Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I am trying to live in all of the southern states. So far I have lived in Georgia, Louisiana, and North Carolina, where I currently reside with my bulldog, Grits.  (That is really his name.  And he is of the UGA bulldog line.)   I suppose he is like in a mule in all respects but one…his ability to produce offspring.  Otherwise, he doesn’t listen, he doesn’t do much but lay around, and he has a nasty attitude to boot.  I guess if that is mule criteria, I could be considered one as well. 

Southern Legitimacy Statement

I lived in Charlotte, North Carolina with family friends for about three months in the summer of 2003. My memories of the Charlotte airport and the warm climate, in addition to friends whose company made me feel at home then, remain my treasured recollections of the south.

Southern Legacy:

My Daddy’s nickname is Pooch or Poochie. All his sisters say that when he was just a little boy, the local yard dog bit him…but to the dog’s surprise, my Dad bit him back. Speaking of my Dad, he has a faint blue scar across the bridge of his nose, something about an ax and coal dust. In the secretary upstairs are pictures of my Mother in her coffin and a tape cassette of the funeral. Who does that anymore? Is this southern or just some morbid way of remembering the dead? I always tell people, if I’m stranded on a deserted island all I want to eat is hot cornbread with cold milk (and maybe a bowl to eat them together) and red velvet cake. Hmm, that’s really a toss-up between the Red Velvet or the Mississippi Mud cake my Granny (who always said she was gonna get shed of things) made for each of my birthdays. And last, but certainly not least, sausage gravy and biscuits. I once read an article about cooking with kudzu and thought it was a really good idea. Oh yeah, and speaking of southern legitimacy, my Daddy once said, “what’s wrong with having a red neck?” If that doesn’t take the cake, then I don’t know what does.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My father is a minister from North Carolina. He claims we’re
descendants of Gen. Nathanial Greene but has no proof. I have always
put my corn-on -the-cob directly onto the stick of butter, take my
grits with cheese, and know that Duke does not count as a Southern
university. I take pleasure in correcting people as to the right way
to pronounce ‘Appalachia.’ Dean Smith resides in the same category as Mother Theresa, Gandhi, and Dale Earnhardt. I am a graduate of Elon University and a student in the MFA program at Hollins University.

**

Poetry Editor’s Note:

The Dead Mule is proud to present a very special poem, “Real South,” as the final poem by Luke Johnson. I’d never before received a poem (in a submission) that truly made me cry. This one did. Luke assures me that “the poem fought it’s way through many drafts (and many trips back to the museum).”

We now publish “Real South” with great honor, thank Luke for allowing us to present it to our fine Mule readers, and hope Luke sends other poems our way.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I guess there are many ways to be southern, like the time I, as a youngster, made myself a salad out of cabbage, and the other time I got in trouble for throwing pieces of broken shingles at cars. Or maybe being southern is evident in the hours I spent on the front porch of Papaw’ house, checking the temperature of the candle wax he had to soak his foot in because the doctor said it would help his arthritis. It didn’t. No, I believe my southernness is best shown by the fact that one summer my Papaw and my Dad took time to stand in the driveway and show me how to wash mud off of the asphalt by using a “back and forth” swishing motion. Yea, that would be it.

Southern Legitimacy Statement

I had a friend once who harkened from southern Illinois, so I figure she rubbed shoulders with the south. That and her sister’s name was Maggie. She had that southern woman capability of being within ten minutes of looking like a million bucks, no matter the day or time.

I’m a slender woman. Some would unkindly refer to me as skinny. The first time I met Emma, she gave me the once-over and remarked, “Honey, it looks like you’ve got to run around in the shower to get wet.”

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I’m either an adopter or an adoptee, but in either case, Virginia is the other party involved and has been for close on 20 years. Although I travel a lot and don’t spend nearly as much time in Virginia as I really really want to, I’m dedicatedly saving pennies to buy a small house for retirement in Rappahannock County - along the Rappahannock River, of course - with a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains and close enough that I can go camping in the Blue Ridges every single weekend if I want to, especially in spring, in oak and hickory forest with purple and yellow violets and wild geraniums and Carolina chickadee and hooded warbler…

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born and raised in L.A. (Lower Alabama). Have a hankerin for grits, cussin, and fiesty southern women.

