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August 21, 2026
from All That’s Unseen
by Emilee Hackney
“Loyalty makes for committed, unbreakable bonds,” Emilee Hackney writes, but it “can also foster fear and discourage change.”
In her memoir All That’s Unseen about leaving her close knit, but in many ways stifling, community in the Appalachian mountains to attend Harvard, Emilee Hackney’s opinions about her experiences swing widely. She loves the mountains and coal country but despairs at the limitations it imposed on her life. Harvard provides an escape but nearly overwhelms her.
In the Paragraph of the Week and our commentary we watch her frame the running argument about staying in Appalachia or leaving that she has with herself throughout the book.
The Paragraph of the Week
In my Appalachia, loyalty is synonymous with respect. You are raised to revere the mountains and their people. Your people. The sense of community is so strong because the world beyond, you hear, is strange and cold and unforgiving, and you know this must be true because that's where the politicians are, the coal barons, the rich and powerful who look down on Appalachia and care about it only as far as they can take advantage of it.
–Emilee Hackney
Commentary
After this passage from her memoir, All That’s Unseen, Emilee Hackney goes on to write that leaving this close-knit community feels like a betrayal. “Like saying you're not good enough for me to the people and places that raised you,” but she knows she must leave because these ties also bind. “Loyalty makes for committed, unbreakable bonds,” she explains, but it “can also foster fear and discourage change.” She suffers humiliation and alienation at her Ivy League school, but encounters new ideas that open doors allowing her to grow—to grow, but not grow away. She is proud to be from coal country, and knows that she will always return to a “place undefinable, so worn and wild, that had been stripped and scavenged and shaken and robbed, yet never conceded to the forces that tried to hold it down.”
—THE
This Visible Speaking
Check out Kathryn Winograd’s new blog of words and photos called This Visible Speaking here. Read our feature on her book by the same name here.
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Announcements
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
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The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
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