Category: Essays

Essays

Blake Kilgore: Inspection (memoir)

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in several parts of the South. For starters, I was born in Big D, and then my family moved to the panhandle of Texas, where there are more oil pumps and canyons than trees. Spent...
Essays

Jacquelyn L. M. Scott: Sleeping (memoir)

Southern Legitimacy Statement:  I was born and raised in a small town in Tennessee named Jefferson City. A daughter of a self-proclaimed “Tennessee Hillbilly,” I can shoot a gun and ride a horse, all while eating cornbread soaked in milk. Sleeping...
Essays

Warren Hines: Taranaki Surf Camp (memoir)

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in a decaying town in the Mississippi Delta as an attorney’s son with riverboat captain uncles who treasure few worldly pleasures more than whiskey and a good story. Taranaki Surf Camp “Would ya’ll like to...
The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Essays

Chris Epenshade: Chasing the Wrong Scent (essay)

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in the North Carolina Piedmont from the seventh grade through college. I was fully immersed in classic Southern pursuits including hunting just about everything, fishing, trapping muskrats, frog-gigging, arrowhead collecting, and high-speed, dirt-road driving....
The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Essays

Helen Wurthmann: Forbidden (essay)

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised in Missouri, whose Southern statehood led to the civil war, regardless of whether or not modern Missourians consider themselves Southerners. Missouri and I are the middle children of our respective families: often overlooked...
The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
Essays

Joan Baker: The Burial (memoir)

Southern Legitimacy Statement: This is a story about New York Yankee children listening to their Southern parents’ same old argument about their burial sites in the South. As you say, the South has all answers to all arguments… The Burial “I...