Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I know a fellow who does DJ work on a local radio station, like bluegrass and string band music. What’s so southern about that? He does it with Copenhagen in his mouth and doesn’t spit it out. Says, “I won’t give up my hillbilly ways.” Now that’s southern.

Editors Note:

The Dead Mule is proud to present this beautiful, spiritual chapbook by Kevin Blankenship, formerly a Mule poetry co-editor.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Spokane Washington is a long way from the South, but we do have our commonalities. When my son, nephew and their pals were boys, they liked to hunt for crawdads along Hangman Creek near Waverly, Washington. They’d come home so full of mud that I wasn’t sure which children were my toe-headed own. I’d get to worrying if they didn’t appear by six o’clock, so I’d walk out into the yard and yodel across town, “Supper!” The pitch and octave infused into that single-word song echoed across the valley and bounced against the little butte that stood out to the east of town. The children always came home, although I’m not sure if it was hunger that brought them or that I’d scared the crawdads back under the rocks.

We are all looking forward to Fiction Reborn from the literary ashes of the smoldering pocosin we call home. June 5th. Meanwhile, check out the lovely little remembrance by Sue Ellis over on the Essay page.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: A corny description of Bubba:

It is difficult to say where the name Bubba originated. It does conjures strange notions as to its roots… Imagine the pride of the first mother who looked at her newborn child, took a few seconds to assess her little miracle, and then uttered, “Welcome to the world, Bubba Lee Strunk!”. It does lend slightly more credence if Bubba Lee happens to be a male child, although in vast regions of the American South, the name is unisex. It has become tradition that every southern family has at least one Bubba.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born in the North but moved to the South at a young age. When I did, my accent was loud and nasally
and no one liked it. I mellowed out and started chewing tobacco. It helped me fit in. My family joined one of those Baptist mega-churches with a jumbo screen in the auditorium. I was baptized there in a pool-sized tank up on the altar. Afterwards, they told me I was saved. I only felt wet. I live up north now. People here tell me my accent sounds like a banjo. I don’t go to church anymore, but I still chew tobacco.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I grew up watching Hee-Haw while shelling speckled butter-beans. These days, my country students get excited about prom, like most teens do, but unlike most American teens–they wear camoflauge tuxedos, even the boys. The homecoming queen has a t-shirt that explains it all: Southern Bred/ Venison Fed. Now if that ain’t country; then you can have the homemade pepper vinegar I use on my collards.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born in West Virginia – 101 years after the 35th state whose statehood came about during the war of Northern aggression. Due to the fact that Bluefield has the state lines of Virginia and West Virginia separating it and the only local hospital being located across the line in West Virginia, my parents had no choice in the matter.

I was raised in Southwest Virginia – a coal miner’s daughter who hauled in the coal that kept us warm all winter and took out the ashes each and every day before and after school.

I slopped the hogs, weeded the garden, cut the grass, fed the dogs and argued over the housework with my brother and sister.

