Issues

Summer 2015 Editor’s Note

Silas House ♦

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…

Interview: Jessie van Eerden

Silas House ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Interview

Jessie van Eerden’s speaking voice is gentle, inviting, smooth as a creek stone. She’s reading of prayers, of a woman wearing a black slip and smoking Pall Malls, of the “cloud of witnesses” from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, and her listeners are entranced, transported far from this dull…

The Long Weeping

Jessie van Eerden ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Creative Nonfiction, Special Feature: Voice Lessons

I stand at the hand pump in the grove, young, maybe ten, having run from the signs of dying. Under the small shingled roof on the cement slab, the iron pump is smudged by creatures that licked it in the night, coons and cats and the rumored black bear. My…

Fiction: The Attack

Darnell Arnoult ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Fiction, Special Feature: Voice Lessons

An excerpt from The Nine Lives of Loody Tibbett, a novel in progress Day 1 Iron. Sodium. Lightning. Wind. Stars. Day 10 There’s a flap and roll to it, the kind of soft thunder you hear when you hang sheets on the line and a strong wind comes while you’re…

Shadow

Sandra Marchetti ♦

Spring 2015 ♦

Poetry

Across clearings, an eye—Ted Hughes, “The Thought-Fox” Mushrooms on the trail indicate you haven’t roved this prairie of late; soft-sponged and pink, they’re sweet as the berries ripped in your teeth. “Foxes are opportunistic feeders,” notes a sign—I never mind the goldfinches who arc my breeze and swap big bluestem…

Refrain

Sandra Marchetti ♦

Spring 2015 ♦

Poetry

The birches dizzy me, shaking down their mint and white confetti crowns around the Scarlet Tanager, a trilling sky-high king: red come orange, come black, come green. From this forest freshed with song, a goose lay drawn, opened in a field ringed in feathers— orange come red, come black, come…

Spring 2015 Editor’s Note

Silas House ♦

Spring 2015 ♦

Editor's Note

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.…

Stalking the White Deer

Natalie Sypolt ♦

Spring 2015 ♦

Fiction

Dalton stalked the white deer. It became his obsession, like finding that thing and owning it in a hard, bloody way would fill a hole neither of us could name. We were newly married then and him just back from the war. He’d been home about a year, but it…

Interview: Wiley Cash

Amy Clark ♦

Spring 2015 ♦

Interview

Wiley Cash and I sit in the Rhododendron Lodge dining room at Virginia’s Breaks Interstate Park, where he is the guest author for the Appalachian Writing Project’s annual Writing Retreat. A wall of glass gives us a panorama of peaks and cliffs that are known as the “Grand Canyon of the…