Interview with Rae Garringer: Founder of Country Queers
Illustration by Beyond the Clock Storyteller + Illustrator-in-Residence, Nhatt Nichols.
Rae Garringer was our September 2024 Beyond the Clock rural rockstar guest. During our conversation at Beyond the Clock with Rae, we explored the tensions and risks we take on when we have increased visibility, the courage it takes to remain connected in divisive times, and the resources needed to continue showing up for your cause and your community in rural places. The conversation below is an extended interview between Nhatt Nichols, the Beyond the Clock Storyteller + Illustrator-in-Residence, and Rae Garringer, post-September’s Beyond the Clock.
About Rae:
Rae Garringer (they/them) is a writer, oral historian, and audio producer who grew up on a sheep farm in southeastern West Virginia, and now lives a few counties away on S’atsoyaha (Yuchi) and Šaawanwaki (Shawnee) lands. They are the founder of Country Queers, a multimedia oral history project documenting rural and small town LGBTQIA2S+ experiences since 2013. Rae is the author of Country Queers: A Love Letter (Haymarket Books, Fall 2024) and the editor of To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian Writers (University Press of Kentucky, Spring 2025). When not working with stories, Rae spends a lot of time failing at keeping goats in fences, swimming in the river, and two-stepping around their trailer.
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN Rae Garringer AND NHATT NICHOLS:
Note from Nhatt to the reader: We spoke over the phone while Rae fed their goats, an audio experience I’d like to ask you to imagine while you read this interview.
Nhatt Nichols:
One thing we have in common is we had a compulsion to collect stories, which then became a compulsion to share them. Were those two things integral, or were you like a listener for a long time first?
Rae Garringer:
At first, I just needed to do this. In some ways, I feel like it was sort of a selfish motivation; I really needed it. The compulsion to record, document, and preserve started first, and it's still the strongest part of it for me. I feel a sense of urgency about it sometimes.
Nhatt:
You did not start out thinking, ‘I'm gonna create an amazing podcast that everybody's going to subscribe to’.
Rae:
Absolutely not. I started out in the house next to the sheep farm I grew up on with no internet, a landline phone, and no cell service. My parents listened to NPR; I'm a lifelong radio listener, but I feel like I found audio by accident through oral histories. It became the quickest and easiest way to get the stories out in a way that was free and easily accessible, no matter where you are. There was no part of me that thought this was an audio project in the beginning.
Nhatt:
The fact that it's become a podcast means that people are saying their stories in their own voices. That medium seems very true to your process.
Rae:
I didn't know how to make recordings. I didn't know how to do the interviews. I didn't have any training and in addition to learning more about oral history through practice and the generosity of people who shared their stories and agreed to let me fumble my way through figuring out how to do it. I ended up learning a lot about audio by making dozens of pretty terrible audio recordings.
In some of the early interviews, there's no visual representations of people. Then I went to grad school because I felt really overwhelmed by the 40 some interviews I had gathered, what to do with them, and how to share them because the people who shared their stories, there was some expectation that I would do something with them.
Then, the big road trip I did in 2014 was made possible through crowdfunding. People were invested in the stories. I started to feel pressure to get them out in some way, but also just total overwhelm about not really knowing how to do that.
In grad school, it was sort of serendipitous that I took a couple of classes at the Duke Center for Documentary Studies. I took an Intro to Audio Documentary class where I learned some basics of editing. And I was like, Oh, this is interesting. I have a bunch of audio, I don't have visuals for going back to make a film. And then, I got hired at a community radio station where I was responsible for cranking out just tons of content for years, and that's really how the podcast was born.
Nhatt:
I have a background in journalism, and so for me, the thing that's important is documenting the moment in time, not just the story. I feel like my duty is to readers, not my subjects, so it was really interesting to hear you talk as an oral historian about your duty being to your subject.
Rae:
With lots of respect and gratitude for journalists, I actually hate that approach. That your duty is to your reader, not your subject, feels like some of the root of some historic harm that I think the field of journalism has done to a variety of marginalized communities through an extractive process.
I get why there's reasons in journalistic contexts where that's necessary, and I think in some ways it's a gift of this not being a journalistic process.
I think oral history is so intimate and vulnerable. When I was working as a public affairs director at a community radio station in Eastern Kentucky, the way I interviewed people for radio stories was different than the way I interview people for oral histories because with oral histories, you're trying to get, not a moment in time, but as much of a life story as someone wants to share, which involves really intimate, really vulnerable moments.
I didn't have training in journalism or documentary work, but I had been part of sort of central Appalachian social justice movement spaces where questions of who gets to tell what stories, how our communities are represented, and how narratives in a political context can be damaging for communities, but also can be a thing that we reclaim as a tool of power building.
Nhatt:
There's a balance there. Most of my work is not always that sensitive. But, more and more, I'm doing things with a view to who the story is for, and how to tell it with equity and kindness.
Rae:
With this project, from the beginning, I give people options which don't work in a journalistic context, and there's reasons why that's important. People can come up with a pseudonym. We can say just the state where they live, not the town, because of the ongoing realities of real threats, both in terms of physical violence, but also when I started this project in 2013, DOMA hadn't [been overturned] yet.
It's very personal, whereas when I'm interviewing small town like firefighters about their funding, I wouldn't feel like I needed them to review what they said about the need for better funding for volunteer fire departments because that just feels like something they would say anywhere in public.
Visit Nhatt Nichols online by clicking here!
Visit Rae Garringer and Country Queers online by clicking here!