Category: Fiction

Southern Legitimacy Statement: No need for the Confederate flag, which has spread far beyond the South as a symbol of hatred and racism. Waffle House serves as the true boundary marker for the region. Cheesy eggs, grits, raisin toast, and...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Sunday mornings at our house it’s grits, red eye gravy, country ham, eggs over easy and buttermilk biscuits. (Please don’t tell my doctor.) I’ve walked 3 miles to a one room schoolhouse taught by an 18-year old...

Southern Legitimacy Statement On my dad’s side of the family, we arrived in North America with Winthrop’s fleet in 1630. They were a whole decade behind mom’s kinfolk, who came on the Mayflower in 1620. I can say with confidence...

Southern Legitimacy Statement : I was born and raised in the great state of North Carolina, where I grew up in what was once a farming community. I was raised by those who grew up working in the tobacco fields...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up miles from Kentucky, spent summers in Tennessee, and married a guy from Tennessee. I consider the South my second home. Is that legitimate enough? Oh, my daughter will be attending Ole Miss in the...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: There used to be preachers along the North Carolina/Virginia border who ran whiskey Saturday nights and preached fire and brimstone Sunday mornings. I know. I listened to them through the windows of The Holy Way Baptist Church...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I ate grits for the first time when I was eighteen and a starving university student in Tallahassee, Florida. Grits filled something deep inside me as did the intoxicating perfume of a rainstorm during a summer afternoon...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in the North, live in the North, but spent 4 years studying literature in Atlanta, which I’m guessing you don’t consider to be the South. This story is, however, about people who came to...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Hong Kong (it’s in the southern part of China). I lived in Burlington, KY for a few years. While I was coaching high school football across the river in Ohio, the coaches would...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I had a northerner ask me where I was from. I replied, “I’m a Virginian.” He thought that pretty efficient: I told him where I was from and what I was in one statement. Redneck Exhumation “You...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Though I was born in upstate New York and grew up in Michigan, my Southern leanings began to emerge when I studied Faulkner, blues, and jazz in college. I’ve now lived for almost twenty years in the...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: As proclaimed in the foreword of my coming-of-age novel “Saint Andrews’ Parish”: “I count it a blessing of the first magnitude: Being born in Charleston, South Carolina, and growing up in that part of it known as...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Now, I’m not about to claim New Orleans as distinctly southern, and certainly not New Smyrna Beach or Key West. And I’m sceptical of all variants of y’all on the page. But look at how I spell...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was raised in Georgia and came of age in Bama. Summer’s are for fishin’, fryin’ okra, and makin’ tomato sandwiches. Come winter, I’m cussin’ the cold with a glass of bourbon. My wife makes damn fine...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: One day while riding my motorcycle, I came upon a sign that read “site of the Mason-Dixon Line”. I looked at it for a while, then crossed to the other side, then back again, then sorta straddled...