro-near, but it’s all horse farms and everybody knowing what everybody else is doing. There was a guy that I went out with my senior year in high school that was not exactly a fine, upstanding young man, and it’s such a small town that my mom knew that I was on a date with him before I got home. So that’s kind of the small town mentality that I grew up with. 

Liz Carey: 

My dad was the director for the emergency department at the University of Kentucky, but he also ran the emergency room at Woodford Memorial, back then it was Woodford Memorial, which was our local hospital, and he would routinely have people come to our house or he would go to people’s houses to take care of them. It was a much different kind of mentality. And so that was sort of a part of our fabric. 

Liz Carey: 

But I think the important part was, here we came from these communities, my mom and dad came from these communities in Eastern Kentucky and every holiday, all of us would sit around the table after dinner was over, especially all of the women, and we would start talking and telling stories and giving those family histories and all of the women in our family talked about politics, and you really had to know what you were talking about or people would just totally shoot you down. My grandmother was very involved in politics. She was very involved in the Methodist church. When she was like 75 years old, they said, “Ms. Carey, what would you do if you weren’t a Methodist and a Democrat?” And she said, “Well, I’d be damned ashamed of myself.” 

Liz Carey: 

So that’s kind of the mentality that I grew up with. And we always told those stories and those tall tales about one of my great, great, great grandfathers, his mother, basically, when she was 19 years old, had an affair with the married farmer next door to her and when she got pregnant, she had the child and he was raised by his dad. So his mom moved with her dad to Kentucky, they established a farm, and then she went back to Virginia, kidnapped him and brought him back to Kentucky. He went on to become a Kentucky state legislator, Sinclair Roberts, and he won two terms, he lost his third term because he was not in favor of cousins being allowed to marry, and back in the 1800s in Kentucky, that was a big deal. 

Liz Carey: 

So these are the types of stories that we sat around and told at the dinner table and talked about all of the things that were going on in our families, which I think a lot of rural communities do and a lot of people in the South do, and that sort of peppered the way that I write and the influences that I had in getting into writing. 

Liz Carey: 

I spent 20 plus years as a reporter, and for the past seven years, I’ve been freelancing. I write for the Daily Yonder and I do their rural health, one of the rural health reporters. So I like to joke, I’ve said this jokingly a couple of times and people think that I’m serious, but clearly, as a rural health reporter, I’ve had nothing to write about for the past two and a half years, right? 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Yeah. Well, I do want to talk some more about your role as a rural health reporter for the Daily Yonder, but I want to go back to the dinner table, I guess, and I want to know a little bit more about why you were so intrigued by those conversations, how politics was viewed in your family, what were you all debating and talking about most around that dinner table? 

Liz Carey: 

Well, I’m going to answer that question by telling you a story. 

Liz Carey: 

So my grandmother, when she was 19 years old, she started teaching in a one-room schoolhouse, and she taught grades 1 through 8. So she was born in 1898. So by the time she got to being marriage age is about the same time that we were talking about… 

Liz Carey: 

Change is about the same time that we were talking about the women’s right to vote. And she was really big in the women’s right to vote. It was really, really important to her to be able to have that voice. So she used to tell this story about all these men who were so anti women’s right to vote. And there’s this one guy, he’s walking along this trail and there’s this big log, this hollowed out log, and starts to rain. So he crawls into the log to get out from the rain. But when it stops raining, he realizes he’s kind of stuck. 

Liz Carey: 

So he is sitting there trying to figure out how to get out of this situation, and two women come and they sit down on the log and they start telling their stories about how it’s unfair that they don’t have a voice in politics, and that all of this is taken away from them. They don’t have the same rights as men and they don’t have the same rights to own property. They don’t have any voice at all whatsoever. And then she said by the time they were finished talking, that man was felt so small, he was able to crawl right out through those knotholes. 

Liz Carey: 

When she got to the point where she was going to get married, she made her husband take her to Washington, DC for the suffragette marches for their honeymoon. So, that’s where all of our politics comes from. I mean, it was really unusual in our family. I understand most of the time women are sitting around the table talking about recipes and they’re talking about dresses and they’re talking about, I guess, the Kardashians now. I don’t know. But we all sat around and all of the women talked about politics and who was doing what and what policies needed to be changed. 

