After careful deliberation, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature has nominated the following writers and poets for Best of the Web 2007. Check out their fine work.
Fiction:
“Clamming in January” by John McCaffrey
“Death’s Janitor” by Andrew Killmeier
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Poetry:
“Among the Missing” by Pris Campbell (scroll down)
“Fireflies” by Jenni Russell (scroll down)
“Ghost Child” by Jayne Pupek (scroll down)
“Lunch” […]

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My favorite food is chicken and sausage gumbo—and I have to add boiled crawfish too, yeah. I’m plenty educated, but my accent still drips with that Cajun patois, cher. I love Cajun, Zydeco and Blues music—I play it in my pick up loud enough to drown out those rappers booming out of those rap mobiles. If God is not Cajun, I’m not sure there can be a heaven. Oh yeah, I think beer is food.

This is my first post to the Mule, although I’ve been on a the staff for a while now—first as Poetry Co-Editor and then last year taking over as Poetry Editor. Working with Valerie MacEwan has been great fun. I’m learning so much about editing. But I still have a lot to […]

I was born, raised, and still live just barely south of the Mason/Dixon line, also known as the Ohio River. I eat okra and fried catfish and buttermilk cornbread. I know how to make doughballs to catch the catfish. I read Faulkner, I’m bored by Updike. I cried all the way through Their Eyes Were Watching God and can just about begin to know what Flannery O’Connor meant by “Good Country People.” I subscribe to The Oxford American, I don’t subscribe to The New Yorker. I listen to Muddy Waters, I’m bored by Tony Bennett. I knew all the words to “Goodnight Irene” and could belt them in roadhouses before I could read. I consider Robert Johnson one of the best poets of the twentieth century.

Dearest of all Mules, our wonderful poets, please give me a moment of your time to discuss the backend of the Mule. We use WordPress as our foundation, our backend, for publishing the Dead Mule. For years and years, Robert MacEwan (yup, my husband) would code a Mule template especially for me and I’d use […]

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Will it help if I say that I was so homesick for South Carolina two weeks ago that I got into Google Earth and called up a tiny corner of Williamsburg County, my mother’s birthplace, and then moved to the small town of Sumter, where I was born, to find the exact neighborhood where I once played with my brothers in the dirt with our coal bucket in the backyard? It’s possible that living where I have lived for twenty years, southern Appalachia, could make me a southerner, but that’s not the case. My roots are in South Carolina, and when spring comes I’m like a dog catching a scent in the air. I want to get in the car and drive down the mountain to the low country where I was born and bred, where generations of my family were born and bred. Two years ago I brought my mother, Mama, up near me to live, and you’d think that having her with her equally southern accent and charm ten miles down the road in a cozy nursing home that I visit almost too much would make me feel as if I’d brought the most important part of South Carolina, my father already buried down there, up to me. I’ll tell you the truth. When the two of us get together and sit on the porch (since I picked her nursing home because it has a porch and flowers she can tend and horses across the street that we can watch and all the loving care you’d get in a big extended family living in a big house the way her family did a few generations ago), it’s almost like being back on her porch. But it’s not quite the same.

Would I lose points if I said I qualify for Colonial Dames but am not at all likely ever to join? Having moved away from the South Carolina where my family had lived for generations without straying far, having married a man from New Jersey, having borne a son who doesn’t talk like he comes from South Carolina—these things should not be held against me.

I currently live in Meadowview, a rural town in Virginia near the border of Tennessee, and work in Emory, an even more rural town in the interior of Meadowview (Emory is a village within a town, a very small village within a very small town).

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, I’m a related to Margaret Mitchell on my mother’s side of the family and I once kissed Butterfly McQueen. It doesn’t get any more southern than that, ya’ll.

Jillian was raised by a pipe organ builder and a Montessori teacher, neither of whom have accents or ancestors who participated in the War Between the States, but her mamma makes the hands-down best pecan pie anywhere in the world. As further proof of her southern legitimacy, please note that Jillian dated a NASCAR fanatic (yes, she’s been to Bristol) and a paintball junkie, then married an Arkansas catfish farmer’s son, who is, as her father-in-law puts it “landed gentry”. If that don’t make her southern, nothin’ will. You wanna fight about it?

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born a “Telfair baby” here in Savannah, Georgia. Telfair was the Woman’s Hospital that faced Forsyth Park in historic Savannah. My parents walked next door to have me as they lived in the Round House, meaning the porch went all the way around, circling the old home , built before the Victorian era at 10 East Duffy Street.
When I would “go missing” they’d find me taking a tour of the hospital with one of the nurses showing me off. I got off onto the social ladder in this way.

Being Southern means knowing the etiquette handed down by the genes and knowing when to draw out that twang a little longer when there was an audience. I milked it for everything it was worth.

My father was assigned to the USS Savannah, a Naval Destroyer Escort that made her maiden voyage from Savannah. He met my mother as she was walking her dog through Chippewa Square (famous now for Forest Gump’s “life’s a box of chocolates”. They were
married shortly after they met and went on to raise eight children in those huge houses that the south is noted for from way back. I was raised on hoe cakes and cane syprup and grits with tomato gravy.

