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Tar Hollow Trans: Essays
"I've lived a completely ordinary life, so much that I don't know how to write a transgender or queer or Appalachian story, because I don't feel like I've lived one.... Though, in searching for ways to write myself in my stories, maybe I can find power in this ordinariness."
Raised in southeast Ohio, Stacy Jane Grover would not describe her upbringing as "Appalachian." Appalachia existed farther afield—more rural, more country than the landscape of her hometown.
Grover returned to the places of her childhood to reconcile her identity and experience with the culture and the people who had raised her. She began to reflect on her memories and discovered that group identities like Appalachian and transgender are linked by more than just the stinging brand of social otherness.
In Tar Hollow Trans, Grover explores her transgender experience through common Appalachian cultural traditions. In "Dead Furrows," a death vigil and funeral leads to an investigation of Appalachian funerary rituals and their failure to help Grover cope with the grief of being denied her transness. "Homeplace" threads family interactions with farm animals and Grover's coming out journey, illuminating the disturbing parallels between the American Veterinary Association's guidelines for ethical euthanasia and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's guidelines for transgender care.
Together, her essays write transgender experience into broader cultural narratives beyond transition and interrogate the failures of concepts such as memory, metaphor, heritage, and tradition. Tar Hollow Trans investigates the ways the labels of transgender and Appalachian have been created and understood and reckons with the ways the ever-becoming transgender self, like a stigmatized region, can find new spaces of growth.
Raised in southeast Ohio, Stacy Jane Grover would not describe her upbringing as "Appalachian." Appalachia existed farther afield—more rural, more country than the landscape of her hometown.
Grover returned to the places of her childhood to reconcile her identity and experience with the culture and the people who had raised her. She began to reflect on her memories and discovered that group identities like Appalachian and transgender are linked by more than just the stinging brand of social otherness.
In Tar Hollow Trans, Grover explores her transgender experience through common Appalachian cultural traditions. In "Dead Furrows," a death vigil and funeral leads to an investigation of Appalachian funerary rituals and their failure to help Grover cope with the grief of being denied her transness. "Homeplace" threads family interactions with farm animals and Grover's coming out journey, illuminating the disturbing parallels between the American Veterinary Association's guidelines for ethical euthanasia and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's guidelines for transgender care.
Together, her essays write transgender experience into broader cultural narratives beyond transition and interrogate the failures of concepts such as memory, metaphor, heritage, and tradition. Tar Hollow Trans investigates the ways the labels of transgender and Appalachian have been created and understood and reckons with the ways the ever-becoming transgender self, like a stigmatized region, can find new spaces of growth.
176 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 20, 2023
24 people are currently reading
943 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
February 12, 2024
Love! Excellent fusion of appalachian studies and memoir. I thought the introduction and the approach to this essay collection was genius; this collection is really a practice in memory.
favorite essays - Dead Furrows (appalachian funeral practices mixed with musings on a toxic relationship, Salt Rising (appalachian myth, musings on community, all on goth subculture & rural vs metropolitain queer life), & The Line Spins Through Time (origin vs practice, hex signs and Pennsylvania Dutch superstition, the myth of trans origin story & collective creation of the myth of trans realization?)
average essay rating - 4.5
favorite essays - Dead Furrows (appalachian funeral practices mixed with musings on a toxic relationship, Salt Rising (appalachian myth, musings on community, all on goth subculture & rural vs metropolitain queer life), & The Line Spins Through Time (origin vs practice, hex signs and Pennsylvania Dutch superstition, the myth of trans origin story & collective creation of the myth of trans realization?)
average essay rating - 4.5
July 25, 2024
jd vance can go suck an egg
January 4, 2025
Stacey’s perspective offers some new insights and debunks common associations surrounding queerness and life in Appalachia. As a former emo kid, I really enjoyed this read.
March 14, 2024
A book that made me really homesick.
Lots to think about. And a lot of historical evidence uncovered here for my own theories of the ties between Appalachia and queerness.
