Southern Legitimacy Statement:
When i was six, and we lived in Gainesville, Ga., my great-granddaddy (Mr. Arthur Wright) told me that if a turtle bit you, it would hold on til it thundered. (i believed him but tried to test it anyhow.) Then, chewing raw garlic like it was a piece of Juicy Fruit gum in church on fourth Sunday, and smiling, he offered me a taste. i bit the garlic and went into a trance of sensory overload. Instantaneously accepted that the world was amazing, miraculous, and real surprising, all at once. And that was good because when we moved up the road to Cornelia, Ga. soon after (when my bio-parents separated), there was at least 20 of us living in a four room wooden house. i’m Southern to the bone because i though all of that was “normal.”

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born up in the southern end of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. As far as I know, I’m legitimate (in our town, I’d have heard if the various widow ladies had come up a finger or two short in their count). I married a Northerner (as opposed to a Yankee), so I’m more or less in exile for the time being. As it happens, I did have grits for breakfast this morning (butter and pepper, thank you) and I am drinking sweet tea as I write this.

I think I spent far too many years thinking the unthinkable for a living. This has had no effect on me that I’m aware of, though I do have a predilection for collecting odd people and an inordinate thirst for Dr. Pepper. While my physical position is generally indeterminable, my heart is firmly anchored at 38.9N,78.2W.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My family lived in rural Alabama when I was a kid.
I was to witness some big changes in the south after WW2. Although change was inevitable I loved the old south. I’ve tried to preserve the south I knew in short stories. Sadly I have few writing skills to showcase. Some of my stuff is a combination of truth and fiction. My story, “A Mule Tale” is true in fact I’m surprised at the number of mule stories I have store in my head.
Hopefully this story will create a yearning among the readers for more.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My Latino roots offer a unique perspective to my Southern legitimacy. I was raised so far in the South it’s not even the South to many, that’s how far south I lived, Miami to be exact. Eventually I moved up with you “northerner’s” to Raleigh, North Carolina, and was introduced to a pig pickin’ almost immediately. My friendly neighbors weren’t impressed about how we Colombians do the exact same thing, but they were awful polite! So here I am, a stranger in a strange land, 5 years now. I say hey, not good morning, and my wife is hot on the trail of the best hushpuppy recipe she can find. Legitimacy established!

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Watch and learn as we take a Mule Poet and turn her into a Mule Flash Fiction Writer.

My Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I’m Southern by adventurous inoculation. I left college in Chicago the first week of January as a White Seattleite with Mardi Gras on the brain. My friend and I got a lift from Farrell Haney in a rumbling Camaro convertible with Texas plates, and spent the first night away in a hotel in Kentucky. Pool was closed and covered with a thatch of brown leaves that stuck to us like fish scales: baptized as we swam a celebrating-being-free lap.
When Farrell disappeared with all our stuff in New Orleans, we tracked him to Homa, Not the Other Homer, where we got to look into the flashlights and down the barrels of the Sheriffs’ guns, in the process of getting our gear back. With over a month to go before Fat Tuesday, we turned up at the local manpower barracks for roustabouts. Swede was the foreman and had just tossed a couple of guys out with a couple of smacks of his 2×4 and needed some fresh meat. Welcome to the Company Store… After 5 weeks of dwindling funds, with the pay from a 23 hour stint of throwing bags of drilling sand as a grubstake, we broke out of servitude and went to stay with the Brothers of the Little Lamb in the City. Fifty cents a night; grits, gravy and okra for breakfast. With luck, we’d be picked each morning for dish washing and room service prep at the alley entrance of the Roosevelt. We finally got to see her, and she was worth it. We sneaked below the chains and rode under the captain’s window on the river ferry crossing, bringing our boyhoods into synch with our surroundings. We manpowered at the Picayune and at the airstrip. Eight of us descaled the inside bilge compartment of a river tug with welding hammers that rang like a waterfall of ball bearings on a tin roof. We lived on red beans and rice, with sometimes tea, and slept under azaleas in the park when Brother Joseph smelled the wine on our breath. Yeah, we got in on the party, too.
My buddy and I separated in March, he for the Smokies and me for Austin. I left town on a one speed cruiser towing an upside down Pirogue. Never made Austin. Seems that all the traffic on the southern route to Texas puts bikes onto the shoulders; since there’s not a stone to be found for highway work, tiny shells are packed down instead and wait to suck in big fat paperboy bike tires. I hitched home with $2.67 in my pocket, and left my gear on purpose, this time, with a note for whichever bayou-comber found the bike and boat: “All yours. Hope they do you better than me.”
That was forty years ago and I’ve been selling hardware on the West Coast since then. But if the Real Estate agent or the Seller had dropped their commission or asking price even another $5K three years ago, I’d be selling screws out of Shelbyville, Kentucky, today and loving it.
By the way, if you are reading this and happen to have found the blue bike and pirogue with wheels, let me know! I’ve got yourall owner’s manual.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Tennessee, started growing up in Louisiana, and finished in Virginia. I have never lived anywhere but the American South and to me it is normal. Being Southern is like being tall (which I am) in so far as it’s most noticeable when you’re around people who are not. I explain why I don’t play basketball with the same enthusiasm with which I acknowledge that certain contractions I use in everyday conversation are not officially recognized. Bein’ tall doe’n't mean youc’n play good. Talkin’ diff’rent doe’n't mean you can’t write right. Right?

