“My father was a coal miner for thirty-five years and died of black lung,” Howard told me, while resting from the heat and overhead brushstrokes of the outdoor mural he’s working on for a local food pantry. “When I [told my father] I wanted to study art—well, that wasn’t well received.”

Announcing the Oxford American’s 19th Music Issue.

In 2017, we are returning to the state series. And we are thrilled to announce that it’s your turn, Kentucky.

It’s a brisk February afternoon in Lexington, Kentucky, and Louis Zoeller Bickett II and I are sitting in his office, which is lined with 500 binders. A few shelves of author-signed books, all of them tagged and indexed, stand in the room behind me. Our coffee mugs are not tagged, but the small Windsor chair I’m sitting in is.

Atget, Modotti, Weston, Stieglitz, Avedon, Karsh, Brassaï, Bresson, Ulmann. Jim would hand the books to me with no explanation, no bias of who was who and why and what the world already thought of the work. He told me only to put paper clips on the pages holding photographs that “found something in me.”

“The summer of 2014, my daughter and I found ourselves on McCracken Pike in Millville, Kentucky, staring up at the former Old Taylor distillery,” explains Sarah Hoskins of her project Bourbon as it Used to be, Now Castle & Key, a documentation of the ruins and rehabilitation of the site.

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. 

The Kentucky I knew looked verdant and sun-dappled as my family drove through the palisades and then the gentle bluegrass on our way to the mountains from the city of Louisville. And even when we reached the mountains themselves, which so physically display the significance of shadow and mystery, I was still in a place that all the grownups around me treasured for its nurturing, its sustenance, its mothering. Even those who’d lived away for decades, in other states, in other countries, still called the mountains “home” because that was what they believed.

A Kentucky Music Issue web exclusive: J. D. Wilkes’s Jackson Purchase.

The richness of the Jackson Purchase has served so many artists and thinkers over the years, the least of which includes your author. From the kudzu-choked ghost tracks of the L&N railroad to the charcoal-sketch vistas of our silver winters, the Purchase continuously impresses upon us its mysticism, its regional transcendence. I set every song, story, and film I create somewhere within its fables. Here are a few of its surviving, gothic destinations.

Glenn Hall’s DarkWater captures the changing biological and environmental landscape of the Ohio River Valley—and what may be a dying way of life.

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. 

Over the last three years, Alex and I have spent a total of eight summer nights in the Carlton Marion Inn. It’s a tidy motel with a gravel parking lot and a pool overlooking Crooked Creek Valley. This year, though, there’d be no fun to be had in the pool. Not even any fishing. We didn’t know that yet, but maybe we could feel it. Maybe we were afraid of what was coming, what was already there and would not stop.

In What Survives, Michael Morris looks at the values of faith and family that persist despite dwindling economies in rural Kentucky.