Editor's Note Jason Kyle Howard This summer I spent three weeks in Ireland, roaming the island's cities and countryside with nineteen Berea College students and a colleague. An art professor, he and I were teaching a mixed-genre course we called "The Artist as Traveler" that focused on the necessity of observation and the notion of ekphrasis—creating a piece of art in response to another piece of art. [End Page 5] With one exception, our mixture of creative writing and drawing students had never traveled abroad. As the weeks went by, we immersed ourselves in both urban and rural experiences, spending time in Dublin, Wicklow, Newgrange, Drumcliffe, Sligo, Galway, and Cork. But the students' favorite destination was the Aran Islands, where we spent four days on Inishmore, population 900, an island eight miles long by two-and-a-half miles wide that is located off the coast of West Ireland in the roiling Atlantic. There, in between bicycle rides through rain and sunshine to visit some of the island's sites, the students burrowed into their final creative projects—an extended travel essay and a portfolio of sketches and drawings. One day, on a return trip to Dún Aonghasa, a prehistoric hill fort, a small group of us got lost in returning to the hotel and found ourselves near the top of the island with a stunning panorama of land and sea. As the wind whipped round us, we studied the network of small lanes and the coastline to plot our way back—a route that ended up taking us on a series of rocky cowpaths before we finally found the main road. One student observed that getting lost in Ireland was the most fun he'd had in a long time. Despite having been to Ireland several times before, I, too, was finding myself lost. I was seeing this familiar country through the eyes of my students, paying attention to what they noticed and how they responded. Observation, I had told them, is the core of good creative writing. Perhaps even beyond creating story, our charge as creative writers is to translate something that might be familiar in a fresh, original way for the reader—to provoke in them a gasp of recognition or a proverbial tilt of the head that signals I never thought of it that way. Such criteria is one benchmark for how we evaluate submissions at Appalachian Heritage. The stories, essays, and [End Page 6] poems must practice the art of observation, providing the reader with the essential element of discovery. In this issue, you will encounter unexpected layers of meaning and discovery in Suzanne Supplee's short story "The Simple Act of Caring," in Molly McClennen's essay "Landscapes," and in the other sterling pieces of prose. You will find yourself admiring the lyricism and turns of phrase in the poetry of Jeff Hardin, Katharine Kistler, and others. You will spend time considering the reasons for the narrative impulse in Robert Erle Barham's craft essay and marveling at how Margaret Renkl sees the world in her interview with us. All the while, I hope you will become lost in these pages, just as we were on Inishmore—that you will find yourself on some rock-strewn lane with the wind in your hair, your eyes shining like the sea. [End Page 7] Copyright © 2019 Berea College
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Sep 29, 2020
Christofer Satria + 1
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