Notebook: (1) Days of Arts and Letters, Two Southern Festivals

Keeping it going: The Berry Center’s Kentucky Arts and Letters Day and the Nashville’s Southern Festival of Books

Arriving on Saturday at The Locker in New Castle, Kentucky, for Kentucky Arts and Letters Day, sponsored by The Berry Center, whose bookstore is Book Post’s Autumn 2025 partner bookseller

Our Book Post Notebook this month is a little late, because we wanted to scoop in Kentucky Arts and Letters Day last weekend. This week’s book review will appear a little later in the week.

On Saturday, at Kentucky Arts and Letters Day in New Castle, Kentucky, Robert Gipe, who wrote for Book Post about Chris Hamby’s book about fighting black lung disease among coal workers, read a short story called “World of Waters.” In the story an older man, rattled by heavy rains in the night, remembers visiting North Carolina after Hurricane Helene and hearing accounts of young fishing guides who had risked their lives to rescue people in terrifying conditions. “They named a bunch more people in their thirties and forties from that community who’d either come back from off or rose up to jump in and help and that one boy said he’d never been prouder in his life to be from a place than he had been after the hurricane,” he writes. Later, a man who had been a teacher asked the guides, “do you think in a generation, that the young people here will have the skills to do what you have done here?” and the boys said, “yeah, I think they’ll be enough of us. First one said, I want to live here more than I ever have in my life. But I don’t know that I could tell people it’s safe here.”