Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I can claim ancestry to the South because my ma used to live in Louisiana and her brother, wife and family of 6 married kids all live below the Mason-Dixon line. Personally, however, I’ve only flown over the Southern states on my way to Florida twice—once to perform at DisneyWorld with my high school marching band (boy, did I think I was going to melt like the wicked witch of the West that day) and then for business. Figuratively speaking though, I have to admit that I feel akin to a handful of Southern writers: Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Conner, Cormac McCarthy, Anne Tyler, and most significantly Reynolds Price. The humanity in their works inspire me. Have you ever read an author and felt connected to them because of how they carefully and nonjudgementally depicted the human condition; and how we can rise from the ashes and find redemption, even under the ugliest of circumstances? Yep, that’s how I feel about these writers.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up living in a red house on stilts that was over a mile away from even a small body of water. How is this Southern? How is it not! In that same house we spent most of the summer sleeping in the screened in porch that made up most of the second floor. The first floor was mainly cement so during those same summers we could still break out a baby pool and swim while it was raining outside. We could also have a crab boil or grill hot dogs right there beneath the house while our wolf looking German Shepherd, Lady, looked on.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was raised in a town of 2500 souls in South Carolina where I ate grits, red-eyed ham, fried okra, and sopped gravy made from southern fried chicken. My great-grandfather was a foot soldier in the War Between the States. I still speak south-talk despite the efforts of northern friends to convince me it sounds ‘dumb’. I miss the Platters, crinolines softly rustling under my skirt, and driving around the dairy bar on Saturday nights to see if any cute boys were in town.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

* I believe I am legitimate; my father believed it, anyway, which is what counts.
* I live in the South but don’t answer to my name when it is pronounced by a Southerner.
* I do think about the South now and again, especially when a wild turkey lands on the back lawn, but I avoid thinking about fried green tomatoes.
* I am better acquainted with the Arctic Circle than the Mason-Dixon Line.
* I have a large extended family but they never visit except when they need a free motel on the way to somewhere else/better.
* After many years close to the Arctic Circle, I may allow a moose to slip into a poem here and there. But he always leaves before I can get a shot off.
* To help me settle in, I attended a Biscuit Workshop in Franklin, Tennessee.
* I bought Cornbread Nation.
* During my last visit to an ABC, I was startled to see a big display of apple pie flavored moonshine.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I can only say, I gape on the corner, golden-haired and curious.

I’ve moved over 40 times in my life. Does settling in Arizona count as Southern living? If not, I apologize, it’s all sunshine and blisters.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Alexis, NC raised, I come from a true southern, mountain backwoods, moonshining heritage, and even serve as an editor of the prose journal moonShine review, though that’s a totally different kind of “Shine”. My family swore off Shine running a generation or two back and went legal with my brother’s Woodmill Winery business just several years ago in Vale, NC. I write about many topics, but growing up Southern is one of my favorite inspirations. l reckon I’m just a farm girl at heart, residing for the past twenty years in the big city of Charlotte, NC.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Is it because my kids were born in Durham County General? Not really. Is it because my mom was a cheerleader at Reynold’s High and my dad’s camp counselor was Terry Sanford? Nope. Not because my grandfather was a Seaboard engineer in Hamlet, NC. Not because his grandfather still has his name on a pew in Wingate Baptist Church, and not even because great-great-etc. James Griffin walked down from Virginia in 1760 to plow a farm in Union County. No, it’s because thirty years ago I planted a redbud in the side yard, and this spring all down the ridge behind the house there are little redbuds blooming.

