Southern Legitimacy Statement: I said comic books when I moved to Tensas Parish, Louisiana as a small kid. I said funny books when I left. I moved there during WWII from Manhattan. I remember and love St. Joe, LA. I don’t remember Manhattan. I have a sculpture show coming up…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: If you hold your fingers over the eyes of your imagination and squint real hard, you can easily mistake a dead moose for a dead mule and Newfoundland for the South. I agree with Kurt Vonnegut that our purpose in life is to fart around. Night Time…
Here’s my Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born on the Gulf Coast of Texas, I grew up in a little town—a buttermilk junction—called “La Marque,” “the mark,” by the French woman who worked at the railroad depot way back when. Raised by a Texas daddy from the east Texas town of Center…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I once moved to Nebraska. This after 28 years of legitimate southern living in upstate South Carolina. For two cold hard Midwestern years, I shivered inside a corn farmer’s coat and dreamt of the day I’d come back South. Praise God: I don’t need to dream anymore….
Here’s my Southern Legitimacy Statement: At my school you could use ACC Tournament Friday as an excused absence. You just needed a note from your mom: “Please excuse Johnny from class on Friday. He was watching the basketball.” I’m also Southern enough to worry that people I know will read…
Southern Legitimacy Statement : Only a snow-starched Canadian would consider me, a born-Brooklynite, from the south; though my current Queens neighbors claim I have a country gait. Walleyed I spot him eyeing me, though I can’t gauge any eyes. He’s faint against the ceiling, easily mistaken for gossamer. The bathroom…
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: The South is a complex kaleidoscope of contradictions that historically coexisted through compartmentalizing when ideal clashed with real. Brutality and gentility, discrimination and democracy, hospitality and race/class hostility, and more odd couples, lived and live in our kaleidoscope, which at each twist shifts the aspect created by…
Photos this month feature the work of W Goodwin.* W Goodwin is a biologist, writer and digital artist. W gravitates toward nature, animals and people, sometimes in that order. W’s been a journalist long enough to write hundreds of articles for newspapers, magazines, blogs and websites. W’s photography has won…
My Southern Legitimacy statement says I have been printed in North Carolina, baby-sat there, and trained for the military with Tennessee’s 278th Regiment (activated for Korean encounter) at Fort Devens, MA. Decision Borne by April Water I was fishing off the bridge over the Ipswich River, a few hundred yards…
SOUTHERN LEGITIMACY STATEMENT: My family moved from San Fransisco California to Orlando, Florida a year or so before I was born. They are originally from the Northeast – a mix of Canadian-Indian, French, and Mohawk/Pequot Indigenous – making me the only one of my family born in the South. I…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I come from Alaska and I married a woman from the Outer Banks. I fell in love the lifestyle, language and unique character — and charterers — in Buxton, Ocracoke, Avon and Waves. We will be retiring there and I look forward to fishing for Red Drum…
Southern Legitimacy Statement When I finally big enough to work the tobacco fields, tractors and sometimes mules pulled a long sled through the wide rows that were placed every sixth row. Sled rows were wider than the rows we moved down, bent at the waist, gathering the bottom three leaves…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was raised in a mill village in North Carolina. My parents worked at the Burlington Cotton Mill. Every spring a leathery old black man drove up to our mill house on a buckboard, unhitched a mule and used him to plow a garden space about half…
The photographs used in this month’s Mule are from the Library of Congress Dust Bowl archives. Dorthea Lange photographs. Aren’t they mesmerizing? I think they’re incredible slices of Americana. Thanks for reading … good stuff this month! Valerie MacEwan
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Since my last Dead Mule submission, I’ve only grown more southern, moving south by 7 degrees of latitude to the Sunshine State, which, incidentally, is where I was born. A North Carolina resident for almost 20 years, I maintain a personal map of all the Bojangles in…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Heck, eighteen years in Charleston, eighteen more in Charlotte. If I’m not legit by now when will I be? Gators in the pond, hurricanes whirling up and down the coast–I’ve run from them and most times got away. Sweat dripping down my face, shirt stuck to my…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Ever since my mother died in North Carolina, I’ve felt an affinity for that state. Maybe one day I’ll wind up living there. Or dying there. Love Me Tender Coming Right Up “I’m the pretty sister with the curly hair,” I say, twirling my dark, curly hair….
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am a Buxton landowner living in the frozen north. My wife grew up on the Outer Banks and we expect to retire there. Many of my mystery short stories take place on the Outer Banks and my latest novel, THE MATTER OF THE DEMATERIALIZING ARMORED CAR,…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Atlanta, Georgia(1956), and reared in Powder Springs and Marietta. I’ve lived in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi (and Oklahoma and West Virginia). I’ve taught at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, Tennessee Tech, North Carolina State University, LSU-Baton Rouge, Mississippi State…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born in the hill country of northeast Mississippi, educated at Mississippi State University and Mississippi University for Women, living just outside the state capital of Jackson, Mississippi–Julie Whitehead is about as Mississippi as it gets. Above My Raising I came from white trash in north Mississippi. I…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I have been published in North and South Caroline, baby-sat three grandchildren there, trained at Fort Devens, MA with Tennessee’s 278th Infantry activated for the Korean campaign, played as one of two Northerners on their undefeated football team 1950, and one son living in NC gave his car…
My Southern Legitimacy Statement I moved to a small farm on Virginia’s Eastern Shore in 2004 on which I put a conservation easement. The community of woods, pond, fields and salt marsh will be forever protected from the ravages of development and industrialized chicken farming flooding in from the north….
Take a swallow. Breathe in a deep gulp of air. Walk to the edge of the dance floor. You are about to take the first step. Getting enough nerve to ask a dancer to join you for a step or two is hard. You have to stop being shy and…