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In my 2016 stage play Which Side Are You On: The Florence Reece Story, I envision a scene at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, wherein union activist and songwriter Florence Reece and Civil Rights reformer Martin Luther King, Jr. are discussing ways for opposing violence. The exchange follows:Continue Reading

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Revisiting Myles Horton’s The Long Haul   The remarkable thing about Myles Horton is that he chose to be a person instead of a personality. As a rising young labor organizer and civil rights activist, Horton was surrounded by personalities – a cadre of forward looking, socially attuned recruits, someContinue Reading

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Joel Agee, the son At age 41, Agee had suffered the first of two heart attacks, the second of which would kill him when he was just forty-six, having recently completed his novel A Death in the Family before his death. Agee was contemptuous of moderation, insisting on living lifeContinue Reading

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James Agee, the father I’ll start with a blanket statement: Most, if not all, writers are SOBs (including women authors). Take William Faulkner, for example, whose drinking bouts were legendary and whose daughter, on the occasion of her tenth birthday, begged Faulkner to stop drinking for just one day. ToContinue Reading

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James Agee’s “Knoxville: Summer 1915” may arguably be the most beautiful prose poem in English. A prose poem is a hybrid sharing characteristics of both prose and poetry. A striking example would be the Old Testament book of Psalms found in the King James translation of the Bible. “Knoxville: SummerContinue 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

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We Southerners cherish our “characters” – eccentrics and outliers who intensify the spiciness of life. Take William Faulkner. To his neighbors in Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner was “count no count,” a little bitty fellow who put on airs while sporting a limp and a cane and donning a cape for hisContinue Reading

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Losing him at the instant of diagnosis, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind but hers, his grandmother watched You wink from view until no more than a grainy dot on the horizon’s last glorious performance of the Great Withdrawal. The picture of a small girl insisting on her way thisContinue Reading

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We here at Appalachia Bare hope the holiday season brought everyone warmth and togetherness. We wish all our readers, subscribers, and submitters a healthy, happy, safe New Year. Appalachia Bare will take a brief hiatus and will return January 18, 2022. We’ll use this time to perform a little websiteContinue Reading

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I recently had the honor of conducting an interview with our own Edward Francisco about his new book The Ever Changing Sky: Meditations on the Psalms (Wipf & Stock, 2021). Much of that interview is found below. The entire interview will be available this Friday, November 19, on Edward Francisco:Continue Reading