Creative Nonfiction – Page 4 – Appalachian Review

The Curve of the Smoke

Beth Newberry ♦

Fall 2015 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

On a Thursday night in late June, the air is sticky on my skin as I smoke a cigarette at my kitchen window and watch the smoke curl into the air. It curves like my fingers do when I hold a pen. I stand at the open window and face…

The Long Weeping

Jessie van Eerden ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Creative Nonfiction, Special Feature: Voice Lessons

I stand at the hand pump in the grove, young, maybe ten, having run from the signs of dying. Under the small shingled roof on the cement slab, the iron pump is smudged by creatures that licked it in the night, coons and cats and the rumored black bear. My…

Blue Dinosaur

Cheryl Smart ♦

Spring 2015 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

1.Rob a Townie I remember stealing only once. It was not the sort of thing a God-fearing girl would normally do. Stealing would set my seven-year-old soul in danger of the Hell fire promised to me every week by Sunday School teachers and weeping pastors pacing the pulpit, raising their…

Blue Kentucky Girl

Sonja Livingston ♦

Summer 2014 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

Named for the moon. Little Luna. Luna, blue. The details surrounding your birth are murky, some say 1878, others say a decade later, but why squabble over a handful of years? What’s most clear is that by the time you were born in eastern Kentucky, people had settled into its…

Johnson City

Carter Sickels ♦

Spring 2014 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

Stephen was singing along and tapping his hands on the steering wheel to the Mountain Goats, one of his favorite bands. It was a good day for driving and singing. October blue sky, hills layered with oaks and maples and sweetgums flashing scarlet and gold leaves. We’d left Chapel Hill…

Power and Obedience: Restoring Pacifism to American Politics

Fenton Johnson ♦

Winter 2014 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

We were four brothers, sons of the Kentucky hills who came of age in lockstep with the escalating war in Vietnam. In 1964, my oldest brother volunteered for the Air Force, following an ancient tradition in which, for the sake of education or economic advancement, men from the working classes risk…