Edison Jennings: “I live in Virginia at the pointy end where it slides like a scalpel into the interstices of Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina, with West Virginia nuzzling all cozy to the north, which is to say, I live in Appalachia, coal country, hill country, MAGA country—bigotry, fundamentalism, meth labs, and guns (lots of guns). It’s also beautiful, and its people are tough and weathered victims of predatory capitalism who have suffered scorn and ridicule. I write about it because, as Maurice Manning put it, ‘aesthetic value is not simply the stuff of high art, but a feature of all human vitality—even the commonest among us has an idea of art, because … it is always a human expression.’” (web)
