Issues

The Great Flood

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Summer 2016 ♦
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…
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Junebug

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Summer 2016 ♦
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…
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Gifts of the South

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Summer 2016 ♦
An Eclipse The moon, red like fat dripping from the porterhouse side of the T-Bone, an American God in its own rites. Beef moon, nurturing our ebb and flow with hands that knead us to tenderness and umami. Then, a cleanse, clean as gin straight up tasting like clear night…
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Interview: Sonja Livingston

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Summer 2016 ♦
In essayist Sonja Livingston’s latest collection Ladies Night at the Dreamland (University of Georgia Press), the Appalachian native of western New York explores the lives of historical women—famous, notorious, and invented—and in many ways her own life and understanding of herself. Through re-imaginings of figures like Virginia Dare (“Dare”), Luna…
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The Rope Swing (Corcoran)

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Spring 2016 ♦
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…
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Interview: Crystal Wilkinson

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Spring 2016 ♦
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…
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