Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods

Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia

Laura Long, Doug Van Gundy

The sixty-three fiction writers and poets within this anthology delve deep into the many senses of place that modern West Virginia, the core of Appalachia, inspires.
Throughout this collection, we see profound wonder, questioning, and conflicts involving family, sexual identity, class, discrimination, environmental beauty, and peril, and all the sorts of rebellion, error, contemplation, and contentment that an intrepid soul can devise. These stories and poems, all published within the last fifteen years, are grounded in what it means to live in and identify with a complex place.
With a mix of established writers like Jayne Anne Phillips, Norman Jordan, Ann Pancake, Maggie Anderson, and Denise Giardina and fresh voices like Matthew Neill Null, Ida Stewart, Rajia Hassib, and Scott McClanahan, this collection breaks open new visions of all-American landscapes of the heart. By turns rowdy and contemplative, hilarious and bleak, and lyrical and gritty, it is a collage of extraordinary literary visions.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Olives
• And then I Arrive at the Powerful Green Hill
• Mercy
• Vow of Silence
• Stone-Hearted
• “What if There Weren’t any Stars?”
• The Rink Girl
• The Dream of the Father
• Through the Still Hours
• The Boys of Bradleytown
• August, West Virginia
• The Dirt Road
• Jennie
• Thin Places
• On Finally Blaming myself a Little Finally
• Almost Heaven, Almost Famous
• Kennedy Wins West Virginia!
• Shed
• Quilting
• A Jar of Rain
• Phantom Flesh
• Appalachian Ghost
• Dark Early
• Belle Fleur
• A History of Barbed wire
• Chokedamp
• From the Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life
• Picking Blackberries
• I Have Slept in Beds and in Gutters
• Helen, Sovereign
• Homage to Hazel Dickens
• Zach Speaks
• Camping as Boys in the Cow Field
• Quarantine
• Robbing Pillars
• Dogwood, Cardinal
• Boy Killed on the Grafton Road
• Apocrypha
• Natural Resources
• Me and my Daddy Listen to Bob Marley
• From Lark and Termite
• What’s Left of the Jamie Archer Band
• West Virginia, or what do you want me to Say?
• Path
• The Hillbilly Break-Dance and the Talking Crow
• Crepuscule
• Don’t Think Like the Mountains,They’re Nothing Like the Future
• Letter to an Unknown, and Probably Deceased,Photographer
• Lessons
• Point Blank
• Her
• Recovering Blues
• Lettuce
• Cortège
• Solvo
• Edna
• Country Music
• Bear Country Blues
• Relapse means i Forgot to be Better
• The Field
• Daddy Longlegs
• The Roy Critchfield Scandals
• Absentee
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Credits