both challenged and enthralled us. We read over 200 stories and ultimately chose the amazing dozens you will soon click to read.

This painting with its quirky touch of ‘onary self satisfaction has drawn a lot of good natured attention . I painted her to go with a story called My Little Night Job , later changed to First Crime. The painting I think stands by itself aside from the story which was first published in Story [...]

Southern Legitimacy Statement
My favorite memories are sitting in the dark on the porch while Daddy told stories after he had worked in the fields all day. Across the road, in a swamp, the frogs’ chorus often grew so loud, I couldn’t hear my father’s voice. We fought mosquitoes until Mother finally said, “Come on in, girls, time for you to go to bed.” My brothers stayed up with Daddy, Ray playing his Sears Roebuck guitar and learning songs from his Roy Acuff song book.
Inside, I leaned my head in the open window trying to get just one little breath of fresh air. No place is as hot as south Georgia in summer.

A new SLS from Mr. Hogan:
I play upright bass in an Americana/Bluegrass band composed of myself and three other family members. We call ourselves East of Zion. Can you hear the wind in the live (black) oak trees? – apologies to Don Williams. And speaking of Williams’, another line of Don’s applies as well: “those Williams boys still mean a lot to me, Hank and Tennessee.” That works perfectly for me. I play southern music in an Arkansas Ozarks band and Hank Williams is almost the first singer I ever heard in my life. We do an occasional Hank song ourselves. I also have a Ph. D. in Literature and am a big fan of Tennessee Williams – in particular I like the Richard Burton film version of Night of the Iguana and I’ve always enjoyed The Glass Menagerie. I think that sufficiently covers the hillbilly-literary dichotomy of the south well enough for now.

“My Southern Legitimacy Statement is the opening paragraph of my novel, Stepping on the Cracks: Early on a humid Saturday in late August of 1952, Dirty Billy Williams was waiting with the other paregoric addicts at the backdoor of Powers and Moore Pharmacy when a particularly brilliant idea caused his eyebrows to dance and a chuckle to cough its way up and out of his sunken chest. After plunking down his buck -and-a-half and signing his name in the ledger kept fastidiously by Dr. Powers himself, he slipped the small bottle of morphine-laced liquid carefully into his pants pocket and kept his hand closed around it. Mindful that the good doctor didn’t permit riff-raff to frequent his soda fountain, Billy fairly bounded across the street to Berrey and Marks Pure Oil, where a nickel in the outdoor Coca-Cola machine yielded six ounces of a sweet mixer to cut his bitter daily legal limit and the unlocked bathroom gave him the privacy to take a leak while downing his needed morning cocktail in one long, eager slurp.”

I was once approached in a bar somewhere in the outskirts of Virginia by a toothless man who clearly stated via drunken whimpers, ‘You are pertier than a catfish and that’s a compliment ‘cuz catfish is real perty.’ I love to catfish. I was born and raised in Virginia. I am a catfish.

I love the South deeply, and I am loyal to grits, scrapple, and storytelling.

I’ve lived so long layered up with wool in Connecticut, I sometimes wonder whether Georgia was a dream. Up here, the land is rocky and shoves itself into the sea. Unlike the islands of Georgia, where the land eases itself towards the sea until it is mushed up and happy to be hidden. The snakes up here have no venom and stay in the garden buried in warm holes. Unlike the mean snakes of Georgia, who always dare you to come near. But if you look hard enough, you can find those snakes here, particularly in New York. They walk on two legs and dare you to come near.

SLS: We’ve been here twelve years, having moved from Southern California. After my first “covered dish” (we referred to them as ‘pot luck’) I knew I was firmly in the South when my cilantro and black bean salsa was overlooked for a congealed salad with a pretzel crust. I didn’t take it personally and can now create a fine presentation for any covered dish occasion, any time!

Nothin’ like spendin’ all day on your hands and knees in the woods diggin’ ‘gensang’ and ‘yeller root’, to fund the next expedition to the top of that hill with a couple friends, a tent, and all the natural light you can carry. Cept, maybe the addition of a string of redeyes caught from Kinni Creek.