We flew the rebel flag, listened to Hank Jr., rode around in pickup trucks held together by rust and neglect and attended church by force as free will didn’t exist where Jesus and my Mother was concerned.
We spoke of the South with hushed reverence, staggering around under the weight of self-identity that being Southern had bestowed upon us. We were Southern by the grace of God, chosen people existing in a land flowing with coal and the word of God. We were rebels who were going to rise again or die trying.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I am writing this with cowboy boots on, which I consider the most comfortable shoe God ever gave this planet. Some like to say Texas isn’t the “real” South and maybe they have a bit of a point. Most of us aren’t familiar with kudzu and I can’t claim to have eaten many moon pies. But when it comes to crazy preachers, sweaty summers, pickup trucks, beer in the cup holders, all-day barbeques and those other down home peculiarities, we’re proudly Southern here in Texas. As for me, I’m from here in the born-and-raised sort of way. My parents are from here too. My grandmother grew up on a cattle ranch near Lubbock. Her mother worked that ranch. And the bloodlines go further back than that. I’ve moved out of Texas twice and moved back twice. I don’t plan to leave again and am glad my two children are growing up watching Cowboys games and eating cornbread and beans and fajitas cooked right. I like this life. I write a lot about this life. “Shark Teeth” is about a piece of this life dying.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I would like my ashes to be thrown into the Vermillion River, underneath the Ambassador Caffrey bridge, but before all of that happens, I enjoy talking to the ducks and nutria rats at Girard Park. I’ve been living in Lafayette, LA for roughly 26 years and one day I hope to have one spinner rim spinning on one of the rims of my Toyota Camry, which has just reached its 222,000 mileage mark. I love the fickle weather–how it can snow one morning (after 5 years of no snow), and then two days later, it will be 75 degrees. Firstly, I put hot sauce in my cereal.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I live in Yankeeland now but every time I come back from going home I talk like I did down there. One time I was in the elevator with a man I was the boss of and when he commented on my newly enhanced southern accent I started going all-out like my cousin Mable Ann and he cringed visibly and said, “Please stop.” I think he thought I’d gone stupid on him, bless his heart. That tickled me to death.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

A resident of Arkansas, I know everyone in the south drives a green car or truck each Spring, regardless of the color of paint underneath the pollen. To confirm my southern residency, I can ask “what recession?” We’ve been poor so long, its hard to tell we’re living in a recession – and I’m glad the rest of the nation might now enjoy life as much as we do.

Congratulations Mule Writer Taylor Brown.
Contest Winners

CutBank is pleased to announce the winners of the 2009 Montana Prize in Fiction, Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction, and Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry.  The prizewinning works will appear in CutBank 71, available next month.The winner of the Montana Prize in Fiction, selected by guest judge Joy Williams, is [...]

An interesting blog post to consider.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I’m from South of the South. That’s South Carolina, where we inch up the humidity one degree every year until we learn how to breathe underwater. We haven’t forgotten about secession, we just changed the strategy. I can’t tell you about momma’s great cooking and grandad’s famous stories but I’d love to pull on your coat about grandma’s four tablespoons of salt in every meal cause the sixty years of cigarettes have killed her sense of taste, or uncle robert’s career as a d-leaguer for the Braves. I’m now living in North Carolina and enjoying the barbecue and unending wealth of creativity that is limitless in both subject and form.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born in West Virginia – 101 years after the 35th state whose statehood came about during the war of Northern aggression. Due to the fact that Bluefield has the state lines of Virginia and West Virginia separating it and the only local hospital being located across the line in West Virginia, my parents had no choice in the matter.

I was raised in Southwest Virginia – a coal miner’s daughter who hauled in the coal that kept us warm all winter and took out the ashes each and every day before and after school.

I slopped the hogs, weeded the garden, cut the grass, fed the dogs and argued over the housework with my brother and sister.

We flew the rebel flag, listened to Hank Jr., rode around in pickup trucks held together by rust and neglect and attended church by force as free will didn’t exist where Jesus and my Mother was concerned.

We spoke of the South with hushed reverence, staggering around under the weight of self-identity that being Southern had bestowed upon us. We were Southern by the grace of God, chosen people existing in a land flowing with coal and the word of God. We were rebels who were going to rise again or die trying.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born in the south. I have always lived in the south. And I plan on dying in the south. And on my tombstone it shall read “Her Lies Colonel Gasseous Q Clay, Proud to have never even visited New York City”. -If that is not the core of southern beliefs, I don’t know what is. By the way, Colonel is an honorary title bestowed upon me by my most gracious neighbors.

Southern Legitimacy Statement – I hereby do swear and attest that I am, always have been, and always be a resident of the SOUTH. During those unfortunate times that I have had to leave it has remained the home of my heart and soul. BBQ sauce runs through my veins and sweet ice tea on a hot Southern Summer Day is my heaven. I may be a Yankee by virtue of birth but the south is where I have planted my heart!

