Hateful

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Summer 2015 ♦
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…
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Interview: Jessie van Eerden

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Summer 2015 ♦
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…
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Shadow

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Spring 2015 ♦
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…
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Refrain

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Spring 2015 ♦
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…
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Spring 2015 Editor’s Note

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Spring 2015 ♦
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.…
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Stalking the White Deer

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Spring 2015 ♦
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…
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Interview: Wiley Cash

Interview: Wiley Cash

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Spring 2015 ♦
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…
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Blue Dinosaur

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Spring 2015 ♦
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…
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