Southern Legitimacy Statement

As soon as there was a boat to Virginia, my family was on it. More or less. I grew up in Georgia, and when I go other places, people tell me I don’t have an accent. I don’t consider that a compliment but I don’t think it’s true anyhow. Also, I am one of those Southern women writers, yes, one of those.

I love the South deeply, and I am loyal to grits, scrapple, and storytelling.

I have been humbled. Schooled so to speak. Returning to college has taught this old gal a new trick or two about being herself…which is of course in the broadest sense Southern, but in the more narrow about being a Short “A” Appalachian native. These last few weeks, I have been taught (from a very passionate West Virginia App Lit professor at New River Valley Community College in Dublin, Virginia) that us App’s have been rightly overlooked in the literary canon sense of the word and culture, and language…and well, come to think of it in just about everything!. But what’s a good Southern, Appalachian, Virginia gal to do? Weep Scarlet O’Hara style? Why no, darling, dry those tears! I’ll be damned, I’ve got Appalachian DNA and that means of all things, I’m stoic. Independent. Proud! My Southern roots have been aptly verified and verily ratified (right here on the Mule) to which I say red velvet cake, yes! Hot cornbread and cold milk, hell yes! To that let’s add a shout out to my new found and embraced Appalachian culture. So…If you’s up my holler which is a yonder piece up the way a ball-hootin’ ….you aught knowed it might be a cold ‘un so stop a spell and you’uns share a cathead and flannel cake with this ole hussy. You’ns here?

Come back You’ns swan?

I have lived in North Carolina for twelve years. I was born in Rolla, Missouri and now live in what my relatives would call the “big city” of Raleigh. I am somewhat doubtful about writing a Southern legitimacy statement because I have serious doubts about my legitimacy, or at least that of my mother. But I’m a true Southerner, laid back to the point where I probably spend more time in traffic commuting from Durham to Raleigh and back than actually working.

My father grew up in the western Missouri with no running water, plumbing or electricity. That might not be Southern, but does that sound familiar to anyone here? My daddy’s grandmother’s claim to fame is that she could pour a dishpan full of moonshine into a jug without spilling a drop. I may not be a moonshine drinkin’, sweat-drippin’, pickup drivin’, yankee hatin’ redneck who eats greasy bacon, runny eggs fried in lard with grits, and sits on my neighbor’s sagging porch drinking beer and smoking cigars, but I like to write about them, and I do enjoy an occasional meal of shrimp and grits.

I lived in the South–Alabama and Georgia–about 20 years.

I was born, raised, and have lived my entire life in Louisiana. My high school’s mascot was a rebel foot soldier, and our flag was the Confederate flag. My Me-Maw’s pecan pie was the product of a secret miracle recipe that to this day cannot be reproduced. My grandfather wore his best overalls to church. Although I’m now a vegetarian (an unforgivable offense where I’m from), I can shoot and skin anything, set crawfish traps and run a trot line (but never on Sundays). I learned to swim in ponds, out-swimming water moccasins and mosquitoes. The good and the bad, the exquisite and the brutal, the refined and the raw, I am and always will be a proud Son of the South.

I have always been Southern in my heart. William Faulkner and Truman Capote are my favorite authors. Grits, kale, collards, all my favorite vegetables. I love the South.

For more than 30 years I have lived in North Carolina, which last I knew, was still considered part of the South even if the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area probably has as many Northerners as Southerners living in these part nowdays and you can’t find a meat and three vegetable restaurant or hushpuppies any place. Please let me know if you have kicked us out of the South. Before that I was from Appalachian Pennsylvania and West Virginia which are lot like the South except we say you-ens instead of you all. My story also takes place in the South. So, I guess I got my bases covered. I understand you like under 1,000 words and I tried but I guess, like horseshoes, it doesn’t count because I got 1,150 words. Hope you still like it. Lydia, Janine and James are really good Southern people. Leticia and Bobby, too.

Sothern Legitimacy Statement

There is now place that compares to the South. I’ve been around to quite a few place, with family and alone. I enjoy seeing different places, experiencing different customs, tasting different food, but crossing that invisible line back into the South is the greatest feeling.

