There is no foreign land. It is the traveler only that is foreign.”

Robert Louis Stevenson



I often refer to the town that I grew up in as Little Appalachia. With many of the same core characteristics and family values as Appalachia proper, our urban hillbilly town, perched on the fringe of two mammoth boroughs of New York, was a reminder that hillbilly runs deeper than sidewalks and blacktop. As far as I knew, my own family was only one generation out of the poor Pennsylvania backwaters of the Little Conemaugh River and abandoned farm towns of Delhi, with a diaspora to nowhere. The same held true for our neighbors, most who were also first generation New Yorkers.


Although this place only existed for a short moment in time, and has since disappeared, this was our world and the place we called home.