So They Can Hear You is the debut anthology from Appalachia Spark. Its pages are a gathering of voices rooted in the hills, hollers, and heartlands of the Appalachian region, and it speaks to the quiet things we rarely say aloud.
This collection moves through grief and humor, tenderness and fury, the aftermath of love and the stubborn persistence of hope. From the careful inventory of a dissolving marriage catalogued in cardboard boxes, to the terror of being known too deeply, to the old ghost lights still flickering in Appalachian memory, these poems don't look away.
What makes So They Can Hear You rare is its range. Serious and strange, intimate and expansive, the collection holds space for every weather of human experience: the knot that holds even as it unravels, the hope that burns as much as it sustains, the landscape that shapes the people who shape the page.
Twelve Appalachian writers contributed their most honest selves to these pages. Together, they offer what the best poetry always has: proof that the things we carry in silence are rarely carried alone.
Melissa Toothman is a Weston native living in Buckhannon with deep familial roots to the Appalachias. She can barely recall a moment of her life when she wasn't interested in writing. She owns an upstart art and publishing company, Appalachia Spark LLC, where she pursues her lifelong dream of establishing a welcoming, inspiring, and encouraging environment for writers to realize their publishing dreams without the intimidation that can often stem from the process. Her primary focus is on raising up the variety of voices that hail from the Appalachian region. Melissa describes herself as a dreamer with a vision that won't leave her unless she exhausts all her efforts trying to pursue it.She runs Appalachia Spark Writers Guild, a still-evolving workshop group focused on timed writing sprints to help participants get into the habit of breaking that shell of perfection and fear that often holds them back from a regular writing practice. Sprints aren't meant to be masterpieces, and the group meetings are judgement free zones for writers at all skill levels and genre interests. Melissa is an avid writer with a background in news editing and journalism, earning multiple awards over the years for her work. She has Bachelors of Arts degrees in Creative Writing and Visual Arts earned in 2008 at Alderson Broaddus University. In 2025, she enrolled in the Editor in Book Publishing course with ELVTR instructed by Julia Wallace, the Executive Managing Editor and Copy Chief of Penguin Random House. She completed this course as a top student with a certificate and personal letter of recommendation from the instructor.