On road trips, we’d pester my father to give us an idea how much longer we had to drive, how much further we had to go. He’d drive on, stoic, minding us as little as possible. He confided in me once while I was riding in the passenger seat that he’d be a lot more comfortable ‘once we got back across the line. Just look or the “Grits” sign. When we see grits advertised, then we’re back in the South.”

I still use that logic today. Sure, they sell grits all over the place, but when you pull into a restaurant and see that huge sign assuring you they sell grits, you know you’re in the South. Sausage and gravy, red eye gravy, and cheese to put in the grits are a given.

d prefer to let the work speak for itself as much as possible. Its set in Lousiana and up the Ohio river. And though it doesn’t all take place in the physical south, it all takes place in the mental south. The river mind.

Although after living in the South for over thirty years, I still find it more natural to say “You guys” than “Y’all,” I hadn’t realized how Southern my progeny had become until a recent dinner with my son and his family. My son, who was born and raised in Atlanta, prepared curried chicken over grits.

Born and raised along the graceful river traces in Louisiana, I kept a keen ear and eye on things around me. I must have known that one day I would write about all the feuds and fistfights, scandals and scams, and hellfire and salvation that brought color to our little world. In between time, we feasted on a mess of what folks today call “soul food”: cornbread and collards, grits and gravy, catfish and hushpuppies, sweet potato fries and pecan pie, hot water bread and purple hull peas. We had no special name for our “cuisine” — just “food.” It costs a lot more once you give it a fancy name.

Southern Legitimacy Statement

I don’t have the first clue what it means to be a “legitimate southerner,” but I do have some historical cred. On my Daddy’s side, I come from a long line of rebels and malcontents that first settled in the south before the Revolutionary war. My great-great-great grandpa Joshua settled in Virginia, in what later became the State of Franklin, a proto-rebellion before the big show got started in Concord. The family lore says he knew Daniel Boone, but I swear to God, every southerner has relatives who once knew Daniel Boone. His kids moved Tennessee and then to Mississippi, where they settled just south of Oxford, before the Cherokee and Choctaw were all driven west. They stayed about a generation and then picked up and moved again, this time to Pope County, Arkansas. My great-great-great grandfather Hezekiah died of the measles in Little Rock, where he’d gone to serve as a cavalryman for the Confederacy. Ever since, his progeny have lived right there in Pope County, on the cusp of the Ozarks. I’ve moved on to the big city, Little Rock, where I teach and write and think.

Southern Legitimacy Statement
I was born in Alabama, and I now live in Maryland. Maryland is a Southern state, you know. It’s below the Mason-Dixon line. Llots of Yankee transplants would say different, but Yankees don’t have a clue about Southern geography. There’s home (the South), and “up North” (everywhere else). There are home folks (Southerners), and Yankees (everyone else). I make scrumptious fried chicken and biscuits. I believe barbeque is the food of the gods. My blood runs sweet tea.

I am 8th generation Virginian recent transplant to Berkeley CA. Willa Cather is a distant cousin, or was. I love Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams too.

My mind went South in 1964. I was 16, playing football on
sorry-looking fields in front of twenty people on Saturday
afternoons. A teammate bought a magazine and we saw what
Friday Night Lights looked like in Valdosta, Georgia: ten
thousand people in the stands, the gold-and-black uniforms
shining like silk. I started wishing I’d been born there, not
realizing I might have had trouble benching the Valdosta
playbook. My fantasies moved to Knoxville. I dreamed next of
hurling my then-170 pounds at ‘Bama fullbacks, denying them
the checkerboard end zones of Neyland Stadium. Football
passed. Country music took its place. I would boom-box the car
radio and broadcast George Strait and Shelly West to the
unenlightened folk of my backward northern town: New York
City. For the record, I have spent (not done) time in Virginia
and Maryland, for sundry purposes, all of them legal. I have
eaten Southern cooking there and, when he was with us, I never
missed Justin Wilson on the TV. Thanks to him, I now use
Louisiana Hot Sauce on selected breakfast items.

