In this episode of our Conversations series, Wes Blake and Em J Parsley discuss novellas and more.

Things Mentioned

• Appalachian Literary Arts Festival

Books Mentioned

• Pineville Trace by Wes Blake
• You, From Below by Em Parsley
• Kinfolks by Gurney Norman
• Nothing Gold Can Stay by Ron Rash
• Stories by Breece D’j Pancake
• Deviant Hollers edited by Zane McNeill and Rebecca Scott
• Queer Communion edited by Davis Shoulders
• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
• All About Love by bell hooks
• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
• The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
• Flux by Jinwoo Chong
• The Caretaker by Ron Rash
• Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison
• Trigger Warning by Jacinda Townsend
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
• Light Years by James Salter

Guest Info

Wes Blake is the award-winning author of Pineville Trace, a Southern Gothic flash novella (Etchings Press, 2024). His narrative nonfiction collection Hazelgreen and Other Haunts, a memoir of place-in-essays, is forthcoming in 2027 from West Virginia University Press. Wes’ debut book won the Etchings Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. His fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Literature, storySouth, Louisiana Literature Journal, and Untelling, among others. He is part of the visiting faculty at Eastern Kentucky University’s Bluegrass Writers Studio MFA in Creative Writing Program and lives in Nonesuch, Kentucky with his wife and cats, where they’ve planted 100 trees. Learn more at wesblake.com. 

Website | Instagram

Em J Parsley (they/he) is a farmer, environmentalist, and cultivator of oyster mushrooms living in Lexington, Kentucky. They are the author of the novella, You, From Below (Split Lip Press, 2025) and the poetry chapbook, The Anonym Gospels (April Gloaming Publishing, 2024), which won the Apogee Poetry Chapbook Award.  

Website | Instagram

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