I keep thinking about how this unique, lovely story brings the reader a triple bonus — the sense of home, of history and of compassion. Fullerton delivers all three in abundance. One can know the place as well as the people. The characters sizzle with personality. The narrator’s sense of self…
We’ve got fiction, essays, poetry, creative non-fiction. Wow, the Mule’s plate is certainly full this month. Twenty-four years ago, when I first started publishing the Mule, formatting was one page at a time, about an hour a page. Now the Mule has a “back-end” of managed WordPress, via GoDaddy whose…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Honeysuckles, Chopped Pork BBQ and Muscadine Wine I remember walking from my grand mama’s house with my brother. We’d walkthrough the lane that was in truth a two way, one way street. I mean the signs said one way but cars went both ways and nobody seemed…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Galveston, TX, and raised in Houston after my family evacuated following Hurricane Carla. I am educated at the University of Texas, Texas State University, and Texas Tech. That’s a whole bunch of southern bona fides. But here’s more. I grew and still enjoy…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born in San Diego, raised in Western PA, during my fourteenth year of existence, my parents decided to relocate the family to South Carolina. How I hated the humidity, the drawling language, and politeness. Almost two decades have passed. Could’ve moved back up north on multiple occasions,…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My family never hid our crazy folks; they generally sat on the front porch and enjoyed the breeze just like the family who weren’t crazy. Come to think of it, we all had some crazy mixed in amongst our sanity. My mother cooked red-eye gravy every time…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: We were a prototypical southern nuclear family. My Papaw came up in the Great Smokey Mountains, near Farner Tennessee and Cherokee North Carolina. When he was nine, he lost track of the time one summer evening, squirrel hunting up on the mountain, and he avoided a sound…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Howard is a retired materials management and manufacturing professional with over forty years in the military and manufacturing arenas. He spent time at sixty plus posts while in the military and has traveled to all fifty states (working in twenty-two of them). Howard earned a Masters from…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in a small farming town in Northeast Arkansas a mere seven miles south of the Missouri border. As a child, I would marvel at how quickly the accents changed once crossing the state line. I currently reside in Arkansas after a brief stint living…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Lives in my town! Can’t get much more southern than that. Jonathan is a consummate writer and a wonderful gardener. He’s been southern all his life. A COVID-19 Halloween Out there: No pale horse Or long, black robes No latex masks Of grisly horror No long…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I may have grown up a Yankee, but I moved to Austin, Texas at 6 years old and have almost forgotten that I used to find it weird to say “y’all.” In Which Nothing Happens I was in the 5th grade when he called me a whore….
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My hometown straddles the bleeding northern edge of the South. The Mason-Dixon line runs directly through it; on the map, that line is a rut carved jagged in the earth. Step to one side, you’re in the North. Step to the other, you’re in the South. Directly…
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My yard dogs are polite and only bark when strangers walking by neglect them and forget to speak to them. The voices of people I’ve never met will waft up to the second story windows of my home, “Hello there, everything okay today? How ya’ doing? Sweet pups. Nice pups … “
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Virginia Lee does not consider herself a poet, but she can write a decent set of song lyrics when the wind is just right and the moon’s phase is amenable. Lee mostly writes colloquial fiction set in the American South as suits her otherwise seemingly useless degree…
Well, we’re all in this together, aren’t we folks? Spend a little time away from the humdrum here on the Mule and read your way into some alternate reality. If you’re reading the Mule for the first or the fiftieth time, we welcome you to our little corner of the…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I lived my entire childhood under the shadow of the Brushy Mountains in Western North Carolina. I lived in a farmhouse built in 1897 or so that was bought by my great great grandmother Pearl who was a madame in a brothel. My family was always rich…
I have no clue what information is pertinent, so without further ado: K. J. Kovacs – Southern Legitimacy Statement : I had a bona fide sign from the King. Make that signs, plural. I’m tempted not to tell you about the signs, because maybe you don’t deserve to know. I…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Mark Mulholland is not from the South and has never been there. In fact Mark isn’t from the USA at all, or indeed Canada or the UK or even Australia or anywhere snazzy like that. Mark, through no fault of his own, was born and raised in…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Gerry who’s worked as a healthcare consultant in Nashville, partied with relatives living in Greensboro and stayed awhile in Sunflower County, Mississippi. “FAMILIAS” Thirty-Seven Year Kvetch “I think it’s just elegant to have an imagination. I just have no imagination at all. I have lots of other…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve been cogitating Southern Lit for over sixty years, from the time I was a student of Donald Davidson, one of them Fugitive guys at Vanderbilt. (I was also on a fancy literary panel with John Crowe Ransom. Wrote a poem for Allen Tate which he said,…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Married to a woman from Ocilla, GA, who dated a lobbyist for the Tennessee Medical Association, who collected fascinating (and actual) causes of death, hence the title. Went to Bed Fine, Woke Up Dead SHE’D GONE TO bed in the Johnson City Stopover – that much was…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in the Cumberland Mountains in the Heart of Appalachia on Virginia’s Crooked Road near the border of Tennessee, Kentucky and North Carolina. My dad was a tobacco farmer, my brothers were loggers, and my uncle died of Black Lung Disease from his work in…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve lived at the margins for some time, within the southern sections of northern territories that is. I went to school in Southern Connecticut and now I live in the Southern Tier of upstate New York. As if I was planted, just above my own navel, when…
My Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and grew up in the pines and blackwater creeks of central Louisiana. In the Army I had the privilege to spend some time in Tennessee and Kentucky, but the only bluegrass band I ever got to see was in a desert in Egypt…