Sitting in Lost River, West Virginia

Posted in Outdoors & Travel on May 31st, 2010 by marklynn
Sitting in Lost River, West Virginia
The Lost River Valley is long and narrow, a peninsula of farmland flanked by steep mountains. It lies between George Washington National Forest and the lush, low range that ripples off to its West. There are cattle, old houses, and a meandering creek that locals call a river. Driving down State Road 259 yesterday, I was struck that no one element dominates this scene. Read More »


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Party in the Southeast’s Coolest Town

Posted in Outdoors & Travel on May 26th, 2010 by marklynn
Party in the Southeast’s Coolest Town
Remember Budget Travel’s coolest small towns contest? Good news! Brevard, North Carolina won the title for the Southeast and emerged as the third coolest town in the entire nation. Your votes helped, and here’s your chance to celebrate. The White Squirrel Festival starts this Saturday. For two days, the heart of Brevard will be small-town party-central complete with a box car derby and nearly twenty bands. Read More »


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NEW FEATURE! The Photo Album

Posted in History & Culture on May 23rd, 2010 by marklynn
NEW FEATURE! The Photo Album
If we were to combine all of our photos into one giant Appalachian album, how would it look? This is our chance to find out. You can now upload your favorite photos on The Revivalist. Feel free to share any and every picture that illustrates Appalachian life. They can be of mountain vistas, custom cars, baptisms, your favorite river, mall outings, plant life, pig pickins’, new babies, deer in your yard, prime camp spots, or your own smiling f Read More »


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My Great Aunt Arizona

Posted in Art & Lit on May 19th, 2010 by marklynn
The blog Appalachian History just posted a simple, sweet poem that I thought you all might appreciate. It is entitled “My Great Aunt Arizona.” It was written by Gloria Houston, a teacher, about her great aunt, who was also a teacher. It begins like this: My great-aunt Arizona was born in a log cabin her papa built in the meadow on Henson Creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Read More »


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Shelby Lee Adams Invited Me to a Party

Posted in Art & Lit on May 16th, 2010 by marklynn
Shelby Lee Adams Invited Me to a Party
Halloween Twins, '06 Shelby Lee Adams invited me to a party. It’s this June in the backwoods of Kentucky, and it will celebrate his recent Guggenheim Fellowship. Mind you, I’ve never met the man. At this point, we had exchanged exactly one email each, and his contained this invite: “A thought, I’m having a party in Leatherwood, Ky…If you’re interested, you could attend. You could interview friends and subje Read More »


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Appalachia’s Erin Brokovich

Posted in History & Culture on May 12th, 2010 by marklynn
Appalachia’s Erin Brokovich
Diane Sawyer wasn’t the only reporter who earned accolades this year for an Appalachian story. Daniel Gilbert earned a Pulitzer Prize when he delivered the 33,000 readers of the Bristol Herald Courier a riveting series on the filching of natural gas from landowners in Southwest Virginia. A prime example is Earl Whited: “By the time Earl Whited, of Russell County, Va., died in 2006, more than a dozen gas wells on his property had suck Read More »


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Get a Squirrel’s POV on an Appalachian Canopy Tour

Posted in Outdoors & Travel on May 9th, 2010 by marklynn
Get a Squirrel’s POV on an Appalachian Canopy Tour
Ever watch forest squirrels bounce from limb to limb and wonder what the world looks like from up there? Starting next Saturday, you can find out. A company called Navitat is opening a new canopy tour in the Asheville area. Riding on zip lines, visitors traverse from one forest tree to another. According to the screeching and whooping folks in the below video, it’s thrilling.  Read More »


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One Weekend: Two Bluegrass Artists Lost

Posted in Music on May 5th, 2010 by marklynn
One Weekend: Two Bluegrass Artists Lost
This weekend, traffic accidents took a deadly toll on bluegrass music. As reported in The Roanoke Times, two separate wrecks took the lives of two musicians. The first was Friday night. Houston Caldwell was widely regarded as one of the hottest, young banjo players around. At age eighteen, he had twice placed in the top four banjo players at the Old Fiddlers Convention and had become a fixture on the music scene, usually performing with his band Read More »


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County Ghost

Posted in Art & Lit on May 2nd, 2010 by marklynn
What would you do if a specter started bustin’ up your moonshine? Chase him with your musket and blow your hillside shack apart, of course! Fashioned after Loony Tunes cartoons, County Ghost is a four part series of shorts. It opens with the above clip set on a ramshackle cattle farm. While this isn’t definitively Appalachia, Mike Geiger, the series animator, explained to me that it could be: - Where does your moonshiner live? Have Read More »


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