Greenup facts

Greenup Facts is a part of Bikes, Kites, and All Good Stuff.

Greenup Facts

 No, the Greenup, Kentucky featured at Bikes, Kites, and All Good Stuff is not [the real one]. For one thing it is larger and for another it is more ethnically diverse.

Here is what you can expect to find in the fictionalized version of Greenup, Kentucky where Oisin Renjyi lives:

Population: 15,000 (Yes, this is more than an order of magnitude larger than the real life version, but it is still tiny.)

Two shopping malls: I haven't named them yet. They'll appear in the writing. They are the only malls for miles around and one will include a [Wally World] and a [Hannaford's].

There is also: YGTA which stands for Your Greenup County Transit Authority. This runs the buses and yes we have seven day a week mass transit.

Hmmm....there must be something going on in Greenup County and there is. There is a new Saturn auto plant and a new steel foundry. This means jobs. This means money. This means new businesses and prosperity. This is also how Oisin ended up in Greenup, but you'll see more of that as you read his story.

With all that, Greenup is still a small town stuck in Appalachia. Students at the high school take the ACT rather than the SAT (Oisin will some day change that as will some of his peers. He's not the only one. One is rarely ever unique.) and there is no fourth year French even through the Kentucky Virtual High School, though that may change by the time Oisin is a junior.

Professionals and educated people have settled in Greenup drawn by the same opportunity as factory workers. Urban people have fled the cities in search of "quality of life" and not found much so they've had to import it.

This makes for a bit of a chaotic social milieu. Well, you get the idea. And yes, there are some "third spaces" in Greenup, public parks, a state park, and just plain back roads. Outside the County Seat, you are going to fall off the world. It does have an end as city people learn with some dismay when they move away from the main metropolitan areas or older East Coast cities. If you join this story, you are free to write both in town and beyond where the world ends.

If you have a rural sensibility, which I sorely lack, you might even give this a fresh prespective, but as a scribe I know my limits, hence the fictional Greenup is an Appalachian boom town. Enjoy.....