Liz Carey: 

And we were always figuring out how to make our world a better place. Yeah. So we’re used to getting out and telling stories and talking and being a part of the community and really getting involved with all of the stuff that’s going on. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

As you’re reporting for the Daily Yonder about rural health issues. They’re kind of single stories that we know about Rural America and rural health issues in particular that often it’s said rural people are older, sicker, have less access to services, that rural in general is on the decline and rural people are declining as well. There’s the opioid crisis and that often turns into a single story. But your storytelling and your ability to listen for nuance, I think comes through in your reporting. And I wonder if, as you’re talking about these rural health issues, how do you make sure that you are telling more than just a single story, but that you’re adding some nuance and complexity? 

Liz Carey: 

That’s a good question. I think that because of the fact that I’ve been doing it for so long, that it’s we’re able to pull out and suss out some of those details. I was just talking to someone the other day about their diabetes issues, and diabetes is a big deal in rural communities. She and I were talking and she’s like, “Well, I live in South Carolina and it’s almost impossible to get on Medicare and Medicaid in South Carolina unless you have you’re living with your children’s father.” She and her husband were disabled and unemployed, couldn’t get on Medicare, both of them had diabetes. 

Liz Carey: 

They’re working these little Zaxby’s jobs, the fast food restaurants and stuff like that, trying to make a living. And she was like, I was able to get with the pharmaceutical company to get the drugs. It wasn’t the drugs that was the problem. It was the test strips. She was going to flea markets and thrift stores to get test strips, and oftentimes those test strips are expired. So the results that they were getting were not accurate results in terms of her husband’s A1C. So I think being able to talk to people and get them to tell you more about what’s going on in their particular situation helps to give a better understanding of where people are, where they’re at. 

Liz Carey: 

I think a lot of people in urban areas just cannot comprehend what it’s like to have to drive 45 minutes to an hour to get to a grocery store or to get to a doctor’s office or to go to a pharmacy. And they don’t understand the implications of that because it’s a cost issue. It’s a time issue. It’s a labor issue. It’s an access issue. It’s not just, oh yeah, I got to drive 45 minutes to go to the grocery store. It’s I got to have gas and I got to have time off work. I got to have a car. I got to have somebody to watch my kids. There’s so many more things that are involved instead of just, yeah, I’m going to hop in the car and go to the grocery store. 

Liz Carey: 

So I think understanding all of those different nuances helps me to be able to not only suss out all of that information from rural residents, because I can relate to them on their terms. I can meet them on their level. What’s the old term, the phrase? People don’t care about what you know until they know that you care. And so I think when we prove to them that we understand where they are and what they’re dealing with, they’re more willing to talk to us about their issues. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

You have a lot of those examples and interviews in your articles, everything from the one you just described to, I was reading up on some of your older pieces, one of them about cryptocurrency mining in small towns. Were there any stories that you covered or looked at during the pandemic that you’ll carry with you or that seemed emblematic of the moment that we were in during those two years? 

Liz Carey: 

Yeah. There were a couple. One was about a 26, 27-year-old guy, who because of the isolation it exacerbated his mental health. And because of the fact that he lived in a rural area, he wasn’t able to get the mental health that he needed and ultimately ended up committing suicide. And when I was talking to people about that, almost every behavioral health person that I talked to said there is tsunami of mental health issues coming our way, and we’re not going to see- 

Liz Carey: 

… tsunami of mental health issues coming our way, and we’re not going to see it until probably two years after the pandemic’s over. I think we’re seeing that now. You know how a tsunami, you see the water sort of pull away, and then it just comes back? I think we’re seeing that pulling away. There’s so much going on out there. There’s so many people who are struggling, and I think some of the good parts were all of the efforts that these small towns did to increase vaccinations. We did a lot of stories on the vaccine efforts that people had in their small towns, and I thought that was really, really great. There was a lot of things that I learned that I didn’t know about before. All of the people who come from Canada to go to New Mexico and Arizona, or Washington State to get to these warmer weathers. Then all of the migration that comes across from Mexico into Arizona and New Mexico to take care of agricultural things. There’s a lot of immigration that people like. 

