Bite-Sized Appalachia
Photo: Rachel Reeher
Truth may very well be stranger than fiction, though fiction can be a helpful tool for understanding the strangeness that pervades much of the human experience. Tucker Leighty-Phillips ’18 uses his writing to mine the sometimes bizarre realities hidden just beneath the surface of ordinary life.
“I found that when I started to de-familiarize, or lean into the surreal or the absurd, I could capture the truth of a thing in a way that the more direct address of it wasn’t doing,” says Leighty-Phillips.
Maybe This Is What I Deserve, his debut short story collection, embraces the absurd as a tool for illuminating and challenging the memories and myths at the heart of his childhood growing up in rural Appalachia. Over the course of 28 flash fiction stories, readers are introduced to a landscape consumed by consumerist impulses and desires. Toddlers imagine themselves as airports. Parents yearn to become chain stores. Kids construct their identities through the lens of their favorite brands. This intentional conflation between what is human and what is commodity, Leighty-Phillips argues, serves to critique common misconceptions about the place he calls home.
“One of the things I think about in my work is the way that commodity works in terms of class identifiers. I wanted to sort of push back on Appalachian fiction as being the mountains and the streams and the hills and the hollers,” he says. “In this day and age, the Walmarts and Dollar Generals are just as much a part of the landscape, whether we like it or not.”
Flash fiction is both a genre and a form unto itself, one that favors extreme brevity. This economy of language can be used to generate narrative momentum while enhancing thematic clarity. In “Statement from the Silver-taloned Monster Ravaging the Local Townspeople,” which comes in at under 200 words, Leighty-Phillips uses the perspective of a literal monster to draw attention to the effect that extractive economies have on the communities they inhabit. The piece’s pithiness, coupled with its matter-of-fact tone, draws attention to the absurdity of the normalized disparities between the ruling and working classes.
For most of his life, Leighty-Phillips identified with being a reader, devouring any text he could get his hands on, including the works of Roald Dahl, Judy Blume and Louis Sachar. It was upon transferring to Bucknell as a Community College Scholar that he really started to think of himself as a writer.
“At Harrisburg Area Community College, I was working on a degree in publicity and communications. When I got to Bucknell, I switched to literary studies, and I took an elective class doing flash fiction with Joe Scapellato. It just opened up a lot of possibilities for me, and I started to write more,” says Leighty-Phillips. “Being able to take a class in short-short fiction that’s all about contemporary flash fiction is something that I never had the chance to do anywhere else.”
Alumni & Faculty Publications
Made in Maine (Woodhall Press, 2023)
After studying international relations at Bucknell, Henry continued her education at Harvard University and the University of Wyoming. Her time as an English teacher and a children’s librarian inspired her to write for a young-adult audience. Made in Maine is a Young Adult novel that addresses issues of addiction, homophobia, identity, adoption, alienation, socioeconomic disparity, the power of community, and ultimately, hope. It has been nominated for several awards, including the 2024 Pushcart Prize. Henry is also a playwright who lives in Davidson, N.C.
James Zervanos ’92, M’95
Your Story Starts Here: A Year on the Brink with Generation Z (Vine Leaves Press, 2024)
Zervanos, a high school English teacher, formulated his second memoir from journal entries he wrote throughout a year documenting the issues “his kids” grappled with, including identity politics, gun violence and political uncertainty. Zervanos is a Philadelphia-based writer, artist and teacher whose award-winning short stories have been published in literary journals and magazines. While at Bucknell, the English and art history double-major and baseball player received the William Bucknell Prize for English and was named Patriot League Scholar-Athlete of the Year.
Jackson Hill, professor emeritus of music
Symphony No. 3 (“Fleisher Discoveries” podcast, 2023)
For four decades, Hill, an accomplished composer of symphonic, ensemble and vocal music, taught at Bucknell University, where he served as associate dean, Presidential Professor and chair of the Department of Music. In November, his Symphony No. 3 was selected as the subject of the “Fleisher Discoveries,” a podcast that highlights “remarkable treasures” housed in the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Hill’s symphony premiered at Bucknell in 2006 and can be found by searching “Fleisher Discoveries Hill” on SoundCloud.