Gasoline is undead. Petro-masculinity is a revenant. These hills run thick with ghosts. Since fuel is a crucible of Appalachian identity, especially in the minds of outsiders, it matters whether the emerging discourse on “petro-masculinity” is a story we might ourselves tell differently. Kentucky author Lee Mandelo attempts to do […]
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Published in August of this year, “English Lit” is Bernard Clay’s autobiographical poetry debut – one that took decades to complete. “A lot of the poems I started writing when I first started writing poetry back in high school,” Clay said. “So a lot of these poems are like time […]
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As a kid, I delighted in grossing out my elementary school classmates with details of how my lower-income, Middle Tennessee family ate squirrel meat. My grandfather would go out with a hunting rifle and get a mess of squirrels from the woods on our property. Then we’d fry up the […]
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In the forward for Familiar Paths, Vol. 1, photographer and documentary filmmaker Jared Hamilton says, “This series is meant to feel like mamaw’s warm blanket on a rainy day.” And it does. The zine is filled with black and white images and contains almost no text, with the exception of […]
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With Spanglish lyrics, the pluck of a banjo and strum of a guitarra de son, music by Charlottsville’s Lua Project is hard to place. The band defines its sound as “Mexilachian”—a blend of Appalachian old-time and Mexican folk music. But Lua members said their music also draws on Jewish and Eastern European traditions, with […]
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I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland in the 1950s and 1960s where in school we learned about “poor” people in Appalachia (we pronounced it Ap-a-LAY-shuh). Images of skinny, barefoot children playing in dirt and Pres. Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The words hillbilly, white trash and redneck were […]
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