THE KENTUCKY LIFE OF
BLAIR THOMAS HESS BY LAURYN HAAS | PHOTOS BY ISAAC JANSSEN
B
lair Hess, accidental expert on the state of Kentucky and real writer (although she struggles to identify with the term, as many of us do), has made things difficult for herself in her household. She met her husband, Elliott Hess, in college at the Kentucky Kernel on a story assignment that took the two of them downtown to interview the homeless. She wrote the story, and he took the photos. They now have a curly blonde four-year-old girl, also named Elliott Hess. In their home, it’s Blair versus Elliott Squared. “We named our daughter Elliott because things aren’t confusing enough in my life. I call her Ella, and she is very quick to tell me that’s not her name, her name is Elliott,” Hess said. “They band together because they’ll be like ‘well we’re the Elliotts and you’re not.’ Look what I’ve done.” But Blair and her daughter do have one important thing in common: they’re both born-and-bred Kentucky girls. Blair grew up in Lexington, her mother is from the Maysville area, and her father is from western Kentucky. As Blair puts it, she had a very “Kentucky kind of family.” “A lot of friends when I was growing up would go out of state to visit grandparents, but my whole everything was right here in Kentucky. And I used to really hate that. I used to be like… why can’t my grandparents be somewhere cool that we get to go travel and visit, but summers were spent in western Kentucky on my grandparents’ farm… I just had a very Kentucky upbringing, very traditional,” Hess said. Vacations in Disney World and at the beach came second to exploring her home state. Blair’s family took regular trips to Lincoln’s birthplace, Mammoth Cave and Cumberland Falls. Every year she went to the Trigg County Country Ham Festival to marvel at everything from the prized pigs to the Ms. Ham Hock competition to the sack the pig contests. An appreciation for all that Kentucky has to offer was instilled in her from a very young age. When it was time to head off to college, Blair followed in her mother’s footsteps and decided on Western Kentucky University. She spent a year in
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