Of all the chapters that I read and reviewed in my most recent review of the book “Letters From the Smokies” in Smoky Mountain Living (June-July 2025), the story of the Walker Sisters was the one story that got my attention probably more than any of the others.

For all of you ’70s and ’80s hipsters, I’ve got one for you. In his new book, acclaimed author Paul Elie (“The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex and Controversy in the 1980s,” Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025, 464 pages) takes a deep dive into the music and arts scene of the 1970s and 80s.

Reminiscent of “Starting From San Francisco,” one of the first books by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Francisco is also where Victor Depta spent some of his early years and where this 2024 reprint of his 1973 book “The Creek” (Ohio Univ. Press, 2024) begins — with references to Coit Tower, Nob Hill and the Fillmore District when he was there and reading Wordsworth, Whitman and Rimbaud.

I have always been a sucker for a good love story, so when I was told that J. M. Coetzee — who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature — had a new novel and that it was a love story (“The Pole,” W. Norton & Co., 2023), I was all in. 

In May, a very special anniversary issue of the Asheville Poetry Review was released for public consumption celebrating 30 years as one of this country’s seminal literary journals. 

“We are not human beings on a spiritual journey,

but rather spiritual beings on a human journey.”

Teilhard de Chardin

— from: “Thoreau’s God” 

Having grown up in proximity to a Cherokee community (Little Snowbird in Graham County), I’m familiar with and sensitive to the history and the psychology of Native peoples who have been marginalized and worse from their cultural roots and their homelands.

“The simple act of walking and taking in what I saw and puzzling over what I encountered as I went. The rhythm and simplicity of it.”              

— Neil King Jr. 

“In time, maybe the land will decide.”

Scott T. Starbuck is an award-winning poet, career fisherman, climate activist and longtime resident of the Pacific Northwest. His most recent book, “Bridge at the End of the World (New and Selected Poems)” is a culmination of his major published poetic output. 

If you ever wondered what it would be like to live as a monk or a nun, this book delves deeply into the subject. In this extremely well-written and heartfelt memoir, “Cloistered: My Years as a Nun” (St. Martin’s Press, 2024), Catherine Coldstream begins by taking us back to her life as a young woman who has many talents, is smart, well-read, is multilingual, energetic, adventuristic and living a dreamed of life in Paris after having grown up in the UK.