We weren’t allowed to go to school barefooted but from Easter Sunday on, the minute we got home from school, our shoes came off and stayed off till the fall and that’s the way it was growing up in my small, southern, hometown of Derita, NC. My family drank iced tea with all our Sunday dinners — winter, spring, summer and fall but nobody ever asked for more “sweet tea.” Only Yankees would need to clarify it. Everybody in the whole south knew that tea was always sweetened with sugar before it was served. We did, however, have to ask for lemon if we wanted it. And another thing, Othermama made sure I always had a pair of white gloves. I wore them to Sunday school, family reunions and funerals like all the other southern ladies. On these white-gloved occasions, I was often allowed to have a stick of chewing gum, but I had strict orders not to chew it. Othermama believed that chewing gum was common and that the wellbred just didn’t do it. Weeks before I entered Womens College in 1961, which is now UNC-Greensboro, I went into Montaldo’s Dress Shop in Charlotte and bought my first pair of Weejuns. It was common knowledge that Weejuns were the shoes worn at all southern colleges. The loafers (the most expensive shoes I’d ever had) cost forty something dollars. They were must-haves and Othermama, my maternal grandmother, who understood “must- haves,” gave me the money to buy them. As a freshman I wore my Weejuns with tremendous pride — day in and day out — even though the shoes were so tight they absolutely killed my feet. I keep praying they would stretch out but they never did. Unbeknownst to me at the time (in those days they only
measured the length of my foot), I needed a “D” width. Going barefooted all those years had made it so. Every kid in Derita probably grew up to have “D” widths or worse.

I have always had a lot to say and, in my opinion, I think that’s part of being a southerner.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: As we say down here in North Carolina, I’m Tar Heel born and Tar Heel bred and when I die, I’ll be Tar Heel dead. Fruit of a good old boy who loved his beer and was full of colorful sayings for every occasion. You know, something that smelled real bad would “gag a maggot,” while a steamy July day was “hot as a young wife’s passion.” His nemesis was dear old mom, who would roll her eyes when these things popped out of his mouth because she was the daughter of a Southern Baptist minister, which makes me the grandson and is deemed worse in some circles, and god knows I’ve tried to live up to it (or down as the case may be). One of our best family stories involves my daddy standing in line in the ABC store with a bottle of bourbon when one of the deacons from granddaddy’s church happened in, getting a little spooked when he knew he was spotted. “I’m, uh, just picking up something for a friend,” the deacon claimed. “That’s okay,” daddy told him. “I’m getting this for the preacher.” My granddaddy stayed pissed off about that for a long, long time.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
As a Yankee, one who grew up and resides north of the Mason Dixon, I claim an unusual amount of Southern ties. On my mother’s side I have plenty of late relatives from Memphis. My late Uncle Henry liked to say ‘The War of Yankee Aggression’. Apparently he was speaking of the CW, but as an 8 year old I just didn’t get it. Trips to Memphis in my early years sparked me to write a novel which includes a road trip from Northern Illinois to Memphis. Novel yet to be published – collecting dust as we speak.
I spent three years in the U.S. Army, all of them in the south. I called North Carolina and South Carolina home for that time and traveled around quite a bit. This included tobacco roads, cotton fields, and an occasional drive from Ft. Bragg to Myrtle Beach where I’d spend the weekend sleeping on the beach. During my army years I had oodles of friends from the south (the Army’s full of them) Ashland KY, Lake City, FL, Dothan, AL…. sweet tea for everyone to wash down that Sizzler steak.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve lived in the deep South long enough to get annoyed when I hear a Yankee or a Texan use “y’all” in the singular.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Although I’m a native Floridian currently living in Northern California, the majority of my family are still scattered throughout the south. As a child I spent the summers in Tennessee, on a parcel of land that was also home to my grandparents, three great aunts and uncles, and five cousins. Plus, there was never a shortage of folks stopping by just to sit a spell and pass the time of day. I have discovered, upon returning to visit, that there is a feeling I get in the south that I get nowhere else. I suspect it has a lot to do with some of my fondest memories of those long lost summers: waking to the smell of country ham and eggs, playing in the tobacco patch, hand churning ice cream, catching bees in a glass jar, and picking fresh blackberries that soon found their way into the most delicious cobblers. Whatever it is, I will always consider myself a southerner, and enjoy to the fullest every opportunity I get to return.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Even today when my energy is low because of a cold I see my Aunt Nina coming at me with the bottle of Vicks Vapo-Rub. How I hated that sticky ointment and the statement I knew would come out of her mouth, “If you would quit going outside with your hair wet, you wouldn’t be sick now! Though I now live in Oregon I have infused into the people who work for me the knowledge of,”Lit up like Levi’s.” This was a department store in downtown Louisville, Kentucky that at the turn of the century had a LOT of lights. People used the expression, “Lit up like Levi’s, whenever they saw what to them was a preposterous amount of lighting. Every time someone left on a trip the words hearken to me from long ago, “Don’t watch them out of sight, its bad luck.” WE still have our superstitions. If you drop a fork, a woman is coming. If you drop a knife a man is coming. If a bird gets in the house and sings on you’re bed, God help you.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here just as fast as I could after college. I found myself a 5th generation Texan and married him. For New Year’s, we plan to eat black-eyed peas and collard greens for breakfast, lunch AND dinner, just to ensure that I’ll have the good fortune of being published in DEAD MULE this year. No, I’ve never dealt with a dead mule, or a live one for that matter, but I did once find a dead raccoon outside my back door. I tried to figure out how to make a Daniel Boone hat out of it, but finally gave up and threw it in the freezer until I could round up a few other critters for some road-kill stew.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
As a preteen I ran through civil war trenches of Kennesaw Mountain, crawled through tunnels of Cheatham Hill and looked for bullets that my father and his father as children had missed. I dug unexploded canon balls, pristine as the day they were fired, from the creek behind the house. I listened to old men, who missed the war by a hundred years or more, recall it as vividly as if it had happened the year before. Being southern is to share a region and a history, and to know with a certainty that while you are here, you were also there.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born and raised in Athens, GA. Now I live in Oxford, MS and I have a toothpick in my mouth right now.

