Summer 2016

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…

Dimestore: A Writer’s Life (Smith)

Lee Smith. Dimestore: A Writer’s Life. Chapel Hill, N.C..: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2016. 202 pages. Hardcover. $24.95. Dimestore: A Writer’s Life is a collection of fifteen essays, published over the span of twenty years. “This little book,” as Lee Smith called it in a recent reading in Abingdon,…

The Great Flood

Hazard, Kentucky is no different than a hundred rural towns started as a trading post, funded by coal that turned lungs and hands dark at the start of the twentieth century. And while I love the story of Hazard folk making the Stone Gap journey, having to go over Big…

Junebug

From the kitchen window I can see two little girls lying in my yard like small sacks of brightly-dressed potatoes. My daughter June is walking among them, followed by another girl struggling with my wheelbarrow. June is draping one prone girl with a sheet, my good sheets, given to us…

Gifts of the South

An Eclipse The moon, red like fat dripping from the porterhouse side of the T-Bone, an American God in its own rites. Beef moon, nurturing our ebb and flow with hands that knead us to tenderness and umami. Then, a cleanse, clean as gin straight up tasting like clear night…

Interview: Sonja Livingston

In essayist Sonja Livingston’s latest collection Ladies Night at the Dreamland (University of Georgia Press), the Appalachian native of western New York explores the lives of historical women—famous, notorious, and invented—and in many ways her own life and understanding of herself. Through re-imaginings of figures like Virginia Dare (“Dare”), Luna…