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 lived in Tennessee and Georgia for a significant portion of…
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 spring near the Suwanee River, or jumping into the frigid…
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 in about the fifth grade, when my buddy and I…
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 a little boy. You can’t go back in time but…
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 hurts not to pat someone on the back but by…
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 world by envisioning alternate possibilities for the way things are.”…
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 ups ignited by racial inequities and injustices in the ensuing…
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 wanted more than to leave the place for some far-flung…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’m Southern California, born and raised, (learned to surf in high school P.E.). But my Dad’s parents came from big families in Oklahoma, leaving behind more relatives than he can count. My statement feels like a family reunion in blazing summer, light years from home; a house…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born and bred in Texas. If you see a guy trying not to lose his balance while walking across the cobblestone streets of Philadelphia in his cowboy boots, that would be me. The Oldest Barber in Texas His great-granddaughter hung a sign from his barber pole saying…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in south-central South Dakota. My maternal great grandfather’s family came from Nodaway County, Missouri named after the Nodaway River that flows south. My home town is Mission, population less than a thousand, the largest city on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation. I have not…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Fayetteville, Arkansas is my home. I grew up here and then was gone for a very long time. But I came back to live here again and to research and write. I’m a local historian, a novelist, and a poet. Some of my work is set in…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: “I am a Chicago native who lived in New Orleans for brief stints (the longest being nine months in duration) at various times during my twenties. Since I was a restless vagabond gal, I constantly moved and traveled to places where I thought I might get a…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up n a small town on the Kentucky-Tennessee border where elections were determined by which politician passed out the most half-pints of liquor. When we were kids we got paid 50 cents a piece to pass out Seagram’s Seven and Coronal Lee. When we weren’t…
SOUTHERN LEGITIMACY STATEMENT When we unexpectedly showed up at Grandma’s house on any given Sunday, she would send one of my older brothers into the yard to catch a chicken or two. She was quicker and more efficient at wringing the chicken’s neck, so she would deftly, with a flick…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: When we think of the south, those of us who are older remember sitting on porches to visit or to help others string beans when the crop was in. Our house, in southwestern Virginia, faced a street where we could watch cars pass, sometimes with people we…
My SLS varies with my mood and the moon. Sometimes I think about how race relations and people’s perspectives have and have not changed. Sometimes it’s as simple as what’s on the table for dinner. Sometimes it’s about the overarching kindness you find and share through even casual acquaintances. Sometimes…
SOUTHERN LEGITIMACY STATEMENT When we unexpectedly showed up at Grandma’s house on any given Sunday, she would send one of my older brothers into the yard to catch a chicken or two. She was quicker and more efficient at wringing the chicken’s neck, so she would deftly, with a flick…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was raised in the foothills of North Carolina and have spent the majority of my adult life in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Watauga County, NC. This piece locates its narrative along Brushy Fork Ridge, where I built my house twenty years ago. The Tao of…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am a double immigrant from Italy and Venezuela who became a Texan 25 years ago. On top of that, I am a first-generation college graduate who received a master’s degree in Journalism from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. That’s over 30 years of experience as a…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Nicole Yurcaba is a Ukrainian-American poet and essayist who teaches at Bridgewater College in Virginia. Well-Traveled It’s had a long journey, your letter. Today, it arrived nearly six weeks post-maling—at its intended destination, not to its intended person. I am not there, in Iceland. I am 4,852…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Dear editors at The Dead Mule, Have I ever told you how much I love the South? Probably not, because we’ve never met. I live all the way up here in Alberta, Canada and have so much appreciation for the Southern United States having a food background…
SOUTHERN LEGITIMACY STATEMENT: Mississippi birthed me skinny, Louisiana fattened me up, Georgia married me off, Tennessee worked me like a borrowed mule and Florida retired me. My favorite quote is from Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz. ” The South is a place. East, west, and north are nothing…
My Southern Legitimacy Statement: We lived up in a holler outside Waynesboro, Tennessee. My dad was a master sergeant in Korea, at 23 years old. They killed everyone else, except Private Simmons, so they put my dad in charge. We never got along, so I hit the road Jack… Those…