I don’t know exactly what a “southerner” is by single sentence definition, but I know its meaning intuitively from my experience, and I know it when I see it… (read the rest of this SLS)

Ain’t it just like a bunch of Southern folks to have to qualify how Southern they are to other people claiming to be Southern on a site devoted to Southern Letters, so that the other so-called Southerners won’t question the validity of whatever it is they are about to say about some peculiarity of Southern life, their life? Ain’t that just like us. ‘Cause it don’t really matter none to us about what gets said about the South so much as it does who is do the talking. I mean, my granddaddy was born in Tennessee; and if he got to telling me about a flood that that flooded the river over forty feet above the bank when he was little, no doubt I’d have known by his word exactly what happened in the biggest flood in a half-century. But if I didn’t know where he was raised, and I couldn’t hear him tell it in person, then I’d have been real skeptical about a story like that myself. ‘Cause I don’t want somebody else from outside the region telling our stories. So, normally I feel no need to validate my Southern Blood— but I’ll gladly do it here: Born in Nashville. Raised out on Piney River. Schooled up on the Cumberland Plateau. Still here. I’ve seen the Grand Ole Opry live no telling how many times. I know what a hogsucker is. I know what a pole cat is. If someone says they measured out a rick, I know what they measured and what the final dimensions are. I’ve heard the old stories. I’ve listened to the tales.I’ve made my pilgrimage to Rowan Oak. I can bring ten orange pekoe tea bags to a quick boil in a medium sauce pan. I can bring the water down to a simmer, and slowly pull the flavor from the leaves in the bags. After they’ve simmered long enough, I can pour that hot tea in with two and a half cups of sugar and enough water to make a gallon and a half out of the sweet medicine. Then I can pour it over ice (maybe a tiny bit of lemon), and go on living another day. Been here all my life. So if ya’ll don’t mind I’d like to tell a story about some places and folks I know.

I’m from Grayson County Kentucky which may not be the deep south but to most folks it is the south as I learned when we moved to California back in 1955 ten years before the state started tipping into the ocean from too many people, cars, freeways and earthquakes where friends called me “Kentuck” and others just “dumb hillbilly” and a teacher once accused me of abusing the English language and I said I abused it no more than Bill Shakespeare and he said get out of my class…

Justin Smith was born in a border town in deep South Texas, and he’s spent most of his life trying to figure out if that qualifies him as Southern or not. His favorite pastimes include listening to unordained pirate radio preachers on the AM dial and drinking cheap bourbon.

Bred and buttered in Lynchburg, Virginia. Been frog gigging and fishing with a hula popper. Had chiggers and poison ivy. Went to college at Virginia Tech. Know how to make buttermilk biscuits and blackberry cobbler. Love my mom and got more dogs than cats. Wouldn’t have it any other way.

Reared in Mississippi; married in Louisiana; raised a family in Texas. When I get north of Kentucky I get shortness of breath, cold sweats, blurred vision. It’s a weary existence far from home.

I grew up and continue to live in the flatwoods outside Baxley, Georgia. Aside from that, my story serves as my SLS. If that’s not enough, we must have drastically different interpretations of what constitutes “southern-ness.”

SOUTHERN LEGITIMACY STATEMENT:
Not countin’ schoolin’, I have lived in the south, in the North Carolina mountains, for my en-tire natural life to this very point in time. My father is partly to blame for this. His humorless ancestors (judging by the few pictures we have) were among the earliest settlers of Ashe County, although I don’t believe it had been so identified when they got there. Named after Samuel Ashe, a patriot of the Revolutionary War and notable jurist of the Superior Court bench, Ashe County is stuck uncomfortably in the northwesternmost corner of the Carolinas with Virginia on the immediate north and Tennessee just to the west, right in the saddle of the wandering Blue Ridge Mountains. Jefferson is the county seat, and Jefferson is where I grew up. If anyone ever knew how my father’s family first found themselves clawin’ out an existence in this cold mountain town, they have long since been silenced by slow, inexorable time and no record of that journey was left behind. So no one knows for sure. I suspect they must have migrated to the mountains sometime before the town and county were incorporated, such that it appeared to everyone thereafter that father’s family was simply indigenous to the area, as if like rhododendrons they had sprung up out of the cold ground at the beginning of time. It is doubtless no secret therefore that I carry what is almost certainly compromised genetic material, but that, I s’pose, balances out about right with knowin’ where yer from.

