Valerie Nieman v. 3.0

I read the other day that Paul Simon wrote "Homeward Bound" while on a train trip in or around Manchester, England. That song was a favorite when I was a teenager, though I'd traveled no farther than Maine, and still calls up strong emotion when I hear it. So it's not surprising that when I connected with the folks at Kestrel literary journal to appear again this year at the Kestrel Festival in October, that music began playing in my thoughts. Kestrel was a special part of my years in West Virginia, where I began my work as a writer, gained my first publications, and then was "brought into the fold" as a literary magazine editor with the nascent Kestrel. Martin Lammon and the late John King and I would gather over coffee at the Poky Dot restaurant in Fairmont, WV, a classic "breakfast all day" diner that's been upscaled in recent years, to exchange our stacks of manuscripts and discuss what we liked, and what we weren't certain about. I...

I've just finished a review of Meredith Sue Willis's Out of the Mountains , a new collection of stories about people from the heart of the mountains. I'd seen a couple of the stories already in her earlier collection, and felt comfortable and familiar in the new ones, recognizing a landscape we shared for many years. MSW grew up in the Shinnston area of northern West Virginia, though she moved to New Jersey in adulthood- I grew up in New York State but lived for many years near Farmington, WV, just down the highway. So we saw those mountains from similar angles. This book follows close on another, Degrees of Elevation , a new anthology of stories about Appalachia today. I treasured that chorus of voices considering that familiar mountain landscape in unique ways, from Chris Offutt to Crystal Wilkinson to Ron Rash, and was pleased to be counted among their number. And that followed a reading of Miracle Boy by Pinckney Benedict, a native son of Southern Appalachia who wa...