Interview

Erin Keane talks ‘Runaway’

Erin Keane talks ‘Runaway’

At a greasy spoon in Louisville, Erin Keane dissects a phrase she holds in particular contempt: It was a different time. She spits it out over the clatter of dishes and shouted orders coming from the nearby kitchen, rolling her expressive eyes for good measure. The weaselly wording, she believes,…
In Conversation: Neema Avashia

In Conversation: Neema Avashia

“In truth, I’ve always felt uneasy in my relationship to the word ‘Appalachian’… do you not count if you are Brown, Indian, the child of immigrants who moved to a place out of necessity again thirty years later, when work disappeared?” Neema Avashia writes in Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian…
In Conversation: Marianne Worthington

In Conversation: Marianne Worthington

As a child growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the 1950s and 1960s, Marianne Worthington was surrounded and subsumed by country music. Her parents often tuned their television set to WATE, the local station that aired Knoxville businessman-turned-mayor Cas Walker’s Farm and Home Hour variety show, which featured established and…
In Conversation: Jayne Moore Waldrop

In Conversation: Jayne Moore Waldrop

In “For What It’s Worth,” one of the stories that populate Jayne Moore Waldrop’s tender, linked story collection Drowned Town, a character muses about “generational labor.” The notion is at the heart of this book, which considers how the federal government’s seizure of land in western Kentucky to create two…
In Conversation: Leah Hampton

In Conversation: Leah Hampton

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…