I’m excited to share an interview with Noah Soltau (Managing Editor) & Wesley Scott McMasters (Literary Editor), who share their insights about Red Branch Review, a literary and visual art annual based in Knoxville, Tennessee.
WRJ collaborator Ashley Cundiff conducted the interview, and since she resides in southwestern Virginia, she fits right in with the Appalachian themes of Red Branch.
Here is a bit about the publication.
From the editors: The Red Branch Review seeks to bring to readers the kaleidoscope of human experience and is responding to the increasing liminality of the Appalachian experience. The editors are gathering artistic and literary voices that express that tension and evoke a sense of place into conversation with one another.
Red Branch recognizes and celebrates the heterogeneity of Appalachia. The editors welcome contributors and readers to bring their individual voices and perspectives to Red Branch, and we encourage potential contributors to familiarize themselves with our work before submitting.
Submissions will reopen in 2026. See complete guidelines here.
Ashley: The Red Branch Review is a journal and nonprofit organization based in Knoxville, Tennessee that grapples with the Appalachian experience. I’m your neighbor to the north in southwestern Virginia, and I admit that even after living in this area for two decades I have a hard time fitting the idea of Appalachia into set cultural or geographical terms. How would you define the Appalachian experience?
Noah: I think the ARC (the Appalachian Regional Commission’s) map is a limited but valuable place to begin. The region is connected to the land, to people, and to dispossession and displacement. I think, traditionally, there have been strong preferences in Northern and Southern Appalachia to be defined as such, but as American society flattens into the very few haves and the very many have nots, the most important distinction to me is one of minoritization and exploitation rather than, necessarily, the peculiarities of geography. For me, place is important, but we are also interested in bringing interesting voices into a larger conversation. I don’t want us to be motivated by regionalism, but rather illuminate particular contexts through poetry, prose, and visual art.
I think the specificity of experience (being Black in Kentucky or Knoxville, working a small farm and owning a business in Lawrenceburg, TN, raising a family as a mechanic in suburban Pennsylvania, responding to a natural disaster as a veteran in Western North Carolina, being a lover, a mother, a student, a teacher, etc.) in response to the conditions of our existence is at the center of most of the work that we publish. So, I agree, I think Appalachia is actually impossible to fit into one set of cultural or geographical terms, and it’s the kaleidoscopic expressions of art and literature that arise from those conditions that might be our best bet to experience it, purposefully in a way that defies categories.
Red Branch itself comes out of this semantic kaleidoscope. The literary reference in the name comes from Knoxville-native Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper. But Appalachia is also full of small streams, called branches, that are features of the mountainous landscape. Then, of course, there are the linguistic and visual references in the logo to trees, veins, and arteries, so we have really conceived Red Branch as a nexus for the expression of all of these different experiences: the embodied, the literary, the natural. We hope to become part of the definitional project.
Wesley: I don’t think I would add much to Noah’s definitions here. Because he is the Managing Editor, I am grateful for his ability to cohere a varied editorial staff’s vision. I think it is important that the editors live in Appalachia. I think it is important that we are interested in representing Appalachia. I like Noah’s goal of being “part of the definitional project,” because I think as writers and editors in this region and a part of this culture, that means that we are participating in it. Otherwise, we’re not doing much of anything. Being able to see the Appalachian mountains sure helps to define what someone means by “Appalachian,” but a lot more people have seen them, or spent time looking at them, in ways that have shaped their lives from that point forward, and that means something, too. Living and knowing what it is like to live in a geographical region is relevant, but those experiences will each be unique. There is a sense that to know a place means to have struggled in it or because of it, and this brings an emotional connection to the way someone defines themselves. Ultimately, the more work we do to define the Appalachian experience in concrete terms, the harder it is to do so. I’m up for approaching it differently.
Ashley: Would you be willing to share a little about your own biographies and experiences and how they relate to the Appalachian experience or your writing experience more generally?
