Southern Highland Reader

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The Southern Highland Reader

This is Appalachia, these are the Great Smokies, and they are both gentle and rugged, ancient and timeless.

For many hundreds of years the people of the Southern Highlands led lives that were molded by the mountains. This is still the case, although the context has changed. The population is much more diverse, and it isn’t particularly difficult to live here anymore. Yet the mountains continue to mold, only more so now by the possibilities that they offer.

This site is about these mountains and their people. The people who lived here before and the people who live here right now.

It’s been almost two centuries since Sequoyah created a syllabary for his native Cherokee tongue. He confined that poetic and descriptive language to paper, like fireflies clapped in a Mason Jar, but without his accomplishment the language might’ve died altogether.

Roughly a century later came Horace Kephart: outdoorsman, eccentric, idealist and eventual author of the classic Our Southern Highlanders. He was searching for the “back of beyond,” and he would find it high in the Smokies, where he made camp and set about “clothing the bones” of the Appalachian mythos “in flesh and blood.”

Then, after World War II, John Parris came home to Sylva. A storied war correspondent, he turned his attentions to the mountains, and for forty years he roamed them for the Asheville Citizen-Times, writing sharp, poignant tales of an independent, vanishing culture.

These days, a torrent of information rushes over and around us in a way these men couldn’t have imagined. Kephart and Parris fished small streams full of big stories, hungry to be told, and struggled with which ones to keep. These days, it seems, information is everywhere, but the small, silvery flashes of significance are hard to spot and trickier to catch.

Let’s give it a try. Thanks for reading, and let us hear from you.

The Southern Highland Reader is a daily journal of news, features, writing and opinion based in Sylva, North Carolina. It began publication in February, 2008. Contact us here: info(at)thesouthernhighlandreader(dot)com

Area of interest
Our specific area of interest is the region of North Carolina’s south-central mountains that includes Jackson, Macon, Swain and Graham Counties, the Qualla Boundary and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. (The Southern Highlands, by loose definition, push further East and West).

These mountains are part of the southern Appalachian mountain chain and the Blue Ridge.

Our Mission
The Southern Highland Reader seeks to serve its readership by elevating understanding of the region it serves – the people, the places, and the challenges that face them both.

News
It’s our goal to provide context, background and perspective for news stories from across the southern mountains. We’ll do this through a mix of our own reporting and by comparing and contrasting the work of other journalists, who will be credited and linked.

Navigational Notes
At it’s foundation, this site is a blog–a sequential stream of journal entries. We’ve added supplemental pages to highlight “feature” entries, set in a loose newspaper format.

Comments
Our “letters to the editor” are moderated. They are posted at our discretion. If they are coarsely worded but still make a point, we might edit them and include them. If they include more than one link, they might not make it through our spam filters. Personal attacks might be edited and included, but more than likely not.