"The First Fall" includes stories and poems about the first time falling for something, or someone. It features a story by Saoira Tucker Smith, novel excerpts by Bryan Hurt, and Kathleen Fuller, and poems by Hannah Patterson, Luke Spivey, and Kendra Sparkman. An extra special edition including translations by Peyton Bullock is available online at the KUAF website, via Spotify and Podbean.
Saoira Tucker Smith tells "Sometimes the First Fall is a Raindrop," a story based in 1999 Fayetteville, at the tail end of a summer very similar to this past one. Soaira Smith Tucker is a writer, folklorist, and Southern storyteller whose work explores myth, memory, beauty, and place. She serves on the board of Ozark Folkways, where she supports its cultural work through programming, grant writing, and occasional archival work. She has lead workshops and shared stories at local community gatherings and festivals.
Hannah Patterson reads her poems "The Fall," "Spring," and "Free Will." These poems take on the persona of Eve, a woman recently fallen from heaven to an earth based in the Ozarks landscape. Hannah Lane Patterson (she/her) is a writer and photographer from the roundabout South. She earned her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arkansas, where she teaches undergraduate writing. You’ll find her poems in Dandy and Susurrus. Through her work, she practices queer ecology and ecospirituality; in other words, she obsesses over false binaries, false hierarchies, and our interconnectedness with the natural world around us.
"Vapor" by Luke Spivey tells of the first time falling in love with someone. Really falling in love. Luke Spivey is an author, builder, human trailer park, wannabe survivalist, amateur mechanist, cool rock collector, doggy daddy, teacher, and friend. He cohosts a community poetry reading called the Monthly Molt. You can follow him on Instagram @lucasspivey.
Kathleen Fuller reads an excerpt from her new novel Autumn at the Cat Café, a romance novel that take places in Ohio, in the fall, at a cat café. Kathleen Fuller lives in Central Arkanasas and is a USA Today bestselling author.
Bryan Hurts reads an excerpt from Into the Earth With You forthcoming from Regal House Publishing. In this excerpt, the character has fallen into a cave, into the dark, into the unknown. Bryan Hurt is the author of Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France, winner of the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, and the editor of Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest. His chapbook The Fourth Man was recently published by IKE: A Publishing Project.
In "An open letter to my very first love," Kendra Sparkman does just that- speak to her first love. And their perceived falling out. Kendra Sparkman started a zine project called Sublunary(dot)space in 2022. Sublunary is the distance between the earth and the moon. It is terrestrial, carnal, possibly mundane. She has 8 issues of introspective personal works presented through a love of graphic design. Oscillation is a reoccurring theme in her work.
"_underscore" is a local storytelling show meant to both underscore local writers’ and poets’ work while, at the same time, putting this work into conversation with each other by creating an oral archive.
The program is open to all genres of writing, including short stories, poems, plays, and nonfiction, as long as the writer either currently resides in or is from northwest Arkansas. Episodes are themed and to submit your work, please email the host, Grace Penry, at penrygrace@gmail.com.
