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A Rural Calling: Savannah Barrett [1]
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Date: 2024-09-25
Savannah Barrett walks the wooded grounds of what was once the Grayson Springs Inn and Resort summoning her forebears for guidance.
Barrett and her husband, Joe Manning – a writer, editor, musician, and co-founder of the Louisville Story Program – recently bought six acres of this land from her grandmother. She envisions their daughter, Sylvia, being the seventh generation in her lineage to steward it. This is the homeplace.
History is immediate in these woods of rural Western Kentucky. When Barrett was growing up here in Grayson County, her great-great-grandparents’ home still stood in the woods. Three of her great-grandparents helped raise her. Homecomings include visits to the family cemetery.
“You really know your dead,” Barrett said. Character traits reemerge. She’s frequently compared to her great-grandmother Sally, who likewise knew her own mind from a very early age.
Barrett is co-founder of the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange, a leadership program that works to connect Kentuckians – to build relationships and foster collaboration – across geography, ideology, identity, race, class, gender.
She’s also among a group of folks – her husband, her high school sweetheart, his parents, a cousin, some friends from Louisville and Lexington – who’ve purchased 102 acres of the former Grayson Springs Inn and Resort. They plan to preserve these springs, creeks, and woodlands; restore the inn for gatherings; celebrate the culture; and bolster the regional economy.
Barrett has spent a great deal of her adult life in Louisville – she and her family live in the city’s Beechmont neighborhood – and while there, said longtime friend Richard Young, she’s gained many of the values that drive her. “But as a 12-generation Grayson Countian,” Young said, “she is, in the deepest version of herself, a rural Kentuckian wherever she goes.”
Her work – the work of the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange – is about bridging divides and securing connections. It’s about, she said, recognizing that “we all live downstream, and that these challenges are connected, and the only way to overcome them is to band together and advocate for one another.”
Savannah Barrett is co-founder of the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange, a leadership program that works to connect Kentuckians across geography, ideology, identity, race, class, and gender. (Photo by Taylor Killough)
Barrett’s perspective as a rural Kentuckian in an urban center is invaluable, Young said. “Savannah sees the disconnect – and the opportunity – first hand.”
When she was a little girl, she would sit alongside Lizard Branch, the creek that runs through this land, and write poems on sycamore bark, then sail those missives off, imagining an ancestor receives them.
For Barrett, those conversations are where it all starts.
Never Much Good at Fishing
Growing up, Barrett’s grandparents on her mother’s side were United Auto Workers organizers. Her mom, Kim, worked for a fraternal life insurance company.
She was a precocious kid: launched a local arts festival, an arts agency, and the arts club at her high school. Her rural community was always eager to help fulfill her dreams.
“Every time I was ever in the Grayson County News Gazette,” Barrett said, “people that I didn’t even know would laminate the articles and mail them to me.”
She left for the University of Louisville, where she was a modern culture major with minors in anthropology and social justice movements. There, she interned at the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research and was a scholar in the Muhammad Ali Scholars Program.
Removed from her community, her appreciation for it deepened – that remove, she believes, was necessary to gain perspective – and upon graduation she returned, “interested in learning all the stuff that I’d realized I hadn’t learned because I was writing poems in the creek bed.”
“I wanted to learn how to kill hogs. I wanted to make chicken and dumplings in one day from a live chicken.” She wanted to improve her canning and hunting skills.
She’d never been much good at fishing “because I talked too much.”
“So I went home and tried to learn all of these things.”
Though always recognized as maybe just a little bit different, Barrett was never made to feel out of place in her community. But politics now became an issue with some.
“Since the MAGA movement has become the greatest populist movement of our time, I think folks are genuinely hurt that I’m not with them. I think I talked about it too much in 2016 and 2017, with a lot of righteousness, and I regret that. I wish that I had listened better.”
She has little patience for those who judge from afar.
“I’ve had a lot of rough conversations with smart people about how they are not living their values in the way that they talk about my people.” She’s “endlessly frustrated” with a “willful lack of curiosity and compassion towards rural people” and a “willful glossing over of all the diversity that exists within rural America.”
“There are so many assumptions made about places like Kentucky, when in reality, after the killing of Brianna Taylor in Louisville, 64 counties in Kentucky had racial-justice actions on their courthouse squares within two weeks,” Barrett said. “Those were rural people who were standing up for their neighbors, who wanted their neighbors to know they supported them.”
