Southern by Choice or Birth

Asheville writer Jay Moye, himself a musician, this week shares his deep and enlightening interview with Taylor. Last year, Jay brought us the story of a little Carolina town in transformation, Old Fort.

Another previous contributor, Mikala Jones-Wall, has a story about how growing up in a Blairsville, Georgia, family that has helped keep the sorghum-syrup production of their community going for more than a half-century. This weekend, the fifty-fourth annual Blairsville Sorghum Festival kicks off. You might find that Mikala’s look at how her hometown keeps the culture of southern Appalachia alive makes you want to road-trip to the mountains this weekend or next.

And finally, we welcome a new contributor, Eleni Karelis, a young woman of Hazard County, Kentucky, whose writing makes me want to (if I may borrow the title of the latest Hiss album) jump for joy. Her mastery of the poetic voice of Appalachia is stunning, particularly given the fact that she had barely graduated from the University of Kentucky when she sent these three poems to us. Her love of the place that raised her is beautifully clear in her writing. She is now pursuing her writer’s education further at the University of Westminster in London. You must read her work, so you can one day say, “I read her when…”