Issues

Calling Out the Dead

Fall 2015 ♦

Poetry

I was a sound sleeper in my teens. My mother’s voice used to break through my dreams, waking me for school with news. Hey, that funny guy from Saturday Night Live died, what’s his name, Ackroyd? Or, They shot one of the Beatles. I’m trying to hear her tone again,…

Mary Yoder, Walking

Lydia Munnell ♦

Fall 2015 ♦

Fiction

I think of Mary Yoder standing just outside the kitchen door, one foot holding it open, swatting mosquitos in the white flood light. She smoked a cigarette like it was delicious. Her waist-length hair was tied back in a tight ponytail and then braided—she hadn’t figured that part out yet.…

Fall 2015 Editor’s Note

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Fall 2015 ♦

Editor's Note

In her memoir Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, bell hooks writes of growing up in small town Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in the 1950s—of a girl “young, gifted, and black” who finds refuge in books, who creates a secret world, who notices the roles women and men play in her culture. It’s…

The Curve of the Smoke

Beth Newberry ♦

Fall 2015 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

On a Thursday night in late June, the air is sticky on my skin as I smoke a cigarette at my kitchen window and watch the smoke curl into the air. It curves like my fingers do when I hold a pen. I stand at the open window and face…

In Conversation: bell hooks and Laverne Cox

bell hooks ♦

Fall 2015 ♦

Featured Author, Interview

Originally published in November 2015. Earlier this spring, bell hooks invited the award-winning actress, producer, and advocate Laverne Cox to speak at the private opening of The bell hooks Institute, a new center in Berea dedicated to critical thinking and contemplating the intersectional issues of race, gender, and class. The…

Night in the Burned House

Lucien Darjeun Meadows ♦

Fall 2015 ♦

Poetry

In my old bedroom, in this house now my Aunt A’s, walls mottle grey into black, char hiding that this room was ever painted purple in a hope that someone would guess, would know. Burning night, my hidden journals blown across the field—and my aunt, gathering boughs for wreaths, found…

Memorate

Christie Collins ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Poetry

The field. Light. Morning. Then, my father, uncle. Apples, everywhere. In boxes, in palms, in teeth. Apples, everywhere. The black mare. Wild. The black mare that dawned from the mountain. Wild. The rough sketches of my earliest memory. My father places me on the back of the beast & we…

Jean Ritchie (1922-2015)

Loyal Jones ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Special Feature

I first met Jean Ritchie about seventy years ago at Brasstown, North Carolina, where I grew up and where her sisters Mae and Edna were at the John C. Campbell Folk School. Just a few years later, as a foreign-lander-soldier, I found a copy of Singing Family of the Cumberlands…

Summer 2015 Editor’s Note

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Editor's Note

During their panel discussion titled “Voice Lessons” at the 2015 Appalachian Studies Association Conference, writers and teachers Darnell Arnoult, Karen Salyer McElmurray, Amanda Jo Runyon, and Jessie van Eerden offered their thoughts on voice in creative writing. They talked of the vital voices that have shaped their work over the…

Hateful

Pauletta Hansel ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Poetry

my Granny said, her pleated velvet cheeks aquiver as we watched the battered Fords and coal trucks splatter gravel from the road above the porch. That’s one thing I can’t abide. I don’t remember who it was or what he did that made my Granny spit his name like chaw…