Author: MacEwan

The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Poetry

Carol Lynn Grellas: Two Poems

Southern Legitimacy Statement: My favorite movie is Gone with the Wind. I’ve saved the drapes from every home I’ve ever owned hoping I might salvage a gown or two that even Scarlett would be proud to wear.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Poetry

Michael Dwayne Smith: Blues for a Day

Southern Legitimacy Statement: First off, cookin' ... I mean Grandmama's fried chicken, roadside shack boudin sausage made with crawfish, and speaking of crawfish, I mean crawfish étouffée and oyster po-boys and blackened catfish for lunch, with ice cold Turbodog poured all over it-- and don't forget the fried dill pickles, please. Second, blood ... I wasn't born in the South (yes, I admit, southern California), but my family runs through Missouri and Texas, by way of Tennessee. And third, brotherhood ... one of my best friends is from Mississippi, and it's because of him I get to spend time eating, drinking, and photographing in Jackson and Vicksburg and New Orleans. It's just something that walks with you all your days, whether you like it or not, whether you want to feel blues or bluegrass or Irish or cajun in your blood, or no. I'm hungry.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Poetry

Joanna S. Lee: incongruent

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Of closer bloodline to Robert E. than to Bruce, I grew up learning battle names: Manassas, not Bull Run; Sharpsburg, not Antietam. And though I was raised nigh the border (Winchester—three battles of its own), I call Richmond, and the banks of the James River, home.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Poetry

Paul Owen: Railroad Tracks

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am a college professor in the Asheville, NC area and have lived here for the last eleven years. I assume that qualifies me as living in the South.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Poetry

Tracei R. Willis: When You Tell My Story

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I consider myself to be a Southerner with Northern tendencies, an illegitimate daughter of the South if you will. I was born in Ohio to parents who were born and bred in Alabama. They felt their southern roots wilting when I was five years old, so they uprooted their flower child from sidewalks, snow, and front stoops, and transplanted me in red clay of Alabama, the Magnolia trees of Mississippi, and right up on my Big Mama's front porch. Whenever my Northern idiosyncrasies began to surface, my parents would send to one of my grandmothers for some Southern reconditioning. It was in the kitchens of Nellie Willis and Annie Jones that I learned some vital Southern lessons: 1. In the South there are canisters on kitchen counters that contain sugar, flour, corn meal and grits-- store brand sugar is acceptable, but anything other than Martha White Self-Rising flour, Sunflower corn meal, and Jim Dandy grits, and you'll have a sure-fire riot on your hands. 2. There are as many ways to cook grits as there are women who cook grits, just smile and rave about not ever having had a finer bowl of grits and you'll be okay. 3. Every kitchen counter has two blue cans of Crisco, one that actually has Crisco in it, and the other to hold bacon drippings. (Don't ask questions, just eat.) 4. Sweet tea comes two ways down here, cold and sweet. You can make it on the stove top, you can make on the back porch, you can add lemon, mint, peaches or berries-- just don't make it from a jar of instant powder mix, and don't make it with sugar substitute-- if you ask for unsweetened tea down here, you're libel to end up with a cold glass of ice water. 5. The best seasoning for greens, peas, beans, squash, and corn? Meat. Preferably smoked meat. Preferably the neck, hock, or tail of a turkey, hog, or ox. Running short on meat? (That's what that can of bacon drippings is for.) I am a Southerner, by way of Ohio, transplanted in Mississippi, with kudzu-like attachments to Alabama.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Poetry

Cody Badaracca: Sludge

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Although hailing from North Routt County, Colorado, Cody Badaracca spent 5 1/2 years of his recent young adult life living in Nashville, Tennessee, where he developed an affectionate spot for Tennessee, grits, Coon Hounds, and irregular word contractions. If he should die in the Volunteer State, Cody requests that his body be allowed to be overgrown by kudzu somewhere in the Cherokee National Forest.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Fiction

Lee Wright — Tuesday Evening In A Small Southern Town

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Lee Wright was born, raised, and educated in a tiny textile mill town just across the Georgia line from Chattanooga. In spite of that, he managed to learn to translate things like “I knowed that he’d get throwed outta school for drankin’ ‘n’ when he growed up, he wuddn’t gonna ‘mount to nuttin’.” into actual English sentences.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Fiction

The Acceptance Speech by Hope Denney

SLS: I grew up cutting out biscuits on my grandmother’s formica countertop while wearing an apron that belonged to her mother. I am on a first name basis with my relatives that have been dead for over a century and can tell you about every feud that has happened in my home county for the last fifty years.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Fiction

The Intruder by Brenda Rose

Southern Legitimacy Statement I grew up barefoot and poor in southern Georgia. During the summer months, I worked in the tobacco fields. Mama and Daddy were my parents. I speak and write in the language of the South.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Fiction

Herself Alone by John Riley

Southern Legitimacy Statement In August there was always the river. On dog days, school beckoning, the joy of uninterrupted time between the morning and evening chores long absorbed by a sun that had flattened your expectations of what summer would bring, I seemed to always find myself at the river. Some people are drawn to fire, others to water, moving water that is, even if the movement is nearly imperceptible, and in my South the summer heat warned me away from fire. It was the river inching through the thick woods that lured me to come, preferably alone, to come and clear away a spot to sit among the dead leaves and rocks and branches, to come and immerse myself in the stream of thoughts and dreams and ambitions that, yet unbruised by the world, raced inside the visitor sitting above the patient river.
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The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Fiction

The Pontiac and the Dodge by susan robbins

southern legitimacy statement: I am legitimately Southern, though I have moved across the road from the 1820 farm house where I grew up in rural Virginia. That house had seventeen rooms, seven of which were falling away, so we let them. A big snapping turtle lived under the sagging porch. Down the road from us was a house Thomas Jefferson had designed for his poor cousins who moved out of our house when that miniature Monticello was ready.
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