I recently received the following pleasant email from none other than Good George Brosi, editor of the excellent Appalachian Heritage. Geo writes:

"Dear Pinckney,

Congratulations!

Your story, 'Joe Messinger is Dreaming,' is a winner of a 2007 Plattner Award for Outstanding Fiction appearing in Appalachian Heritage for the year!!!!

AND none other than Lee Maynard was the judge!!!

We will send you a handsome bookrack from Berea College Crafts with a commemorative plaque on it!

Whoopee!!!

George"

Now, that many exclamation points usually means that the message gets eaten by the spam filter.

I'm glad this one didn't, because I love Lee Maynard, the man and the writer (if you don't know his novel Crum, and you have any interest in Appalachian lit or in Appalachia, then you should get it soonest), and I love Appalachian Heritage, and I love Geo Brosi, and now I love Plattner.

That's a lot of love.

And soon enough I'll have a bookrack to commemorate it all.

Reproduced below, the cover of the Summer 2007 issue of AH, which had my story in it, and the first page of the story, and a picture of Joe Kittinger, the mad genius on whom the story is loosely based (with likewise a shout out to Chuck Yeager and Homer Hickam).

In the picture, Joe is jumping out of the gondola of a balloon roughly nineteen miles above the surface of the earth.

.