Liz Carey: 

There was a lot of things that I learned about substance abuse. I remember one behavioral health person telling me that when you’re dealing with drug issues in small towns, you have to remember you’re not as likely to go to a pharmacist and say, “I need these medically-assisted drug treatments”, because that pharmacist may sit next to you in church. So, there are some challenges in rural communities with drug treatment that I don’t think that urban communities have to worry about. Yeah, those were some of the things that I learned that I was just floored by, but at the same time, seeing the innovations, and the way that people attacked problems, and the way that communities came together to create solutions in just an impossible time. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

I wonder when you think about rural America’s future, and especially rural America’s role in democracy right now, because so much of what we talk about these days is how are we going to maintain or save our democracy, I wonder if you think about, is there a role for these rural communities in this moment? Do you think about that a lot as you do this reporting and writing? 

Liz Carey: 

Yeah, there’s a hope that we can keep rural children in rural communities to make sure that those communities survive, and it’s not just the older, sicker, poorer. I think during the pandemic we did see a lot of people fleeing to rural areas. Now, whether or not they’re going to stay, we’ll have to see. I think a lot of it depends on whether or not we can get those broadband connections up, whether we can make sure that the infrastructure within rural communities is on the same par as it is in urban communities. I think that if we can fix those broadband issues, that we have a lot of opportunity to keep younger people in rural areas, and they are changing the flavor of rural areas. 

Liz Carey: 

They’re much more likely to not have a stigma against mental health issues. They’re much more open to the diversity that actually is in rural communities that we don’t really associate with rural communities. Everybody thinks that rural communities are predominantly old white hillbillies, or old white country folk, but that’s not really the case. There’s a lot of diversity that’s out there, and I think as we keep the younger kids in rural communities, we’ll be able to see a lot more of that diversity and acceptance of diversity. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Well, I want to make sure that we talk a little bit about your book, Monsters, Myths and Legends. It’s funny, when I was thinking about it, I was guessing we might actually talk about some real monsters, some myths that we have about rural, and some legends, but I think the book is more about true monsters and tall tales, not so much about some of those dire issues that we were just talking about. Is that the case? 

Liz Carey: 

Right. Yeah. Like I said, I was working on all of these COVID issues, and getting press releases every day that… COVID, COVID, COVID. I was just like, “Oh my God. I’m going to pull my hair out. This is just too much.” But then I got this one press release that there was a crew from Expedition Bigfoot that was going to be in Kentucky, and I was like, “Why the heck would anybody be looking for bigfoot in Kentucky?” It turns out they went into southeastern Kentucky, and were looking around, and I was like, “Well, y’all have got to let me write about this.” 

Liz Carey: 

So, it was just talking to the scientists and about all the stuff that they found, and all these bigfoot legends, and I just wasn’t expecting anybody to pay any attention to it. But then all of a sudden, everybody is looking at this story and we’re like, “Hmm. There’s a lot of rural legends out there.” Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but we don’t get a lot of cryptids in Chicago. It’s mostly in rural areas. So, we were looking at Mothman in Point Pleasant, and the Flatwoods Monster in West Virginia, and we just started looking at all of these different things, and it was one a month. We kept looking at all of these cryptids, and legends, and people just loved them. I was like, “Okay.” So, October of last year, we put together one big huge piece. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Why is that? Why do you think that is? 

Liz Carey: 

I think that people- 

Liz Carey: 

Big, huge. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Why is that? Why do you think that is? 

Liz Carey: 

I think that people want to know about the unknown or things that are not, I don’t know. I think we all have this thing in us that wants to believe that there are things that we don’t know about out there. And there’s always, I don’t know, if you’ve ever been out in the middle of nowhere at night and every creak of a branch or whatever sounds like a serial killer about ready to jump into your house. 

