Episode 138: The Hills Are Alive With Nathan Isaac

“Graveyard Apples.” Watercolor on textured paper.

Storytelling is integral to Applachian culture. Long ago, even after radio and television was invented, folks out in the hills and hollers didn’t necessarily have access to those technologies, so they’d cultivate the ability to tell a good story. Stories could be made up, from folklore, from history, from local mythology, but the favorite ones were the ones that were passed from generation to generation within a family, and were “true.”

Those stories were the best, and even after our family had radios and televestions, we still told stories when we got together and visited, We told old stories, new stories, funny stories, sad stories, silly stories and creepy stories.

Nathan Isaac grew up in the same sort of Appalachian storytelling milieu that I did, so we had a lot of fun comparing and contrasting the weirdness of our respective childhoods. Nathan mines his childhood for threads to follow in researhing his wonderful Pennyroyal Podcast; I use mine to inform my own research into weird topics.

Nathan and I had a great time talking together, and we hope you have a good time listening.