I am writing on the other side of Pilot Mountain in Western Virginia
today at Pilot School. I agree with Marita Garin that a “regional literature is possible for Appalachia” and increasingly necessary. Piercing the Veil by Byron Hoot and Greg Clary is an effort to re-imagine Appalachian identity and explores newer possibilities through a poetic storyline of suggestion as well as the photographer’s careful lens. Part of the vocation of the Poet is to convey divine mystery and Piercing the Veil seeks to unravel the “ordinary extraordinary” all around us-it is a transcendental “in seeing” of the eternal now, a recasting of newer hope for a region still recovering from decades of industrial havoc and loss of identity.
-T. Byron Kelly
Studio Appalachia
Pilot Virginia