I was born in Forrest City, AR. Moved to Russellville, AR when I was four. Went to college in Boca Raton, FL, for a year to play football. People thought I was dumb because I talked slower than them. By about mid-semester most of the team was coming to me for help in Composition One. Wore boots, a red flannel, and Wranglers out to my first ever club in Fort Lauderdale and got some funny looks. After one year, transferred back to Arkadelphia, AR, and now attend Ouachita Baptist University. I still play ball.

My grandfather’s grandfather was a doctor who graduated from Vanderbilt and was a field surgeon in the General Sterling Price’s southern cavalry–the War broke him and he became an alcoholic, though he was sober enough to deliver my grandfather. The family story goes that the Johnstons–my grandmother’s people–were related to the Civil War Confederate generals Joseph Johnston and Albert Sydney Johnston. My grandmother’s father was a spy for the South at 14 and when he died at 84 still had the saber scar on his bottom where a Union captain sliced him and cut off the back of his saddle as he escaped from an inn after throwing a cup of coffee in the face of a black man who sat at the table across from him–this story was told with pride when I was a boy and at the age of five it made me sick. Martin King is my most beloved American and my childhood friends were blacks, hispanics and dust-bowl whites from Oklahoma, Arkansas, etc. My mother was a graduate of Stanford, but as a boy at a poor school I said “k-a-i-n-t” instead of “can’t” in order to fit in and not embarrass my less fortunate friends. Half the South after the Civil War and the Dust Bowl ended up in California, where I was born. That’s how my people got out here, and they were still talking about the burning of Atlanta when I was a boy.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I live in Austin and was born in San Antonio, which are technically in the South but fall more in the Southwestern category. However, I did go to summer camp in Tennessee, which inspired this story, and I am currently raising three gulf coast box turtles (exclusive to the South) in my bathroom.

Whether by birth or adoption, southern legitimacy is an earned position, the result of listening to and telling stories. It’s the best form of therapy, particularly if explored with agreeable friends and in the company of front-porch libations.

My SLS
Things that I have done that make me Legitimately Southern: I drew my first (and will probably draw my last) breath in a shallow part of the Deep South. My family has always called biscuits “Cat Heads” – understand, it ain’t a biscuit unless it is handmade and the dough punched out with a tin can. Those things squeezed inside a roll of cardboard are NOT biscuits. I have a cousin named Man and another named Tater Head – notice I did not say “called.” I have done my business in an outhouse, realizing too late that all that was left of the Sears catalogue was its front and back cover. I have done other business in the woods at night. My granddaddies rolled their own cigarettes and spit a lot. I have pulled water from a well and not for the pure delight of it; nor was it part of some museum’s cultural, educational activity. I have ridden in both a mule drawn wagon and ground slide. I have been pulled through a cotton field on a cotton sack by one of my cotton-pickin uncles. Once me, Man, and Tater Head climbed up in the loft of Uncle Leon’s barn with a pair of Aunt Gladys’s old garden britches and a shirt. We tied ‘em together with hay strang and stuffed ‘em with hay until we had a headless lookin thang that we dropped down into Bessy’s stall and onto her back while she was eatin corn. I have lied about causing farm animals to damage farm structures. One time me and Tater Head was fishin for mud cats after we had heard Ronnie Joe tell about seein flyin fish while he was in the Navy. The first mud cat Tater Head caught – when he finally got it off the hook – he slung it not quite straight up into the air, but more on an ever-so-slight angle behind him. The sun blinded Tater Head when he looked up to watch it sail up against the blue sky the way Ronnie Joe had described, so he lost track of it, or else he woulda had sense enough to move. That mud cat come down and stuck right between Tater Head’s shoulder blades by one of its side fins. Tater Head became a Pentecostal preacher who could speak in tongues. Man decided he was tired of Uncle Grover and Aunt Gladys tellin him what to do all the time, so he joined the Army. We found out later that Ronnie Joe served four years all right, but not in the navy. So, considering me and mine, I’m Southern enough, I think.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I grew up on the outskirts of a small Mississippi town in a house at least a mile from the first paved road. My brothers and I made games out of throwing red clay clods at one another. My mother has never been able to extract the letter R out the word “wash”. I married my high school sweetheart. Her great-grandmother sat on her porch and listened to the cannons of Shiloh. I get chills at “A Country Boy Can Survive”. I wouldn’t change a thing.

