This article explores the performance of Appalachian identity via the use of tellable narratives by students in two composition classrooms that were the focus of an ethnographic case study. Utilizing examples gleaned from interviews, classroom observations, and student writing, I illustrate how the students in my study demonstrated narrative complexity as they skillfully and creatively mediated the rhetorical situations they faced, crafting tellable and untellable narratives of Appalachian identity in response to their audience’s needs.

This article explores the literacy lives of students enrolled in English Composition courses at two open-admission universities in Central Appalachia and the complex role of immediate and extended family members as sponsors of literacy. Some relatives emerge as both sponsors and inhibitors—or perhaps more accurately, sponsors of competing meanings of literacy—and illustrate the larger social forces surrounding literacy in students’ lives.