Revise Your Eyes
Junious “Jay” Ward, Charlotte’s inaugural Poet Laureate, serves up three new poems and talks about how his new post lets him “take the church to the people.”
Stories
Chippendales, Winnie the Pooh, and Mississippi Corduroy
What he learned as a child in Mississippi left him unable to come out to his family—or even to himself—until he was thirty-one years old.
By John W. Bateman /
Preservation
Old ways of preserving food run deep in the culture of Appalachia. It turns out that preserving life requires the same principles.
By Erica Abrams Locklear /
Every Story Is a Confession
Is renewing an old friendship always the right thing to do? Maybe not.
By Kevin Grauke /
Myrtle’s Malapropisms
A writer remembers pickling beans with her grandmother, “the Appalachian Gothic version of Yogi Berra.”
By Candice Dyer /
Sacred Bones
“Hold tight to history,” Appalachian poet E.J. Wade writes, so we might be awakened.
By E.J. Wade /
Long Gone and Gone Far
The Great Recession forced more than a million Americans into nomad land, traveling in search of seasonal work. Bill Scott chose that life forty years ago.
By Lanier Isom /
The Happiness of Saying Goodbye
Long ago, a pair of larger-than-life families—two couples with seven kids between them—rang in the new year together every year. Some bonds never break.
By Nelson d. Ross /
Family Ties
We discover our family is connected to this other one, and that friend to another one, until we all learn how we are woven into the great sweep of Southern history.
By Chuck Reece /
Dreamwalking
With otherworldly clarity, a New Orleans poet details the depths of trying times.
By Nikki Ummel /
Good Money
The Buckleys were, you might say, entrepreneurial. Particularly on Fourth of July Eve in the Waffle House parking lot.
By Carli Moses /
Moccasin
“There is love that walks in fallows,” this Louisville poet writes. Ain’t that the truth.
By David Higdon /
The Names of Love
How music and blackberries nourish and knit us together.