Okay, I admit, I went to school at Cornell and Columbia University (yes the one in the Big Apple) but grew up in Oklahoma and Arkansas and MS. I have an alcoholic Granma Eunice who hid Lambrusco bottles and Winston’s at the boat dock at Lake Eufalula.She got blasted while checking those trot lines. That’s in Eufaula, OK (But close to the Arkansas line). She said Jesus drank wine so why not her?

I went to seventh grade in Hattiesburg , MS and remember a bum I once saw begging for money, holding a Bible. I also developed my taste for fried okra and my admiration of boy healers in Mississippi.A kid named Orville who was at the same school I was at was in fact a healer. I also learned about how hairspray helps in the humidity and about Junior League and how I would never be able to join, having some Indian blood in me from way back. But the Dizzy Daisy Society might take me in when married–if I married a dentist or some upstanding man from the area, a friend’s Mother assured me. Luckily, we moved back to Ft Smith then hopped the state line to Southern OK, Carter County just in time for high school. I was Golf Queen ’81. Those teen years were mighty glamorous.

I currently live in Oklahoma these days b/c that ‘s where I landed a college teaching job, 80 miles west of Fort Smith .I have lots of cousins in Fort Smith as they never left the area, and I visit as Cousin Dell would say “alot.” We usually drink and holler at kids who lick the toads because someone told them they could get high from licking a toad’s ass. Kids, what are you gonna do with ‘ em?

When not drinking on my porch with my friend Patsy, a lawyer and redneck as she practices personal injury law, and talking about dumb guys and academic weenie type of guys who think their shit don’t stink and working the job & busying myself with buying lottery tickets, I write .

April 2010

We did not expect to publish another review in the Mule so soon nor to realize this will be the second of a trilogy of reviews of poetry books we will publish this year. But even before I read Paper House, I knew I would write one for this book. Jessie Carty is a poet of considerable promise—a brave poet who does not shy away from herself and the stories only she can tell. Her book of poems is among my favorites. Jessie has also written an essay that appears below this review. Read and enjoy. The third review will most likely be published in July.

Long quotations appear with permission.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

When I started my first full time, career driven job, I was surprised at how many people I worked with that would make fun of people who lived in trailers and mobile homes. I wondered how can you call yourself Southern if you haven’t lived in a trailer or at least known someone who lived in one?

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I am a life-long Virginian. While I am not proud of it, I was a member of the Children of the Confederacy. You had to have a proven kinship with a veteran in order to join—and you then forever answered the role-call with the name of your Confederate ancestor. I could have joined on either side of the family, having blood- relative Confederate veterans on both. That I chose to join on my mother’s side cost me the affection of my paternal aunt for the rest of her life. I also have three first cousins named Skeeter, Bunk, and Puddin’.

Editor’s Note:

The Dead Mule looks forward to publishing one Southern Poet Laureate each April. Please welcome our fourth Mule Poet Laureate, Claudia Emerson, Poet Laureate of Virginia.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I learned all about living in the North the hard way. I lived there. Lived in a little lake-effect town south of Erie where recreation consisted mostly of scraping snow off your car in the morning, at lunchtime and when driving home from work. Then donning your mukluks and walking to the tavern for a sandwich and a beer just so you didn’t have to scrape snow again.

Also lived in Pittsburgh where things were marginally better. Finally figured out that the South is the place to be. Moved to Key West, which is the ideal spot if you’re independently wealthy. I’m not, so for the past 15 years North Carolina has been my happy home. My Southern Legitimacy Statement is mostly this: I hate winter. I’m writing this as we get seven inches of snow. Considering that this is the first measurable snowfall we’ve had this winter, I can live with it.

