At seventeen, Joseph Wright left his working-class neighborhood of redbrick row homes and Italian restaurants in South Philly to spend a crisp spring and boiling summer in the woods of western Virginia.

At a moment when national dialogue about the Confederate Flag is prevalent, Michael Mergen’s piece Confederate Heroes, Confederate Dead considers how the South—especially Virginia—memorializes the Confederacy.

When Ben Metcalf’s first novel, Against the Country, was published in January of this year, it drew scant attention from the world we designate “literary,” and none from the marketplace of what we call ideas. But another look reveals that Metcalf seems guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of sentences written with intent—sentences of extraordinary interest and beauty, originality and art, drama and delight.

Source and Confluence, by Scott Jost, explores the origins and tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Through his images of floods and rapids, scenic overlooks and weedy river banks, Jost searches for signs of balance between human interests and natural systems.

An interview with the photographer from 1999.

I suppose one definition of propaganda (or pornography?) might be: art that denies the mysterious.

For the past month, The William King Museum in Abingdon, Virginia, has presented Transience a group photography exhibition showcasing the work of Trish Gibson, Joshua Harr, and Amber Law, three students from East Tennessee State University. Exhibited collectively, the trio’s work examines the fleeting nature of personal experience and how local environments change over time.