As far as I know, American literature scholars generally see a distinction between literature from the American South vs literature from the rest of the United States, particularly from the Civil War onward. American literature is known for its portrayal of the importance of individual identity, whereas that theme isn’t so common in literature out of the South, as it often goes the opposite direction. This isn’t to say EVERYTHING from these regions follow this patten, but it is a recognized distinction.

There’s nothing quite like being different to help you be more understanding when you run into others who are different, to help you articulate differences you can finally see. Also, being from Texas, you learn how to deal with people making fairly ridiculous assumptions and saying fairly ridiculous things to your face, e.g. “I lower my expectations for the conversation when I find out someone’s from Texas.”

But now I’m pretty sure I’m ready to leave mountains and get back to sky and stop starting over and stay with some of the support systems I’ve bothered to build up over the years, the people who know my story from the years it was most drastically shaped.

If you are a high-school senior and you are lucky enough to have someone to be in love with, do NOT break up with this person simply because the two of you will be three hours away. Too many people throw away something beautiful under the assumption that they will find love just as easily on campus (assuming they’re not eschewing love for random hook-ups), but many of us understand that it’s not really that easy.

Do you mean “Southern” as in “southern United States”? That would be American literature, too, you know. No one has actually seceded for a long time.

And I’ll agree with you about the rural South and its clinging to certain prejudices, but, let’s face it, blue-state America has plenty of its own, too.

Staying in our close knit communities generation after generation hasn’t really helped the situations with racism, sexism, heterosexism and other isms. At least in my experience, default community bonds can sometimes re-enforce unhealthy beliefs when people follow them unquestioningly in the name of tradition. Questioning often gets your ostracized from the community. As a result, no one ever questions or leaves the community so they’re not exposed to outside ideas and the core stays the same. It’s really a vicious cycle.

Not that I’ve really gotten out yet. I’m living and going to school in the biggest city in the Appalachian mountain chain, an hour away from the rural town I grew up in. I’m still here mostly because of poverty and a sizable scholarship that requires you to stay in state for undergrad. I’m still very enmeshed with my extended family back home. I love them, but it’s not healthy. Communities (particularly ones a person grows up in) are not necessarily healthy but that doesn’t make them any less communities when they have a place in your heart. I’m leaving the state for graduate school for the official reason that there are no good schools with terminal Master’s programs in English in my state, but the real reason is that I need to get out. There are certain unhealthy patters and defaults I will NEVER let go of until I’m wrenched from the people who instilled them in me.

I’ve gotten a lot closer to my mother and grandmother in the last couple years. I feel like it’s going to be harder to move away now. I don’t think that I’ll ever regret getting to know them better, but it’s going to be painful in the short run. I don’t know that I’ll ever come back here to live. I want to make a new community somewhere that will be healthy and will encourage me to be more the person I want to be, instead of who my ancestors were.

PS - These beliefs are pretty heavily influenced but the limitations of poverty. I just get a continuous sense of crushing and overwhelming hopeless in my community. Majority of the people I graduated with won’t ever go to collge. My state has one of the the lowest high school graduation rates in the country.

I’m currently living smack-dab across the globe from my family, and my graduation in a couple of weeks will be the first time they’ve ever come up to see me - all other times I’ve gone home to see them. Only one has an idea of what it’s like for me living here, in terms of freedom creatively and the learning I get. I think it’s worthwhile getting away from family, at least for a little while, to see if you can stand on your own two feet. If anything, living so far away has made me see that I appreciate my family a lot more than I actually let on.

But one person’s community is another’s prison, after all.

That’s a sign of an unhealthy community, I think. That’s not to say that some people won’t always need to get out on their own, the farther the better, ASAP — that’s one path to adulthood, and it will always work best for some people. What I take issue with is the idea that healthy, thriving communities do/should produce feelings of suffocation, desperation, and an irresistible need to escape in all their young people. If it feels like a prison, is it really a community?

The message I got was that I should would to get as far away from my family as possible. My parents were actually shocked to learn that I don’t despise them, and in fact would prefer to be close to them and my brother. It’s bizarre to me that people a trained to assume their own kids will hate them, and that kids are trained to assume that families and communities have little or nothing left to teach them by the time they turn 18. I think that idea — that the way to learn and grow is, instead of working with the older members of one’s community,to strike out entirely on one’s own — is a major part of the reason that so many older people in our society feel worthless. And actually, yeah, we’ve framed them that way, as useless to their own children.

As a caveat, though: maybe this system is one that works well in certain cultures (WASPs), but not amongst others (Sephardic Jews). The real problem isn’t that some families do things this way, but that this is billed as the way to do things.