The Appalachian Sisterhood Magazine

Maggie Risner, June 2025 NOSW Graduate
Event Coordinator & Co-Facilitator
New Opportunity School for Women

Roots
I was born in Martin, a little town in Floyd County, Kentucky, you’d miss if you blinked. The only girl in 4 children, and a middle child at that.  But my first real memories aren’t from there. They’re from Michigan, where my parents moved when I was a baby, so my dad could work at the Hoover factory with my papaw. Both sides of my family trace back to the same hollows in Floyd County, but my grandparents had gone north to build a life, and that’s where I was raised until I was five.

Those early years were marked by my dad’s drinking and the violence that followed him home; flashing lights, late nights packed into cars with strangers, running to stay safe. One of the hardest moments of my childhood was when my mother tricked me into seeing my dad after months of hiding from him, only to learn we were all moving back to Kentucky.

Kentucky meant little to me then; just some family and nights spent in a funeral home saying goodbye to people I barely knew. What I did know was that my dad terrified me, and the people who made me feel safe, my Mamaw and Papaw, were about to be hours away.

We landed in Bear Hollow, Johnson County, in a hundred-year-old shack of a house on six acres with a fireplace for heat and box fans for air. Inside those walls was more heartache than happiness. Outside was a different world. The barn, the garden, the streams; that farmland was my sanctuary. My dad found one of my brothers willing to learn his cruelty, and I watched that same hand turn toward me from a second brother. Nobody in the family seemed to notice, or care. I learned early that my words didn’t matter and that speaking them could bring more pain. My mom then became my only safety, and together, mother and daughter suffered in almost the same way.

Still, I can’t fully regret those years. I became a farm girl. I learned to survive winters with no wood or coal, to make dinner from almost nothing, to be self-sufficient. My dad, for all his anger, was Appalachian through and through, and some of what he taught me, I still carry with pride. My mother made sure, that the good moments we had throughout our childhood held value and worth.  You can create the best memories and traditions with very little.

We stayed there almost a decade, until the county condemned the house, not for being dirty (my mom kept it spotless) but because it could no longer be made safe. So, we moved back to Martin, my birth town. Little did I know that was exactly where my dad wanted to be. In the middle of his kind of people.

The only glimpses I had of a different kind of life came during summers with Mamaw and Papaw in Michigan. Those weeks gave me peace, even while I worried the phone might ring with news that my mother hadn’t survived my dad’s temper. But those summers also showed me, without my realizing it at the time, how a man should treat a woman, how a family should support each other, and that the world was bigger than the holler I was growing up in. My papaw, with his goofy heart and love of music, became my rock.

The Long Fight
High school brought its own weight. I was working toward being the first in my family to graduate, working part time, and training in JROTC color guard and drill team, aiming to enlist after graduation as my ticket out. Then things at home grew more chaotic, and I ended up hospitalized, followed by a 72-hour mental health evaluation. I spent my junior year mostly inside my bedroom, diagnosed with agoraphobia, depression, social anxiety, and panic attacks, too afraid to go far from those four walls. By senior year, I knew that if I didn’t fight my way out, that room would become the rest of my life. I graduated with teachers who let me avoid crowded halls, and thought, “Finally, I can run.”

Instead, I ended up in a relationship that started before graduation and lasted, off and on, for fourteen years. It gave me two beautiful sons and the slow, painful realization that the man I loved was a reflection of my father. Drugs and drinking took that home from me too, and I was left raising two boys largely on my own, hearing every hurtful thing my dad had ever told me echoed back: that I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t worth loving, and was worthless. But I knew one thing for certain. I would never raise my children the way I was raised. I left, and I didn’t go back.

Being on my own showed me how little I could actually rely on my family. One brother, along with his wife, became addicted to meth among other things, despite them having six children between them. Another brother, working hard to raise his own family, kept his distance from all of it, including our father. I became the outcast for refusing to live the life everyone else had chosen, and I learned that anyone can be a victim. Some people just choose to stay one.

