Rusty Barnes's Blog: Fried Chicken and Coffee, page 42

Today in Appalachia and Around The Bend

Someone, I hope to hell, is voting against fracking in NY and PA. I'm trying something different on the blog today, an aggregate of Appalachian/rural interest links. I hope at least some of them are edifying. I hope too that people will send stories and poems and essays my way. Haven't had many submissions lately. [...]

Straight from Newsweek's Gullet to Your Ears

Or eyes. . .  But I really need to know now: is Pennsylvania like West Virginia or Alabama or Kentucky? It will make such a difference in my life, I can't tell you. Pffffttttt. But here's the quotation, from. . . no one, I guess, gauging from the article,which has no byline. Carville maybe? What [...]

Redneck Poems is Released

Sorry for the spam; I won't do it often, but here's the news: my free e-book/chapbook is available now. It's called Redneck Poems and it's part of the MiPOesias Chapbook Series. It's available for free via Scribd and Issuu and in print (free on iPad) for a small fee via Magcloud. It's even on Goodreads [...]

Slow News Days

Not really. I've had welcome visitors for a week now and I have a new issue of Night Train due out soon. I figure we'll be back to regular posting in about a week. In the meantime, theres' this: Activists from across Appalachia are in Washington, DC, this week to call attention to mountaintop removal [...]

Best of the Web Nominations

Here they are–

Give Up and Go Home, Jasper–Charles Dodd White

http://www.friedchickenandcoffee.com/...

Jeff Crook–The End of the War

http://www.friedchickenandcoffee.com/...

John Mcmanus–Blood Brothers

http://www.friedchickenandcoffee.com/...

PA Homeland Security gave names of anti-drill activists to drilling company

Anti-frack, watch your back, somebody's watching you. . .

Pennsylvania Homeland Security has been spying on anti-drilling activists, taking down names of attendees at meetings and even a screening of a documentary on drilling; these dossiers on peaceful protesters are then supplied to Marcellus Shale, a drilling company. The State Homeland Security Director James Powers justifies [...:]

Michigan Seems Like a Dream To Me Now, poem by Dennis Mahagin

From Corvallis to Farmville, the Kesey novel
steepled my kneecap, while a girl named Kathy
chatted me across the Greyhound aisle,
out of kindness, curiosity, spring

fever or pity. And the piebald bovines
in their greenery, standing still yet rushing
past Tillamook where steamy slush hung on
the mud flaps chunky as gorgonzola.

Kathy, such a wanton brown-eyed smart ass
from OSU asked me [...:]

Della, fiction by Jarrid Deaton

Dan says he's getting tired of me talking in my sleep. Says I mumble like a child and toss and turn, flail my arms. What I see is the inside of the school bus. I see forty kids laughing. Then the bus tilts and the laughter stops. Water rushes in like a [...:]

Ron Rash Festival October 1st and 2nd Gardner-Webb University

Charles Dodd White made me aware of this. Wish I could go. No doubt some of you are. The festival is sponsored by Gardner-Webb's Southern Appalachian Culture Series.

Ron Rash currently holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University. His family has deep roots in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, and most of [...:]

Highway 50, fiction by Murray Dunlap

photo by davemeistermoab

Two AM. Highway 50. Ely, Nevada. We laughed out loud at the Break-a-Heart Hotel in Silver Springs, flew past the Last Chance Saloon in Austin, then passed up the Parsonage House in Eureka. A coyote darted across both lanes a few minutes ago, and I've seen more road-kill in one night than [...:]