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Despite being born in central Texas, I was raised among the wheat fields of Oklahoma. Where the lazy hawks swooped through tornado alley and we all would get sick from eating too many crab apples. The land of the Indians, the outlaws domain, and the center of Big XII football was my home for 10 years of my youth. Now, living south of the Red River, I enjoy the winter season in shorts and sandals, a snow cone while Christmas Caroling, and wonder why anyone would want to shovel snow. If that is not enough to prove my southern legitimacy, please note: my grandparents were second cousins!

Retreating Aggressively into the Dark by Harry Calhoun Presented by Big Table Publishing Company Chapbook Series “In this mostly good life there are mornings / when I want to slip back into bed and curl fetal,” begins Retreating Aggressively into the Dark, the newest collection of poetry by Pushcart Prize nominee Harry Calhoun. From dealing [...]

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I relocated to suburban Atlanta, GA in 2003 and since then have really enjoyed becoming immersed in Southern culture. Belligerent, like many Notherners at the start, I have grown to enjoy the food. I look the other way when I see a Confederate flag and appreciate most of all the more mannerly approach to life that the South has to offer. I eat grits, go to the Waffle House at least once a week, have developed a little bit of an accent, and wouldn’t really dream of living anywhere else if I had a say in the matter.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

In my faraway youth I marvelled at a Confederate soldier’s piece of hardtack on display at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. When I returned years later, I still had nothing to offer, except 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.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

As a true son of the South I display the Confederate banner this Flag Day. I visit Randy James’ Comfort Cafe every Sunday, wipe the red clay off my swamp slippers, and set down, amidst the magnolias, to a spread of pork ‘pullins and the finest moon pies this side of Crabtree Creek.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I know I’m Southern and I have my reasons. First of all, my Daddy was born in Lynch, Kentucky. He demonstrated the right way to skin a muskrat when I was eight–a skill that’s useful for a working poet. I bake cornbread on request—and it’s perfect every time. My favorite fruit is the peach, so perfect when picked ripe and treated gently, so disappointing when raised with indifference. I’m against indifference in any form. Until I was ten I didn’t know there were bed-covers not pieced together and quilted by relatives. Finally, I know I must be Southern because I make the best sweet tea in Detroit, and when I serve small cookies with the tea, I think “tea cakes,” then I think of Teacake, the best character ever in one of the best novels ever, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My family is from Chicago but moved to Six Mile, South Carolina when I was two. The town was rural and filled with a lot of natural beauty. I would run through the pine forests and stare at the dogwoods in our backyard for hours. My family seemed less entranced. My mother hated whenever I would say ain’t. My elementary school football team was called the Termites. I was teased, called a “yankee” from those who knew where my family was from. When I was ten we moved to the quaint Lynchburg, Virginia where Jerry Falwell’s church is located. I went to college in Richmond and fell in love with the city. It has a haunted feel to it. My ex would blame all our arguments on its negative energy: all that unsettling history. Sometimes I would drive around aimlessly for hours there–the cobblestone Shockoe Slip, Monument Avenue and the beautiful Hollywood Cemetery. I live in New York now and would like to go back to Six Mile someday just to walk under the pines again.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