Overall, I loved the choice to often say “this essay isn’t what you want it to be.” Because often, the past and the present aren’t going to fit perfectly into the academic conversation. Because academia distills the truth. I think it’s easy to give the people what they want when you are writing a piece about buzzwordy things like being trans and Appalachia, but Stacy Jane Grover keeps it authentic throughout.
Lots to think about. And a lot of historical evidence uncovered here for my own theories of the ties between Appalachia and queerness.
Overall, I loved the choice to often say “this essay isn’t what you want it to be.” Because often, the past and the present aren’t going to fit perfectly into the academic conversation. Because academia distills the truth. I think it’s easy to give the people what they want when you are writing a piece about buzzwordy things like being trans and Appalachia, but Stacy Jane Grover keeps it authentic throughout.
July 31, 2025
These essays helped me grapple with feeling “inadequate” as an Appalachian that didn’t grow up entirely the stereotypical mountain ways. It also reached out a hand to the fellow shy queer kid I was. I’m just a trans guy that wants to live an ordinary life in my home town.
October 12, 2023
Vivid, vibrant, and real. Stacy Jane has written memories and woven them with history and since our lives over lapped as pre-teens and teenagers a lot of this book was like dusting off the cobwebs of my own youth and my own memories. Any book, story, or essay that can do that is masterful. The dedication had me crying, along with various other parts throughout. This Book is powerful, meaningful, and I know will be a balm to folks in Appalachian small towns who don’t fit the “Cookie cutter normal” I hope this finds/is finding it’s audience and that people luxuriate in the storytelling.
November 29, 2024
Tar Hollow Trans explores the intersectionality of being transgender and Appalachian and so much more. The reflection on belonging and not belonging to a community was particularly impactful and has allowed me to see a different perspective I otherwise probably would not have thought about. An overall unique, enjoyable, and thought provoking read.
January 1, 2024
Reading these essays in the book from a trans perspective from around the area I grew up in was really interesting and something I have never been able to do in literature before!
October 14, 2024
1000 stars
Currently reading
August 29, 2025working my way thru several books as they pop up on libby and i can read them on the desk 3
September 9, 2025
Looooooved Grover’s essays and writing style. Her words were almost so transcendent as to go a bit above my head, but I can’t wait to grab a copy of this one and pore over a few of these essays even more. I felt very seen in how she wrote about Appalachia not being a monolith or just one and only one experience, being Appalachian even though she grew up not identifying with that term and still has reservations around it, and being seen as “other” in Appalachian spaces. The beauty is in the diversity. Really appreciated how she wrote about how she had never fully felt abnormal because her lived experience was her normal *because* it was their experience. This one is deep, y’all!
January 14, 2025
I grew up in the Appalachian mountains of Western North Carolina and for the past decade I’ve lived in the major metros of San Francisco and NYC. Reading Tar Hollow Trans felt like catharsis. My relationship with “home” is complex, and I often feel culturally homeless—severed from my birthplace but not fully comfortable in the city where I now live. How refreshing to have those complexities echoed in Stacy Jane Grover’s work.
