Issues

I Come to the Garden Alone

Marc Harshman ♦

Fall 2018, Issues ♦

Poetry

He walked the hill to the fence, fell as he reached with pliers to mend the break. The deer had done this, voracious, and his garden done this, to him, and his obsession to fix, to do, had done this, too. And now this, a single, slick stone underfoot: simple,…

In Conversation: bell hooks and Fenton Johnson

bell hooks ♦

Summer 2018 ♦

Interview

When Appalachian Heritage hosted a conversation between bell hooks and Fenton Johnson in April, the two native Kentuckians spoke to a packed house filled with students, professors, community members, and even a couple who had driven in from Texas specially for the event. After Johnson read from his recently published…

The Tennessee Kid

Hal Crowther ♦

Summer 2018 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

From the book Freedom Fighters and Hell Raisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners by Hal Crowther. Copyright © 2018 by Hal Crowther. Reprinted by permission of Blair. Photographs can mislead, and sometimes conceal more than they reveal. But on occasion, usually in hindsight, a photograph radiates so much insight you need…

[Jesus Rides Shotgun]

Savannah Sipple ♦

Summer 2018 ♦

Poetry

We go balls to the wall, windows down, aviator sunglasses always on. …

What We Tell Ourselves

Savannah Sipple ♦

Summer 2018 ♦

Poetry

I. I show him my pay stub my weekly deposit slip reasons for needing ten dollars this is how it has to be This is working nine hour days on my feet barely a break to…

Surface Level

Chris Holbrook ♦

Summer 2018 ♦

Fiction

It was Cecil Leemaster’s favorite time on the lake. He’d make his first excursion a few days after Thanksgiving, cruising his bass boat along the resurrected creek channel, following the route of old Highway 7. The late fall drawdown of Cedar Lake by the Corps of Engineers left the twelve mile Burgey’s…

The Wrecker Lot

Jeff Hardin ♦

Summer 2018 ♦

Poetry

After the latest town wreck, my mother would drive us past the wrecker lot to see the twisted shapes of metal; bumpers and back ends deranged, sharp edges glinting; passenger doors cut away to remove the dying, the already dead—the bodies, we heard, sometimes burned beyond recognition. Evening quiet would…

Being In Your Own Mind

Jeff Hardin ♦

Summer 2018 ♦

Poetry

When you’re with, say, your own kind, those toward whom you do not feel a need to prove yourself, to explain the context out of which you speak; being in your own mind’s ease is easier then. No fiddling to find the right word to convey belief in sacramental places…

Summer 2018 Editor’s Note

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Summer 2018 ♦

Editor's Note

Don’t get above your raising. It’s a saying with which many, if not most, Appalachians are familiar. I have heard the phrase all my life, particularly from my family and many in my community when I left southeastern Kentucky at eighteen for an internship on Capitol Hill and subsequently to attend university in…

Book Review: Jaws of Life (Laura Leigh Morris)

Emily Masters ♦

Summer 2018 ♦

Book Reviews

Laura Leigh Morris. Jaws of Life. Morgantown, W.Va.: Vandalia Press, 2018. 168 pages. Softcover. $18.99. Laura Leigh Morris’s debut collection of short stories, Jaws of Life, focuses on characters from a small town in West Virginia. Morris, who has had her fiction published in The Louisville Review, Weave Magazine, and other journals, gathers together some gems from…