Appalachian Review

Shadow

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

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

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…

Blue Dinosaur

Cheryl Smart ♦

Spring 2015 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

1.Rob a Townie I remember stealing only once. It was not the sort of thing a God-fearing girl would normally do. Stealing would set my seven-year-old soul in danger of the Hell fire promised to me every week by Sunday School teachers and weeping pastors pacing the pulpit, raising their…

Interview with Robert Gipe

Dylan Mullins ♦

Blog ♦

Interview

Anyone who meets Robert Gipe knows right off that he’s a character in the best sense of the word. Highly creative and original, Gipe has long had an impact on Appalachian culture and literature in his work as the Appalachian program director at Southeast Community and Technical College in Cumberland, Kentucky;…

Interview with Ronni Lundy

Dylan Mullins ♦

Blog ♦

Interview

When people talk about experts on Appalachian food, most immediately mention Ronni Lundy. A native of Corbin, in southeastern Kentucky, Lundy is perhaps the best-known champion of Appalachian foodways. Southern Living has named her as one of the true preservers of Southern food culture and she is one of the founding members…

New Work from Robert Gipe

Dylan Mullins ♦

Blog ♦

You know it’s going to be a good read when a story starts with someone waking up in the trunk of a Bonneville. Don’t miss “One Good Reason” by Robert Gipe–author of the newly released illustrated novel Trampoline–in the latest issue of the online literary magazine Hidden City Quarterly.

2014 Weatherford Award Winners

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Blog ♦

Congratulations to the 2014 Weatherford Award winners, which were announced on Friday, March 27th at the annual Appalachian Studies Association Conference. The award is given by ASA and Berea College in recognition of books that “best illuminate the challenges, personalities, and unique qualities of the Appalachian South.” Fiction: Marie Manilla, The…