Wesley: I have lived in Appalachia my whole life, from growing up in central Pennsylvania, to living in Orono, Maine, to now living in east Tennessee. As I already suggested and will continue to address, I don’t think of this as an “Appalachian experience” so much as I think of it as my lived experience. Certainly, people would even suggest that because a good portion of my life was spent in Pennsylvania that my experience would not fall under that category at all, which points in some ways to the larger problem of defining such terms. What I do know is that growing up where I did certainly influenced my life in particular ways, and that experience has helped me feel at home at other places in this geographical region. Most importantly, I think, is the kinship that I feel through a tie to the place that I am from – whether you call that Appalachia or something else. Place ties people together in ways that I have always found fascinating, and it’s been an important part of who I am and what I write about. That is not to say that I write about place, because I don’t, and I refuse to. However, my work is deeply tied to place because it has to be. Much like Noah’s answer that describes a “kaleidoscopic expression,” really my work is about relationships, and relationships are necessarily informed by place.
Noah: I grew up in the North Georgia woods and in Chattanooga, TN, and moved to Knoxville for graduate school, during which time I also studied for a year in Germany. I now live in Knoxville and work at a small liberal arts university in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. My first reputable publications have been in Appalachian literary magazines (like Still: The Journal and Cutleaf,) and we have found real community with writers and scholars in the Appalachian Studies Association and with writers and artists both in and around Knoxville and scattered across Appalachia and the South East. So, like Wesley said, it’s more of my lived experience that happens to be in Appalachia.
As an editor, I am interested in relationships to place, and as a writer, it informs the other kinds of lyrical and narrative work I try to do with language. I think of place less like mamaw’s garden or papaw’s porch, but images that are concrete, sensual, visceral. There is plenty of room in Appalachia for granny poems, or short stories about the family farm, but I think we contain multitudes, and Appalachia is so often essentialized as a particular kind of rural whiteness, that we have some compelling opportunities to tell other stories, too.
I think Appalachia is actually impossible to fit into one set of cultural or geographical terms, and it’s the kaleidoscopic expressions of art and literature that arise from those conditions that might be our best bet to experience it, purposefully in a way that defies categories.
Ashley: The Red Branch Review is primarily a print journal (digital downloads are also available), which I love! Why choose the print format as opposed to going fully online?
Wesley: Noah and I like the headache that comes with trying to make sure we can afford to print every year. Tangibility matters when it comes to art, and there are plenty of online journals that offer really good work in that medium. Our medium is physical print, and that is what we’ve committed to as something different and material.
Noah: Wesley is certainly right about the headache. I’m interested in the art object. I’m interested in sustainability and longevity. I think the key to that is creating beautiful, well-constructed books and getting them into the hands of our writers, artists, and readers. Our incredibly talented visual arts editor, Heather Hartman, and I committed to that from the first issue. Wesley and I had many discussions about what success would look like when we started this (and many times since,) and one of the primary metrics was that artists want to get paid, and, barring that, to see their work in print. So, we committed to print regardless of financial support, in part to honor the work of our contributors, but also because we wanted to avoid the pitfall of so many digital-only publications: the ephemera of the internet leading to oblivion.
We would probably have a larger audience if we were completely free and online, but, between our social media accounts, the work on our website, and the very affordable digital downloads, I think we have struck the right balance between access and a commitment to sustainable creative work on our part. The other matter, of course, is time: our professional lives are structured in such a way that we can commit to creating one volume a year. We resist the pressure to produce content (rather than curating art, literature, and poetry) by constraining ourselves to a schedule that allows us to care for the work in the way it deserves.
Thomas Flynn II, “I stood at the mouth of the river and wondered why my thoughts were swallowed” (acrylic on canvas mounted on wood)
From thomasflynnii.com
Ashley: You both have backgrounds in higher education. How does your experience in teaching affect your approach editorial work?
Noah: I’m fortunate to have spent a good portion of my education and career reading some of the best poetry and fiction in English, German, and in translation. My experiences as a reader, writer, a translator affect the way I teach and the texts I choose, certainly, but I think, more than anything, helping students to read and write with the care I expect of them has made me a better editor. I will say, though, that my own writing and submitting practice, and helping some of the students I have mentored in that regard, has had the biggest impact on my editorial persona. There’s not a whole lot worse, as a writer, than getting an impersonal and poorly formatted form rejection, and reading pieces that have not been proofread or bear no relation to the work we have published in turn makes me conscientious in my own editing and submission practices.