I am perhaps not as legitimate as the real Southerners. They will not drive in the lightest dusting of snow. They close schools and cancel events when a winter storm cloud crosses the horizon. They buy milk and bread and clear out the supermarket shelves when snow is predicted because, well, they’ve been told that’s what you do when it snows. Doesn’t occur to them that in two days it will be 50 again and the snow will melt and they’ll be feeding bread to the birds and pouring milk down the sink. But I am a Southerner because this is a darned nice place to live and because it’s actually nice to see snow when it’s not a steady diet. And “y’all” is such a genteel and sweet collective pronoun compared to “you’uns” and “youse guys.”

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I like to tell people I am a Southerner with the misfortune of having been born in New Jersey. They believe it for about half the statement. I can’t help the way I talk. I was born and raised by parents that talked this way, by my grandfather that talked this way, and all of my friends growing up talked this way. By the time I moved to North Carolina I was eighteen and my vocal chords and tongue were already honed and curled into Yankee colloquialisms. Changing the way I talk would be like trying to become left-handed after having grown up right-handed. It doesn’t happen. But I am a Southerner! I like grits, fried chicken, turnips and collard greens, country ham, black-eyed peas, and northern style pizza. I include northern style pizza because it is better and most Southerners like it better. We connect that way. Besides all of what I like there is a sign on the New Jersey Turnpike somewhere around Exit 3 that says “Mason-Dixon Line” and that has to count for something in my Southernization, but I don’t like mayonnaise.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I have a great Alabama barbed-wire scar on my left thigh. My wife knows where it is. I was a Bowdon, Georgia Red Devil and played middle-linebacker and once had my helmet split in half by Chris Ellis–he was a fullback from Ranburne, Alabama, a hoss. What you do is break off the tiny green tip and then suck the juice out of the honeysuckle. A Farmer’s Almanac is better than any bevy of meteorologists. You mix your cornbread with your black-eyed peas in a bowl and use a wooden spoon. Don’t step on a water moccasin; I’m just sayin’. Drink cold beer while you cut the grass and watch for mounds of fire ants.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I am a traveler by heart, but the South is home. Georgia is a state that stays with you, it sings, it will kick your ass for throwing around the word “redneck”. The South today is written on dirt roads, iPods, and steadfast courtesy. Raised in Athens, Georgia to move in my teen years to the Blue Ridge Mountains, I’ve left no cultural stone unturned. An artist only creates from what he knows. As the University of Georgia swells with brilliant stars, there’s also a visceral sense of religion, superstition, and the blues. You don’t have to be from the South to be Southern; it’s a matter of soul. As a Southern poet I try to reflect this complicated beauty while also calling out demons. As far as you are able, join faith to reason. –Boethius

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I’m a mountain mama, born south of the Mason-Dixon in West-bygod-Virginia, daughter of an itinerant preacher-to-miners. Although I’ve not lived in my birth state for many years, y’all can still hear traces of twang in my speech. I warsh my hair, dry it with a tail-el. At night my head rests on a pilla and the winda is open. Grits are always in my pantry and the freezer’s stocked with soup beans even though I’ve had to forego frying everything in bacon fat. For four happy months each year, I get to live in the deep south. Pass the cornbread, please.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My childhood home was a one bedroom, one bath, painted red oddity that stood on stilts even though we were miles from any kind of water.

Down at the river that was a few miles away, We used to go crabbing, a lazy sport of hanging fishing line with bait off the end of the pier. When we’d caught enough my family’d toss them all into a huge pot over a fire in the back yard. The only way I liked crab was when my Mom would make crab creole.

I’m pretty sure our version of creole wasn’t authentic since none of us had been as far South as Louisiana (well except to drive through to Texas, but we didn’t stop) but at least we know BBQ is pulled pork that shouldn’t require extra sauce since the flavor is in the meat. I’ll fight ya over that.