I refused. My ex-husband and my family kept trying to control what was left of my life through stalking, threats, and manipulation. When one brother’s troubles caught up to him and his family disappeared overnight, I learned the hard way, through a frightening encounter with my son at a store, that some people will go through anyone to get to who they’re after. But by then I’d been through enough to stand my ground. Nothing was going to happen to my child in front of me.

The hard years kept coming. A house fire left me temporarily homeless, and rather than let my children experience that, I let their father keep them for a few months while I found us a new home, breaking my own heart to keep them safe. Around the same time, my dad finally put my mother in a coma, and I was blamed for giving up on my kids, though that had nothing to do with why their father had them. Not long after I found my footing again, my second-oldest brother went missing and was later found deceased. Within months, I was raising his two daughters as well.

Guilt, doubt, fear, trauma, depression. I carried all of it. But the one thing it never took from me was hope. My papaw was gone by then, but his words stayed with me, “Never lose hope, Maggie, and don’t forget to laugh.”

Raising my nieces wasn’t the hard part; children aren’t responsible for what’s done to them. But helping one of them work through the same kind of trauma I’d survived, in some ways worse, was the heaviest weight I’d carried. It poured into everything: my sons, my home, my relationship, my sense of myself. For a while, I lost the fight, the laughter, the hope. I knew I couldn’t pull myself out of it alone anymore, and I knew there had to be something better than the pain I’d witnessed my whole life. I wanted better for my children, and even for my brother’s children. I was losing hope, but I reached for one more straw of it anyway.

The Turn
I started therapy. My therapist saw the small flicker of light I’d held onto and she gave it air. She mentioned the New Opportunity School for Women. My first reaction was to laugh; sure, why not, nothing left to lose. I took the three-day course from my couch over Zoom while my kids were at school. Day one, I already recognized what they were teaching, but something about how they presented it felt different. Day two, I found myself crying over hurts I hadn’t known were still there. By day three, the flicker had caught breath again, and I knew I had to do the Two-Week Immersive Retreat.

I had no one to watch my kids for two weeks, and one of them was struggling badly. I was terrified to leave. But something kept pushing me to start somewhere, so in June 2025 I packed my bags and drove to Berea, a town I’d only ever heard of, scared to death. I walked into the cabin, laid out my things, and asked for more faith and more hope.

Two weeks later, I walked out ready to fight harder for myself and for my children. The Program Director, Crystal Burton, the instructors, and my new sisters who sat alongside me, just as scared as I was, gave that flicker enough air to become a fire. They showed me how far I’d come, that my struggles hadn’t been for nothing, that I mattered to people who genuinely cared, that love isn’t supposed to hurt, and that boundaries matter. For the first time in my life, someone showed me through their words and their actions, that I was worth it all.

I’d always had some kind of light in me. I’d just never been allowed to show it. I came home from Berea changed, not knowing exactly how, but knowing I was going to change my life and my children’s lives. I could use my own story to give someone else that same light.

Months later, after I’d told Crystal and my therapist how much I wanted to help others the way I’d been helped, I got a phone call: a job offer, from the same people who’d taken a chance on a broken woman with nothing to gain from it. I screamed loud enough to break glass, and I couldn’t stop the tears. Finally, something is really changing. The door is opening.

Faith, hope, laughter, and music. Papaw, you were right. It all worked out.

In May of 2026, I moved to Berea. And on June 1st, I walked back through the doors of New Opportunity School for Women, but this time to stay- as their Events Coordinator and Co-Facilitator. I still face struggles, and I still doubt myself sometimes, but nothing compares to what I used to carry every day. I know this is where I’m supposed to be. My children are happy and thriving. No one can stop me now.

I owe a lot to the people I’ve met along the way, but who I am becoming, I owe to NOSW and to myself. Wherever this road leads, I know I can walk it, and I’ll carry the kind of support I never fully had growing up: the sisterhood I’ve found here. I’m grateful for this journey, and I can’t wait to watch that same change happen in every woman who walks through those doors and learns to trust us, and herself, in the two weeks ahead.

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