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A tidal wave of frustration and anger birthed something beautiful and inspiring for educator-turned-author Willie Carver.

Carver was in Winchester last Thursday to promote his new book of poetry, “Gay Poems For Red States,” at Regeneration Distilling Company on East Broadway Street.

“It’s a collection of narrative poems about growing up gay in Appalachia,” Carver said during an interview before the event. “It’s one of those love letters you write to someone that you are still mad at…I think there is a kid inside of me who is really angry about what is going on in some of the places in our state legislature and education system. He wanted to write, so I let him.”

Carver started work on the book in the spring of 2022 and completed the project four months later.

“From there, it was just a Cinderella story, frankly, of the right people intervening on my behalf and helping me,” Carver said.

He signed a contract with the University Press of Kentucky last August, who published the book in June.

Having his book published was the silver lining in what has been a tough year for Carver.

Teaching and the fight that came

Carver always knew he wanted to be a teacher, but his initial goal was to teach at the college level. Then a moment in a French linguistics class changed his professional trajectory.

“I looked around at all these Ph.D. candidates in linguistics, and I looked at the professor, and I thought, ‘My sister is smarter than everyone in this room, including me,’” Carver said. “My sister finished high school and went no further than that. She would have been the smartest person in that room. So I said to myself, ‘Why is my sister not in this room?’”

Then and there, Carver decided he wanted to help bring about a world where people like his sister could grace the heights of the ivory tower of academia.

For the next 15 years, Carver did his best to do just that, spending most of his teaching career in nearby Montgomery County.

“I worked to make sure that my students were successful, making sure that they saw what they could be. It doesn’t mean that everyone went to college, and it doesn’t mean that everyone should, but it does mean that whatever their wildest dream was, they believed that it could happen, and they believed it was worth trying for,” he said.

Carver also advised an after-school club called Open Light that advocated for LGBTQIA issues and participated in community service projects.

And as he labored to inspire his students to reach the highest heights, Carver did so himself.

In 2022, he was named the Kentucky Teacher of the Year and was invited to the White House that same year.

The award and subsequent attention would put Carver and Open Light under the intense spotlight that living in a small community sometimes brings.

Individuals started attending board of education meetings and lobbed countless accusations at Carver.

“That I was some sort of groomer,” Carver said about the accusations. “That I was by my very nature harmful to students and that I was harming students; that I was leading my students on an intentional path to sexualize them.”

The accusers then turned their crusade to cyberspace. Carver said that the attack against him continued and later focused on some of his students, several of whom were doxxed online.

Carver and the student’s parents pleaded with Montgomery County Schools officials to take some action.

“Their parents asked the school to please protect them and respond to change this ugly narrative about who they were,” Carver said.

According to Carver, the school district refused and stayed silent on the issue.

Faced with what he viewed as an impossible situation to scale, Carver resigned from his position and took a new job at the University of Kentucky as an academic advisor.

Despite that, Carver still believes in places like Montgomery County.

A special place called small towns

Carver grew up near Martin in Floyd County, so rural America is a place near and dear to his heart.

To illustrate why, he recalled a recent conversation at the Gateway Regional Arts Center in Mount Sterling about who owned a dunking booth.

“We were talking about it, and when I said the word dunking tank, a woman literally popped out of a hallway and asked, ‘Who has the dunking tank?’ I said, ‘Brooke Barrett has it right now.’ Then Jodan Campbell [the center’s director] said, ‘Yeah, I just asked her if we could have it,’” Carver said.

The conversation devolved into everyone giving their two cents on where the tank was and who owned it; it seemed everyone in town had an experience with it at one time or another.

“That is the connection in a small town that I really like. Everyone literally relies on everyone for information, for resources and for lifting each other up,” Carver said. “I’ve lived in bigger cities where there are just not times to make those connections.”

Sometimes the closeness and connections are why the culture wars have raged so fiercely in smaller communities, especially if there is a built-in aversion to confrontation in the municipal DNA.

“What ends up happening is whatever is the established way of doing this is how you do stuff,” Carver said. “And there are lots of angry people saying hateful things, and no one really challenges them because they say, ‘Well, that is how things are.’”

In Carver’s opinion, dissenting voices are often accused of upsetting the apple cart because they challenge the status quo, which is why he thinks there need to be more diverse voices emerging from small towns.

“It is important because we have young people in these small towns that are Black, brown and Queer young people who need to be able to see themselves who need reminders that who they are is already enough,” Carver said.

Said message is one that is often diluted and ignored.

“I think usually there is a message that they need to transform into something urban and that they need to flee,” Carver said.

For those young people, there is support in smaller places.

“There are people fighting in small towns, and their fight is a lot more ferocious because it has to be,” Carver said. “That inspires me as well. You are not going to find anybody in New York, Los Angeles or Chicago fighting as hard as the mom of a trans kid in Clark County, Kentucky.”

As he did during his teaching career, Carver has continued to advocate for youth by working with organizations like Progress Kentucky and the Kentucky Youth Law Project to ensure their voices are heard.

It is why Carver thinks events like his book signing are so important.

“Kids in Clark County and adults in Clark County often feel like they are completely estranged from parts of themselves; the LGBTQ part of themselves of the Black or brown part of themselves to some extent. I want people to have access to the types of events that affirm who they are.”