Summer 2015

Summer 2015 Editor’s Note

Jason 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…

Riding on Comets: A Memoir (Pleska)

Donna M. Crow ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Book Reviews

Cat Pleska. Riding on Comets: A Memoir. Morgantown, W.Va.: Vandalia Press, 2015. 236 pages. Softcover. $16.99. If Cat Pleska is riding on comets, her family members are the constellations she observes on her journey. Descriptions of her father’s drinking, her mother’s depression, hospitalization and electroshock therapy, are juxtaposed against Christmas…

Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley: Novellas and Stories (Pancake)

Elaine Fowler Palencia ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Book Reviews

Ann Pancake. Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley: Novellas and Stories. Berkeley, Ca.: Counterpoint Press, 2015. 289 pages. Hardcover. $24.00. In the lead story of Ann Pancake’s compelling new collection, a novella called “In Such Light,” Janie is spending the summer back with her grandparents in Remington, West…

Bat House Blessing

Donna J. Long ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Poetry

At dusk the bats emerge, two and two and two from a hole in the eave invisible until they appear, aureoles for the last light.

Hateful

Pauletta Hansel ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Poetry

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…

Interview: Jessie van Eerden

Jason Howard ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Interview

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…

That Boy from the 50’s

Hadley Hury ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Pitch Perfect: Poems About Music, Poetry

I’ve seen him sitting at a small table in that rose and aqua kitchen at the row of windows farthest from the stove coloring in his Peter Pan book while his mother cooks and hums along with Patti Page or The McGuire Sisters.

Black Radio

Roy Bentley ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Pitch Perfect: Poems About Music, Poetry

It was a Zenith Trans-Oceanic, with rows of red-orange push buttons and serial black tuning knobs that said the path to Wonder commenced with a frequency indicator floating like the bubble in a carpenter’s level.

Listening to a Recording of Edden Hammons Playing “General Washington’s March”

Doug Van Gundy ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Pitch Perfect: Poems About Music, Poetry

The guitarist is clearly out of his depth, adequate, sure – skilled even – but he isn’t standing on the same earth as the fiddler, and the fiddler isn’t standing on the earth

The Mountaineer’s Daughter

Bradley R. Strahan ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Pitch Perfect: Poems About Music, Poetry

Bathed in red spotlights, the color of cheap wine, the girl in the print dress smiles. Her voice, high and clear as mountain air, almost unheard in the noisy room.