Front Range, a nationally circulated annual literary journal, is accepting submissions of high quality short fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction as well as artwork for its 5th issue, spring 2010.  Reading window is 1 Aug-7 Nov 2009.
Please check submission guidelines at http://www.frontrangereview.org Submit to either this email address or to frontrangereview@hotmail.com
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Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Though he was born and raised in Fresno, California, just an hour from Yosemite and two hours from the central coast, and though he references often, in his work, life in the barrios of Fresno, Michael Medrano tries his very best to reference the south. In fact, in San Diego, where he likes to celebrate Cinco De Mayo, often resists on dining cliché Mexican Cuisine; he prefers Cajun cooking and makes it a point to eat at New Orleans’ Creole Cafe. He loves their Sweet Tea and often waves to passersby from their courtyard patio with andouille sausage grease dripping onto his clothes.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I never saw it, but my great-grandparents had a farm in the middle of Norfolk, Virginia. I went to college in Florida and lived in Georgia for several years. About the pies, my husband’s Aunt Barbara makes the best chocolate pie in the world, and we always eat it when we visit family in Marietta. My daughter can replicate it perfectly. My husband and I have been living in Virginia for the past twelve years where we’ve been raising our two children. The pie baking child will attend a fine Virginia university this September.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born in Alabama and have lived in the south almost all my life. Being about three bricks shy of a load and stubborn as a mule, I strayed north once upon a time. Turned tail and ran back home after three months because it was Sunday and I couldn’t smell fried chicken cooking. And nobody understood that pot likker and moonshine aren’t the same thing. I’ve been to river baptisms, downhome revivals, and my share of dinners on the ground. I don’t eat fried green tomatoes unless cornmeal and a cast iron skillet were involved in the cooking. After the famous movie came out all these crazy Hollywood types started putting out low-fat, baked versions – that would’ve had my granddaddy writing Washington and threatening to secede again. And when I was a kid, Grandmama picked out the cloth sacks of flour and feed based on her fashion sense because I wore feedsack dresses till I was about seven.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I’ve been to almost every state in the union but picked eastern NC! i wept for joy at my first taste of grits. i can make biscuits faster than i can can log onto FB. my out of state family all say i have an accent, but so do my neighbors. my boys hate putting socks on to go to church. i’ve caught myself saying, ‘well bless your little achin’ heart’. the sun rises over our beaches and sets in our mountains

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Born (and currently live) in Nashville, TN. My father is from Wilson County, TN and my mother hails from Meridian, MS. Demographically speaking, this should be enough. But one bright day while visiting my grandmother in Mississippi, I went into a general store (don’t even ask) and found pickles that were soaked in Kool-Aid. They were bright red and purple, each flavor in a large jar that requires the proprietor to get a long set of tongs and put the aforementioned pickle (brightly colored or otherwise) into a wax paper sleeve. I did not say: what fresh hell is this? I did not say: That takes ghetto to new and unprecedented levels. I purchased one posthaste, let that pickle color my face for several hours and reveled in the ingenuity of southern cuisine. For the record, I had the grape pickle.

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. 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:

I am from Appalachia, and kin talk right when i need to. I can pick a banjo, know all the words to “willow garden” and like sliced cheese in my grits. I know what a poke is, and why it’s called poke salad. i have lived in Louisiana and Texas if south of the Mason-Dixon is all you count, but the way i figure it, anywhere there’s fish in the river and shine and fistfights and oxycodone addicts and beer and Hank Williams and a pig cooking in an oil barrel is a party, no matter where you put it on the map, and any town the trains don’t stop in any more is in the same country.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I’ve eaten more kinds of greens than most Yankees have ever heard of.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was raised on a rural tobacco farm in eastern North Carolina. It’s hard to describe to people exactly where. Like many rural Southerners I have to start with a big city and work my way down. “Do you know Raleigh?” If you do I can add in, “Well maybe you know Rocky Mount or Wilson with the tobacco markets and all the bar-be-que? How about Kenly? They even have an interstate exit on I-95, along that stretch where you can’t even pick up a gospel or country music station.” Only people from North Carolina usually know those places. The real test then is “Ever heard of Stancil’s Chapel? Crocker’s Nub? Shoeheel?” Only the people that I barned tobacco with or went to my highschool in the middle of a cornfield have heard of those. Those aren’t so much cities or even towns, just places where country roads cross and there’s generally a small general store if anything. Shoeheel is actually where someone nailed an actual shoe heel to a post so they could keep track of where they were and give directions – thus it’s name.

