No one in this piece lives in Appalachia. We’ve left to seek our fortunes elsewhere, at least for now. Caught between the hazy past of childhood and the solidity of middle age, we exist now in a third place — perpetually caught in the memory space between steel buildings and the hills where we grew up.
Those green, rolling mountains are the first visual to greet the viewer in the first installment of the three-part film series 301 Stories, written and directed by Ethan Romaine. The cinematic triptych follows a group of friends during their final summer as kids — that sweet and sweaty period between high school graduation and freshman fall.
A simple premise, sure. But the magic is in the details.
“I wanted each scene, place and moment to feel uniquely Appalachian,” said Ethan. “Something a little more nuanced than how so much of the media represents the region.”
You won’t find the classic poverty porn imagery of trailer parks and discarded needles in 301 Stories. But if you’re from Appalachia, I think you will find visuals and characters that feel distinctly familiar and refreshingly authentic. The wood-paneled walls of a diner where the affable and elderly proprietors serve chocolate coke to locals late into the night. A bonfire party in the middle of nowhere, complete with truck bed hook-ups and (probably) illegal fireworks. In the first installment of the series, titled “Lover’s Leap,” friends float contentedly down the Potomac River, gazing up at the Allegheny Mountains from their inner tubes. (The group’s peaceful day is later broken by an unfortunate scrotal injury, which, even more unfortunately, was based on the filmmaker’s personal experience.)
Film still from Ethan Romaine’s series “Lover’s Leap”
The project was inspired by Ethan’s teenage years in Frostburg, MD. After graduating high school, he left for New York City to pursue his filmmaking dreams at New York University. But when it came time to create his senior thesis film, Ethan found his inspiration not in the bustling city streets but in the winding roads of his hometown.
This is an irony that many artists from Appalachia encounter. Many of us grow up dreaming of getting out of our sleepy towns and heading towards the bright lights and endless opportunities of the proverbial “big city.” And yet, once we get the distance from home that we’d always craved, we often find ourselves re-evaluating our relationship with Appalachia, especially when it comes time to step away and try to put pen to paper.
This, I think, is the third place. In popular culture, “third places” refer to places in a community where people can gather freely — cafes, libraries, local bars, parks, etc. A third place can be anywhere that isn’t your home or your workplace. But I mean something different. The third place, for the artist, is the space between the former and the future self. The place the mind goes when we create, where we draw from the pain and pleasure of the past and use it to reach toward an unknown future. The third place is where the most beautiful and most truthful creations come from.
“When I was younger, I had a bit of resentment towards Appalachia,” explained Grace Lewis, a poet and storyteller from Tennessee now based in Seattle. “I felt frustrated with the conservative politics and religion. I just wanted to distance myself. Like, ‘That’s not who I am.’”
But once Grace had moved out west after graduation from East Tennessee State University, she found herself getting defensive in conversations with liberal Pacific Northwesterners. “I’ll say I’m from Tennessee, and I’ll kind of get this sigh. ‘That must have been so hard.’ When you start to encounter people’s assumptions about the place where you’re from, it starts to make you feel a little protective.”
Grace is a progressive who was as frustrated as anyone with the deep-red politics of her home state, but the complaints she’d voiced her whole life sounded a lot harsher coming from people who had no real relationship with Tennessee. “It made me more aware of how important my Appalachian heritage is to me.”
Since moving to Seattle, Grace has been re-evaluating her relationship with her old home through her poetry, which she shares on her Instagram account Third Place Creative. It’s a fitting name. Between her new life in Seattle and her old life in Tennessee, she has created a third space — one of memory, nostalgia and healing. Her poems often explore images from her childhood, stooping in shallow creek beds to search for crawdads or listening to her grandfather’s drawl as he told the same family stories again and again.
In one piece, titled “Prize of Summer,” Grace writes, “That child grown in the rocks of the river, / still lives inside me, /and yearns for a proper holler.”
The nostalgia born of a bucolic mountain childhood is also woven into the music of Jake Guthrie’s New York City-based folk music duo The Holler. He formed the group with his friend and fellow West Virginian Casey Johnson in 2023, and they’ve been spreading their fond memories of childhoods spent in Appalachia at gigs across the city ever since.
It’s funny. Once you move to a concrete jungle, you start to appreciate the natural beauty of the place you’ve left behind a whole lot more. Jake’s first lyrics for the group struck him like lightning one day while he was walking near Central Park. Suddenly, a great swell of gratitude for the place he’d come from bubbled up and came spilling out in verses. “I just kept saying ‘Thank you. Thank you, God, for the color green!’”
Those words, scribbled on a park bench, became the duo’s first song “The Color Green,” which will also be the name of their upcoming debut album, slated for release this fall.
“I feel that there is a sense of spirituality that the mountains have that is pretty undeniable,” explained Jake. “The experience so far is that the music brings the spiritual experience of the mountains, not only to us, but to everybody, no matter where they come from.”
