Ocracoke Island, NC

Yes, the April issue is lagging behind, no fooling. I’m on Ocracoke Island, NC. Where the wi-fi is slow and the living is good. If you’re scheduled to be published…

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…

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…

State of the Mule Address

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’m so southern, I created the southern legitimacy statement in 1996 when we first started publishing this literary journal. The requirement to send a “statement” seemed fun…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

Adrienne Pilon :: Roots

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I live pretty far south of the Mason-Dixon line, in central North Carolina. Though I’m a transplant, I make a mean batch of chow-chow and a sublime…