Issues

Waiting for the Invasion

Fall 2014 ♦

Poetry

In other years I watched the sky for birds flying south in formation. This year they pass in unbroken lines through my sleep, driven down on machine wings. I know the voice you use for telling children not to fear every droning sound that scatters their play like shrapnel or…

Interview: Barbara Kingsolver

Crystal Wilkinson ♦

Fall 2014 ♦

Interview

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can,” Barbara Kingsolver wrote in her debut novel The Bean Trees, first published in 1988. Back then she could not have known that her entire ethos as one of our finest…

Summer 2014 Editor’s Note

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Summer 2014 ♦

Editor's Note

At the beginning of the year, one of my dear friends, whom I believe to be one of the best readers I know, started a Facebook campaign. Each day she collects a book—driving to purchase one from a bookshop in nearby Owensboro, ordering one online, or culling one from her…

Foundered

A.W. Marshall ♦

Summer 2014 ♦

Fiction

“Someday you’ll be dead and everyone else can eat,” Iris said, after Floyd took the last of the mashed potatoes without asking if anyone wanted more. “Don’t nod your head at me like that. I know what you’re thinking.” “Shut up or I’ll kick you into the living room,” he…

Telephone

Pauletta Hansel ♦

Summer 2014 ♦

Poetry

I. An appendage of my stepdaughter’s hand, pink as the tongue it has muted. Even as she sleeps it snores gently in her loosened grasp. All day her thumbs tap coded words across the screen, her eyes alive in its light. II. In my mother’s hand, another riddle she once…

Blue Kentucky Girl

Sonja Livingston ♦

Summer 2014 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

Named for the moon. Little Luna. Luna, blue. The details surrounding your birth are murky, some say 1878, others say a decade later, but why squabble over a handful of years? What’s most clear is that by the time you were born in eastern Kentucky, people had settled into its…

Interview: Jacinda Townsend

David Cornette ♦

Spring 2014 ♦

Interview

In February, Jacinda Townsend’s debut novel Saint Monkey was published to critical praise. Deeply moving and beautifully written, the book follows two young African-American women as they grow up in Eastern Kentucky in the 1950s. Audrey Martin and Caroline Wallace are consistently confronted with challenges and change; not only must…

Spring 2014 Editor’s Note

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Spring 2014 ♦

Editor's Note

In 1953, William Styron was riding high on the success of his debut novel, Lie Down in Darkness, which had been published two years earlier to great acclaim. He was just twenty-eight when he sat down with Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton at a café on the Boulevard Montparnasse in…

Battlefield

Carol Grametbauer ♦

Spring 2014 ♦

Poetry

Mid-October, and around the rocks of Devil’s Den legions of cabbage white butterflies march in wild disorder, like scattered clouds of ashes in the late-day light. Under the blank staring eyes of bronze generals we negotiate winding dirt paths among boulders encrusted with shapeless patches like grey-green lace: when I…

Johnson City

Carter Sickels ♦

Spring 2014 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

Stephen was singing along and tapping his hands on the steering wheel to the Mountain Goats, one of his favorite bands. It was a good day for driving and singing. October blue sky, hills layered with oaks and maples and sweetgums flashing scarlet and gold leaves. We’d left Chapel Hill…