Southern Legitimacy Statement: There used to be preachers along the North Carolina/Virginia border who ran whiskey Saturday nights and preached fire and brimstone Sunday mornings. I know. I listened to them through the windows of The Holy Way Baptist Church as I smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes and sipped some of…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was ten years old when I first visited a hospital. I had been chasing a black snake through an open corn field where someone had left a pitchfork. One of the tines tore through my foot and sent me screaming toward the house. The snake got…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: An image of a worn Meerschaum clinched tightly between my father’s tobacco-stained teeth as he loosed an iron horseshoe toward a wooden stob in the ground. Granny’s Rapture “Bobby, you better git in here fore the Rapture comes and leaves you behind.” I had just pitched a…

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was raised in a mill village in North Carolina. My parents worked at the Burlington Cotton Mill. Every spring a leathery old black man drove up to our mill house on a buckboard, unhitched a mule and used him to plow a garden space about half…

Why do we read? Neil Gaiman says we read fiction because it can show you a different world. One essential “function of fiction in human life” he says, lies in “its ability to introduce us to different versions of the world by envisioning alternate possibilities for the way things are.”…