Southern legitimacy Statement:

I was born and raised in Portsmouth, Va. My father is from Little Rock, Ark. and though I have not lived south of the Mason Dixon Line for many years, I still love old Virginia. Love what I have read so far on your website.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I went to my last two years of high school in Greenville, NC, and undergrad at Elon University in Elon, NC. More importantly, my Daddy’s family is southern, I have been in more than one heated argument concerning BBQ (Eastern style all the way), have near encyclopedic knowledge of ACC basketball, and remember a time when you could walk out on Johnnie Mercer Pier for free.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Y’all have a Southern Legitimacy statement from me that accompanied two poems last July. Nothing much has changed:
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. My wife is from the state of New York but she will not admit this in mixed company. I regularly take her home to Louisiana, where she is learning dipthongs and other voice softners.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I have twice been published in the Dead Mule, and that’s as legitimate as you get, but, just in case:

I was born in Wayne County, NC, a mecca of eastern NC style BBQ and spent summers in Jones County, NC, where the snakes come from. i spent those summers in the scorching tobacco fields and lived on tomato sandwiches, sliced cucumbers and a nightly helping of Jerry Clower on the radio with my granddaddy. little Jimmy Dickens talked of “tsking an old cold tater and wait.” we might get a tater along with the cucumbers, but they were never cold, and we were never forced to wait. On the cool evenings, there might be a big pot of butter beans or chicken and tomato soup, complete with the hearts,. Now that’s Southern, but, again, just in case: I married a South Carolina girl who knows how to ring a chicken’s neck, though unpracticed since her teen years.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Glenn Cassidy has now lived in one house in Carrboro, North Carolina longer than the total time he lived in four different houses in New Jersey, the state he was born in. He still does not like sweet tea, grits, or watching the pine pollen paint his car chartreuse every March. But he loves wild dogwoods in bloom, the scent of magnolia flowers, and ACC basketball. My father was a stubborn as a mule and my mother says I take after him.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born in the hill country of East Texas where blue bonnets filled the pastures as far as a child’s eye could see. We chased armadillos across the fields while horn toads watched by the sandy, country roads. Each summer, Dad and Mom loaded us into the car and we’d drive seven hours (southeast) to the family rice farm in South Louisiana. We’d stay two glorious weeks with grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles. We climbed trees, rode horses, chased guinea hens across cotton fields and marsh hens through the rice fields. We boiled and ate crawfish caught with nets from a shallow, wide pond. Grandma and Mom made chicken and andouille gumbo, shrimp etouffee, crawfish bisque and other Cajun dishes. Forget about the grits but we sure ate a lot of rice.

At night, after supper, Aunt Wilda brought out her accordion. We cleared the veranda of chairs and unhooked the swing as she sat against the wall, tapping her feet. Soon she began to play. Mom and Dad and other couples began the fais do-do, dancing the Cajun two step. There was much laughter and great fun. The old house vibrated way into the night to the Cajun music and the dancing feet. The children were also encouraged to join in and I can recall my oldest sister teaching me to dance.

On the last day, we said our goodbyes, hugged our grandparents and waved to our cousins. As we left the farm, we always stopped at the family graveyard, bringing flowers we had gathered in early morning. Standing beside the graves, Dad would tell us something about each family member. Some of the graves were very old, going back two hundred years or so. It was at the graveyard, we learned being Cajun American was not so bad. In fact, it made us feel kind of special.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My father’s people were Tories who came south, went west, and stayed in Kentucky mountains. God killed by panthers. Fought with Morgan, Jackson. Witnessed Appomattox. Built a graveyard for themselves on the site of a cavalry skirmish. Raised sons and worked them. The sons ran away, chased Pancho Villa with Patton. The fathers brought them back. Worked them. Clutched land. Loved land like a son: more than a hundred acres at the Middle Fork of Jenny’s Creek, where the Shawnees had carried off Jenny Wiley and murdered her babies. Addison: that was his land, my grandfather’s father, who reared sons, called them his “bear dog boys.” Jay Cecil: that was my father, who was the first one of his line raised below the mountains. When he died, he died young. The old women who remembered Addison’s time said it was because he’d left the mountains.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Born and Raised in Asheville in the 60′s-early 80′s, A mountain town divided between extreme RIGHT and extreme LEFT. If you grow up in the midst of social angst you will come out a free thinker but with God’s hand still on your heart.

Spent much of my youth in Madison and Yancey Counties and also knew the Blue Ridge Parkway like the back of my hand. Now I just get lost there.

