Leo Coffey :: Gutted ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised in a small community in Western North Carolina. I come from a long line of trade workers, musicians, and storytellers. The South…
The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
"Since 1996. No good Southern writing is complete without a dead mule. Everybody is south of somewhere, but there's nowhere quite like the Southern USA."
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised in a small community in Western North Carolina. I come from a long line of trade workers, musicians, and storytellers. The South…
My Southern Legitimacy Statement is this: I have lived in rural Virginia for 75 years and seen the public schools integrated, the white flight schools close and some Confederate Statues…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Richmond, Virginia and still live there. My momma was from Franklin County and grew up on bootleg money. My daddy’s from Johnson City,…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve been in the south. Got shot at running rural streets in Raleigh, NC; ran free on the levees in New Orleans. Love Faulkner. Parents & in-laws…
Legit: I actually like grits and okra and somewhat understand the everyday despair in Faulkner. A Hundred years From Now There had been 10 pandemics since the first. There also…
I was born and raised in rural North Carolina. I left the South in my mid-twenties, but the South never left me. Now on the other side of the country–out…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up Southern. Southern California, that is, though my cousins moved to North Carolina (still south!) when we were young teens. So, I’ve spent a significant…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve heard it both ways. I was born at the Boyce Clinic in Hohenwald Tennessee, or at my grandparents’ house in Napier in Lewis County, a defunct…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was raised during the late 1940s to the early 1960s in Central Florida, not usually considered a Deep South state, but still not without some of…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Yeah, I was born in St. Louis, Missouri, but I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, when I was four. My Midwestern cousins used to tease me about…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: The most legit thing I can say is I’m not originally from the south and don’t pretend to be. I’ve lived [barely] below the Mason-Dixon Line most…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’m a 69-year old writer who remembers when he was a 13-year old writer, as Octavia Butler was wont to say. Tossed between the Cherokee foothills of…
Southern Legitimacy Statement Drinking out of an outdoor hose and running to the house in time to catch the opening song to my mama’s stories sums up my childhood. My…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve lived in Walker County, Alabama my entire life. Our main exports are coal, tornadoes, and The Old Testament. I’ve seen ghosts in barbecue restaurants and preachers…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve lived in the former confederacy most of my life. I was born in Texas, grew up in Virginia, and now live on a two-acre spread in…
My Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in the Landmark community in Arkansas (not big enough to be called a “town,” mind you) down the road from Singley Dairy. When…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: As I previously done said last time I submitted, I grew up in Florida. And that certainly doesn’t count. Surrounded by rich Yankees for twenty-some-odd years, I…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: One time in Chicago I had to ask some teenager working in a booth at a parking garage whether I could get back in with my ticket…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in California, but I moved to Louisiana when I was four and grew up in one of the few dry parishes in the state.…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’m localized in the north, always was, born and shaped by it, but I drift south. It should come as no surprise that my wife is from…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised in Pumpkin Center aka Punkin’ Center, North Carolina. I’ve drank moonshine, gathered fresh eggs, fallen into cow manure, and been shocked by…