Loose Leaf Notes

The special ten-year anniversary issue of Floyd County Moonshine has hit the newsstands, virtual and otherwise.

Moonshine is a bi-annual literary journal of local flavor that features primarily regional authors, as well as new and established poets and prose writers from all over.  Photography of Floyd’s rural scenery is also included in every issue, and this special all-color anniversary issue features six of my photographs, including the cover shot. Its editor-in-chief is Aaron Moore, who grew up in Floyd and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative and World Literature at Sichuan University in China.

The issue also includes a poem, Pines Gone, by my Floyd friend Katherine Chantal and a humorous telling of losing her head by my friend Chelsea Adams, as well as more than a dozen prose and poetry pieces from other writers.

Other Floyd and New River Valley writers that I know include Dianne Goff, who has a short story about a horse named “Senator,” Rob Neukirch whose stream-of-consciousness poetic prose piece is titled “Nest,” and Shayley Martin whose poem, Once They Grew Chinqaupins, speaks to the nostalgia around the loss of the American chestnut while the chinquapins are here to appreciate.

I wrote a review of the premiere issue of the Moonshine for our local paper in 2008. Here’s an excerpt: The name, Floyd County Moonshine, is not a literal reflection of the magazine’s content, but is “designed to arouse quaint associations of a local or regional Southern/Appalachian flavor,” says Aaron Moore in the Editor’s Preface. The publication’s subtitle, “Local Color Literature” is more specific to what it offers. Moore hopes the offering will appeal to wide variety of people, from literary academics to everyday readers. The mix of fresh voices blended with those of more established writers lends itself to crossing literary boundaries.

Last year, poet and Emory and Henry College creative writing teacher, Felicia Mitchell, reviewed my poetry book, Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife, in Moonshine.  It began: Colleen Redman’s new chapbook from Finishing Line Press, Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife, is an intriguing collection. The poems, rich with imagery and introspection, resonate with an original voice grounded in a range of experiences.  Intelligent and compassionate, they promise to draw in readers with their layering of dream and day, of past and present, of insight and story.

I also have a poem in this current issue, The Distance, written to my sister Kathy who died November 2015. I read The Distance at The Fairmount Five Poetry Salon,  hosted by poets Jack Callan and Judith Stevens in their Norfolk home in May. You can hear me read it HERE.

Floyd County Moonshine can be purchased at The Harvest Moon Food Store and The Floyd Country Store in Floyd or via Paypal or by sending a check or money order ($10 + $2 shipping) made out to Floyd County Moonshine LLC to 720 Christiansburg Pike, Floyd, VA 24091.  Check out the Moonshine Facebook page. Deadline for the next issue (Spring 2019) is January 31, 2019.

______________Our World Tuesday