Jessica Simpkiss: Moon’s Truth ( short fiction)
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Despite being born in Sin City, I was raised on I-95, traveling and living in all the states between the Mason Dixon Line and the Florida Everglades, always finding home in a North Carolinian sleepy, coastal town....
Happy New Year to our Mule Readers
This year, 2018 (duh) promises to be an extraordinary one for the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. We’re seeing many of our promising talented writers turn into NOVELISTS right before our very eyes. Look forward to book reviews and...
Chris Espenshade : One Many Casting: Fishing for Blues (memoir/essay)
Southern Legitimacy Statement: From the 7th grade through college, I lived in the North Carolina Piedmont. I worked for 12 years in Atlanta, and eight years in Greensboro, NC. I respond positively to a cold Cheerwine and a side of hush puppies. One...
Brittny Meredith: The Ladies of Lazarus
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Twenty miles north of the New Madrid Faultline surrounded by cotton fields– or land that used to be cotton fields but is now filled with manufactured homes, sits the town of Sikeston, Missouri–or, if you are over...
Gabrielle Montesanti: I Used To Run In Kalamazoo (essay)
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Like Missouri, a state considered both midwestern and southern, much of my work revolves around my clashing identities. Having lived in Alaska, Michigan, and Ohio, moving to Missouri to pursue an MFA in creative nonfiction afforded me...
Stephanie Haun: Thoughts on Beauty, Bologna, and Lewis Grizzard (essay)
Thoughts on Beauty, Bologna, and Lewis Grizzard Anyone who knows me understands there are very few books or articles I haven’t read. Amongst all the scholarly and literary reading I have done, I’ll even admit to enjoying the occasional trashy...
Joseph Murphy: Dining With The Vultures (poetry)
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My wife and I own a 130 acre farm in Franklin, Tennessee. We have a parcel of horses and grow grass, i.e. hay. Before we bought the spread the only way to the house was across a ford....
Abigail Thomas: Good Evening (memoir)
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I lived in New Orleans for several years when I was a kid, on the campus of Tulane. I went to the R.M. Lusher School. My address was 51A Macalester Place. I loved it there. Now I live...
Susan Little: Donkeys in Paradise (memoir)
Southern Legitimacy Statement: “I was born in Memphis for the sole reason that it had the hospital closest to Earle, Arkansas. My daddy was informed of my birth via telegram, as he had enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps during WWII....
Donna Walker-Nixon: Daddy’s Legacy (fiction)
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My daddy was a good man, who asked for little or no praise. He worked hard to provide for my sisters and me, and this prose piece shows the sacrifices of men who long for the country can...
Matt Starr: Carthage (fiction)
Southern Legitimacy Statement: They say write what you know, so I write about the South. I’m a product of North Carolina; the son of a mill worker; a small town specialist; a disciple of McCarthy and Faulkner; a kid from...
John Oliver Hodges: Alive In The Jungle (fiction)
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am a Florida boy currently alive in New Jersey, where people ask me every day, “Where you from?” I say, “Flahda,” and they laugh and giggle and tell me how much they love my accent. Just yesterday...
Randall Ivey: Mae Ola: A Remonstrance (fiction)
As for a Southern legitimacy statement, I sometimes have to stop myself from referring to Virginians as Yankees. Mae Ola: A Remonstrance You just love to worry, don’t you? Wallow in worrying, I say. I never seen nobody study worrying...
Patrick Brady: Most of the Time I Feel All Right (fiction)
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I thought New Orleans pretty exotic for the fifteen years I scrambled after a living there. Now that I live in Lafayette, in the heart of Acadiana, I see where the Big Easy gets her best material....
Tricia Booker: The Place of Peace and Crickets (Memoir – Review)
Tricia Boooker’s: “The Place of Peace and Crickets: how adoption, heartache, and love built a family” is brutal, honest, loving and a masterpiece of a memoir. Booker goes in deep, where most of us would never dare to go,...
Poetry
Essays
