Caren Rich “The Fruitcake”
Southern Legitimacy Statement
I was born and raised in the South. Sweet tea runs through my veins. There are enough lights on my house during the Christmas season to signal planes. I make fruit cake and love the sweet sugary pillows that are divinity. My kids run year round barefoot and the dog doesn't wear a collar. I am southern and proud of it.
Gregg Punger “The Candle Girl”
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born and raised by a true southern woman from Mars Bluff, South Carolina in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where I spent most of my youth making forts and mud slides in the creek behind my house and playing football. Through her stories about her life growing up on a farm and my time spent at my ancestral home, a two story white farm house with columns and a large porch surrounded by woods and acres of fields, I learned to be a southerner.
Steve Gowin “Ringneck”
SLS
I am a Yankee... Ok you'd find out sooner or later. But most of my writer friends are Southern writers. My affinities are for Faulkner and O'Connor. Well if that doesn't sink me, I hope you enjoy my story.
Marah Blair “My Grandfather’s House”
Southern Legitimacy Statement
I was born in the “sticks” of Central Virginia. Silos across the street, bare feet in the freshly tilled garden patch, and mud fights in the rain. I am a very big fan of sweet tea, biscuits with real salted butter, and good old fashion bon fires. The south is very dear to my heart.
December 2012 Poetry
Photography redux in this issue... Little did we know, back then, that most of these iconic Southern buildings would be long gone by 2012. Hurricanes and floods destroyed every building in the images featured in the poetry section. If damaged by Bertha, the death of the buildings was assured post-Dennis and Floyd.
Ray Sharp: Wind Fierce as Love
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I left the South many years ago as a young man, yet still on long winter nights I ask myself why. The Northern Lights are beautiful with their cold and alien glow, but I surely miss sticky summers in the Ohio River Valley, honeysuckle vine on the back fence, and the soft lilting way that Laura is pronounced Laahrah.
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L. A. Lawton: Four Poems
I've lived more than half my 74 years in the South, mostly by choice. I regard "y'all" as a perfectly legitimate second-person plural. I make super crabcakes and key lime pie, but I don't eat grits out of loyalty to my mama's Hoosier corn pudding. I have a photo of me with Eudora Welty, dated one of her cousins in New York in the sixties, and wish I'd ever encountered Flannery O'Connor; I knew a man who had. I've been kissed on the cheek by two Southern bishops, one for a glass of wine and one for finding him a C.S. Lewis poem with the word "longanimity" in. One of my great-great-grandmothers was a Virginian who eloped with an abolitionist lawyer and another one pioneered Midwest from Carolina, where I plan to leave my dust.
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Gretchen A. Bateman: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Born in Connecticut, raised in Maryland (yes, it's below the Mason Dixon Line!) and now living in Tennessee, I have come to realize that I am a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll. I've been writing since I was a child and had my first poem published at the age of 8. I enjoy the outdoors, sports, and trying to emulate the Tennessee twang.
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