Ballerina of the Neighborhood by Jeanne Lupton
Southern Legitimacy Statement
How I miss the Virginia countryside, the dusy red dirt, the soft summer rain, the green of the Shenandoah Valley, the damp heat of the swampland where I grew up. I'm so proud Virginia went Obama's way in the election. The Old Dominion ain't what she used to be, ain't what she used to be, ain't what she used to be. How I love her, even now from the other coast, and I always will.
No Questions No Lies by Eric Boyd
SLS: Me, I grew up in Charlotte, and shortly after having my dog eaten by the people in the apartment building across the creek, was moved up to Pittsburgh by my family. Milled around for a while, then had a sabbatical from 2010-2011 which resulted in my winning the PEN American Center's Prison Writing contest. Weird how things work out. Funny in a sad way.
The Familiar by Sylvia Dodgen
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and bred in the Alabama Wiregrass to a father, who said, “Yes, Ma’am” to every female no matter how old or young, and a mother, who painted her lips and nails red and wore heels, hose and a garter everyday of the week except Saturdays, when she rode horses with my father then she wore jodhpurs and boots. Her hair was the hardest thing she had to deal with on a daily basis. If for some reason she couldn’t make it to the beauty shop, she took meals in her bedroom, announcing that her hair looked like a “stump full of granddaddies.” She believed in benign neglect. I ran around barefoot in cutoff dungarees without a shirt. The dungaree suspenders pulled over my shoulders and hooked to metal buttons on a bib, covering my chest. I was sandy, freckled and tick-ridden.
Occasionally, daddy would bring in quail and partridge from a Saturday morning shoot. I would pick them clean on Saturday night, while my parents were dining and dancing. We’d have fried quail and grits for dinner at noon on Monday. We ate fried fish roe and grits for breakfast on Sundays and brains and eggs many weekdays. I grew up on scuppernong wine made by my granddaddy. I was a child of the 1950's and life in the Wiregrass was peaceful, pleasant and in some ways peculiar (I just didn’t know it then).
The Vehicle My Father Slept In by Jason Sobelman
SLS : I have seen a couple episodes of Lizard Lick Towing. No?
Well, I traveled across two states to hear a Southern Preacher, because that is as close as he would get to the abyss that is my current residency . God bless you Pastor David Terrell.
Shelby Stephenson: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Here are 4 pieces from Shub's Cooking. (One of my nicknames is Shub.)
These (poems) are "real" recipes, or based in things I grew up eating, mostly cooked by my mother. And I learned something, after I got toward the end of running out of food to write about: my mother did not use a recipe for anything other than something she did not grow up cooking.
In other words: if we did not kill it, the food, we did not eat. Or: if the chickens didn't lay we didn't eat eggs. Pigs, small game and so on--same.
The recipes I found in her box with the tin eagle tacked on the front--that little box is filled with recipes for desserts.
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K.C. Bosch: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My dating website is YesterdaysTractor.com. My truck is known as Red. My dog is named Dog. I have three girlfriends named Anne: Sue-Anne, Betty-Anne, and LuAnne; my hunting buddies are Wilmer and his brother Ennis. My sister is a teetotalin' non-smokin' monogamous vegetarian, but she's from Boston. The Rapp News covers national and international news on one page, but has 5 pages of high school sports, NASCAR, and local gossip.
Redneck is a noun and a verb. My keys stay in my truck my house ain’t ever been locked. Town is OK as long as it's ten miles away from here. Tea is sweet and gravy is what you put your eggs over. Black-eyed peas and corn bread are more than a New Year’s Day novelty snack. Living in Huntly, I know that Virginia is not the south; it is the middle, the middle of everything.
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David Wiseman: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Hillbilly bibliomancer, unindicted co-conspirator, instigator of bad habits, and occasional stone-mason, has met the devil a couple of times and come away from it with no more than a few bad habits and a prescription. I am fond of whiskey, hound dogs, and pork. I claim to have lived in Virginia for 225 years, and am older than I looks. I write poems because the universe is falling apart like a toilet paper submarine and someone must point at it and laugh. My recent work has appeared in a number of online and print journals.
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Michael Lee Johnson: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I'm not southern as such, having lived most of my life in the Midwest United States, and 10 years in Canada; however, I did live in Florida for three years under humid, stressful times and a divorce. I'm not sure if Florida even qualifies as the South with so many “Florida Snowbirds" coming and going. In Florida while walking near a cypress swamp along a water canal area I was about a half-mile down the trail when I saw at least five cottonmouth snakes on the other side of the bank or my side, with their white mouths wide open. I had foolishly purchased a 22 caliber pistol a few days earlier thinking I was going to shoot at some birds or anything else that moved. At that moment, a cottonmouth snake slithered across my tennis shoes, startling me, and I fired, almost shooting my own foot off. I ran faster than any rabbit back to my car, to my sheltered life. Does that qualify as southern?
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R. W. Haynes: Four Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Pushing grits and Confederates aside for the moment, I'll just say that my recollections of childhood in southern Georgia are illuminated in strange and intriguing ways each time I return to William Bartram's Travels, a book Mark Van Doren suggests Wordsworth took with him to Germany in 1798. OK, back to hog-calling, possum-wrestling, and turpentine-drinking.
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Steve West: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born in the Arkansas Ozarks, taught high school at Shirley, Arkansas (population about 600); went to graduate school in Hattiesburg, Mississippi; and have taught at a college in Pulaski, Tennessee, for 28 years. That’s pretty well covering the South, especially as Pulaski is infamous as the home of the Ku Klux Klan, a dubious honor that it has been diligently trying to overcome for years now.
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Jill White: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
For more than twenty-five years, I have lived in the Panhandle of Florida, where the humidity curls my hair and hot hushpuppies curl my toes. I live for the scent of confederate jasmine in April and the sight of dolphins at play in the bayou. If you call me on the phone you can even hear my Southern legitimacy first hand!
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Adreyo Sen: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born in India, which is where I now reside, in the gloriously dirty and laidback city of Kolkata. I’ve been educated on the eastern seaboard of the United States on two separate and unequally instructive occasions and as far as the south goes, I have no legitimacy. Save a great fondness for Margaret Mitchell’s ‘Gone with the Wind’ and a fine lady by the name of Ada McCoy.
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Wanda Reagan: Two Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Born and bred in the Deep South, heart of the old Confederacy
Red clay under my nails and a voice as sweet as soft iced tea
I explain myself better in verse:
Poetry
Essays
