Letters of appreciation are appreciated!

I am extremely impressed with Ginosko Literary Journal. If you haven’t given it a read, click on over and enjoy yourself.
Take time to know this journal.
We here at the Mule have our favorites, yes we admit it.
Like Ghoti
… and now this,
Ginosko.
ginosko [...]

We had two mules on our old farm–Bob and Mike. Bob was blind in one eye and Mike died from the grass founder. Bob got old and died a peaceful but lonely death.

My dad was from Mississippi, outside Oxford, and my mom from North Carolina, where I grew up. The old farm was in Randolph County. The old man up and left us and my mom rented out our tobacco allotment and got a job in a mill in town. Later on my grandpa moved in with us. He’d lost half of one arm to a cotton gin back in 1919. Everyone called him “Nub.” He was eighty-two when he moved in and I was ten.

I’ve lived down here most of my life. Did the Southern thing and left, determined to never come back, and came back a few years later. The old farm place was sold years ago and is a trailer court now. I live in a city and work as an editor. I love sweet potatoes.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Southern writers don’t have to make a thing. Good grief: everything just happens right before their eyes.

I was born and raised in a part of the country not thought of a typically southern. I was raised in Estill County, Kentucky, which lies beside the Kentucky River at the foothills of the magnificent Appalachian Mountains. I have always thought of Kentucky as a bastard child of the south. The south doesn’t claim Kentucky in proper society, but we who live there know we belong to the south just the same. Listen to our speech and after three words you know we are related closer to Tennessee and Georgia than we could ever be to our northern cousins. I grew up drinking sweet tea and eating cornbread. I say Mam and Sir. I know what kudzu is and I have tasted moonshine fresh from a still. Now it don’t matter much what you think, because I know I am Southern.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I have had coon dogs, and know how to make sweet tea and fry chicken, fry pork chops, fry everything I think. I know the sounds of Sunday in the south, and I know the whispers of honeysuckle in the twilight. I am southern to the core, for better or for worse.

Editor’s note: All chapbooks in this issue are by invitation only.

Concerning Tim Peeler’s Southern Legitimacy:

“Tim Peeler” means “southern” in the Dead Mule’s book. He’s been in the Mule since way back before the Mule died. Check him out on the Wayback Machine.

We published another chapbook, “Propagation,” by Tim Peeler in November 2007. Check it out.

Editor’s note: All chapbooks in this issue are by invitation only.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was raised on a catfish farm in Eastern Arkansas. My family raised cattle, soybeans, and rice. My favorite meal is biscuits and gravy for breakfast and Memphis ribs for lunch. Supper is cornbread and white beans, of course.

Editor’s note: All chapbooks in this issue are by invitation only.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

In my faraway youth I once marveled at a Confederate soldier’s piece of hardtack on display at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. Truly amazing how descendants of the “old South” honored even apparently common artifacts of their past. When I returned to the museum years later, I still had little to contribute. The best I could offer was the stale wad of gum in my mouth which refused to stick to the bottom of the display case. Perhaps I had fought in the wrong war. And on the wrong side.

Editor’s note: All chapbooks in this issue are by invitation only.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up in south central Virginia and attended college North Carolina. I currently live in New England. I like up here a lot but I do still yearn for the south—its people, places and uniquely southern events. I miss how strangers will tip their hats in greeting, and I miss how thunderstorms roll through in summer with such fury and then leave behind a sky scrubbed clean. I have talked of returning to the South, to Virginia, most likely. A small house with a back porch, on a hill. I can sit in my rocker and stare out at the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. It’s a dream.

Southern Legitimacy Statement #4

My Granny Stephens cooked on a woodstove: pinto beans and turnip greens seasoned in fatback, fried potatoes, cornbread, biscuits and gravy served with fresh out of the barn yard fried chicken. Occasionally, I was sent down into the cellar to retrieve jars of canned tomatoes, chow chow, or icicle pickles. We’d have southern-style tea and lemonade, sweet, succulent, better than store-bought soda pop. And if you could discipline yourself and not overeat, you’d save room for peach cobbler or fried apple pie. Granny knew her woodstove inside-out, top to bottom, and was a master at creating a large delicious meal out of very little food…sort of like what Jesus did with a few fish and a loaf of bread. You had the feeling that something holy had been conjured-up when you sat down at Granny’s table, which is another reason we said grace before every meal.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I wasn’t born or raised in the south, but lived a number of years in the region. What strikes me now, is how different the more geographically south of Florida is compared with the more linguistically south of North Carolina. Perhaps this has more to do with where I lived in each place, but it is the latter that I think of when I think of the south. It is the charge of a language of place creating it’s own world. Of words I thought I knew taking on and creating a space to dwell, to live and be alive. I hope some of this is in my poems.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up on a farm in North Carolina. I never picked cotton—too young when that was preferred crop to plant. I did pick cucumbers, shuck corn, crop tobacco, and slop hogs. I can tell you almost anything about raising tobacco, from preparing the plant beds, to setting out the tobacco plants, to topping and suckering the plants, to putting in tobacco—looping the tobacco leaves on tobacco sticks and hanging them in a barn to cure, to taking down a barn of tobacco and grading the leaves, to scaling and selling the cured leaves at the tobacco market. If that doesn’t make me southern, then I don’t know what does.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I’m a Louisianan, once removed, from Shreveport—where sweating in the sun in the brambles behind my step-grandma’s backyard, gathering the wild strawberries that grew there, and stealing a few from my sweaty hands, from the batches meant for jam, was the most delicious thing ever.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up in Virginia. My first French-kiss was on the steps of the Custis-Lee Mansion. I chew Grizzly Wintergreen Long Cut because it’s less expensive than Skoal.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My county (Stanly County, like most southern counties) had segregated schools. My grandmother stored all of the books from the “black” school (West Badin High School), when they closed it down, in her garage. As a very young girl (beginning at the age of 3), my grandmother would allow me to go out there and read anything and everything my heart desired. From those early lessons with her, I became a lover of words and an advocate for the Civil Rights Movement. At my old school, they used to call me “Miss Black History.” Most of the books showed the debacle of slavery and spoke in the Ebonic and pidgin dialect from the plantation slaves and the voice of Zora Neale Hurston. THAT was the intelligence I knew. The word (Pateroller) was meant to be patroller or the ones that searched for slaves. Even in 2010, my county still shows signs of segregation and the inconsistencies of equality rears its ugly head.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My background is Louisiana—conceived in New Orleans, born in Minden, raised in Haynesville. I have published two novels with a Louisiana setting, though the town of Oil Camp, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Haynesville, appears on no map. I once lived in Kentucky, thinking that it was northern because of the proximity of my town up there to Ohio. I now live in rural northwest Arkansas, which isn’t nearly as
Southern as it thinks it is but will have to do for the time being.