Clayton Walker :: euthanasia ::

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Refusing the confederate conscript, the men of Winston County, Alabama were given a choice to join the confederate army or be killed. Several men, including my great…

Greg Stidham :: Mississippi in Spring

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Am I legitimate? Well, my parents led me to believe so. But legitimately “southern”? I was born in Indiana, lived in Ohio until age five, when we…

Les Brown :: Chicken House ::

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…

Edward Burke :: Marlovian Moment ::

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…

Andrew Johnson :: Big Bottom Fish ::

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,…

Danny Barbare :: Pisgah Mountain

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…

Ettore Cassetta :: Ghost Country

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…

May Jordan: “Walking Through”

Walking Through A Sunday lit with sunlightmade the mountainof snow we accumulated, shine as if a glacier at dawn.I was up-stairs getting dressedfor church when suddenly,my husband called for meto…

Barbara Conrad: “This Bed”

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, only…

Paul Jones: “Hell”

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.…

Lenny Lianne: When Rains Were Frog Chokers

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.…

Claire Massey: Driver Side Window

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…

Jessica Weyer Bentley: Revival

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…