Who has the right to tell the story of a place? My friend Jeremy B. Jones is a man of Appalachia, but you wouldn’t know it by his accent. He plays a little banjo, but not, I believe, as an affectation. Jones has an essay in the book “Appalachian Reckoning: A […]

A nonprofit school of luthiery in Eastern Kentucky is helping develop an instrument-building company that will build the local economy along with high-end guitars. All kinds of stringed instruments fill the storefront of the Appalachian School of Luthiery in Knott County, Kentucky. There are antique pieces, like an old banjo […]

Living in the mountains of Appalachia, the nature that surrounds us often becomes a mere backdrop. We expect it to be there, so we forget about it.  In the new book “Mountains Piled Upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene,” nearly 50 writers focused on the natural world of Appalachia […]

“We can concern ourselves with presence rather than with phantom, image rather than with conjure. Bad as it is, the world is potentially full of good photographs. But to be good, photographs have to be full of the world.” — Dorothea Lange and Daniel Dixon, Photographing the Familiar: A Statement […]