I’m going to share a subset of the passages I underlined in the book (of which there were many!):
[Speaking of childhood] “I dressed and played how I chose, hidden by the trees and valleys that surrounded me, unencumbered by the terrible burden of gender.” (p. 12)
“I moved to the state capital, where I found not the expected freedom but constraint, not the promised anonymity that would allow fluidity in my expressions but constant surveillance. I inherited a new queerness, one that was now a mark I was told how to wear, shaping me into contours I didn’t recognize. I was what was restraining my transformation, and to grow into the shared vision of metropolitanism that would lead to my salvation, I left behind all that the country planted in me. That seeing stars was a part of being, that horizons were literal, that backwards was a direction that most often led to family, that sunsets couldn’t be blocked by anything but mountains and only if one decided not to climb them—these things I could not bring into the dusty confines of the metropolis.” (p. 13-14)
“The mountains have opened my senses to a different way of knowing, of being, so that no matter where I go or who I encounter, I weave them into the quilt of my past.” (p. 16-17)
[About adolescence] “What happened, what changed so that I felt excluded where I had always felt I belonged? […] I didn’t fit in with the boys and I didn’t want to, yet I was ever increasingly pushed toward them, and it hurt me.” (p. 22-23)
“I looked at my family and I knew that I was not growing into their shapes.” (p. 27)
“I don’t want to create a dominant narrative at the expense of the more complicated reality to gain the acceptance of legible visibility over authentic representation.” (p. 34)
“My girlhood became a dusty dresser in a forbidden room.” (p. 55)
[About funerals] “The absurdity or mourning food, flavorless subsistence food: pale cornbread, anemic potatoes, strips of dry chicken, as if no taste exists in grief, as if savoring while mourning equates to savoring death.” (p. 59)
“I can’t answer why I went through what I went through, only describe the way I ended up there.” (p. 66)
“In the uncertainty and confusion of cyberspace, at least I could exist in the correct body[…] The digital world carried our burdens for us, and we could rest knowing that the next time we dialed up, our other selves would be waiting.” (p. 85)
“[…] rural small towns in the US are imagined not only as places but also as times.” (p. 95)
“[…] rural places, especially Appalachia, are excluded from being the sites of queer and transgender life. Instead, urban locations become the sole loci for queer and transgender communities, and queer and transgender people’s flight from rural locations to cities seems inevitable, even compulsory.” (p. 98)
[Citing anthropologist Kath Weston] “[…] when rural queers arrive in cities and find these supposed queer havens, they are often disappointed and alienated. […] To flourish in the metropolis, the community there needs a backward place like Appalachia to exist to define itself against. The deeply felt effect of this binary is that queer and transgender people who live in rural areas, or who have moved to major cities but retain a deep love and attachment to their home regions and people, are told that they are not fully queer or transgender, and that they invite whatever alienation or violence they experience.” (p. 99)
“Maybe I see community as a solution to capitalism. But I know that this too is a myth.” (p. 102)
“When I try to claim the scenes I’ve inhabited as communities, I foreclose on the possibility of growing and shifting as a person by locking myself into a rigid field of belonging. […] I also foreclose on that same possibility for others who inhabit them. I reduce my friends to only one facet of their existence, like their sexualities and genders or subcultures.” (p. 103)
“I’ve clung to the idea of my lost queer Appalachian community because I know deep down that I’ve never experienced one.” (p. 104)
“I can allow symbols to lose their meaning. I must let structures crumble.” (p. 113)
[On the notion of “true” identity] “The quest to write one’s transgender story thus begins with rewriting one’s past. We must transform our histories to fit a rigid narrative assigned to us, much the way our gender/sex assignment at birth shapes and limits the possible narratives of our entire future. […] This is part of the reason why people invest so heavily in questions about origins, because if there were other narratives, other possibilities, the asker of such questions could come to understand that their identities could have been and could still be otherwise.” (p. 123)
“Rendering various forms of living legible for the mainstream offers no protection, no privacy, no right to interiority, no ability to be otherwise.” (p. 125)
“When we are lost, unstable, unsure, everything in life opens and expands and we become able to wonder, able to think from within and beyond what can be readily understood.” (p. 126)
Thank you, Stacy Jane Grover, for sharing yourself with such honesty and curiosity. I feel less alone because of your writing.