Liz Carey: 

You want to think that these are things that are out there. I remember when I was, one of the first chapters of the book is about the legend of Boggy Creek. That was a movie that came out when I was 10 probably. And I remember my cousins coming to see it with me. And it scared the living bajeebies out of me. I’ve never had anything scare me that much. And that idea of this big huge monster type thing coming out of the swamps and coming after people, I think it just struck a chord with me. I’ve always been interested in Bigfoot and all of those other things. So to be able to write this was just wonderful. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

How did you source these legends, myths? How did you find these stories? 

Liz Carey: 

See that picture right there? So that is a map that has the most popular rural myths and legends all across the country. So the lizard man in South Carolina that we didn’t do anything about, because I know for a fact it’s a hoax. Cattle mutilations in Washington, the Dark Watchers in California. There were all of these things. And then we collaborated together, Jan and one of the editors of the Daily Yonder and I and a couple other people got together and we came up with this list of things that we wanted to look into. And since I’m from Kentucky, there was an alien landing supposedly in Kelly, Kentucky, which was where the term little green men came from. 

Liz Carey: 

Moth Man is not that far away from here. As a matter of fact, I just went to the Mothman Festival a couple of weekends ago. And I think that was the other thing that was so intriguing to us because it’s not just that there are these rural myths and legends. Some of them, they have become tourist draws. Mothman Festival and Mothman himself brings in probably 25,000 people into Point Pleasant, West Virginia every year. That’s huge for some place like Point Pleasant, and they’ve used it to really fund museums. They’ve used it to fund this gorgeous waterfront amphitheater along the river there. There’s a guy on the shores of Lake Pepin that is offering a $50,000 award if anybody can come up with DNA from Pepie, the Lake Pepin Sea Monster. And I think people want to believe in those things. And I think- 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Oh my gosh. So you’re saying this is an economic development strategy? 

Liz Carey: 

Yeah. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Sorry. So this is an economic development strategy for rural places too. If we could all just come up with our, what is the legend that binds us, links us together, and then celebrate it. Well, and Halloween is right around the corner. Is there a particular story in this collection that you feel is fairly spooky and good for this season? 

Liz Carey: 

I’m trying to think. Bunny Man in Virginia, and this is Bunny Man, is this guy, and this is actually a real story. It’s a guy who dressed up in a bunny suit and threatened people with an ax. It only happened twice, but then it turned into a legend that people were like, “Oh yeah, he’s killing children and he is eating rabbits.” And all this other stuff. But again, it’s turned into this almost economic development thing in that so many people come to hang out at this place called Bunny Man Bridge, where he is supposed to have lived, that police have to cut off all of the access to that bridge during Halloween because they’re afraid that people are going to get run over or get hurt or whatever, just based on this rural legend. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

That’s fascinating. All right, so folks can get this book. It’s out now. I saw it on Amazon for Kindle. And is it elsewhere? Can we pick it up elsewhere? 

Liz Carey: 

We’re working right now to do a print on demand. We’re working on getting the audio book taken care of. You can get the ebook through the Daily Yonder, and it’s on almost all of the major ebook distribution channels. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Oh, that’s exciting. So Rural Monsters, Myths and legends. 

Liz Carey: 

Right. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

I always ask my guests, what are you reading right now? Or watching or listening to that is either inspiring you or challenging you or something you’d want to share with the rest of our listeners? 

Liz Carey: 

Well, it’s Halloween, so I started reading Steven King’s Night Shift again. I just put down the Splendid and the Vile to read that. And I’m currently addicted to Cobra Kai. I don’t know why, but I guess it’s because of all the eighties stuff. And then every day, I’m reading tons of press releases about just great things that are happening in rural communities. So it’s inspiring to go out and tell those stories. 

Whitney Kimball Coe: 

Well, thank you so much for being on today and for your good work with The Daily Yonder, and I’m excited that this book is out and I encourage everybody to look for it. Rural Monsters, Myths and Legends by Liz Carey. Thank you Liz for being here. 

Liz Carey: 

Thank you. Thank you so much.