The south is more than tradition for me. It’s a religion of heritage and pride. I’ve traveled the world since my birth and the one redeeming factor with all people all over is when they hear the southern accent, a huge grin comes over their faces and they ask you to say …waw ta (water) again and again. Being a true southern belle is an institution that isn’t found anywhere else in this world and reason enough to be proud of the passion found only in the great tradition called “Dixie”. I’m a proud part of that institution and endear the tradition in my heart and I wouldn’t trade Dixie for all the high cotton on earth.
~Susan Kathryn de vegter~

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I am Southern because I choose to be. I was raised in the very cold Midwest. I then moved to sunny Los Angeles where I met my husband who was born in Baton Rouge, LA. Every time we would go to Louisiana to visit family and friends we never wanted to return to California. Then Katrina. We decided that we would rather be in the muck with our friends than two thousand miles away, frantic with worry and helpless to do anything about it.

Less than a year later we sold our house, packed up our animals and bought a house in Lafayette and I couldn’t be happier. The people are friendly, lunch is an enjoyment of company, not a meeting and then there is the matter of crawfish and po-boys!

Southern Legitimacy Statement
Although I was born beneath the Mason-Dixon line, I grew up in the Midwest, and only after graduate school did I return for a decade to my southern roots. First my wife and I lived in San Marcos, Texas, where our next-door neighbor was an elderly woman named Eula Sutherland, who hailed originally from Georgia and who would invite us at every opportunity into her apartment to share long conversations and her homemade cake or pie, sometimes which had ants crawling on it: she never seemed to notice. Next we moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, taught at Virginia Tech, and fell in love with the Blue Ridge Mountains. When we finally returned to the Midwest, we had grown so accustomed to the effusive friendliness of the people of the South that we at first thought everyone we met was brusque and rude. Since then, of course, we have adjusted, and, indeed, are probably brusque and rude ourselves.

My friends here in Ohio are always asking me to tell them about where I grew up. They love to hear stories about entertaining myself in the piney woods of south Alabama by stirring for doodlebugs, tying strings to Junebugs and flying them like kites, making necklaces from chinaberries, and watching the boys play ball on sandspur lots. They want me to have them over for purple-hulled peas, vegetable eggs (otherwise known as eggplants), fried anything, sweet potato pie, and Luzianne coffee. And they know my #1 comfort food is grits. Even my Yankee husband knows that.

I think my love of Southern writing blossomed the summer after 10th grade, when every ladies’ club around Bradleyton asked me to give a program about To Kill a Mockingbird. Later I was one of the founders of the Unofficial Pike County William Styron Fan Club and (the summer Nixon resigned) went to the first Faulkner Symposium.

What I miss most about living in the South is the voices, the accents, the “bless her heart” that no one in the Midwest seems to offer.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Though I live near DC now, I am still a country girl at heart. I grew up on the border of North Carolina, and I am here to tell you that the sky really is bluer there than anywhere else. It’s Tarheel blue actually. I miss mornings waking up to eat my biscuits with Karo syrup with Granddaddy in front of the wood stove. There will never be anything more enjoyable than running the paper route with Granddaddy in his ‘73 Dodge Ram and eating peanut butter crackers while drinking Mama’s sweet tea from a Mason jar. It’s times like those that my poems are trying to hold on to.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born and raised in the feudal mill village of Kannapolis, North Carolina in the 1950’s, have never lived outside the state, and don’t want to. When I was a child my neighbor Preacher Pethel ran a country store, plowed everyone’s victory garden with a mule during the week, and preached hell-fire on the weekends. If that’s not enough to get your Mule ear’s listening, then let me tell you that I eat banana sandwiches, okra, and collards, and drink sweet tea with abandon. Being southern, I am full of lovely loving contradictions and thus hate white grits which to my taste should only be eaten as a condiment for pools of butter; but I adore yellow grits, and stone or water ground grits. I think kudzu in flower is one of the earth’s great pleasures. I was born knowing the difference between eastern and western North Carolinians, and eastern and western NC barbecue [both noun and verb]. Of Appalachian Scots-Irish and Cherokee stock, one would think I would prefer Lexington-style cue , but I don’t, even though it’s just fine; rather give me some Wilson, NC barbecue anytime [although, now, in truth, the best cue anywhere, except in Italy, is at the Barbecue Joint in Chapel Hill]. Having been eastern Indian in my last life, I embrace Vedanta and Jesus [the real one not the current day self-righteous one], and given a choice between my fantasy desert island only meal of country style steak, lima beans, sweet potato biscuits, and grandma Gill’s pound cake or Goa Fish Curry, onion chutney, paratha, and raita, I’d probably have both and ask for more. Some folks might not consider most of my work southern enough, but I do. It don’t matter to me. My vale of humility has room enough for other’s mountains of conceit. Oh, and Neese’s sausage is just great, especially the extra sage. But sometime look out for Tom Thumb or Thingamajig from the Wilson County area, and watch out!

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
No one believes i grew up in rural north Georgia. Not even my family. I only have an accent when I’m sleepy or drinking. I don’t drive a truck, hunt, own a single rebel flag, and the closet thing to a mullet I can claim is a “rat tail” I talked my mother into letting my grow in 4th grade. However, I am the product of several generations living in the same small North Georgia town, where my parents and extended family are now experiencing the beginning stages of Atlanta’s northward sprawl. My theory is that, in response to Sherman, the city has decided to expand in every direction until it consumes the entire continent. I don’t know exactly how I feel about that, but I’ll give it some serious thought as I sip my sweet tea…