Barbara Conrad: “This Bed”
This Bed I’m counting the years I’ve slept in this Charleston four-poster rice bed,and yes, the men who’ve slept here with me. More than five, fewer than a dozen, only two still rooted in regret. Even when nights are long...
Paul Jones: “Hell”
About my Southernness: I am still Southern. The other day, I visited the Old St Paul’s Cemetery near Newton, NC. The place is chock full of Setzers, my grandmother’s people. The first one in the ground there came from Heidelberg...
David Kirby: “I’m Not the Person She Thinks You Are”
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I spent the first twenty-one years of my life in Baton Rouge. Like everyone else, I knew all about Billy Cannon, the LSU halfback who won the Heisman Trophy and was later arrested for counterfeiting and sent...
Benjamin Scott: Travis, the First
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Dallas to a father from Hopkins County, Texas and a mother from Ashley County, Arkansas. I come from a long and proud line of dairy farmers, oil drillers, coal miners, and truck drivers....
Ed Brickell: The Horned Toads Confront Their Young Human Captors
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Batesville, Arkansas and was duly moved to Palestine, Texas at the age of three so my dad could try his hand at coaching Texas high school football. He was pretty good at it...
David Earl Williams: When She Dressed Up Nice
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up at Greenup County in Kentucky right near Plum Fork Holler. My grandfather was a graduate of Leavenworth in Kansas where he received his federal degree in Moonshine. Jesse Stuart came to my high school,...
Lenny Lianne: When Rains Were Frog Chokers
My Southern Legitimacy Statement: I spent the first five-eighth of my life, the formative years, in Virginia and come from Southerners with a love of language and landscape, good storytellers. My ideal meal would be a tall glass of iced...
Christopher Lowe: Hashbrowns
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I spent my first 22 years in Mississippi and my next 17 in south Louisiana. I was driven northward by hurricanes, but my southern bonafides abide. I say y’all freely, holler at the TV during Ole Miss...
Claire Massey: Driver Side Window
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My grandparents’ Mississippi home was my port in a storm. There was literal nourishment (oh, that gumbo and cornbread!) as well as literary food for a budding creative. No matter the subject, their bookshelves were open. There...
Cecile Dixon: Barlow
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was jerked up by my hair, (according to several preachers) in the spot where the Bluegrass kisses the Appalachian Mountains. I traveled the Hillbilly Highway North and sojourned in Ohio for thirty five years and for...
Jonathan Odell: The Language of Home
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born and raised a white guy in Jim Crow Mississippi. In other words, I missed a hell of lot of what went on around me from my privileged white bubble. Midlife, I moved to Minnesota and was...
David Stafford: Shoes
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Just doodling ’round during the pandemic and thought I’d drop you a few lines. I’m still a tater-eating, ex-cotton picker from the Missouri bootheel, living in the great state of South Carolina, the city of Charleston. Shoes...
Jessica Weyer Bentley: Revival
Southern Legitimacy Statement: As with all volunteer vegetation, I was transferred South as a seedling in the wind as my mother decided to give a southern man a chance the second time around. Though I was a New Yorker’s daughter,...
Poetry
Essays
