A poem from our spring 2015 issue.

It’s Derby Day. And it’s been 30 years since 1984 when I stood in the grandstand at Churchill Downs after betting my last $20 on Swale that horse I groomed and watched as he pulled away from Wayne Lukas’s great filly Althea to win the 110th running of the race. Thirty years and a lot of souls have risen to the upper register of life and my own life has been made more reachable by what their love did to me.

Divided into four sections and set in Kentucky, Fanny Says  by Nickole Brown weaves a double narrative that folds together both a granddaughter’s recollections and a grandmother’s persona. The imagery is blunt, the dialect true, and what unfolds is a metaphoric hope chest, a series of living flashbacks through which Brown creates a poetic treatise on memory’s workings.

Seven photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard.

Central Kentucky in the 1960s was a gathering place for unusual talent. Guy Davenport wrote, painted, and taught in Lexington with his friend the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard just down the road. Wendell Berry was around, too, teaching creative writing at the University of Kentucky, until he moved up to Henry County to farm. Thomas Merton lived in a country monastery to the southeast.

It’s midnight in Kentucky. A man sits at a desk, pecking at an ancient Apple I computer; the light’s still on in the basement. Somewhere a juke box is playing “A Feather’s Not A Bird,” by Rosanne Cash. A glass of bourbon bounces when it hits the barroom floor.

One of the few contemporary shows that has made a real home in the South is FX’s Justified. Its characters are deeply rooted in Harlan County, Kentucky, and bound by complex webs of family, historical, and regional loyalties.

Cooking with Chris. The author lays out his imaginary career as a spy in another hilarious essay, comparing the "Stories and Recipes From CIA Families All Over the World" and the "Cherokee Club Cookbook." As he says, these texts were literally meant for him to find.

We are saddened to learn of the death of bluegrass legend Dave Evans on Sunday, June 25, 2017. He was sixty-five. Revisit Lee Johnson’s story about Evans from our Fall 2013 issue.

Not long after my friend Pete and I met, he asked if I wanted to go with him to East Kentucky for Dave Evans’s sixtieth birthday party. I didn’t recognize the name at first, but from what Pete told me about the man, it sounded like it would be a great opportunity to play music and really learn from a master.

Cooking with Chris. My approach to cooking is one of passionate intensity that traditionally involves a great deal of what used to be called “blue” language, or plain old-fashioned cussing. My current kitchen project will be a trial, since I intend to follow a recipe for “Bible Cake.”

 

 

Cooking with Chris. As a kid, I was allowed to eat one egg per week. Mom fixed eggs on Sunday for a meal eaten at indeterminate times, dependent upon my father’s hangover. We ate late, often past noon, after being hungry for hours.

Bill Best, who founded the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center, saves seeds—not in the way that people save stamps or coins, but in the way that people save endangered species, or possessions from a fire. He grows and stores about 700 varieties of beans on his farm in Berea, Kentucky, where he lives with Irmgard, his wife of fifty-one years, in a midcentury ranch house she designed, with stone chimneys he built. Some of his seeds are more than 150 years old—one goes back to the American Revolution.