Creative Nonfiction – Page 3 – Appalachian Review

The Tennessee Kid

Hal Crowther ♦

Summer 2018 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

From the book Freedom Fighters and Hell Raisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners by Hal Crowther. Copyright © 2018 by Hal Crowther. Reprinted by permission of Blair. Photographs can mislead, and sometimes conceal more than they reveal. But on occasion, usually in hindsight, a photograph radiates so much insight you need…

Some Thoughts on Marriage Before I Wed

Rebecca Gayle Howell ♦

Spring 2018 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

By one notion, Cleo rose in the Van Lear morning. He’d dress, shout something smart to Frankie as her goodbye, drive to Druther’s in Paintsville and drink his coffee with the boys, then leave it all behind for that day’s make-or-break at Bob’s Pay Lake. Cleo’d park a straight line into…

Attics

Karen Salyer McElmurray ♦

Winter 2018 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

Tuesday’s midmorning creative writing class, and the fifteen students are clock-watching or note-taking or simply staring out the windows at the bright spring day. We’re talking about writing personal narratives and I am looking for words to describe a place inside from which such stories come. Heart. Belly. I can’t seem to think of a corporeal description that doesn’t make…

Yoke

Jessie van Eerden ♦

Fall 2017 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

“And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years. She had heard the reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment…And immediately the ﬂow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was…

We Got Lucky: My Life with Tom Petty

Silas House ♦

Blog ♦

Creative Nonfiction, Special Feature

I was seventeen when I first loved him. Seventeen and a complete mess. I had recently “gone wild.” That’s what people in my church said. All my life I had been the perfect little Holiness boy, and I had only recently started to drink: Natural Light or Jim Beam. And…

A Natural American

Micah McCrary ♦

Spring 2017 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

My very first car had a manual transmission: it was a red ‘91 Jeep Cherokee, which my father and I purchased together when I was twenty. It took a couple of weeks for me to get used to driving a stick shift, for me not to stall at an intersection or…

Chasing Bread

Sadie Shorr-Parks ♦

Fall 2016 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

For breakfast, we ate old cheese with the polka-dots cut off and drank the red tea you brought back from Cape Town. I handed you slices of cheese in silence as we sat on our beloved Oriental rug. I suggested we paint our walls the color of our tea-stained mugs.…

A Mountaintop Experience

Denise Giardina ♦

Fall 2016 ♦

Creative Nonfiction, Featured Author

When God created heaven and earth, he looked at his handiwork and declared it “good.” Each act of creation received this word of divine satisfaction. As time passed, only one part of God’s creation became the subject of disappointment and anger— ourselves. But after the destruction of the Flood, God…

Silent Song

Susan Tekulve ♦

Spring 2016 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

In Camerota, where the locals dance salsa every night for all of summer in a club called The Cyclops, I step into the butter yellow church in the piazza and find the most sorrowful Madonna I’ve ever seen. She stands on the right side of the altar, her eyes red-rimmed,…

Geographies of Pluto

Amelia Fowler ♦

Winter 2016 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

We do not know the geography of Pluto as intimately as those celestial bodies closer to Earth. Looking up, one eye closed, I could trace the Moon’s Mare Serenitatis with my pinky finger as if grazing the dark circles under a lover’s eyes. The lunar maria, plains of basalt astronomers…