Pete Peterson: Fiction: January 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Sunday mornings at our house it’s grits, red eye gravy, country ham, eggs over easy and buttermilk biscuits. (Please don’t tell my doctor.) I’ve walked 3 miles to a one room schoolhouse taught by an 18-year old...
Brian O’Hare: Memoir : January 2021
My Southern Legitimacy Statement: Like some odd hybrid, I was born in Pensacola, Florida to a New York Irish Marine pilot and his Virginia bride—but raised in Pittsburgh. Yet after six years in the Marine Corps (itself an odd hybrid—as...
Kim Welliver : Poetry : January 2021
My Southern Legitimacy Statement : My parents began our family in Virginia, where I learned can’t never could, my mother gave me my druthers, and plans relied on if the creek don’t rise. Later we moved to Southbend Indiana, and...
Storey Clayton: Creative Non-Fiction: January 2021
Here’s my Southern Legitimacy Statement: I lived and worked in New Orleans for five years, from 2014-2019, including stints as a semi-pro poker player, a nonprofit fundraiser, Tulane University’s debate coach, and an overnight Uber driver (some of these overlapped)....
Michele Davis: Essay : January 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I have almost always lived in the South (Southern Maryland, Southern India, Southern Florida, and Southern California). Give me an afternoon under live oak trees dripping with swaying Spanish moss, sweet tea, and a good book, and...
Steven Croft: Poetry : January 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Valdosta, Georgia. My grandfather was more tied to the mythos of the South than my parents were. My grandfather said at the kitchen table one time, “Your grandmother is a Yankee [from Ohio],”...
Amanda Pugh: Memoir : January 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am as Southern as grits, biscuits, and gravy, having the double blessing of being brought into this world in the great state of Georgia (Atlanta to be precise) and having my raising in the Volunteer State...
John Mason: Flash Fiction: January 2021
I have a Master of Arts in Teaching from Lee University which is in Cleveland, TN, to establish my Southern Legitimacy… to further cement my southern roots, I was born in Columbia, SC, raised, largely, in Oklahoma and Texas, and...
Martha Payne: Fiction: January 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: A graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, I am a native Atlantan born to a father also raised in Atlanta and a mother from small-town northern Florida. I spent many childhood summer days either swimming in a black water...
Heath Dollar : Fiction : January 2021
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My grandfather gave me my first chew of tobacco around the age of five, and I started hunting with a shotgun when I was eight. As for my interest in the Southern aesthetic, well, that probably began...
Joseph Leverette: Memoir : January 2021
I know what it feels like to walk barefooted behind my daddy while he plows that red Georgia clay on a hot summer day. That fresh turned dirt was cool on my feet, and a feeling like no other for...
2020. Moving On.
Southern Legitimacy Statement: We’re so southern, we visit family and friends, outside, ten feet apart, on our big old front porch. We wash our hands, we wear masks, and we are always socially distant. It’s hard not to hug, it...
A Couple or Three Books by Mule Alumni
Why do we read? Neil Gaiman says we read fiction because it can show you a different world. One essential “function of fiction in human life” he says, lies in “its ability to introduce us to different versions of the...
James Ryer: Fiction: Dec 2020
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and have lived in the South when it was segregated, have seen the changes forged through the efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, have witnessed the flare...
Anna Oberg: Creative Non-Fiction: Dec 2020
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and lived twenty years in Knoxville, Tennessee where I spent many evenings Agee-style with the saw of cicadas and the scent of hose water on hot grass. As an adolescent, there was nothing I...
Poetry
Essays