This reverence for the mountains shows up often in The Holler’s songs. In the track “Mourning Dove,” Jake writes, “My heart likes to be among the mountains all around / They used to make me feel so small, late at night I hear them call / But if I went back now, I’m not sure it’d be the same / Different me but same terrain…”
Those words strike a chord. As a teenager, I couldn’t picture building the life I wanted in my home state. I longed to evolve, to change, to become a more cultured and cosmopolitan person. Moving far away from family and friends to a place completely different from the one you grew up really can accelerate you on the path toward adulthood. It’s a romantic idea — that a city can change you. But it’s also true.
Of course, there are also very practical career reasons to leave Appalachia, especially if you aspire to make a living in the arts. As several of the people I talked to for this piece explained, it’s easier to find opportunities and grow a network in big centers of culture like New York and Los Angeles.
That’s why Morgan Widmer — another West Virginia native — traveled across the pond to pursue her MFA at London College of Fashion. Like the rest of us, Morgan couldn’t wait to leave Appalachia in the dust. As an aspiring designer, she’d struggled to find inspiration and opportunities during her time as an undergraduate at West Virginia University.
“No one in Morgantown was wearing anything cool,” she joked. “It was really hard to be inspired by art or fashion there because it just didn’t feel like there was any of it around. Then I came to London, and there was so much to be inspired by. It kind of felt like I was running away from West Virginia.”
Yet when it came time to craft her first big collection as a graduate student, Morgan couldn’t stop thinking about the place she’d been all too happy to leave in the rearview mirror. She’d written off the clothing she saw people wearing every day in Appalachia as uninspired. But once she was thousands of miles away, she found herself drawn right back into the aesthetic of her youth. “I always kept coming back to referencing West Virginia,” she said. “It was annoying me at first, but it just kept happening naturally. So I’m like, ‘I gotta run with this.’”
Out of this creative exercise sprung Morgan’s new collection “Welcome to Morgania.” She’s invented a third place of her own — somewhere in between her Appalachian roots and her new life in the United Kingdom. “It’s a world that you can escape to and be anything you want. And it contains all the things I love,” she explained.
The collection’s pieces are all about juxtaposition: utility and impractical extravagance, masculinity and femininity, snakeskin and polka dots, thrift shop and couture. During the design process, Widmer referenced everyday pieces she used to see West Virginians wearing all the time — wife beater tank tops, well-worn motorcycle jackets and bright orange hunting attire. She even had a “dress up” session with her grandmother and cousins, bringing them sample pieces from the in-progress collection and asking them to try styling them with pieces from their own closets.
The result? A collection of pieces that feel rebellious, playful and, best of all, wholly unique. Morgan showcased Welcome to Morgania as part of London Fashion Week this February and hopes to build off the work she’s already done to continue to shape her label.
Morgan’s work — and the work of all the artists I talked to above — embodies the strange experience of leaving Appalachia behind. So many of us harbored fantasies of big-city living. Oh, the people we would meet! The cuisine we would try! The shops and museums we would explore! But as great as all of that is… you can’t help but miss the simple pleasures. Sleepy summer afternoons on the porch, watching young white-tail deer wander in and out of the backyard. Driving narrow back roads with the windows down and music blasting. The endless inky sky dotted with stars, unobscured by light pollution. As Joni Mitchell aptly put, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?”
But, fortunately for us, Appalachia isn’t gone — it’s just a little further away.
We can go back, even if only for a short while. Jake Guthrie told me he is looking forward to The Holler’s upcoming tour across West Virginia this spring. He and Casey plan to share their music “with the people we wrote it for” in the places that inspired the songs.
After Ethan Romaine wrapped 301 Stories, he took the cast and crew back to Frostburg, MD, to premiere the film series in his hometown among the people who’d inspired it. “It was just one of the best nights ever,” he said. “I had all these actors from New York, and they would be like, ‘This is like the coolest town.’”
Ethan told me he’s been happy to see that in the years since he moved away, his hometown’s art scene has grown. “There’s always been creative people, but it just feels like there really is a bit of a stronger movement now,” he explained. “Like, this area could continue to grow creatively and build these art scenes. It feels like there’s more and more people staying in my hometown and doing really cool things.”
For now, Ethan plans on staying in New York, but getting back to Frostburg as often as possible. He continues to look for ways to put Appalachia on screen and to work with people from the region on new projects. Ethan wants his work to provide the kind of nuanced portrayals of his home and his people that hardly ever exist in mainstream cinema. Since his 301 Stories series, he’s completed a short documentary called Mountain Punk Arts about a non-profit based in Maryland that promotes punk rock in Appalachia. Last November, it won the top award at the Mountain Maryland Film Festival. Someday, Ethan wants to make a feature-length narrative film (set in Appalachia, of course).
Until then, he — and all of us — will continue to find meaning and inspiration in that third place between the places we left behind and the places we find ourselves now.
Morgania photo credits » Photography: Morgan Layla Williams; Models: Bel Hewin (Genesis model management), Emily Stanton (Blue Agency London): Makeup: Hannah Yang; Styling assistance: Sharon Maks
