Appalachian Review

Joshua 7:22 in the Ruins

Jessica Jewell ♦

Winter 2021 ♦

Poetry

The whole city was an ambush the summer before we met & I was disaster provisions. I lit fires up and down Meridian, breaking the law every time the moon disappointed me, tried tunneling home dirt by dew & then you were salve and I, a walking wound. I met…

Drive-In Movie During a Pandemic

Matthew Hawk ♦

Winter 2021 ♦

Poetry

Midweek midsummer night at the drive-in, only one other car ahead of us in line. A gowned man in mask and gloves scans our ticket with his handheld scanner, directs us to tune our car radio and follow signs straight ahead to our screen, where we watch Jurassic Park and…

Queers on the Oregon Trail

Matt Vekakis ♦

Winter 2021 ♦

Poetry

to Oregon I’m relentless: on holidays I pull at your shawl and beg you to play settler as the men down- stairs pray for our souls long before we understand what it means to be queers. even the room is magic: austere, New England white, snow-lined sill mapping the cylinder…

In Conversation: Leah Hampton

Annie Frazier ♦

Winter 2021 ♦

Interview

Leah Hampton’s first book, F*ckface and Other Stories, was released in July 2020. The twelve powerful, funny, tragic, and surprising stories are set in towns across the Appalachian South—from Western North Carolina to Eastern Kentucky to West Virginia to Tennessee and beyond—and are populated with complex and complicating modern Southern…

Cattle Upon a Thousand Hills

Martha Grace Duncan ♦

Winter 2021 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

I. Barn Burning Wood and hay kin burn. —William Faulkner I was two-and-a-half years-old when I stood at the living room window with my very pregnant mother, watching our barn burn down. “I think you kind of enjoyed it,” she told me later. “The neighbors came and threw snowballs at the…

The Trouble With Snakes

Monica Brashears ♦

Winter 2021 ♦

Fiction

I ain’t got much to say but the truth. I swear by God, President Kennedy, by each of my ten toes and every Tennessean sunset—I ain’t got it in me to hurt nobody. I only know that what I been doing would put my mama to tears. You acting out, my…

How to make loss real

Jamey Temple ♦

Fall 2020 ♦

Poetry

Picture someone you love. Maybe your wife, the way she smells when she steps out of the shower, her hair dripping. Imagine her scrunching those strands with a towel, then rubbing lotion onto her thirsty limbs. See her wrapping that towel around her, tucking the ends into the towel dress…

Circa 1994

Barbara Costas-Biggs ♦

Fall 2020 ♦

Poetry

after Jason Isbell’s “The Life You Choose” It wasn’t Jack and Coke, it was Southern Comfort in Taco Bell cups full with ice, no doubt on our way to another viewing of Pulp Fiction or to Hoover Reservoir to steam windows and dream of big cities and rock stars and riot…

For What It’s Worth

Jayne Moore Waldrop ♦

Fall 2020 ♦

Fiction

Occasionally someone would stop Elmer Newby in a store and ask him why in the world he’d help the government run people off their land. Elmer always clenched his teeth and stiffened his shoulders. His cheeks turned red. “Hell, I didn’t decide this. That was some fool in Washington,” he…

A Great Distance

Wiley Cash ♦

Fall 2020 ♦

Featured Author, Fiction

for Daniel Wallace When she was six years old, she spent two nights lost in the woods. Her mother and father had decided to camp in the Smoky Mountains for the weekend, leaving Raleigh on a June morning and arriving at the park entrance in mid-afternoon, just in time to…