I’m going to share a subset of the passages I underlined in the book (of which there were many!):
[Speaking of childhood] “I dressed and played how I chose, hidden by the trees and valleys that surrounded me, unencumbered by the terrible burden of gender.” (p. 12)
“I moved to the state capital, where I found not the expected freedom but constraint, not the promised anonymity that would allow fluidity in my expressions but constant surveillance. I inherited a new queerness, one that was now a mark I was told how to wear, shaping me into contours I didn’t recognize. I was what was restraining my transformation, and to grow into the shared vision of metropolitanism that would lead to my salvation, I left behind all that the country planted in me. That seeing stars was a part of being, that horizons were literal, that backwards was a direction that most often led to family, that sunsets couldn’t be blocked by anything but mountains and only if one decided not to climb them—these things I could not bring into the dusty confines of the metropolis.” (p. 13-14)
“The mountains have opened my senses to a different way of knowing, of being, so that no matter where I go or who I encounter, I weave them into the quilt of my past.” (p. 16-17)
[About adolescence] “What happened, what changed so that I felt excluded where I had always felt I belonged? […] I didn’t fit in with the boys and I didn’t want to, yet I was ever increasingly pushed toward them, and it hurt me.” (p. 22-23)
“I looked at my family and I knew that I was not growing into their shapes.” (p. 27)
“I don’t want to create a dominant narrative at the expense of the more complicated reality to gain the acceptance of legible visibility over authentic representation.” (p. 34)
“My girlhood became a dusty dresser in a forbidden room.” (p. 55)
[About funerals] “The absurdity or mourning food, flavorless subsistence food: pale cornbread, anemic potatoes, strips of dry chicken, as if no taste exists in grief, as if savoring while mourning equates to savoring death.” (p. 59)
“I can’t answer why I went through what I went through, only describe the way I ended up there.” (p. 66)
“In the uncertainty and confusion of cyberspace, at least I could exist in the correct body[…] The digital world carried our burdens for us, and we could rest knowing that the next time we dialed up, our other selves would be waiting.” (p. 85)
“[…] rural small towns in the US are imagined not only as places but also as times.” (p. 95)
“[…] rural places, especially Appalachia, are excluded from being the sites of queer and transgender life. Instead, urban locations become the sole loci for queer and transgender communities, and queer and transgender people’s flight from rural locations to cities seems inevitable, even compulsory.” (p. 98)
[Citing anthropologist Kath Weston] “[…] when rural queers arrive in cities and find these supposed queer havens, they are often disappointed and alienated. […] To flourish in the metropolis, the community there needs a backward place like Appalachia to exist to define itself against. The deeply felt effect of this binary is that queer and transgender people who live in rural areas, or who have moved to major cities but retain a deep love and attachment to their home regions and people, are told that they are not fully queer or transgender, and that they invite whatever alienation or violence they experience.” (p. 99)
“Maybe I see community as a solution to capitalism. But I know that this too is a myth.” (p. 102)
“When I try to claim the scenes I’ve inhabited as communities, I foreclose on the possibility of growing and shifting as a person by locking myself into a rigid field of belonging. […] I also foreclose on that same possibility for others who inhabit them. I reduce my friends to only one facet of their existence, like their sexualities and genders or subcultures.” (p. 103)
“I’ve clung to the idea of my lost queer Appalachian community because I know deep down that I’ve never experienced one.” (p. 104)
“I can allow symbols to lose their meaning. I must let structures crumble.” (p. 113)
[On the notion of “true” identity] “The quest to write one’s transgender story thus begins with rewriting one’s past. We must transform our histories to fit a rigid narrative assigned to us, much the way our gender/sex assignment at birth shapes and limits the possible narratives of our entire future. […] This is part of the reason why people invest so heavily in questions about origins, because if there were other narratives, other possibilities, the asker of such questions could come to understand that their identities could have been and could still be otherwise.” (p. 123)
“Rendering various forms of living legible for the mainstream offers no protection, no privacy, no right to interiority, no ability to be otherwise.” (p. 125)
“When we are lost, unstable, unsure, everything in life opens and expands and we become able to wonder, able to think from within and beyond what can be readily understood.” (p. 126)
Thank you, Stacy Jane Grover, for sharing yourself with such honesty and curiosity. I feel less alone because of your writing.
January 27, 2024
Fantastic essay collection. Ms. Grover sometimes has some trouble transitioning between an academic voice and a more familiar voice in these essays at times, but for a debut collection, these are some real fantastic interrogations of the myth of the rural queer, Appalachia, and what Ms. Grover also experienced. Definitely a writer to keep an eye out for.
June 18, 2024
This book made me feel seen, and I'm so thankful for that. Absolutely adore this collection of essays, and I know I'll probably revisit it.
