After America250, 100 Days In Appalachia Is Searching For The Region’s Future With Its Youth

With the nation’s 250th anniversary now behind us, many people are looking towards the country’s future. It will ultimately be shaped by young adults that don’t always have a place at the table.  

100 Days in Appalachia director of video P. Nick Curran and editor in chief Jesse Wright recently sat down with reporter Chris Schulz to discuss their Appalachia250 project. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.    

Schulz: Jesse, in your own words, can you briefly tell me about 100 Days in Appalachia? 

Wright: Well, it’s a digital outlet that is essentially narrating what’s happening in Appalachia for the rest of the country and the world, focused on voices of the people who live here. So we’re a small team that covers the length and breadth of Appalachia, and our output is largely digital on a digital platform at 100daysinappalachia.com 

Schulz: 100 Days in Appalachia, as part of that mission, has taken on this project around the nation’s 250th anniversary. I believe it’s part of a larger project called US@250, do I have that right? 

Wright: We are Appalachia 250 which is part of a bigger project, which is US@250 or us at 250 and it is part of sort of a subset of projects called Dreams for a Shared Future, centering youth voices in what the vision for America looks like as our nation takes this moment to reflect on its 250th anniversary. I think the temptation, when we look that far back at where we come, the question that naturally springs out of that is, what does the future look like? What does the next 250 years look like? 

Schulz: And you don’t have an answer. I mean, you are searching for this answer among the youth of not just West Virginia, but Appalachia more broadly. Nick, you’ve been out, you’ve been collecting some of these interviews. What have you heard so far? 

Curran: Pretty wide variety. In my experience with the project, in particular, there’s a film we’re producing that has right now four participants who we’ve given cameras to, to film their own experiences. And then I’m dropping in periodically to talk with them, catch up, see what they’ve been up to, and film scenes with them in general. We’ve also done a few workshops in Morgantown and in Elkins. The Elkins one was a lot more active, largely because we did it at a youth build program, so it was a lot of the folks we were working with were just there already.  

In the context of like how we’re looking forward in terms of like AI, the future of work, whatnot, a lot of these younger people are very much rejecting – they’re rejecting AI in this really interesting way, and even this digital space. We’ve given them these early 2000s camcorders that are tactile and really fun with power zooms. They react to those in really interesting ways, where they’ll just pick it up and start interviewing each other, like almost like naturally. That’s what’s been really useful to getting like very real, authentic answers from them about like where they are in their lives, and a lot of that oscillates wildly from like, ‘Please get me out of here’ to ‘I’m at school and I need to go to work next’ to we’re working with a musician who’s also like self-funding a tour, so it’s a lot of very different disparate experiences spread across the state. 

Schulz: Nick, you mentioned that desire to leave. We hear that narrative quite a lot. Why did you all feel it was so important to focus on young people for this project? 

Curran: I think it’s like a sort of a sense of agency, or like giving that back to a generation that maybe doesn’t feel like they have it as much as previous generations. That’s what we’re doing with the camera kits that we built out. We made them so that they were as easy to use as possible. They can just pick them up, press play, and they will run for days. They have enough memory, enough storage to last them for weeks and weeks of recording, and every battery goes for days on end.   

Schulz: Given all of the issues that are facing the region, and specifically the brain drain, those are issues that these kids are not in a position to resolve right now themselves. So why did you feel it was so important to focus on their voices with regards to what the future of Appalachia is going to look like? 

Wright: I would say part of it is just because there tends to be low power for young people in Appalachia. I’d say it’s not a West Virginia problem specifically. We see these issues in every Appalachian state. You could even call it a rural issue. I know that some of our friends, like at Daily Yonder, and some of the other outlets that are covering rural spaces, have seen this sort of pattern, where this lack of agency leads to despondency, leads to a lack of investment in the communities around them. They see leaving as the only way. So this returns some agency to them, even in small ways. It’s saying, ‘Here’s a way that you can tell your own story to a larger audience.’ This isn’t being narrated for us by other people, by older people, by people from outside of the region, so it’s really a co-creation.  

We want to bring our expertise, someone like Nick’s ability to bring lots of threads together and form narrative out of material, but we want that material to come from young people, so they see themselves in this shared vision of what this place could look like in the future, that they are invested in what that future can look like in a way that you wouldn’t if you were prescribing a course of action or you were prescribing tools. I mean, even in these small ways, we’re taking their lead in, I wouldn’t say a wholesale rejection of AI, but there is a distaste we’ve seen in technology supplanting tactile things. So that’s why part of our workshops are video and sort of the tactile experience of a non-phone video experience, but also things like zines, making things by hand, putting them together, and distributing them, maybe in a digital way, but the creation is analog, it’s hands on, it’s people sharing space in the same room, communicating in ways that they wouldn’t in online spaces. So that’s kind of why we’ve centered youth voices.  