More fiction, more Mule, more fun for our fans.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I regularly end up stuck in traffic behind George Jones’ Lexus SUV at my interstate offramp from I-65, here where I live just South of Nashville, Tennessee. Sometimes Mr. Jones wears a funny fishing hat. In addition, I am a diehard Tennessee Titans fan. I had an ancestor who fought for the South, Sgt. Fed Wilson. (Fed short for Frederick.) Often at my local Waffle House, I order grits.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

How much more Southern can I be? I was born and raised between Auburn and Phenix City, Alabama, 30 minutes from the nearest gas station. Our land has an old slave house, water wheel, pecan orchard, and a creek. While growing up, I played with sticks and climbed trees for fun, because we didn’t have more than 3 TV channels. II worked at a Western Store, selling boots and spurs, ropes and cow feed. I went to Auburn University, where, as any Southerner knows, tailgating and football is a way of life. I then moved to the UK for graduate study and am trying to bring a bit of the South to the rest of the world. So far, I have convinced my friends that roping is the best thing ever and that y’all is an acceptable phrase no matter what your accent.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I believe in the tarpaper shack, the tin roof, the dog under the porch, his howl all over the yard. I believe in Miss Flannery and Miss Eudora and Wild Bill, rats in the corn shed, peafowl yelling help, help at passing cars. I believe my hometown of Griffin is just close enough to the asylum in Milledgeville to whiff the crazy fumes. Shotgun with its cracked stock fixed with plastic wood, deer hooves opening up the first melons, a bottle tree with blue bottles (they have to be blue). I believe it is a mistake to try to teach the pigs to sing: it wastes your time and irritates the pigs. I believe the world is going to hell in a ham biscuit. Could be worse. Need some rain.