Tim Bullard: Saving the Depot
Tim Bullard, 1999 ... reporting at its finest. We're sorry that we can no longer find the original photos accompanying the piece.
John Riley: How It Went Bad With Horsepen
Southern Legitimacy Statement: When my son was just a little guy, four or five, and studying the violin he loved to take a break from classical music and go with his pap-paw to an old barn down in Pittsboro that had been converted into a little music hall. When it was their turn the two of them would climb onto the stage and the women in the audience would say, “My, my” and “Look how cute he is.” My boy would be wearing his little white cowboy hat and jeans and boots and when his pap-paw gave him the signal he'd dip his head and start going to town on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” or “Old Joe Clark” or “The Orange Blossom Special,” maybe even a Bob Wills song or two, while the house band accompanied them on dobro and rhythm guitar and bango. My son's parents would be in the audience beaming like bug lights as their boy and his pap-paw fiddled away. I'm sure this happens in other parts of the country, but I'm not sure there is anyplace else where playing the old-time music weaves warmly through generation to generation the way it does here in North Carolina, where the music was born and the best little fiddlers in the world are bred.
Sylvia Dodgen: Encounter
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and bred in the Alabama Wiregrass, where fireflies light summer nights and whippoorwills cry, as souls depart. My daddy never set his hat on the bed, fearing bad luck and didn’t believe in starting any project on a Friday. He believed in planting by the moon and swore long-dead cows could be ghosts too. Unmarried I said I wanted a baby and thought of artificial insemination, he said, “The little bastard will just be welcome.” He was a wise man.
Erin Cochran: Ferris Wheel’s End
Southern Legitimacy Statement: It's been said that my daddy's family is so southern that no one in it from the time brothers Chance, Gardner, and Claude set foot in the Carolinas in 1642 had ever lived north of the Mason-Dixon line until my first cousin moved to Michigan in 1997. That was a travesty in our family worthy of comment from our Uncle Claude, the man who could engage in an hour long conversation without uttering more than five words. He was almost as concerned with her move as he was in finding mamaw's peach cobbler recipe after she passed away that should have been among the good nighties stored away unopened for that inevitable trip to the hospital. I guess that makes us southern but if not, there's an entire county in Alabama that our children have been warned about finding a mate in, as we are related to the entire county in some form. That's probably an exaggeration but there were 1600 people at the last family reunion we attended all descended from one couple and most people came from less than an hour away. The table of "greens" was actually nine tables long and I'm pretty sure my dad ate some from each and every pot.
A. J. Tierney: Stuck Like This Forever
Southern Legitimacy Statement: An “Okie from Muskogee” I am one of very few women who have been crowned both Miss Azalea Festival and Miss Indian Summer. I was convinced for years that Colonel Sanders was my grandfather since my grandmother worked so many hours at Kentucky Fried Chicken. I tagged along curling up under her desk with my Snoopy dog that she bought me with S&H Green Stamp books. I’m still stunned there are people in the world who don’t know about paper shell pecans. You haven’t truly lived until you you’ve watched your grandma fry potatoes, okra, pork chops, and chicken in a cast iron skillet in bacon fat that’s been out on the counter all day.
Art Heifetz: Three Poems
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Came to Richmond in 1977 as a damned Yankee, that is one who decided to stay. Gradually lost my New York accent and started saying “youse all.” Told my clients that my people were F.F.V. and they shook their heads earnestly. “Don’t believe I ever heard of Heifetz.” “Just kidding, ma’am,” I replied. “ We’re from North Carolina.”
Davis Slater: Helping Daddy Win
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised between the Mississippi and the Ozarks, where Missouri eats into Arkansas, you can walk to Tennessee, and you can wave at Kentucky, I'm now vegan, not for health or environmental reasons, but because I'm pretty sure I ran the entire South out of edible critters when I was a boy.
Jeanne Lupton: Candy
Southern Legitimacy Statement
I live in the place of my yearning, Northern California, but I can't get Virginia out of miy mind, 250-year-old Hopewell Friends Meeting House on a hill with the Blue Ridge in view, homecoming picnics there with a hundred cousins, some aunts named Ms. Pigeon, all eating fried chicken, deviled eggs, potato salad, watermelon, chocolate cake, staying cool in the breeze, calling me Thee. Dear Grandma laughing, "Everybody's crazy but me and Thee, and sometimes I wonder about Thee."
Tobi Cogswell: Two Poems
SLS - Tobi Cogswell began kindergarten in Dallas. Even though it was many years ago, she still remembers her first dog was a "Heinz 57" named Sam Finkelstein the Third Rifkin. She remembers a family outing to the zoo where a lion peed on her best friend Betsy who lived down the street, and eating chicken fried steak at the Surrey, in a shopping center where a Wil Wrights was freestanding in a corner of the parking lot. Today she has good friends in Texas, and is pleased to see at least one of them in an earlier issue of this journal.
Phillip Thompson: Kenny’s Saturday Night Cake Walk
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I didn't have a "grandmother" or a "Nana." I had a Granny. She wore red lipstick, always carried a pistol, drove fast, smoked cigarettes, believed in the Good Lord, cooked with lard (in which everything was fried -- chicken, okra, corn, you name it), took all 10 grandkids fishing and was capable of slapping the taste out of your mouth if you sassed her (not that you ever would). She didn't say "sweet" tea because there's only one kind of tea in Mississippi (that's spelled M-I-crooked letter, crooked letter-I-crooked letter, crooked letter-I-humpback, humpback-I), and if you ask for "sweet tea," you're clearly a damn Yankee. Or a carpetbagger, take your pick. She had more grandkids than she had room, so we stayed outside a lot in the summer -- shirtless, shoeless, sweaty and loud and buying Co-Colas at Bubba Cox's store or playing in the bed of Granddaddy's dump truck. If we behaved, we could come in to cool off and listen to "Ode to Billie Joe" on the record player. She said things like "that boy's as crazy as a junebug" and "bless her heart." From the South? Hell, she was the South.
Phillip Thompson: A Novel “Deep Blood”
Review copies arrive on a semi-daily basis here on Brown St. This month brought quite a few volumes of teen fiction and those were passed on to willing recipients. Then there were the two novels that were especially readable and...
Celebrate the Fourth of July, 1933 with a Story from Pete Peterson
Southernicity Statement
I live in Southern California but was reared in the Missouri Ozarks and attended schools where more hogs and dogs were under the school house than text books inside. I know that when you hunt coon or squirrel or quail, even turkey, you kill 'em and brag at church how many you killed. However, when fox hunting, the fox holes up after four or five hours and you thank him for a good race and promise to run him again.
I fry chicken in a cast iron skillet that’s been in the family over a hundred years. It makes great cream gravy. My monthly chicken dinners are quarterly affairs now, since my doctor said I’m to eat only foods I like, and fried chicken's not listed. (He doesn't know about the yellow corn grits and sausage on Sunday mornings.)
I understand the difference between the American Baptist, Reel Foot Baptist and Southern Baptist churches and have tasted the baptismal water of all three. I call ladies of a certain age ‘Ma’am’ and younger ones ‘Miss'. Finally, if there’s a more delightful sound than a nightingale singing at midnight from a magnolia tree under a full moon, only angels have heard it.
When I'm not writing you'll find me tending my Arkansas Traveler, Nebraska Wedding or Brandywine heirloom tomatoes,
An Interview with Dayne Sherman
by Thomas Scott McKenzie *from Summer 2007 Dayne Sherman is writer both dedicated and determined. A former high-school dropout, he began writing fiction in the spring of 1996. In a little more than three years, he has racked up 13...
Poetry
Essays
