Category: Fiction

Southern Legitimacy Statement: We moved to Florida when I was sixteen and when we crossed the border into the state, there were bill boards: This is Wallace Country. That was my introduction into a different and intriguing world. I took to the South, learned to love grits, rutabagas, and anything deep fried. My Midwestern born and bred parents never adapted to Southern ways, but I quickly learned to call sweet potatoes, yams, and baked them into pies like any true Southerner.

Southern Legitimacy Statement I was born and raised in the South. Sweet tea runs through my veins. There are enough lights on my house during the Christmas season to signal planes. I make fruit cake and love the sweet sugary pillows that are divinity. My kids run year round barefoot and the dog doesn't wear a collar. I am southern and proud of it.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised by a true southern woman from Mars Bluff, South Carolina in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where I spent most of my youth making forts and mud slides in the creek behind my house and playing football. Through her stories about her life growing up on a farm and my time spent at my ancestral home, a two story white farm house with columns and a large porch surrounded by woods and acres of fields, I learned to be a southerner.

Southern Legitimacy Statement I was born in the “sticks” of Central Virginia. Silos across the street, bare feet in the freshly tilled garden patch, and mud fights in the rain. I am a very big fan of sweet tea, biscuits with real salted butter, and good old fashion bon fires. The south is very dear to my heart.

"After downing the third Coors, Tommy had to get home to Regina. Tuesday was sex night and he didn’t dare run late. This Tuesday, Regina had promised doggy style and wearing the edible undies. Cherry flavored. Sure, Regina had her problems but she had always remained mostly slender, thank you Jesus, Tommy thought. And she kept the house clutter free of female knick knacks such as glass unicorns and antique dolls. " Read on, yall... Amy Wilson's short story will

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Alas, I dwell in the midwest, but my namesake's buried in Alabama. Crimson Tide. I think about the South, and I want the South to think about me.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Lee Wright was born, raised, and educated in a tiny textile mill town just across the Georgia line from Chattanooga. In spite of that, he managed to learn to translate things like “I knowed that he’d get throwed outta school for drankin’ ‘n’ when he growed up, he wuddn’t gonna ‘mount to nuttin’.” into actual English sentences.

SLS: I grew up cutting out biscuits on my grandmother’s formica countertop while wearing an apron that belonged to her mother. I am on a first name basis with my relatives that have been dead for over a century and can tell you about every feud that has happened in my home county for the last fifty years.

Southern Legitimacy Statement I grew up barefoot and poor in southern Georgia. During the summer months, I worked in the tobacco fields. Mama and Daddy were my parents. I speak and write in the language of the South.

My Southern Legitimacy Statement is both brief and simple; I was born and raised in Georgia, and I always referred to my 5 ft tall paternal grandmother as Big Mama,

Southern Legitimacy Statement In August there was always the river. On dog days, school beckoning, the joy of uninterrupted time between the morning and evening chores long absorbed by a sun that had flattened your expectations of what summer would bring, I seemed to always find myself at the river. Some people are drawn to fire, others to water, moving water that is, even if the movement is nearly imperceptible, and in my South the summer heat warned me away from fire. It was the river inching through the thick woods that lured me to come, preferably alone, to come and clear away a spot to sit among the dead leaves and rocks and branches, to come and immerse myself in the stream of thoughts and dreams and ambitions that, yet unbruised by the world, raced inside the visitor sitting above the patient river.

southern legitimacy statement: I am legitimately Southern, though I have moved across the road from the 1820 farm house where I grew up in rural Virginia. That house had seventeen rooms, seven of which were falling away, so we let them. A big snapping turtle lived under the sagging porch. Down the road from us was a house Thomas Jefferson had designed for his poor cousins who moved out of our house when that miniature Monticello was ready.

Yea! A mule story! Southern Legitimacy Statement I was bred, born and raised in Demopolis, Alabama. I’ve always lived in the South, and I’m about as stereotypical as anyone can be. My sister has two of the columns that were in the Georgia Confederate Hospital in her house. Our great, great granddaddy Snowden recuperated in that hospital. I grew up with a black maid who I thought was mama, and the white lady in the house I wondered why she spent the night with us every night. As I’ve aged I discovered that eating cheese grits every morning for breakfast will make you fat—twenty-five pounds fatter to be exact. I once owned a Jersey milk cow and made my own butter, sour cream, buttermilk, cream cheese and drank a gallon of fresh milk with one third of it sweet cream floating on the surface. Anastasia raised me three calves in all and we milked her daily until she dried up for her next calf. The years I owned the cow, I was er, plump to say the least. I really do have a daughter who Pony Clubbed a mule. And I eat turnip greens from Cracker Barrel every day of my life.

SLS-I come from Ozark hillbillies in Arkansas and Missouri. They could sing a tune, shoot a squirrel, pick cotton, and tell a good one. I grew up in the north, but live in North Carolina. I favor collards over spinach and know how to cook fat back. I reckon that makes me southern enough.