The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
"No good Southern writing is complete without a dead mule."
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Given up for adoption in a one-light Tennessee town, I grew up in Memphis along the Mississippi River dancing ballet at the historic Orpheum Theatre and later…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: A few years in Biloxi, Mississippi Near the coast of waters blue, I enjoyed the Southern hospitality From the local folks I knew. Hearts as big as…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve lived in Louisiana for a handful of years, and I’m now working on a PhD in English at LSU. In my time here, I’ve tried many…
SOUTHERN LEGITIMACY: I lived all my life in Georgia until I graduated from the University of Georgia. My mother was born in Paducah, Kentucky, and her mother in Tennessee. My…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am a North Carolina free-range mountain farm boy. I crawled all over our Blue Ridge, swam with water snakes in the icy cold Stillhouse Branch, (that…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Edward Burke (dba strannikov) now lives for the second time in his life south of the Red River demarcating Texas from Oklahoma. He grew up in South…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I visited the Asbury revival in Wilmore Kentucky for five days. The people there were hospitable and friendly, epitomizing Southern Charm. In the town and the city,…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Basically, I’m 60, and I have never left the South. I went North one time to get vitamins. And Thanksgiving once. Other than that, I stayed stuck…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My maternal grandfather was born in the south of the Marche region, southern Italy, in 1930. In 1948 he joined the Carabinieri Corps in hopes to find…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born on the same day that George Armstrong Custer died, though “Autie”, as he called his adopted self, and I never exchanged letters. But that…
Walking Through A Sunday lit with sunlight made the mountain of snow we accumulated, shine as if a glacier at dawn. I was up-stairs getting dressed for church when suddenly,…
This Bed I’m counting the years I’ve slept in this Charleston four-poster rice bed, and yes, the men who’ve slept here with me. More than five, fewer than a dozen,…
About my Southernness: I am still Southern. The other day, I visited the Old St Paul’s Cemetery near Newton, NC. The place is chock full of Setzers, my grandmother’s people.…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I spent the first twenty-one years of my life in Baton Rouge. Like everyone else, I knew all about Billy Cannon, the LSU halfback who won the…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Batesville, Arkansas and was duly moved to Palestine, Texas at the age of three so my dad could try his hand at coaching…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up at Greenup County in Kentucky right near Plum Fork Holler. My grandfather was a graduate of Leavenworth in Kansas where he received his federal…
My Southern Legitimacy Statement: I spent the first five-eighth of my life, the formative years, in Virginia and come from Southerners with a love of language and landscape, good storytellers.…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My grandparents’ Mississippi home was my port in a storm. There was literal nourishment (oh, that gumbo and cornbread!) as well as literary food for a budding…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: As with all volunteer vegetation, I was transferred South as a seedling in the wind as my mother decided to give a southern man a chance the…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Los Angeles, CA and Belews Creek, NC can be found around the 35th parallel. Both are referred to as “southern” even though they exist at opposite ends…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born from two western NC mountain folk and have kissed the clouds crossing Grandfather Mountain Bridge. As a Clemson graduate, like my father before me,…
