2016 – Page 3 – Appalachian Review

Flood Stage

Tim Polland ♦

Spring 2016 ♦

Fiction, Special Fiction Feature: Deep Waters

The river had been low and sluggish for over a month at that point. The fishing had been good enough, but beyond that there hadn’t been much at all for us to give a hoot about for some time. We felt about as sluggish as the river, mutely longing for…

The Rope Swing (Corcoran)

Adam Booth ♦

Spring 2016 ♦

Book Reviews

Jonathan Corcoran. The Rope Swing: Stories. Morgantown, W. Va.: Vandalia Press, 2016. 144 pages. Softcover. $16.99. To the Outsider reader—the person who isn’t quite sure how to pronounce “Appalachia” and perhaps can’t locate its reaches on a map—the characters in Jonathan Corcoran’s short story collection The Rope Swing will stand…

Spring 2016 Editor’s Note

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Spring 2016 ♦

Editor's Note

I grew up in southeastern Kentucky near Straight Creek, a body of water with bends and curves that contradicted its name. My friends and I often waded in its placid waters, hunting for crawdads as the heat bugs sang a steady chorus in the brambles and treetops. But the creek…

Interview: Crystal Wilkinson

Silas House ♦

Spring 2016 ♦

Interview

In the introduction to her debut short story collection Blackberries, Blackberries, celebrated fiction writer Crystal Wilkinson drew a strong connection between two parts of her identity. “Being country,” she wrote, “is as much a part of me as my full lips, wide hips, dreadlocks and high cheekbones. There are many…

Audre Lorde was a Secret Hillbilly: A liturgy for the 21st Century

Rebecca Gayle Howell ♦

Spring 2016 ♦

Poetry

February 23, 2016 Lorde, who would have turned 82 last Thursday. If she had not died in that year of the rising Clintons, 1992. If she had not battled for 14 years before that breast cancer liver cancer For 58 years before that the cancer of a disappearing mother the…

The Man Who Loved Birds (Johnson)

Jayne Moore Waldrop ♦

Spring 2016 ♦

Book Reviews

Fenton Johnson. The Man Who Loved Birds. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 318 pages. Hardcover. $24.95. In The Man Who Loved Birds, Fenton Johnson returns to his native landscape in the Kentucky Knobs to revisit themes he has explored in past works—love, the law and the lawless, spirituality,…

The Birds of Opulence (Wilkinson)

Journey McAndrews ♦

Spring 2016 ♦

Book Reviews

Crystal Wilkinson. The Birds of Opulence. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 208 pages. Hardcover. $24.95. Crystal Wilkinson’s new novel The Birds of Opulence opens with this passage: “Imagine a tree, a bird in the tree, the hills, the creek, a possum, the dog chasing the possum. Imagine yourself…

Silent Song

Susan Tekulve ♦

Spring 2016 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

In Camerota, where the locals dance salsa every night for all of summer in a club called The Cyclops, I step into the butter yellow church in the piazza and find the most sorrowful Madonna I’ve ever seen. She stands on the right side of the altar, her eyes red-rimmed,…

Our Kind: An Interview with Julia Franks

Susan Tekulve ♦

Blog ♦

Interview

Within the first few pages of Julia Franks’ breathtaking debut novel, Over the Plain Houses, a North Carolina mountain farm wife named Irenie Lambey slips from her husband’s bed in the middle of an early spring night and runs up to the highest ridge on her property. There, she ducks…

What Lies on the Mind

Jeremy S. McQueen ♦

Winter 2016 ♦

Fiction

The fog rose off the lake like puffs of smoke blown into the atmosphere. Heavy drops beat down the humidity that tried to creep up from the soil. It didn’t have much of a fighting chance. Autumn gave up on its lie of better days to come with each dying leaf. The…