You may blame my Yankee mother when I pour milk and sugar on my grits, but it’s actually my Southern father who hates the cheesy, peppery, gravy-thick, “true” Southern kind. And maybe that’s the point of my legitimacy statement: we’re more than a collection of stereotypes, more than our collards and black-eyed peas, more than our Tennessee Williams and Flannery O’Connor, more than our ass-backward politicians and televangelists and stubborn pride in relatives who fought on the wrong side of a long lost and regrettable war. I am a Southerner, a Floridian, an atheist and a vegetarian. I drink horchata and sweet tea. I listen to Trick Daddy and Loretta Lynne. I love these Southern contradictions, my heritage, but, heaven help me, I don’t like grits.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up in New Jersey and live in New York, where they don’t know how to make a damned Bloody Mary. The Marys here are watery, self-conscious and loaded with Worcestershire to make up for their shortcomings. I feel the same way about the East Coast. I spend everyday near big, important buildings with people who do big, important things. But when I went out to the South, that’s when I realize how sincere life could really be. I had visited Tennessee for a week, and before that went to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia. I fell in love with Butter Rums and backyard alligators. It was endearing to me that people were still selling cassette players and legal fireworks and fanny packs. It disgusted me that a group of church goers were protesting gods against gays. But, I still loved the South because it was honest. Last year I took my first flight alone—into New Orleans. I was kicking myself with fear. But I stayed there for a week, and it changed my life. I ate some gumbo and gawked at the girls on Bourbon. Then, I met some vampires, ate some beignets and almost got killed by a swarm of hornets on the Mississippi. After everything, that flight was well worth it, and the South has spoiled me with its gawdy, pickled, vain, lush, ass-shaking Bloody Marys.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

A friend of mine from Tennessee recently told me that states west of the Mississippi were not the “real” South. Only the ones east of the Mississippi and below the Mason-Dixon Line qualified as Southern. His point might have some validity up here in Northwest Arkansas, where we were about 50-50 Union vs. Confederate, but in actual fact he was wrong. Arkansas, all of it, seceded like the rest of the south, fought against the Union like the other states, and in Reconstruction days was just about as virulently anti-Yankee and anti-social progress as the other recalcitrant states. These are not points of pride but facts of life. It is the white Southerners burden to carry the twin stigmas of having lost the Civil War and to have been on the wrong side of the most important issue of the many issues that informed the War Between the States, namely: slavery – the foulest institution that man has yet devised for maltreating his fellow men and women. Recent attempts by southern governors to celebrate Southern heritage without accepting the historical reality of those twin stigmas show how complex being Southern was, is, and will still be for years to come – whether you live in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee or west of the Mississippi in Arkansas.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I’m from Texas, born and raised. I love steak, I learned everything I know about poetry on a farm in a town that technically doesn’t exist because it doesn’t have a post office. I go to school now at the University of Arkansas, studying creative writing. I love seeing the sun set from different vantage points in the hilly city of Fayetteville. I miss waking up to the sound of a rooster and I still love steak. I’m proud to be from the south and at any chance I get I go visit areas in the south where I haven’t lived like Oklahoma, Mississippi and Alabama.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up so far out in the western Arkansas boonies that once a month a roadgrader passed thru followed by a bookmobile, so far away from other kids my age I thought I must be the only six-year-old in the world and was astonished my first day of school when I saw 25 others crowded into our tiny first grade classroom.

My grandfather was a Choctaw, born on a reservation near Pontotoc, Mississippi. He guided my brother and me into the secret world of the quail and the quiet and taught us to read fur and autumn fire. He told us the slower learner would be traded for a fox.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was raised in a dry county in Mississippi and share the same birthplace as Elvis Aaron Presley. While I took some liberties with the particular species appearing in the poem, I did have the good fortune once of witnessing my grandfather remove mistletoe from a tree by way of shotgun, which remains to this day the most efficient and economical approach to the problem I’ve yet to come across.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born and raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. It’s a small town where almost everyone knows your name, and if they don’t they still wave at you as you drive through town. Everyone grows a garden, has a rocking chair on the front porch, and owns a couple of dogs. Fried chicken and succotash are staples on the dinner table. My father considers corn bread crumbled in a glass of buttermilk to be dessert. Most people still have a wood stove even if they don’t cook on it anymore. And practically everyone has a mason jar of moonshine tucked away in a safe place.

Southern Legitimacy Statement
Not only am I from the South, Arkansas, but with a few exceptions “Southern” or “South” has been part of most everywhere I’ve lived and worked. When I moved from Arkansas just before I turned 16, I moved to the very southernmost area in Southern California – the Imperial Valley, right along the Mexican border. When I went in the service I did basic training in San Antonio, Texas and technical school in Biloxi, Mississippi – in late 1964, the latter was almost “too” southern for me actually. After two years in northern (uh, oh) Japan, I was stationed in Goldsboro, North Carolina. I went to Korea after that – but it’s South Korea. After the service, I had a couple of stints in Nebraska (definitely out of the pattern) but then I began a series of travels taking me south of the border. I lived in Puerto Rico (very south of the border), spent some time in Central America, and a good chunk of time in Mexico. I lived in the southwest as well – in southern Arizona. I think that’s enough places to counter the times I spent in more northern areas like Nebraska, Colorado, and Missouri – although Missouri south of I-70 and west of Columbia is so much like northern Arkansas that you have to be a native to know the difference (if there is one).