Gary Carter: Poetry: Sept 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Having been blessed and honored to have appeared previously in the Mule, I’d proudly hang my southern legitimacy on that fact alone. However, if you need more, let me just point out that when you grow up...
David Swan: Fiction: Sept 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: People say football is religion in the South. To me, it’s the other way around. You’re born into your team (church), listen to the coach or the announcers (preachers), sing the fight songs (hymns), and chow down...
Dennis Ferrara: Poetry: Sept 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I live in Virginia, have lived here for 35 years. I know it’s in the South, but I didn’t recognize that at first. I thought the South was where I grew up—in New Orleans, in Louisiana, in...
David F. VanDevelder: Fiction: Sept. 2021
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...
PA Knight: Fiction: Sept 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Richmond, Virginia and still live there. My momma was from Franklin County and grew up on bootleg money. My daddy’s from Johnson City, Tennessee. When it’s warm I try to jump in the...
Jane Blanchard: Poetry: Sept. 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Native to Virginia and long-resident in Georgia, I’m as Southern as Southern can be. (Let’s not talk about the seven-year stretch in New Jersey.) A prominent Mid-Western poet once told me during a workshop, “I could listen...
Lisa Creech Bledsoe: Poetry: Sept. 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My father’s family were Appalachian farmers from Letcher County, KY and my mother’s were German Jews who ran a kosher deli on Beale Street in Memphis. I live in a remote fold of the NC mountains now....
Ryan Vale McGonigle: Memoir: Sept. 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born and raised in North Carolina to parents graciously welcomed by the South, I have a strange kind of Southern legitimacy. My roots and birth certificate proclaim me as native, but my family’s heritage says otherwise. This...
Mike Horan: Poetry: Sept. 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Mike Horan was raised in the South but now makes his home in the desert outside Palm Springs, California. Landscape I get up while it’s still darkHave toOver 100 before eight a.m.The summer usualBut I need to...
Ashley Kemker: Essay: Sept. 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in the North, to two Southern parents, finally returning to the South, to the peninsula inhabited for several centuries by my mother’s people in my tenth year. My hands have quick caught green anoles;...
Tyler Robert Sheldon: Flash Fiction: Sept. 2021
SOUTHERN LEGITIMACY STATEMENT I’ve lived in Louisiana for five years: I earned my MFA at McNeese State University, am working on a PhD in Rhetoric at LSU, and I love being part of the poetry scene in Lafayette too. I’m...
Christopher Louvet: Poetry : August 2021
My Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born in Virginia though the important years happened in North Carolina, now I live in Hanoi, which though considered the north here is still farther south than anywhere else I’ve ever lived. Summer Portrait Nasturtiums and...