Consider self to be more Mountain than Southern but then that is the Mountain South. Ask me for a distinction between the two and I will write a book about that and why movies that feature actors using FAKE southern for mountain accents tick me off. Now I have lived in Catawba County for many years, and Catawba Co. is NOT in the mountains but DEFINITELY in the South and somehow I have managed to survive like a wildflower brought down from the steep slopes and transplanted in this red clay and sweltering humidity of the Foothills/ Piedmont.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I won’t apologize for being from Alabama. I’m proud of my southern heritage, and all it entails. My friend’s sister was killed in the Birmingham church bombings; my boss played football for Bear Bryant; my father’s favorite breakfast was squirrel brains and eggs. Okay, I apologize for the last one.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born and raised in the mountain hollers of Southwest Virginia, and still reside there today. I hoe taters and fry taters, catch night crawlers after the evening dew settles and fish off creek banks the next morning, and though I don’t always talk right, I always have an accent. And in short, I’m a tomboy turned poet…sort of.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I am from the drab city of Canton, Ohio, just south of Cleveland, where the gray skies and the mediocrity plaguing my home town create a perfect atmosphere for dreaming and writing poetry. I am thirty-four, and for quite some time now, I have dreamt of life with southern spunk.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born and raised in the South. I was born in the middle of nowhere or Edenton, NC. I was then raised next to the middle of nowhere or Greenville, NC. I love the south, the hot summers, the country twang. I have a southern booty with a southern attitude and I flaunt them both the way the south does.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Everything’s bigger and better, where men are regarded as six-foot tall cowboys clad in bull-hide Justin boots and Stetson hats. They are really just overgrown boys in shit kickers and straw hats. In the good ole south, men pride themselves in knee-high mule hide boots to keep their Wranglers out of the mud and protect them from water moccasins while hunting and four-wheeling.

Southern woman have a “blonde-haired, tanned skin, big-boobed” image; that is the honest doggone truth. If you’re lucky, you just might get a glimpse of a lady’s stilettos as she pokes her Barbie doll legs out of her Hummer and tries to descend the ladder somewhat gracefully. They are Southern Belles, after all.

The fact of the matter is that southern folk are down-to-earth and friendly. Country dancing, rodeos, hunting, football and backyard barbecues are the main attractions here. We love family and open our arms to friends. Come join us at the Cracker Barrel for some good ole country cooking and fellowship. We can discuss The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature over coffee. Welcome y’all!

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Long time high school agriculture teacher, longer time Southerner (capital ‘S’ please)

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Besides fixing cars and trucks, I have been teaching high school English, journalism, and creative writing for many years. I currently reside in eastern Alabama on the shore of Lake Wedowee, an 11,000 acre hydroelectric impoundment. Family includes my wife, daughter, son, two dogs, and a cat. Armadillos, deer, wild turkeys, and an assortment of other creatures frequent my property, but I don’t consider them family as they generally do not come inside.

I was born in Atlanta and have always lived within 100 miles of that city but rarely visit there because it’s not southern anymore. Maybe that’s the “New South,” but in my mind the real south exists in the small towns and rural areas, the ridges, hills, creeks, swamps, fields, and forests where–along with the hoot owls, whippoorwills, tree frogs, and crickets–you can still faintly hear the ghosts of young rebels crying in the wind.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in the southern edge of the Blue Ridge in central Alabama, the product of a father from the cotton mill village and a mother who lived on the “respectable” side of the railroad tracks. A forester by trade, I roam the back roads of Alabama meeting people and looking for stories. Besides reading and writing, my interests include old country music, motorcycles, pork barbecue, and fine Boxer bulldogs.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
The other day I caught myself saying “gee-tahr,” referring to that musical instrument with a long neck and strings. There was a time when this would have caused me great alarm, being born many miles north of the Mason-Dixon line, but I just chuckled to myself. Funny thing is my Chicago-born husband didn’t even notice. . .Oh yeah, we’re Southern.

Southern Legitimacy Statement
After the Mardi Gras, on Grand Isle, at the far south end of the Mississippi Delta, I met a Real Louisiana Coonass. He was a large burly man in a uniform with a badge and a gun and spoke with a Cajun accent when he asked, “You know what a real Louisiana coonass is?”

I shrugged my shoulders exercising my constitutional right.

“Well son, you’re looking at one.”

I figured.