We’re just getting ready to produce a report out of a previous project called Project Heard that was also focused on listening to young people in places throughout Appalachia. And part of what we’re doing with Appalachia 250 is an outgrowth of what we heard in those sessions, which was we feel like we are being gate kept out of that shared vision that our voices are being, whether it’s intentional or not, being gate kept out of the process of how we discuss the future, that will largely affect Gen Alpha and Gen Z. I’ll be dead and gone, they’ll still be dealing with these issues that we’ve been discussing in terms of economic transition, in terms of environmental cleanup, those kinds of things. So, yeah, absolutely. We’ve always put youth voices through our Generation Zeitgeist vertical at 100 days in Appalachia. Two of the key players of this project, Griffin McMorrow and Kristen Uppercue, are Gen Z, and they Gen Alpha almost, and they, their voices are loud in this project. They’re the ones who are connecting us older folks to the youth who are now getting ready to sort of come out of high school, go into the next stage of their futures. 

Schulz: Have you heard anything concrete about what they see as the future for Appalachia? 

Curran: I think that remains to be seen. We were talking a little bit about this earlier, but a big part of this project on my end is collecting all of the footage that our young participants film themselves. I already have – between what I’ve shot, what Griffin’s shot, and what the participants have shot – we have somewhere around 30 hours of footage. And a lot of that is like some of the younger folks doing like backwoods hunting and fishing, and another participant on a tour across Appalachia and further into the South, and another participant going home to Puerto Rico, and then coming back. So there’s like, there’s so much. I mean, that’s what they say about filmmaking in general, is like you will often find the story in post-production, and that’s where we’re at. I might have a better answer for you in a month or two months. 

Schulz: I’m already hearing the maintenance of the natural resources and the natural beauty seems important, at least to those who are out hunting, fishing. Jesse mentioned ecological cleanup just now. I already see a theme emerging. Nick, what shape is this all going to take? I mean, it sounds like quite a lot of material to sort through. What can our listening public expect to see or hear come out of all of this? 

Curran: Ideally the way that this takes shape is a short film largely made from the perspective of our younger participants. I think we still have one person that we’re still trying to cast, but generally everyone has taken to it really well, with a lot of encouragement, but like off the bat very little encouragement. People just like, they’re just really excited by having these, because the cameras we got are all early digital, they have power zooms, all the buttons are on them, they’re really tactile, they’re functional. You could very easily do this project on your phone, but this is just like a lot more fun, and everyone just responds to it in a really interesting way. 

Schulz: I want to hear a little bit more about that, because as you say, you could have just as easily told these kids, ‘Pick up your phone, here’s an external hard drive, go out and shoot with your phone.’ Why did you make the choice to give them what some might call antiquated technology to complete this assignment? 

Curran: There’s a – this is probably a little nerdy – but there’s a quote from Brian Eno, the musician that I always think about on this project in particular, but with a lot of my work. He’s talking about how with any medium, what you hate about it in the moment often becomes what is romanticized about it 20 years down the line, so if it’s like tape hiss or like the pop and the crackle of a record, the way VHS tape breaks up, whatever. 

Originally we wanted to do this on miniDV tape, but after researching and buying a few, it just wasn’t going to be consistent or reliable enough. So, the next best thing was 2006-ish early digital, so you still get really interesting grain breakup, and it still feels like the early 2000s. All of the things that I hated about it when I first bought this camera that we based it all off, I love now, and everyone else responds to it too. I think there’s also the degree of, like, it’s not connected to the internet, they can’t film something and upload it. They film it, and we’ll look at it, I don’t know, a week to several months later. We’re treating it like film or tape in that regard, where we have to sit with it for a bit, go back, think about it, and then I go back to them and film with them based on what we saw in their footage. 

Schulz: Jesse, I wanted to go back to something that you started us with. You said that an anniversary, especially one of this size, inspires or almost requires the inverse, to look forward, right? There’s kind of an expectation that the hope of the youth will maybe carry us through a moment like this. We don’t really have an idea of what this cohort thinks just yet. It’s going to take a while to work through that, but as someone who has been working with younger people and hearing them for a while now, I just wonder if you, if you’ve gained any insights about not the next 250 years, but maybe the next 25 years, as, as the young people around us see it? 

Wright: I’m also a professor, you know, at West Virginia University at the Reed School of Media and Communications, and you know, I’ve been full time there since 2020 so hearing a lot. I think you’re right in that it’s a little misplaced to say, ‘Okay, well, the hope is with you.’ I really think the hope is in combining, right? We are the ones, and by we, I mean just sort of the full-grown adults, or the people who are in their full earning potential prime years, what have you, the people with the power in our community, in our societies. I think the automatic response from us is to say, ‘Well, we have the answers, we have the experience, and we have the power to sort of change what the future looks like.’ But what we don’t have is a vision for what that future could look like. At least for me, our vision is tied to a past that no longer exists, that a reality that isn’t there anymore. We are preparing students for jobs in the media industry that will not look the same in a year, five years, 10 years, 25 years. Younger people, while they don’t have the power yet, what they have is the vision.  

