Editor’s Note – Page 2 – Appalachian Review

Summer 2016 Editor’s Note

Summer 2016 ♦

Editor's Note

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…

Spring 2016 Editor’s Note

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Spring 2016 ♦

Editor's Note

I grew up in southeastern Kentucky near Straight Creek, a body of water with bends and curves that contradicted its name. My friends and I often waded in its placid waters, hunting for crawdads as the heat bugs sang a steady chorus in the brambles and treetops. But the creek…

Winter 2016 Editor’s Note

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Winter 2016 ♦

Editor's Note, Kentucky Arts Council, Plattner Awards

This January, the arts community in Kentucky had a close shave. Rumors were rife that Matt Bevin, the Commonwealth’s new governor, was planning to propose abolishing the Kentucky Arts Council in his budget. Such a move would have been disastrous for artists and arts lovers alike: in 2015, the state…

Fall 2015 Editor’s Note

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Fall 2015 ♦

Editor's Note

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…

Summer 2015 Editor’s Note

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Editor's Note

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…

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.…

Winter 2015 Editor’s Note

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Winter 2015 ♦

Editor's Note

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…

Fall 2014 Editor’s Note

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Fall 2014 ♦

Editor's Note

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…

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…

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…