“Filling the Big Empty” by Rhonda Browning White

It’s easy to understand why Rhonda Browning White’s debut novel, Filling the Big Empty (Redhawk Publications 2024) was shortlisted for the 2022 Neilson Prize. The novel is a tour-de-force, relentlessly examining environmental issues in Appalachia. While never losing focus on a young couple’s relationship, the story drops readers into the horrors of mountaintop removal to extract coal, the […]

Donna Meredith interviews Rhonda Browning White, author of “Filling the Big Empty”

Novel Summary: A baby. It’s the one thing Romie Grodin, orphaned at thirteen, wants more than anything else in the world. A real homeplace. It’s what her coal-mining husband Jasper wants—needs—to provide for his family. When the couple’s best friend—their only “family”—is hurt in a mining accident and his wife becomes addicted to drugs, Romie and Jasper must […]

“Honey from the Lion” and “Allegheny Front,” by Matthew Neill Null

Reviewed by Donna Meredith The land itself and male characters dominate the early works of West Virginia author Matthew Neill Null. They include the literary novel Honey from the Lion (Lookout Books, 2015) and a short story collection, Allegheny Front (Sarabande Books, 2016), which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. If there is […]

A conversation: “Walk Till The Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden in Appalachia”

Silence can be “an unfortunate and even dangerous act of submission,” editors Adrian Blevins and Karen Salyer McElmurray write in the preface to this collection of thirty-two essays, Walk Till The Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden in Appalachia (Ohio University Press, 2015). They speak of the enormous expectation from their “workplaces, families, and […]

Allen Mendenhall Interviews Robert J. Ernst, author of “The Inside War”

APM: Thanks for taking the time to sit down for this interview, Bob. Your novel The Inside War is about an Appalachian mountain family during the Civil War. How long have you been interested in the Civil War? RJE: I have had an interest in the Civil War for many years. Specifically, the effect of […]

“The Sheltering,” by Mark Powell

Reviewed by Sam Slaughter There is no need to fear the reaper here. In Mark Powell’s fourth novel, the author who has been called one of the best Appalachian writers of his generation proves that his home turf is not the only place he can write about. The Sheltering is a story of a drone […]