Editor’s Note

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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Fall 2015 Editor’s Note

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Fall 2015 ♦
In her memoir Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, bell hooks writes of growing up in small town Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in the 1950s—of a girl “young, gifted, and black” who finds refuge in books, who creates a secret world, who notices the roles women and men play in her culture. It’s…
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Summer 2015 Editor’s Note

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Summer 2015 ♦
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…
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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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Winter 2015 Editor’s Note

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Winter 2015 ♦
In the dead of winter, sunlight is often in short supply, appearing without warning, only to soon disappear again behind a mass of grey clouds. Many of us can’t help but walk around downcast, wearing what Shakespeare called a “February face” in Much Ado About Nothing—“So full of frost, of…
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Fall 2014 Editor’s Note

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Fall 2014 ♦
In his poem “Digging,” the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney depicts a writer at his desk, a pen resting “Between my finger and my thumb,” ready to begin his day’s work. But the narrator becomes distracted by the sound of a spade striking gravel, and he looks out to find his father’s “straining rump among the…
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Spring 2014 Editor’s Note

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Spring 2014 ♦
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…
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