This Issue

Creating a special issue to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the founding of Appalachian Heritage is an exhilarating, yet daunting, task. Fortunately, I have been blessed with a perceptive and hard-working team dedicated to this effort. Michael Lorrus, a graduate student in creative writing at Hollins University worked as a summer intern reading and evaluating all of the stories and poems from each issue, and my wife Connie Brosi, read all Michael recommended and many more. Our student workers took time from their on-going chores to provide valuable feedback as well, and Chris Green, the Director of the Appalachian Center, copy edited the entire issue. Going back over and over forty years of Appalachian Heritage has made us even more aware of what a vital role the magazine has played in this region. We were impressed anew with how enjoyable and how significant so much of the writing has been.

Because the magazine has contained such a variety of meaningful materials, we quickly realized that we could not create a comprehensive kind of 40th anniversary issue that illuminated all that the magazine has been and has accomplished. Instead we are including only poetry and stories and art and only those that were originally published in Appalachian Heritage, not reprinted here. As a result of these decisions, we have not included anything from some of the magazine’s finest issues, for example those featuring the work of folklorist Leonard Roberts or featured writers Cormac McCarthy and Mary Lee Settle.

We have selected poems, stories, and art that moved us, that struck us as particularly well crafted and that illuminate important aspects of regional life. We have tried to present a mix of authors, just as each issue of Appalachian Heritage does, ranging from those whose contributions are widely recognized to little-known but promising authors. Three of the stories here, for example, were the first published by their authors. We have tried to present a variety of walks of life as well. You will notice authors from the business world, government service, and the non-profit sector as well as a variety of educators, and four Cherokee authors and five African-American writers are included. We aren’t claiming our selections are objectively the very best. We seriously considered well over twice as many possibilities, but we hope the end result is a pleasing and insightful mix.

We start this magazine with an essay that appeared in the very first issue by editor Albert Stewart that explains the mission of the magazine, something that has never changed. His successor, Sidney Saylor Farr, follows him with a poem, “Appalachia Where Are Your Hills?” Then we have put our stories in more-or-less historical order so that the effect is to give the reader a sense of the broad sweep of our region’s heritage.

Reviewing the magazine’s first forty years helped us to appreciate how it has adapted to changing times. In 1973 when Albert Stewart founded Appalachian Heritage, most young people in the region had not heard of any regional authors, and many assumed that books were written only by northeasterners and Europeans. Stewart, himself a native of Knott County, Kentucky, in the heart of the mountain coalfields, was a leader among those who envisioned an invigorating future for regional literature and a time when many young people from the mountains would strive to express themselves and even distinguished themselves as writers.

Although creative writing was a central interest of Albert Stewart, when the magazine was founded there were few resources in the field of regional folklore and regional studies, so the early issues also carried more of this kind of material than it has in the years since. The overall effect was to give readers a keen sense of the region’s culture and creative accomplishments.

After a dozen very fruitful years, Albert Stewart handed the reigns over to another accomplished poet, Sidney Saylor Farr. Like Stewart, a native of the Eastern Kentucky coalfields, she shared an intense commitment to stimulating regional literature. Even at the end of her life she was actively working with small writing groups and...