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Stories

The image shows a dramatic artistic photograph of a wooden spoon engulfed in orange and red flames against a black background, with fire trailing from both the bowl and handle of the spoon. The composition symbolically represents the intersection of chronic illness spoon theory, trauma, and Appalachian wooden spoons through its powerful visualization of a kitchen implement transformed into something both destructive and beautiful.

Spoon Theory

Morgan DePue on how good memories, childhood trauma, and chronic pain can all rest in the hollow of that wooden spoon you hold in your hand.

It’s Time for a Revolution in Southern Thinking

As we celebrate Pride Month, our editor prays that our beloved South will rise above old ways that bring hate where there should be love.

Water Always Wins

A jazz player who grew up roaming the banks of the Mississippi produces a musical meditation on life’s most essential element.

A Letter to the Southern Glitter Kids

He grew up in Mississippi and didn’t come out until he was thirty-one. Here is his letter to LGBTQ+ kids—words he wishes someone had shared with him years earlier.

Sunday Fatback

As a child, she saw only the difference between the simple food in her home and the fancier fare on her friends’ tables. Years later, she would see more clearly.

A Hundred Years of Earl Scruggs

In this centennial year of the North Carolina banjo legend’s birth, bluegrass wizard Tony Trischka extols his Earlness with a masterful tribute.

How to Make It Over Mountains

From northwest Virginia, two poems on the depths of persistence and the limits of our knowledge.

How to Understand America, According to My Father

My father believed a simple mental picture of history could make anyone a lifelong learner. So, he developed a three-century “Time Map.” The education establishment wasn’t interested.

Young and Queer and Mountaineer

Mesha Maren’s third novel, out this week, is a landmark achievement for a new generation of Appalachian writers who assert their right to be fully queer and fully mountaineer.

Georgia

Chock full of images, an ode to the spirit of the New South.

Better Branching for More Blooms

With spring in full swing, two glittering poems from southeast Tennessee.

Rich Dirt

Sometimes, you think you’ve gotten above your raising, and then you discover you started out much higher than you thought.

The Liquor Trailer

Just across the state line, that’s where you go to be a man.