I think I also treat designing Red Branch volumes like I treat course design. There are usually a handful of pieces that I read that are so immediate, or compelling, or devastating, that they have to form the nucleus of the book. I do the same thing in my classes, where I will want students to read a particular set of texts or grapple with a cluster of problems, and the course design becomes giving those works the best context I can, so that the students can develop the skills that they need to. For Red Branch, the design becomes about putting the right pieces into conversation with each other. We obviously occasionally get work that doesn’t meet our standards, and I know it’s an editorial platitude or truism at this point, but we really do say “no” to a lot of excellent work because it doesn’t help structure a particular book. So, I think the writers who know their work is good and are reading this should take some comfort in that.
Wesley: Again, Noah has pretty well defined the relationship between teaching and editing: it’s recursive, and there are endless ways in which these practices inform one another. This is my professional life, so I don’t think of myself as an educator who is also an editor or vice versa. I am a poet and writer, and part of my work is in the classroom and part of it is with this journal and my incredible writer and artist friends and colleagues.
Ashley: Wesley, I found a few of your third-person bios around the internet, and two things that they almost always mention are your roots in Pennsylvania and your current home in eastern Tennessee. Does this sense of place and identity of origin play an important role in your writing?
Wesley: I started to answer this question earlier when talking about Appalachia but stopped myself so I had something to say here.
Yes. Unendingly.
In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne as a narrator in “The Custom House,” describes his connection to Salem, which is one that carries generational trauma and historical horrors. Nevertheless, his description of his bond to the land is something that I’ve always found fascinating, as you might imagine: “This old town of Salem—my native place, though I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and maturer years—possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here…And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection. The sentiment is probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my family has struck into the soil….descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their earthy substance with the soil; until no small portion of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust.”
I guess I, too, have a “sensuous sympathy of dust for dust.”
Ashley: Noah, you have a background in German literature and film and teach German. How does working regularly in another language affect your creative and editorial practices?
Noah: German literature and translation practice have deeply informed my editorial approach. Reading Kafka (and Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature and Milan Kundera’s 2007 New Yorker essay “Die Weltliteratur”) has shaped the way I think about Appalachia and Appalachian literature. Walter Benjamin’s essays “The Task of the Translator,” “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” and “Unpacking my Library” provide me with some of the organizing principles for Red Branch: collecting fragments to gesture to a larger whole, the value of books, the mediated nature of human experience. Adorno, Brecht, Heine, Höch, Hölderlin, Kracauer, and Rilke have influenced my aesthetics, and I bring that perspective to my editorial work. Working between languages and cultures has given me both an appreciation for commonalities and an awareness of difference, both of which help me be a better writer and editor.
My experiences working with my friends and mentors, especially Maria Stehle, while I was in graduate school helped me sharpen the skills I will need to keep Red Branch viable in the long term, both organizationally as an editor but also in terms of developing a creative vision for the work I think is important. A serious commitment to creative practice can be challenging in so many areas of life, and reading and writing about that in a German context from the 19th to the 21st centuries, while also observing my teachers and mentors practicing it in their own lives, was deeply instructive.
I treat designing Red Branch volumes like I treat course design. There are usually a handful of pieces that I read that are so immediate, or compelling, or devastating, that they have to form the nucleus of the book. I do the same thing in my classes, where I will want students to read a particular set of texts or grapple with a cluster of problems. . . . For Red Branch, the design becomes about putting the right pieces into conversation with each other.
Give it up for Noah and Wesley! Check back next week for Part 2 of the interview!
Noah Soltau teaches about art, literature, and society to the mostly-willing. He is Managing Editor of The Red Branch Review. His full-length poetry collection, Titanfall, was shortlisted for the Arthur Smith Prize and is forthcoming from Madville Publishing (2026). His most recent work appears or is forthcoming in Cutleaf, Harbor Review, Quarter(ly) and elsewhere. He lives and works in East Tennessee. Follow him on Instagram @noahsoltau and @redbranchreview.
Wesley Scott McMasters writes, teaches, and lives in east Tennessee just within sight of the Great Smoky Mountains with his wife, Caroline, and their dog, Poet (who came with the name, they swear). His poetry publications include Trying to Be a Person (Words Dance, 2016), In Which My Lover Tells Me About the Nature of Wild Things (Mammoth Books, 2019), and The Bathtub Madonna (Riverdog, 2022).
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This was great! We appreciate the good questions.