Interview – Appalachian Review

Wes Browne talks with George Singleton about crime fiction, encountering characters in the courtroom, and his latest novel

Winter 2025 ♦

Interview

When it was published in early January, Wes Browne’s second novel They All Fall the Same sparked instant buzz online. The Southern noir thriller brings back Burl Spoon, a central character from Browne’s 2020 debut Hillbilly Hustle, whose cannabis empire is still going strong in Jackson County, Kentucky after three decades.…

Monic Ductan on ‘Daughters of Muscadine’, Black Appalachians and the writers who have inspired her

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Fall 2023 ♦

Interview

Monic Ductan was born and raised in north Georgia, so it’s only natural that her debut short story collection, Daughters of Muscadine, is set in that oft-overlooked part of rural Appalachia. A fictional town with a complex history, her Muscadine is home to several generations of Black, working-class, mountain families…

In Conversation: Patricia L. Hudson

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Winter/Spring 2023 ♦

Interview

When she was writing Traces, her debut historical novel about Rebecca Boone, Patricia L. Hudson had a goal: to bridge the distance between present and past. “My goal…was to make readers feel immersed in these women’s thoughts and feelings, so that you felt as if you were moving through their…

Erin Keane talks ‘Runaway’

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Fall 2022 ♦

Interview

At a greasy spoon in Louisville, Erin Keane dissects a phrase she holds in particular contempt: It was a different time. She spits it out over the clatter of dishes and shouted orders coming from the nearby kitchen, rolling her expressive eyes for good measure. The weaselly wording, she believes,…

In Conversation: Neema Avashia

Skylar Bensheimer ♦

Summer 2022 ♦

Interview

“In truth, I’ve always felt uneasy in my relationship to the word ‘Appalachian’… do you not count if you are Brown, Indian, the child of immigrants who moved to a place out of necessity again thirty years later, when work disappeared?” Neema Avashia writes in Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian…

In Conversation: Jocelyn Nicole Johnson & Monic Ductan

Monic Ductan ♦

Spring 2022 ♦

Interview

Timely: that’s but one word to describe Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s electric debut My Monticello, a collection of stories and a novella that bears witness to the white supremacy of both the past and present. Set in and around Charlottesville, Virginia, where Johnson lives and writes, the book centers on Black…

In Conversation: Gavin Colton Discusses “Little Piles of Change”

Skylar Bensheimer ♦

Blog ♦

Interview

Gavin Colton is a fiction writer from Ireland currently living in Lexington, Kentucky where he teaches creative writing workshops at the Carnegie Center. He also coaches academy soccer. His short story, “Little Piles of Changes,” appeared in Appalachian Review’s Winter 2022 issue and follows the working-class family of Colly, Nicole,…

In Conversation: Marianne Worthington

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Winter 2022 ♦

Interview

As a child growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the 1950s and 1960s, Marianne Worthington was surrounded and subsumed by country music. Her parents often tuned their television set to WATE, the local station that aired Knoxville businessman-turned-mayor Cas Walker’s Farm and Home Hour variety show, which featured established and…

In Conversation: Jayne Moore Waldrop

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Fall 2021 ♦

Interview

In “For What It’s Worth,” one of the stories that populate Jayne Moore Waldrop’s tender, linked story collection Drowned Town, a character muses about “generational labor.” The notion is at the heart of this book, which considers how the federal government’s seizure of land in western Kentucky to create two…

In Conversation: Shawna Kay Rodenberg

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Spring 2021 ♦

Interview

There’s a certain amount of defiance hovering between Shawna Kay Rodenberg’s words as she discusses Kin, her debut memoir slated for publication by Bloomsbury in June—and after spending time with her searching, resilient book, it is easy to understand why. Kin recounts her family’s exile from their native Eastern Kentucky…