July 19, 2025
In this collection of essays, Stacy Jane Grover takes an unprecedented angle on queer Appalachian identity. She describes what people imagine when they think of Appalachia, what they imagine when they think of queer identities, and the reality of their intersection. I find myself drawn to this specific literary conversation as I grapple with my own identity. Both Grover and Andrew Joseph White seem to share the feeling of both belonging and ostracization that comes with being a southern queer. We are expected to long for escapism and the "safety" of northern, urban communities, but often disappointed by the reality of those spaces. Southern queers, despite being queer, are still seen as southern first, exhibiting backwards political views and out-of-touch ideals. Therefore, we end up belonging nowhere, not living up to the expectations of metropolitan queerness or fitting into southern traditionalism. Grover, who is academically trained in gender and sexuality studies, discusses the way intellectualism falls short on her journey to understand her identity. Her "Appalachian" identity, which she is reluctant to label as such, doesn't match the ethnographic definition or the history as it is recorded in archives. Her transness doesn't fit into the narrative of intrinsic existence that can be traced back to birth, but something that is fluid and constantly being discovered. She briefly touches on this idea of "bewilderment" described by Fanny Howe as something that is unlocatable and hidden, and explores identity as bewilderment rather than a prescribed and definable thing. I found that Grover's perspective was such a beautiful and gentle way of interpreting the self. She offers herself, and thus the reader, the grace and space to forgive and understand and not-belong together.
If you're looking for ways to engage more with queer/ trans literature or queer community, I highly recommend also reading "I Hope we Choose Love" by Kai Cheng Thom. Both Thom and Grover touch on what community means and what it doesn't mean, abuse in queer spaces, and exploring identities that fall outside of prescribed ideas. Both authors express a similar desire to write with hope and love, for each other, for ourselves, and for our histories.
If you're looking for ways to engage more with queer/ trans literature or queer community, I highly recommend also reading "I Hope we Choose Love" by Kai Cheng Thom. Both Thom and Grover touch on what community means and what it doesn't mean, abuse in queer spaces, and exploring identities that fall outside of prescribed ideas. Both authors express a similar desire to write with hope and love, for each other, for ourselves, and for our histories.
December 17, 2025
Tar Hollow Trans is a quietly powerful and intellectually provocative exploration of identity, culture, and belonging. Stacy Jane Grover brings an extraordinary level of honesty and thoughtfulness to these essays, weaving together her transgender experience with Appalachian cultural narratives. The book illuminates how labels whether geographic, cultural, or gendered shape and sometimes constrain the human experience, while also revealing how ordinary life can hold profound insight and meaning.
Grover’s reflections are deeply moving because they balance vulnerability with analytical rigor. Essays like Dead Furrows and Homeplace transcend personal memoir to examine broader social, ethical, and cultural frameworks, demonstrating how grief, care, and identity intersect in ways often overlooked. Her prose is at once intimate, incisive, and lyrical, making the ordinary moments of life feel extraordinary. Tar Hollow Trans is not only a work of self-exploration but also a contribution to ongoing conversations about gender, place, and the construction of selfhood an essential read for anyone seeking understanding beyond stereotypes.
Michael
Grover’s reflections are deeply moving because they balance vulnerability with analytical rigor. Essays like Dead Furrows and Homeplace transcend personal memoir to examine broader social, ethical, and cultural frameworks, demonstrating how grief, care, and identity intersect in ways often overlooked. Her prose is at once intimate, incisive, and lyrical, making the ordinary moments of life feel extraordinary. Tar Hollow Trans is not only a work of self-exploration but also a contribution to ongoing conversations about gender, place, and the construction of selfhood an essential read for anyone seeking understanding beyond stereotypes.
Michael
October 20, 2025
This book is filled with incisive essays that take a deep dive into the author's identity as a trans person and as a person raised in Appalachia. The memories and moments described are often heartbreaking but so important for the author's journey. The exploration of what "Appalachian" culture and traditions are was fascinating, and the author doesn't give in to the temptation to depict the people of her region as caricatures or stereotypes. The parallels drawn between this and her exploration of her trans identity are so poignant as well. Highly recommended reading for a way to try and understand people just a little bit better (especially if they're not just like you).
