You, From Below – Em J Parsley

[Split Lip Press; 2025]

Appalachia is misunderstood. Writers have tried to capture its essence, often resorting to caricature. But some get it right. On the page, they show Appalachia in all its mystique and glory. The elegiac verses of rural Ohio life in James Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break. The tale of Jayber, a small town barber, wrestling with faith in Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow. Or the rugged realism of Breece D’J Pancake. They all share an understanding of Appalachia and its literature: the reverence for nature, a strong sense of community and, of course, oral storytelling. Em J. Parsley’s You, From Below, is rooted in this tradition.

Parsley, a novelist and poet, lives in rural Kentucky. They are also a farmer and environmental advocate for Appalachia. Like Wendell Berry, Parsley shows their devotion to the natural world through activism and writing.

Told in the second person, the novel follows “You” as they climb a mountain. Their hometown, Mission, has sunken into the earth. “You’re in shock,” writes Parsley. “There’s no other explanation for a person who watches their home get swallowed whole, then finishes their lunch, wipes the dust off their glasses, and begins to climb a mountain.” You can expect plenty of this glib, unblinking candor throughout. We follow the narrator on the mountain. Why? Because we’re ensorcelled by the storyteller’s voice. They have a letter in their pocket that needs to be delivered. To whom, they don’t know. Neither did I on a first read, but that didn’t stop me. You’d think it would, in a book that begins with total destruction. Where’s the Appalachian land, you might ask. In You, From Below, it’s gone. At least, most of it. In true oral tradition, Parsley spins a yarn out of climate change anxiety. You, From Below isn’t your standard cli-fi, though. Here, ecological disaster serves more as a heady, contemplative atmosphere. The real drama is within the narrator, grappling with their own past and the home that’s now missing.

“Rise and fall. Rapture and decay,” is both a refrain and a poetic summary. It’s said throughout the novel with the hypnotic effect one wants from lyrical prose. At only fifty pages, You, From Below is epic in scope. In each brief, episodic chapter, the narrator meets a new character, strangers as disparate as a beekeeper and a man, half-man, half-vulture. Each teaches the protagonist some lesson, most of which are about kindness. In lesser hands, You, From Below would be a moralizing story. Instead, Parsley has written an eco fable that’s deeply contemporary.

Parsley’s language, lyrical and exact, details gruesome scenes from this post-disaster Appalachia. In Chapter V, “The Landslide,” the last living woman in an empty town says:

Sometimes, she would see the townsfolk and there would be a moment, just a moment, where their faces would turn gaunt and she was sure that she had seen a beetle crawl into an empty eye socket. A child washed some mud off their hands in the river, and when they rubbed their palm, the skin peeled away, translucent white and waterlogged.

While the second person voice has a tendency to sound accusatory or, at worst, tedious, Parsley’s use of it only adds to the narrative. Not the distance of third or the intimacy of first. This is the second person as bedtime storyteller. Like the “Jack Tales” of Appalachian folklore, the protagonist of You, From Below could easily be you, the reader. They could be anyone. This clever device invites readers to be the protagonist, confused yet on a mission to “deliver a message.”

Meanwhile, the letter in the narrator’s pocket marks time passing. Again from Chapter V:

You’ve not been traveling long enough for the seasons to be moving in the way they are, but that doesn’t change the facts. The letter in your jacket is a little warped now. You’ve stopped pulling it out to look; you’re afraid of damaging it. Instead you peer into your pocket to make sure the letter’s still there, and leave it be.

The letter’s significance isn’t in its delivery. For the narrator, the letter is comfort. They are striving for clarity and safety in this world sunken in. They want to better understand what it means to be kind, so they remember what their mother taught them about kindness. The letter is one of the only things, besides their memories, that remains somewhat intact.

In this refreshing work of ecofiction, it isn’t catastrophe that compels us to turn pages. It’s the tiniest moments, like the memory of your first girlfriend (“You didn’t date that long, you’re not positive you were ever in love with her, but as you climb you miss her with an abrupt, absurd sharpness”) or musings on the (lacking) Appalachian wilderness (“There are no birds on the mountainside. Where are the birds? There should be a couple flitting around, even with the heavy snow. A robin, warm brown-red against the white, breaking the monotony, a reminder that spring will come. There should be a robin”).

The past haunts everyone here. In what might be the most pointed chapter, our narrator meets a woman in an old schoolhouse, beyond a dilapidated church, another town in ruins. Like every character we meet, this woman tells her story. It’s a brilliant and classic device. The lone traveler meets strangers on the road, confronting some truth during each interaction. When the narrator confronts the woman at the schoolhouse, she is desperate to tell her story. We learn that she was a teacher, a missionary who fell in love with the local preacher. They clash with the local people on their beliefs. “These people…they have so many superstitions, so many funny little rituals,” the woman says. She goes on to describe a woman who warns the town about the end times. Saying rain will “fall up.” The woman tries to testify to the local, a woman she describes as a witch, only to find out her husband, the pastor, has started listening to these warnings and taking them seriously. Regions like Appalachia are used to the new world not understanding their way of life, their stories, dialect. Parsley illustrates this tension beautifully in both sentence and scene. Listening to the woman, the narrator thinks,

Why is she the one who gets to tell this story? She hasn’t the right. She taught them to read and then stole their words and made a home atop their tongues. They are gone—for better or worse—and only she remains to speak for them.

Economic hardship is also at the periphery here, and although it is subtle, Parsley isn’t afraid to confront us with hard truths, sometimes with lines so deft we’re left reeling from the blow. They write:

Lumber towns tend to empty out once they’re past their relevance—children move away, parents retire, live in relative comfort, and die. Their children come to collect their photographs and dishes and leave the homes for rodents and birds to claim until they wilt into their own foundations.

One assumes this final line, where nature reclaims abandoned places, is intentional. The narrator mourns how temporary their world was. Lumber towns empty out, children move. “Rise and fall, rapture and decay,” goes the refrain. What’s more heartbreaking is the description of children moving on, collecting the valuables and letting nature take care of the rest. Parsley seems to be saying, though, that we can’t release the past. No one, not even in Appalachia, can escape disaster, losing family, losing ourselves. We can only hope to sustain ourselves with story, giving meaning to our own quiet lives.

David Dufour is a writer from Louisiana living in Brooklyn. He co-hosts Patio, a monthly reading series.