Issues

A Conversation with Denise Giardina

Fall 2016 ♦

Featured Author, Interview

Denise Giardina is not one to mince words. For nearly four decades, she has been speaking truth to power throughout Appalachia and beyond in her art and social activism, and for a short time, even on the political stump as the Mountain Party candidate for governor of West Virginia. A…

A Mountaintop Experience

Denise Giardina ♦

Fall 2016 ♦

Creative Nonfiction, Featured Author

When God created heaven and earth, he looked at his handiwork and declared it “good.” Each act of creation received this word of divine satisfaction. As time passed, only one part of God’s creation became the subject of disappointment and anger— ourselves. But after the destruction of the Flood, God…

Gospel River

Ron Houchin ♦

Fall 2016 ♦

Poetry

Despite my animosity toward Sunday school and church: the huge helmets of grey hair capped by tight buns, flung back in hallelujahs; the spirit-filled oxblood wingtips loping to and from hard seats, and all the cloth— giant flowery dresses billowing up aisles, flapping dark suits and long ties lolling like…

Gone to Water

Robert Gipe ♦

Fall 2016 ♦

Fiction

God didn’t give us no lakes in Canard County. Too much downhill, too much push to the water. So when the government decided we could use some help, they dammed up our rivers and they made us lakes. Had us make them. The people I come from were good enough…

Utopia Drive (Reece)

Jayne Moore Waldrop ♦

Fall 2016 ♦

Book Reviews

Erik Reece. Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. 368 pages. Hardcover. $28.00. Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea by Erik Reece provides an opportunity to step away from current fractious political discourse and explore…

The Memorial

Katherine Smith ♦

Fall 2016 ♦

Poetry

The road devours the trees and the mountain, like fruit, excretes the miracle of convenience. At the end of the trail a memorial looks over the valley, where mountains crash into a shoreline of silvery pastures shot through with pink evening light, where factories ride the fog like freighters on…

Summer 2016 Editor’s Note

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Summer 2016 ♦

Editor's Note

Dog days are upon us, those dreaded summer weeks of stifling temperatures and humidity that blanket the mountains and bottomlands. Some evenings, just before the gloaming descends, one can actually see the moisture hanging in the air, a ribbon wending just above the treeline. What helps to make these scorching…

Dimestore: A Writer’s Life (Smith)

Amy Clark ♦

Summer 2016 ♦

Book Reviews

Lee Smith. Dimestore: A Writer’s Life. Chapel Hill, N.C..: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2016. 202 pages. Hardcover. $24.95. Dimestore: A Writer’s Life is a collection of fifteen essays, published over the span of twenty years. “This little book,” as Lee Smith called it in a recent reading in Abingdon,…

The Great Flood

Lana Austin ♦

Summer 2016 ♦

Poetry

Hazard, Kentucky is no different than a hundred rural towns started as a trading post, funded by coal that turned lungs and hands dark at the start of the twentieth century. And while I love the story of Hazard folk making the Stone Gap journey, having to go over Big…

Junebug

Chelyen Davis ♦

Summer 2016 ♦

Fiction

From the kitchen window I can see two little girls lying in my yard like small sacks of brightly-dressed potatoes. My daughter June is walking among them, followed by another girl struggling with my wheelbarrow. June is draping one prone girl with a sheet, my good sheets, given to us…