What I’ve seen is some really good solutions. We have sort of a mantra in our newsroom, which is ‘I’ve seen a vision of the future, and it looks like Appalachia.’ So, I’m originally from South Africa. I see this attitude in my fellow countrymen post-apartheid in South Africa. There’s this idea that you do for yourselves, which I see in West Virginia and Appalachia writ large, but I really see it with young people – they’re going to DIY their way through some very difficult situations. That’s not great. I wish it was otherwise, but there’s lessons to be learned in that, in resilience, in mutual aid. We’ve done some pieces- Nick did a great documentary about the homegrown and mutual aid response to flooding in southern West Virginia, it’s just one example of that. That was largely led by younger voices. These are not the people who had the levers of power in their hands. These are people who pried them from those people who had the control to say, “We need to deal with this situation ourselves. No one’s coming to save us.” So in that vision, to sort of extrapolate that out to the country or to the region, we find our solutions here.  

Those solutions can be very useful to people in other parts of the country and other parts of the world. There’s things to learn from each other, just like there are things to learn from each generation. So, by centering those voices, by pulling the material from people themselves without us as an intermediary in terms of guiding those conversations with each other, just capturing them, and then stepping in a key moment to tie that together, we can sort of translate what that vision looks like, put it into practice for a shared solutions based philosophy or set of tools could look like for the future. I’m not going to say we’re going to solve everything, right? We’re not going to say, ‘Okay, this is the only way,’ but it is a part, and I think what we miss, especially in media and in media training, is the power of that vision that young people, they can imagine a future based on their short history of what it, what that technology is going to involve, what jobs might look like in a new environment, much better than I can. 

Schulz: Is there anything else that I haven’t given you a chance to discuss with me, or something that we did touch on that you’d like to highlight at this time? Jesse, we’ll start with you. 

Wright: You asked the question of what our audience could expect, and I think one thing that they can see right now is our social media feed. You know, we are a digital team, but a lot of the output and a lot of the interaction that we’re having with that youth space is happening already. We’ve made several calls for submission, so your audience might subscribe to our newsletter, and you’ll see those specific requests answering a prompt. That’s kind of our role, is to create the space for people to think about what a future could look like, but also reflect on the past. We’ve had some great prompts, like what is the oldest thing in your community? We’ve received some great submissions, you know, just with an open-ended question to see what people come up with.  

We’re also going to be holding some more workshops. We’ve got a couple community workshops on the horizon, so just listen out for those. We’ll have a big event, culminating event in October at WVU. We’re calling it a hackathon, but it’s really just sort of a way to brainstorm our way through the material that we’ve captured, highlight some of the art that is created, some of the projects that are created. We’re also in collaboration with YNST Magazine to produce a limited-edition zine collection in collaboration with our young folks, and as an outgrowth of these workshops. And we’ll post and have posted about that on Instagram, but there’s still plenty of opportunities for people to participate, especially the young people in your lives, but we’re taking submissions across the board. Just keep an eye out for those calls, and please, the more material, the stronger this project will be.  

My goal here is to take as much of it and create an archive out of it, so that’s accessible for future generations. These conversations that we’re having, some of the material that’s being produced, you know, almost create some time capsules out of this, so that the next 250 years anniversary, we can take a look back and say, ‘Well, what were people thinking about back then?’ 

Curran: Well, and even beyond digital archive, the physical archive that we’ll be building with all of the physical media that we create, because I think, like, almost at the end of the project, this is as much a reaction to, like, the algorithm and generative work as it is anything else. Reclaiming seems silly, because we’re only a decade into having iPhones, but, like, this hyper-digitalized culture and art is just, yeah, reclaiming, physical art and physical media, and just how much fun it is to make art with your friends. 

Schulz: Any questions for me or closing thoughts? 

Wright: Just that the work has started, it’s ongoing, and we’ve still got quite a bit to go, so you know the goal here is to really inject Appalachia’s voice into this moment of reflection in our country’s shared history. Appalachia has been a part of building this country, it can certainly be a part of its future. 

Schulz: Nick, any closing thoughts or questions? 

Curran: I knew going into this that we were going to amass a considerable archive of footage, but yesterday was my first time actually sitting down and scrubbing through it for a full day, and it was overwhelming and shocking, but also really exciting, because the stories are all there. Like you said, like even in how I was describing it earlier, you were able to identify themes, so I’m just excited to keep working with the folks we’re working with and finish this film over the next few months.