
David Stafford: Shoes
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 great state of South Carolina, the city of Charleston. Shoes...

Daun Daemon: Fiction
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 soda pop machines that dispensed Cheerwine and Sundrop, and I...

Kenneth Sutton: Fiction: June 2022
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 straight and narrow and repeat it exact. So I’m stickin...

Bradley Sides: Fiction: May 2022
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 had to be our second week—after the crying softened and...

Neil Bearden: Fiction: May 2022
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 bunch of drunks and did a lot of bad shit...

Lukas Tallent: Fiction: May 2022
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 any other southern state during the Civil War, went to...

Ryan Stone: Fiction: April 2022
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, I loved every minute of it. My family raised Holsteins,...

Dominic Burke: Fiction: April 2022
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 pain of it slipping away (which is why the story...

James Vachowski: Flash Fiction: April 2022
Southern Legitimacy Statement: James Vachowski once spent 21 days confined to a quarantine facility in southern China. A former resident of both South Carolina and Beijing, he speaks Mandarin with a drawl. Missed Connections: Master Builder Seeks Missing Piece (M4W,...

Tracy Snyder: Fiction: March 2022
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am a Texas girl, born and raised. My grandparents were old enough to be my great-grandparents, but they reared me. Engulfed in Southern culture and Southern COUNTRY culture, I spent my formative years on the farm....

Constance Gorman: Fiction: March 2022
My Southern Legitimacy Statement : Life was meant to be lived: for better or for worse. Me and Bobby Me, Momma and Bobby were ALMOST sent to the Promised Land in a place I called Our Hide-out. It actually was...

Susan Robbins: Fiction: March 2022
My Southern Legitimacy Statement: I soaked the cured ham for two days and then boiled it for two hours but it was still too salty so I started over, fearing I had ruined it. No, it worked, and now I...

Garin Cycholl: Fiction: March 2022
Southern Legitimacy Statement: In reference to my hometown in southeastern Illinois, my cousin used to say, “The South begins about five miles south of here.” I still cannot agree. You could see the South from a ladder and it wasn’t...