Our family actually moved to eastern NC before it was even a state. They were told to pretty much go down and hang on to whatever they could, but that they’d be pretty much on their own. A couple of years later the whole family would almost be completely wiped out from an Indian massacre. If a couple of the boys hadn’t been working out in a back field on a Sunday (when everyone else was in church) we would have been. So our family owes its very existence to a propensity for casual church going. I’ve tried to keep that family tradition alive as best I can.

We were one of the first families that “went Baptist”, if you find a particularly old Baptist Hymnal you might even find the page that credits an old relative William Creech for choosing the songs that went into it. He was what you might call the first Baptist music director, just from that I have to assume he’s not a direct relative, but more likely a bachelor cousin that probably never married. You know what I mean.

Lastly I think as almost an ultimate bit of Southern Legitimacy, my grandfather was not only a tobacco farmer and ran a goat dairy, he was also a bit of a country vet – and he raised MULES! One of my fondest memories was riding with him on his mule cart to make his milk deliveries. Before baby formula country doctors would recommend goat’s milk for fussy babies that didn’t take to breast feeding. This would later explain my love for Thai Tea, since I grew up on an overly sweet creamy concoction that was generally half goats milk and half sweet tea, so sweet it had that fine sugary sludge at the bottom. One of my least favorite childhood memories though was having to patrol acres of goat pasture for any wild onions that might spoil the milk, the whole time keeping a watchful eye out for any sneaky billy goats. Especially since if you got butted and scraped a knee, my grandfather would slather the wound from this big blue glass bottle of veterinarian antiseptic, it would sting like hell and the bright blue color would dye your skin a dark blue for weeks to come. If we complained, he’d just blow it off “well, if it’s good enough for my mules…”

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My husband, toddler, and I moved to Durham, North Carolina, twenty-eight years ago from Portland, Maine, after being footsore from waiting tables and heartsick with winters that lasted through May. I thought grad school was in my future (it wasn’t)—both UNC and UNC-G had programs that appealed—and the prospects of a warmer, shorter winter beckoned. We sold our few belongings and moved without jobs into a shabby apartment (now demolished). We arrived on a Sunday afternoon. The smells of fried chicken and pesticide wafted out from the halls, and dead cockroaches lined the cupboards. My heart sank: what have I done? Then the ice storm hit.

But soon we discovered Ninth Street Bakery, Wellspring Grocery, and a babysitting co-op, and we met great people, some of whom would be friends for life. I made an okra quiche and tried Brunswick stew (both bad ideas). We hiked the Eno, visited the NO Zoo, ate crisp salted peanuts in Williamston, camped near Emerald Isle and Hanging Rock. I got in on the ground floor with the North Carolina Writers’ Network and met many creative writers and more good friends for life.

In 1989 we bought our first house, in Mebane, then a small mill town, where we still live. Over the years, my husband remodeled our house, I put in an ever-growing garden, we found some cats and some cats found us, and we raised our two sons. At the time we were the only Yankees in town, and my older son’s classmates would beg him to talk so they could hear his accent: his teacher dubbed him E.F. Hutton, because “when Bryce speaks, everyone listens.” One spring day I was hanging out clothes and asked Bryce where his bike was. He replied, “It’s over yonder.” “Ah,” I said, trying not to smile, thinking, he’s truly Southern now. He paused, then asked: “Mom—what’s yonder?”

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas and have lived there most of my life. For short periods of time, I’ve lived in Philadelphia; eastern Kentucky; Athens, Ohio; Birmingham, Alabama, and now New Haven, Connecticut. In all these places, people say I talk funny. Of course, I think they’re the ones with speech problems. Even my dog barks southern and I’m quite proud of him. I don’t have a mule, but I’m sure he would bray southern also. I enjoy talking slowly so people can understand me. Who wants to speak in rapidity and so nasally?

I still say “Bless your heart,” “that tickles me, ” and “honey” so much my family makes fun of me.

New Haven is known as “King of Pizza.” Southern Italian pizza via Arkansas is much better and I still prefer pigs’ feet to the kind of pizza here. Sweet tea is a given, and I resent having to sugar it myself when I’m out of the South; somehow the dissolved sugar in the tea within a large jug makes it even better. I must drink out of a Mason jar to drink the tea. At the end of a meal, I adhere to what my family did after dinner: use jelly on bread that served as our special dessert.

Sooie pig is a special call for this Razorback fan, who dotes on those wild hogs and their fearsome tusks.