Heath Carpenter: Postmodern Reality Television: White County, Arkansas
SLS: I have spent the majority of my life in small-town Arkansas, with small stints in Europe and Florida. In that time I have experienced the glorious and the grit that encompass Southern living: Mint juleps and front porch sitting mixed with dirt roads and mosquito swatting. In the end, I am more Southern Gothic than Southern Gentry; give me Oxford American over Garden and Gun-- O'Connor, Faulkner, and Percy are my champions.
Donna Orchard: Highway 61 Road Trip
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My creative non fiction piece is about sister and I touring an historic blues corridor, Highway 61, through Mississippi looking for the music.
John Lane – Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Much of my genetic material has been circulating between the blue Southern sea and the Blue Ridge for over 200 years. (My sister, an obsessive genealogist, can certify this.) A few family names: Mary Caldonia Behealer, Christopher Columbus
Bradley (“Lum”), Walter Scott Lane, Aunt Lottie Belle. will send my mother’s pinto bean recipe upon request.
June Poets
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Does being a vegetarian disqualify me from being “southern”? I have accepted grits, cornbread, okra, and ridiculously sweet iced tea, but I can’t abide collards and barbeque. I don’t have loquacious uncles spinning yarns at huge family reunions or eccentric aunties that out-butter Paula Deen. All I have is a developed love of the land as I have lived over half my life now in North Carolina. I have hiked in the Great Smokies and splashed off the Outer Banks. I have gardened in the Piedmont’s red clay and in the flat sand of the coastal plain. Elizabeth City is the fourth NC city for me, trending eastward from High Point. A remnant of the Great Dismal Swamp is in my back yard along with the Pasquotank River. They inspired these poems.
April – May front page and links
April – May 2013: Twenty-Eight Poets featuring Joseph Bathanti NC Poet Laureate 2012-2014 Two Original Poems Written in Celebration of Poetry at the Mule April will meld into May here on the Mule… New Fiction. Fabulous Fiction. Remember: We publish new Fiction and Essays on...
“Never Trust The Weatherman” by Shane Hinton
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My family has been farming in the South for fifty years; longer if you count cotton. I don't count cotton.
“Damn Tourists” by John Baradell, Jr.
SLS: Most of my family was born and raised in the Deep South, and remains there (Mississippi, Alabama, and East Texas). Things get a bit confused by some in those areas when they find out that I grew up in the Upper South of Tidewater, Virginia. When they hear my soft accent or that I prefer to be asked first before my tea is sweetened, I am sometimes accused of being a Yankee (not that there's anything wrong with that). Not so with my family, though--I'm still Southern through and through--and proud of it. I'm so Southern that I can go into great detail about my usual scratch staple of grits and its historical importance to the South's survival. True, but I eat them so often (always stone ground--never instant) because they're soooo good.
Plus, I know the difference between a chicken house and a hen house, and have met both chicken catchers and chicken sexers.
Paranoia by Joseph Finder, movie to be released Aug 16th
About mid-way through this Mule’s life, I worked for Popmatters.com as the Books Editor. We had around 70 critics in my department and back in that day, digital previews were not available. I had to arrange for books to be...
Jessica Wimmer – If I Let My Babies Be Born
Southern Legitimacy Statement: It was probably around age seven in the middle of a winter night that I realized how southern I was while dangling my legs in Granny's outhouse.
Poetry
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