Yeah, I spent my teen years in West Virginia, and when I was a kid, in Louisiana. I definitely have that exposure to two different sorts of rural: the South and Appalachia.

A lot of West Virginia is untouched. It doesn't have as many strip malls, it has these old towns that feel like it used to be how it looked. Charleston has this river that runs through it, and it's really beautiful.

In the false American imagination, West Virginia is a joke or else it's a charity case; but more than anything it is unseen, an invisible architecture of labor and struggle; and incarceration shares this invisibility, hidden at the center of everything; our slipshod remedy for an abiding fear, danger pinned to human bodies and then slotted into bunk beds you can't see from any highway.

It's definitely not good for us. All we can do is go out and get a win against West Virginia and hope for a break. It's even bigger now. If we don't win that game, I don't know what's going to happen. We win that game, we give ourselves a chance.

The eighties were my teen years, so the GoGos are sort of a touchstone.

Deep down, I'm just a West Virginia hillbilly.