Sharing Those ‘I-Come-From’ Stories
Barrett left to attend graduate school at the University of Oregon, earning a master’s in art management, with a focus in community arts, in 2013. She was then hired by Art of the Rural, a collaborative arts and culture nonprofit.
She’d found her niche. But: “I was like, ‘This is so great to find this resource where I can see myself in the work, but it doesn’t mean anything if people can’t interact with one another – if they can’t actually find their home in the work together.”
“As I learned from Ivy Brashear, who’s a 10th-generation Perry Countian,” Barrett said, “the shortest distance between two people is a story. And so we really set about trying to create the conditions for people across the state to tell their ‘I-come-from’ stories.”
Thus was the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange born, launched in 2014, a partnership of Art of the Rural and Appalshop.
“I just remember her being this center around which the rest of us were orbiting,” Brashear, a founding steering committee member, recalled. “And I think the reason for that is that she had the idea of what she wanted this to be from the very beginning,” while remaining receptive to input from others.
Barrett’s fellow co-founder was Josh May, a 10th-generation Magoffin Countian. “We had a lot of really similar experiences in our upbringing,” she said, “but he was from the heart of coal country in Eastern Kentucky, and it was so validating for our experiences to map over one another so closely.”
May passed away last November.
The program started by matching together 16 pairs of farmers, artists, small-business owners, health care providers, and others from Louisville and southeastern Kentucky. The work wasn’t focused on bridging a partisan divide, because “we understand that the partisan divide is not at the center of this problem; it’s a symptom.”
“We started to build stronger relationships across Kentucky, rural to rural, urban to urban and rural to urban, because we knew that if we could help unite people towards a sense of commonality that they could overcome those symptoms.”
“We’re trying to build bridges across geographic and racial and economic divides in this state,” Barrett said, “and I think that all of those things are relational problems, and they can only have a relational solution.”
“We talk about pluralism in those settings. And I define that as the presence of very diverse people who do not forsake their diversity for the sake of commonality, but fully express their diversity, because we understand that we are strengthened by our diversity. … Our commonalities are often our shared challenges, history and opportunities.
Grayson Springs was a popular mineral springs resort in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The two-story inn was built in 1836. A natural amphitheater is bordered by streams and forest. (Photo provided by Savannah Barrett)
A Legacy Lives
Richard Young met Barrett through the Kentucky Arts Council and became a member of the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange’s first steering committee. He’s the founder and executive director of the Lexington-based nonprofit CivicLex and among that group that’s purchased the Grayson Springs land. He’s witnessed Barrett’s ease in quite a range of environments.
“She can facilitate a group of leading academics and funders in one moment and be barefoot in a creek the next,” Young said. “Sometimes she even gets those academics and funders in the creek with her.”
“Provocative yet caring; scarily intelligent yet able to cut loose and have a good time,” he said of her. “She can hold complexity unlike anyone else I’ve ever met.”
“She’s able to move in and out of spaces really easily,” Brashear said, “sort of like flowing water.”
Both fully recognize the special place that Grayson County holds in Barrett’s heart – “that gravitational pull of wanting to be back home,” in Young’s words.
“Her whole demeanor changes when she’s talking about where she’s from,” Brashear said. “That’s really beautiful.”
Of her ambitions for those newly purchased 102 acres, Barrett said, “We want this to be a place where people from the community can have a sort of third space, natural environment, where they experience arts and culture that reflects them, and where local community groups are meeting and making decisions and making their community a better place.”
She envisions “a home for people to try new things and experiment together. And we think that’s the seedbed for a healthy community – and beyond that, a healthy social and civic and cultural place … a healthy democracy.”
“Doing a project like this is incredibly brave,” Young said. “When you’re working on the place that you’re from, the stakes are extremely high. That tight relational network of a place like Grayson County really increases the complexity of a project like this in ways that are immeasurable.”
Growing up in a place surrounded by so many generations of her family, Barrett said, and where she can so easily conjure those who have passed, their voices quite naturally inform. It is, of course, a two-way conversation. Metaphorically speaking, she’s never stopped floating sycamore missives to Sally and them.
“I think why I do this work is this responsibility I feel to them – and to steward this place that is just my spiritual reservoir on Earth.”
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