Elizabeth Bruce : The Bell : fiction : April 2019
Here’s my Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born on the Gulf Coast of Texas, I grew up in a little town—a buttermilk junction—called “La Marque,” “the mark,” by the French woman who worked at the railroad depot way back when. Raised by...
Dan Leach : Strays and For Light : Poetry : April 2019
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I once moved to Nebraska. This after 28 years of legitimate southern living in upstate South Carolina. For two cold hard Midwestern years, I shivered inside a corn farmer’s coat and dreamt of the day I’d come...
John M. Daniel : A Dog Wants Simple Things :
Here’s my Southern Legitimacy Statement: At my school you could use ACC Tournament Friday as an excused absence. You just needed a note from your mom: “Please excuse Johnny from class on Friday. He was watching the basketball.” I’m also...
Rich Glinnen : Walleyed : Flash Fiction : April 2019
Southern Legitimacy Statement : Only a snow-starched Canadian would consider me, a born-Brooklynite, from the south; though my current Queens neighbors claim I have a country gait. Walleyed I spot him eyeing me, though I can’t gauge any eyes. He’s...
David VanDevelder : Buster’s Last Load : Memoir : April 2019
Southern Legitimacy Statement: We were a prototypical southern nuclear family. My Papaw came up in the Great Smokey Mountains, near Farner Tennessee and Cherokee North Carolina. When he was nine, he lost track of the time one summer evening, squirrel...
Rhys Beleu: Walmartians and Assholebergers : Fiction : April 2019
Southern Legitimacy Statement: The South is a complex kaleidoscope of contradictions that historically coexisted through compartmentalizing when ideal clashed with real. Brutality and gentility, discrimination and democracy, hospitality and race/class hostility, and more odd couples, lived and live in our...
Photographs in the April 2019 issue
Photos this month feature the work of W Goodwin.* W Goodwin is a biologist, writer and digital artist. W gravitates toward nature, animals and people, sometimes in that order. W’s been a journalist long enough to write hundreds of articles...
Tom Sheehan : Decision Borne by April Water : Memoir : April 2019
My Southern Legitimacy statement says I have been printed in North Carolina, baby-sat there, and trained for the military with Tennessee’s 278th Regiment (activated for Korean encounter) at Fort Devens, MA. Decision Borne by April Water I was fishing off...
Anastasia Jill : Ducks at Night : Fiction : April 2019
SOUTHERN LEGITIMACY STATEMENT: My family moved from San Fransisco California to Orlando, Florida a year or so before I was born. They are originally from the Northeast – a mix of Canadian-Indian, French, and Mohawk/Pequot Indigenous – making me the...
Steven Levi : The Buxton Bootlegger and the Shad Man : Fiction : April 2019
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I come from Alaska and I married a woman from the Outer Banks. I fell in love the lifestyle, language and unique character — and charterers — in Buxton, Ocracoke, Avon and Waves. We will be retiring...
John Riley: The Loon and two more : Flash Fiction : April 2019
Southern Legitimacy Statement When I finally big enough to work the tobacco fields, tractors and sometimes mules pulled a long sled through the wide rows that were placed every sixth row. Sled rows were wider than the rows we moved...
Rodney Barfield : Drunk Underwood :: fiction :: March 2019
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...
March 2019 photo notes
The photographs used in this month’s Mule are from the Library of Congress Dust Bowl archives. Dorthea Lange photographs. Aren’t they mesmerizing? I think they’re incredible slices of Americana. Thanks for reading … good stuff this month! Valerie MacEwan
Poetry
Essays
