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As a graduate student in the 1970s and college English instructor in the 1980s, I could scarcely ignore the tempestuous currents spawned by the literary and cultural movement known as Deconstruction. The brain child of contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction challenged decades of academia’s approach to understanding literature. Deconstructionists argued that culture itself was a text. As such, the movement’s adherents assumed that . . . Continue Reading

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I met J. W. Williamson in 2000 when we were both reading papers at a literary conference at Emory and Henry University in Emory, Virginia. I’d read his 1995 book Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies, and was looking forwardContinue Reading

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For a half century Wendell Berry has been on record defending small communities and local economies, dating back to his 1977 treatise The Unsettling of America, which, as Appalachian author Wilma Dykeman once observed, deserved to unsettle America more than it did. In his roles as poet, essayist, novelist, and,Continue Reading

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In February this year, Appalachia Bare attended the Rose Glen Literary Festival in Sevierville, Tennessee. The festival holds creative workshops and is lined wall-to-wall with authors, artists, publishers, and various other vendors in the creative world. One such talented author we met was Jay Reace, whose young adult book LegacyContinue Reading

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In Anna Laura Reeve’s 2023 debut collection Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility (Belle Point Press), readers will be transported from the domesticity of everyday life to the wonder of the flora and fauna in the balds of Southern Appalachia. Mothers will not be able to read the firstContinue Reading

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Cantor, Gauss, Riemann, Euler. Hilbert. Poincaré. Noether. Hypatia. Klein, Minkowski, Turing, von Neumann. Cauchy, Lie, Dedekind, Brouwer. Boole. Peano. Hamilton, Laplace, Lagrange. If you’re unfamiliar with the names and contributions of the theoretical mathematicians in the modern era, then you may find Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel Stella Maris a challengingContinue Reading

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Danita Dodson’s new book of poetry is called The Medicine Woods. If you recall, our Associate Editor, Edward Francisco reviewed her last book, Trailing the Azimuth. Her poems speak so easily to my heart, so I wanted to write the review for her new collection. In The Medicine Woods, herContinue Reading

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Mary Ruden has compiled a wonderful little book about Tennessee women who changed history. From suffragists, to a preservationist, a granny woman, and a Revolutionary War heroine, Ruden has depicted each life in a thoughtful, artful, creative way. Most all of these historical heroines have two pages devoted to themContinue Reading

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**On a mobile format this book review is best viewed using landscape orientation.    Danita Dodson is a contemplative, a mystic, and an alchemist whose feet are planted solidly in the turf of the natural world – particularly that of East Tennessee. As the poems in her debut collection, TrailingContinue Reading