Gone to Water

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Fall 2016 ♦
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…
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Utopia Drive (Reece)

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Fall 2016 ♦
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…
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The Memorial

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Fall 2016 ♦
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…
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What Our Writers Are Reading

What Our Writers Are Reading

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Blog ♦
In search of a good book to curl up to during a fall afternoon? We compiled a list of books our contributors have been reading to provide you with some inspiration! Jeremy B. Jones won the 2014 Appalachian Book of the Year in nonfiction with his book Bearwallow: A Personal History…
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Summer 2016 Editor’s Note

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Summer 2016 ♦
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…
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Dimestore: A Writer’s Life (Smith)

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Summer 2016 ♦
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,…
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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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