April 17, 2023
These essays take us through the writer's search for where her Appalachian and trans identities co exist in the same space. She writes about how she doesn't fit in to queer spaces in the typical and expected ways and she also doesn't fit into Appalachian spaces in the typical and expected ways. Throughout we see moments where all the intersecting identities exist more peaceably in fields and barns... as if when we get away from people we can be more authentic and just simply exist. These essays are a skilled example of how to weave personal memoir writing with academic research.
August 2, 2025
Stacy Grover’s essays are so refreshingly lost. I felt invited along, to stumble and reject expectation and find something more bruised but honest. Each piece is beautifully constructed, even those that end somewhere other than where you originally expected. “Lancaster Is Burning” weaves stunning imagery through quiet memories that are all the more touching, and sometimes frightening, for their understatement. Each essay stands on its own as an honest investigation, poetically told and brimming with quiet rebellion.
December 22, 2023
NetGalley ARC Educator 550974
Having visited the hills of North Carolina, I understood the environment the author describes. Everything in this book will draw you in and keep you engaged. You will want to visit and help those who need a hand or a light in an otherwise dark place.
The essays can be uplifting to some and gutwrenching for others. I loved this book and hope there's a follow-up or another anthology featuring other queer tar heel community members.
Having visited the hills of North Carolina, I understood the environment the author describes. Everything in this book will draw you in and keep you engaged. You will want to visit and help those who need a hand or a light in an otherwise dark place.
The essays can be uplifting to some and gutwrenching for others. I loved this book and hope there's a follow-up or another anthology featuring other queer tar heel community members.
July 2, 2023
This book is so well thought-out and written, but not overwritten, which is a feat in itself. I loved every word. I haven't read a book that truly challenged me in the way these essays did in a long time. I am a big Stacy Jane Grover fan, and I can't wait to read what she writes next! I’m so thankful to her for sharing her story.
September 15, 2023
Not often that I'm hooked by an introduction, but here we are.
There is something wonderful to read about someone so dexterously navigating conversations about identity and community. It's the blending of a very readable style of writing, and the uniquely relatable desire to construct, deconstruct, and evolve that really hits for me.
**Thanks for the ARC!**
There is something wonderful to read about someone so dexterously navigating conversations about identity and community. It's the blending of a very readable style of writing, and the uniquely relatable desire to construct, deconstruct, and evolve that really hits for me.
**Thanks for the ARC!**
Read
January 18, 2024resonating so much to me as someone who has such firm ties to houtzdale / the middle of nowhere / appalachia. also another one i keep recommending to people!!! told my cousin abt it since she grew up there much more so than i did, told my prof of appalachia/oral histories. should buy a copy of mine own.
January 4, 2026
moments in this I really loved and i found a decent chunk of what the author had to say to be really compelling and interesting. was maybe less compelled by the author's habit of saying what they wanted to do with an essay, then not making that move. the directness there just makes me feel like the essay is in some way unfinished and somehow failing at the thing it set out to do.
September 3, 2023
This is a meandering sort of collection, like a rambling creek cutting through a meadow, “…never reaching its destination, never having a destination at all.” An academic exploration of place and identity.
October 15, 2023
(Rounding up from 2.5) Grover writes about her peers (living and deceased) very thoughtfully, but I found this collection lacking. The essays felt disjointed, and her engagement with queer theorists felt underdeveloped in places.
January 11, 2026
Do you ever feel like someone else has been in your brain? Walking around, peering into the weird corners of your mind. Taking what were infant thoughts of yours and raising them into adulthood? That’s what it feels like reading Stacy Jane Grover. Brilliant and beautiful.
November 21, 2023
The author clearly has a knack for writing; however, I found the themes underdeveloped.
May 13, 2024
This is a beautifully written memoir in essays at the intersections of trans studies, literary theory, and Appalachian studies. I enjoyed it and the ways the arguments in this book were constructed.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews