Steven Lohse :: Temporary Accommodations ::
My Southern Legitimacy Statement: On my mother’s side, the Wilson family helped found the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina. Our holiday salad is made of iceberg lettuce, Miracle Whip, pineapple…
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."
My Southern Legitimacy Statement: On my mother’s side, the Wilson family helped found the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina. Our holiday salad is made of iceberg lettuce, Miracle Whip, pineapple…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I come from a place where you save leftover fat in a coffee can for biscuits or eggs or a gravy base. I come from a place…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Was born and grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. So my hands still deliciously smart from years of attending crawfish boils. Evil in the Object For a…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Bogotá, Colombia. I lived in South Carolina for almost a decade. I earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of South…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I live just outside of Birmingham, Alabama, across the creek from where I grew up. Despite spending eighteen years yelling “War Eagle” like my uncle and grandfather, I…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My South is dichotomy and contradiction. Trailers to million dollar homes. Homemade apple wine from Mason jars to bottles of bourbon from a call list. Dumplins and…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born in Texas and raised in Mississippi, I spent my childhood hunting lotus and chasing fireflies. Though I moved around in my twenties, the South is in…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I live in Southern Illinois, emphasis on Southern. North of us is “downstate,” and sometimes they like to say they are Southern Illinois but they ain’t. Southern…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am Southern by nature as well as birth. I like my tea sweet, spring finds me digging in the dirt to plant flowers and vegetable. I…
(From the 2013 December issue of the Dead Mule. Truly a classic.) We had to borrow a baby. That was the least of our troubles. There were half a dozen…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in the North Carolina foothills with my mama’s beauty shop outside my bedroom window and a car mechanic’s garage across the street. Both had…
Southern Literacy Statement: My friend Sam told if I’m tellin the truth I can wander around a little but if I’m puttin out a stretcher I better stick to the…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Those memories in the creek and at the picnic table are ones I want to live forever… Our Patches Back on one of the nights in what…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Baton Rouge, LA, in 1973, to a sixteen-year old mother. I shot guns and painted cheap apartments with a…
Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised in no where, southeast Tennessee, where more men went to fight for the union (including my great great great great whatever pappy) than…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up on my grandparents’ cattle farm in the Missouri Ozarks. Baptized by springs and copperheads and cow dung and cave mud and family turkey shoots,…
My Southern Legitimacy Statement: I once read Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon and thought it was alright. I wrote this story based on my experience with memory and the…