[Editor’s note: In the spirit of Asheville’s own Wilma Dykeman whose mother and father hailed, respectively, from Buncombe County’s earliest white settlements and from upstate New York, Appalachian People: Natives and Transplants will seek to highlight the shared qualities of Western North Carolina natives and transplants to the region.]
Kathryn Liss, a resident of Asheville for 27 years, has played a leading role as a volunteer in the early years of the antiracism initiative Building Bridges as well as the YWCA’s Stand Against Racism. “For me,” she maintains, “Asheville has been the best place I ever lived.” But she has also come to believe that “we must both heal ourselves with reflection on our personal interactions and also share with others our vision of a righteous world.”
Kathryn grew up in Chevy Chase, MD—until her father was hounded from his position with the Farm Security Administration by McCarthyites. The Liss family moved to Amagansett on the eastern end of New York’s Long Island, where her parents bought a tavern and cottages. Through no intention of their own, the Elm Tree Inn became “a safe haven for many of the gay men who worked on the Broadway stage and in television and movies,” Kathryn writes. When three men were arrested in 1960 outside the tavern on solicitation charges, she adds, “The bar never reopened.”
These quotes are from her memoir Truth Is in the Paradox: Learning to Thrive in a Fractious Society (2019). She goes on to recount her rich and varied life at The Bronx High School of Science, the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the Friends World College in Kenya and Atlanta, and an intentional community called Golden Hill near Cornelia, GA, among other places…