New work from eight poets, Dale Wisely, Jilly Dybka, Ross White, Leslie Joseph, Jessie Carty, Evie Shockley, Tim Peeler and Carter Monroe, will be published on or about November 20. I am completing an interview with Evie Shockley that will be online the same day. Photographs by Bill Losse will be published at [...]
my southern statement thing:
I lived the first major chunk of my life near Little Rock, Arkansas and the second big chunk, the one I’m in now, in Birmingham, Alabama. Sometime in there, I spent four years in Memphis. Yes, my life has been sort of like a Civil Rights Movement bus tour.
I’m grateful for the experience and mindful of all my beautiful neighbors along the way.
Folks, if you don’t know Carter, then you ain’t been reading the Mule.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I grew up in Michigan, but my mom is from Tennessee, so I suppose my first language was Southern. Every summer my mom would drive us kids down to Chattanooga to visit with my Gran and other relatives. Banana pudding, Rock City, sweet tea, cobwebby Confederama*, 8-ounce Cokes = childhood summers. Funny that I married a Nashville musician — I’ve lived here almost 20 years now.
*Confederama is now called The Battles for Chattanooga Museum. (Rolling my eyes.)
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I have one uncle and my wife has one uncle. Both uncles are certain that the War of Northern Aggression is still being fought. Either will bend your ear, at supper or a funeral, about how the South is on the cusp of victory because them fools north of the Mason-Dixon still don’t realize the war never really ended. My wife and I bristle a little at this talk, and wish we could dissuade our uncles, but how could we? They’re South Carolina boys, and we both had the poor sense to be born, schooled, and settled in North Carolina. What could we possibly know about the South?
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I live in Louisiana. Most of my recent writing has taken place on airplanes or in airports on my travels between the South and the Non-South. We are our own breed. As Flannery O’Connor put it, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I have lived in North Carolina my whole life (except the first 6 months of it and the first 6 months after graduation from undergrad when I lived as far away as Virginia). I grew up in Pasquotank and Perquimans Counties, went to college in Greensboro and ended up in Charlotte.
My great-grandfather was supposedly Cherokee. But his last name was Driggers AND he may have changed it to hide from the law. So . . .
And then there was that time in high school when I said “ya’ll” in front of a German exchange student and then had to explain. Good thing he didn’t ask me the name of what I was eating and drinking at the time. Heaven forbid I had to explain an RC cola and a moon-pie.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
In one sense, my response to the idea that “southern legitimacy” is something I need to demonstrate exists in the form of a poem: “cause i’m from dixie too.” (It appears in my book a half-red sea.) On the other hand, since this a requirement for all contributors to The Dead Mule, my poem is not exactly apropos! So I will simply say that I was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee.
[Don't miss the Dead Mule interview with Evie. Just click on "essays."]
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I grew up playing baseball on fields with chicken wire backstops and no outfield fences. We named our dogs after the ones on the Beverly Hillbillies. We weren’t farmers, but we raised two acres of potatoes, an acre of peanuts, and slaughtered a black angus bull every other year. We named the bulls after famous explorers. The biggest dare was riding a bike across the top of the textile mill dam.
Meet one of the newest poets in the Mule family as Helen Losse, Poetry Editor for the Dead Mule, interviews poet Evie Shockley. The amazing, in-depth, insightful conversation is poetry itself. I hope our readers enjoy the interview as much as I did — V. MacEwan, Editor/Publisher