Sherry Chandler

Coffee Talk Quarterly

While I was wandering around the rotunda of the William T. Young library on Thursday, trying to get registered for the KyWWC and find the food (!), some one thrust into my hands a copy of the inaugural issue of the Coffee Talk Quarterly. Serendipity this time, perhaps. Certainly happy coincidence. I’d had this new magazine on my list of things to check out since I’d seen it announced in the Kentucky Literary Newsletter and Calendar.

As promised, the CTQ is 30 tabloid-fold pages of “Art, Culture, Ideas, and Interesting People.” My favorites in this first issue were William House’s article comparing Bill Monroe to Albert Camus and James Vitatoe’s article on Appalachian Hick Hop. The latter turns out to be a project of Appalshop to bring a unique mix of urban and rural music to the growing number of prisons in eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia. Prisons are a growth industry in the impoverished, job-hungry areas of our nations, a national disgrace that gets very little attention. But Appalshop is on it – read Vitatoe’s article and look for the Appalshop documentary “From the Holler to the Hood,” which will deals in part with the effect of bringing “hundreds of thousands of inner city minor offenders to distant rural environment.”

But I digress – I think I was a preacher in a former lifetime. Many good things in this first issue, including the Publisher’s Point of View, which is Dr. Sonya Jones’s fairwell to Susan Sontag. Dr. Jones speculates on how Sontag would have reacted had she visited the “Cumberland Corridor that stretches down I-75 from Lexington to Knoxville.”

It can’t hurt, however, to imagine Sontag setting up a typewriter in a trailer out in the woods near Dykes, KY, and writing a sequel to “Notes on Camp.” Would I elect to publish it if she offered it to CTQ? Pending review, I might.

I haven’t mentioned the book, art, drama reviews and the half dozen wonderful poems by local poets such as Brenda White, Steve Rhodes, and Jane Gentry. CTQ is currently available in Somerset at Baxter’s Coffee Shop, Cafe Latte, and Somerset Community College bookstores and in Lexington at Black Swan and the UK bookstores. Subscriptions are $20/year.

Also, according to the Kentucky Literary Newsletter and Calendar, CTQ is now accepting manuscripts for the spring edition scheduled for release in early June. The theme is Tourism (Cultural Heritage Tourism included): Pros and Cons. Address queries to:

Dr. Sonya Jones, Publisher & Editor
Coffee Talk Quarterly
304 W. Mt. Vernon St.
Somerset, KY 42501
606-875-2967

or email Dr. Jones at sonnieji@yahoo.com

1. A Poem from Coffee Talk Quarterly
2. Jonathan Greene on Amazon
3. Kentucky Literary Awards for 2004
4. A Patchwork of Words
5. “Money Doesn’t Talk, It Swears…”

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