Southern Legitimacy Statement, Volume II:

Lately I have been mining my mother’s life the way some people in my adopted home of Appalachia used to mine coal: burrowing down carefully into her life with all the necessary equipment, including a good lantern. Audrey McClary was born so long ago that her past is much a history lesson as her present is a lesson in how to survive dementia with grace and (mostly) southern charm. Once I wrote a poem called “Slop,” in which I talked about the awkward moment of hearing my mother call a grown man “Boy,” something she never would have done in her “right” mind. If my parents did nothing else right, they raised us to be the antithesis of racist. Yet somewhere inside my mother’s mind was a time when she said racist things, before she became the woman sitting on a city bus who would sit with black women and go off to the S&S Cafeteria to eat lunch, sometimes, with a new black friend. Before my mother lost her memory, she talked about Charleston and wanting to go home. She can’t go home, but I can go home for her, in my poems, and in person, and I can hang a photograph above her bed of the wild dunes she played on as a child and that I have walked more recently, following her path to find my own.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Momma was born in Arkansas, Daddy in Mississippi. For the geographically challenged, that’s opposite sides of the river. If you have to ask which one, I wouldn’t admit it. I have no idea how they got together; as far as I know neither one could swim worth a hoot.

Born in Memphis, I grew up in the Tri-State area, living in small towns that spawned the stories and themes in my work. Both my family names are all over the map of this region, but I joined the service, traveled the world, educated myself, became a total stranger to those who stayed behind. So I returned to memories of a South of a different era; some good, some bad.

I remember sharecroppers, black tenant farmers, picking cotton by hand, mule-drawn plows and wagons. And stoop sitting before TV.

I remember the black school on the far side of town that got our hand-me-down football pads and helmets. And porch gliders.

I remember preachers denouncing JFK from the pulpit, and driving smart kids away from religion. And grocery deliveries by high school kids working after school.

I remember the falsettoed phoniness of the “Belles” who cracked their make-up if they quit smiling. And making a pretty good meal of sausage gravy and fresh-baked biscuits. Any meal.

I remember Moon Pies, Nehi Grapes and big orange drinks. And pecan pie.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I am Southern by virtue of ancestry. My mom’s family (McWhorters) is one of the oldest families in Waxhaw, NC, where everyone knows Andrew Jackson was born. I grew up in Ft. Lauderdale and visited my grandparents practically every summer, spending countless hours on the front porch swing where I could hear Uncle George’s hunting dogs a few blocks over bark and howl every time the train ran through the middle of town. One time my dad sent me to Nesbit’s store to pick up some Half and Half (he meant the milk/cream thing), but when I asked the ladies at the store they gave me Half & Half Tobacco. Boy, was my dad angry.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born and raised in Shelby, NC, where there are probably still a few folks who know me only as “E.P. and Susan’s little girl.” Summer Sundays after church were often spent with my extended family in the mountains. We’d take a picnic of cold fried chicken, deviled eggs, tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches on white bread, pecan pie and sweet tea). When I was not eating, I was swimming in the cold mountain streams and creeks. I’ve wandered a bit – four years in South Jersey (a foreign country); eight years in Maryland, where they are still southern enough to never forgive Abe Lincoln for sending federal marshals to arrest legislators who might have voted for succession. But the mountains of NC won my heart early and that’s where I’ve been for most of the last 17 years. True to my southern heritage, my cats have always had two names—the current kitties are Mary Louise (Mary Lou) and Jessica Grace (Jessie Grace). My husband, who is from Arkansas, didn’t think he was southern until he became addicted to shrimp and grits. Only after we married did he confess that he wondered if he would ever see me wearing anything other than blue jeans.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born in Biloxi, Mississippi, and grew up in California. When I graduated middle school and told everyone my family was moving to Kentucky, they did one of the following two things. They asked me how much fried chicken I was going to eat, or they’d fake a southern accent. Bonus points if they did both. I think that’s some sort of baptism by fire.

Also, there is nothing better than collard greens, except for hot sauce. On absolutely everything.

Oh yeah, as a mulatto, there’s some kind of (offensive) connection between the mule and myself. But no one but can say that, other than me.