Writings by: Silas House

This author has written 50 pieces

Spring 2015 Editor’s Note

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Spring 2015 ♦
Since February, three friends of mine have been diagnosed with cancer. Their stories are all too familiar. A few odd pains—nothing too severe— an eventual doctor’s visit, followed by a couple more, and finally, a diagnosis that seemingly came from out of the blue. They are all in their sixties.…
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2014 Weatherford Award Winners

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Congratulations to the 2014 Weatherford Award winners, which were announced on Friday, March 27th at the annual Appalachian Studies Association Conference. The award is given by ASA and Berea College in recognition of books that “best illuminate the challenges, personalities, and unique qualities of the Appalachian South.” Fiction: Marie Manilla, The…
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“Pain Pills” by Angaleena Presley

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Eastern Kentucky native Angaleena Presley‘s debut solo album, American Middle Class, was released in 2014 to widespread praise, following a career of songwriting and hit-making with country supergroup The Pistol Annies. Here’s a twangy track titled “Pain Pills.”
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Winter 2015 Editor’s Note

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Winter 2015 ♦
In the dead of winter, sunlight is often in short supply, appearing without warning, only to soon disappear again behind a mass of grey clouds. Many of us can’t help but walk around downcast, wearing what Shakespeare called a “February face” in Much Ado About Nothing—“So full of frost, of…
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Interview: David Joy

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Winter 2015 ♦
David Joy is only thirty-one, but come March, this North Carolina writer will see his first novel, Where All the Light Tends to Go, published by Putnam. The book, a gritty tale of “a young man seeking redemption,” is highly anticipated and has garnered advance praise from the likes of…
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Fall 2014 Editor’s Note

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Fall 2014 ♦
In his poem “Digging,” the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney depicts a writer at his desk, a pen resting “Between my finger and my thumb,” ready to begin his day’s work. But the narrator becomes distracted by the sound of a spade striking gravel, and he looks out to find his father’s “straining rump among the…
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Spring 2014 Editor’s Note

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Spring 2014 ♦
In 1953, William Styron was riding high on the success of his debut novel, Lie Down in Darkness, which had been published two years earlier to great acclaim. He was just twenty-eight when he sat down with Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton at a café on the Boulevard Montparnasse in…
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Winter 2014 Editor’s Note

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Winter 2014 ♦
Nine years ago, my paternal grandmother was in the final weeks of her life. I joined my family in keeping vigil back in southeastern Kentucky as often as I could, making the eight-hour drive down Interstate 81 or flying to nearby Knoxville, Tennessee, from my then home in Washington, D.C.…
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