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 rings, and a maraschino cherry. My father was born in...
Eddie Black :: Healing Comes to Morewell Elsewhere ::
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 where men go from one mother to another right after...
Devin Jacobsen :: Evil in the Object ::
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 while I thought love meant the same thing as doing...
Juan Cruz :: Open All Night ::
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 Carolina (the original USC) before moving to Clinton, where I...
Andrew Brasfield :: Green Top ::
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 ended up at the University of Alabama. While attending the...
James Emery :: Yellow Sodbuster::
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 banana pudding to grilled triggerfish and cherry clafoutis. A violent...
Lisa Briley :: Healer ::
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 my blood and where I belong. Healer They say the...
Epiphany Ferrell :: The Amazing Chicken Man
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 Illinois – especially the “Southern Seven,” meaning the southernmost seven...
Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy :: Home Again
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 eat my okra fried and on Sundays you’ll find me...
“Our Nativity – 1970” by Dawn Wilson
(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 teen mothers in the parish who were more than glad...
Benjamin Scott: Travis, the First
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 of dairy farmers, oil drillers, coal miners, and truck drivers....
Christopher Lowe: Hashbrowns
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 say y’all freely, holler at the TV during Ole Miss...
Cecile Dixon: Barlow
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 and sojourned in Ohio for thirty five years and for...
Poetry
Essays