Am always fixin to do somethin. Mostly just fixin.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born, raised and still live in Atlanta. I remember this town before the Braves and Falcons came. I remember when what is now an access road used to be the interstate. I still say ya’ll (it is only proper), know the difference between dinner and supper and know a frog strangler is a heavy downpour. I’ve eaten at the Varsity more times than I’d like to admit, been a Waffle House patron before it was cool and order tea assuming it will be sweet. Strangely, I don’t care for grits. It must be some recessive Yankee gene.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

In 1943 my Mama found me in a cardboard box in Tyler, Texas. Daddy was a railroad man and we moved to Arkansas in ‘53. We ate a lot of black-eyed peas, white bread, fish and squirrel. On cool Fall nights we liked to hunt coon and possum. I smoked my first tobacco at 11 and had my first drink of liquor from an uncle. I somehow managed to get a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Arkansas. I live in Palestine, Texas now and seldom leave the south, except on my Harley.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born and raised in North Carolina, but spent two years of my very distant youth in Louisiana. According to some of my Cajun friends, being from North Carolina makes me a Yankee (i.e., “North”). I tried to explain to them (between large bites of a shrimp po’boy sandwich), that the word “North” in “North Carolina” is meant to clarify the difference between the two Carolinas, but they didn’t buy it. Then again, they never met my Great Aunt Ethel, who called everybody “doll baby,” (with special emphasis if she was addressing a man), and made pitchers of sweet tea that would give diabetes to a honey bear. Her sister, my grandmother, could stretch a vowel farther than a string of silly putty. And those are just two of the many proud Southern women in my family, of which I am definitely one, despite any views to the contrary, ya’ll!

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I spent most of my life in a poor community called Doodle Hill. One grandma lived behind me and one in front. Breakfast was always ready before putting in tobacco or going to dig foundations with granddaddy. Feeding hogs was half of my early childhood. At fifty, it is a little weird having to proclaim my legitimacy as a southerner. Yes, we have it all here, the good and the horrific, the beautiful and the tragic. Where else could Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond be promoted up the political gang plank for their opinions on segregation. Where else could black and white kids play doodle bug under a grandmother’s house while their parents graded tobacco together. If nothing else says southern, the title of my chapbooks “no good will”, “No Welfare, No Pension Plan”, and “Pot Liquor Promises” should sound it out. Yes, I know who was the first person to introduce the steel guitar to the Grand Ole Opry and who introduced the drums to country music and who really wrote “Hello Walls.” Well if this doesn’t legitimize my southerness, I am due to get a tattoo proclaiming my love for mother, Jesus and whiskey. Hallelujah. Set the dogs free.

Southern Legitimacy Statement

I was born in Tensas Parish, Louisiana, on Mayflower Plantation. We were part of the help. I picked some cotton and chopped a little, a skill I never mastered. I now live in River Ridge near New Orleans, about 200 miles and two cultures downriver, with my wife Liz, a native of Detroit bless her heart. New Orleans is a beautiful old city and I doubt we could ever give it up, but I have never seen anything prettier than Tensas when the dogwoods flower and the cotton blooms.

Hmmmm…Southern Legitimacy Statement?

Well, right off we’s put off by havin’ to do a verification of our ‘Southernness’, but then one must weed out the ‘wannabees’ from the far North. Okay, so I’m from, and still live in, Southern Illinois…which a lot a people think is the North. Hell, Richmond and a damn good part of Virginia is further north than me (although I do acknowledge that Richmond, of late, has been somewhat tainted by the immigration of Yankee interlopers). This here area, Southern Illinois, was settled by folks from the South. My people came from South Carolina. Can’t get much more Southern than that. The central and northern part of Illinois was settled by Easterners (a term they use thinkin’ folks won’t think of them as the Yankee dogs they are) and, as the text books will tell ya, the two groups: the Southerners and the rest, mixed like oil and water. And we still do. You can tell when you in a Northern town…people ain’t as friendly…there’s a deffenite lack of humor. Pshaw, there I go on the stump again. Didn’t mean to make this so lengthy. Didn’t even get a chance to jaw about my ten years livin’ in beautiful Georgia along the Chattahoochee or bitch about the War of Northern Aggression. Maybe next time…if there is a next time.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Well, some ten generations of us dirt farming Yelton’s have trod the good soil of Virginia and North Carolina. I am a Rutherford Countian by birth and live there now after periodic exiles to Charlotte, Greensboro and Atlanta (which used to be a Southern city). I study the Civil War and live it in my waking dreams. I admire Lee and Jackson, Longstreet and Hill. My great-grandfather shed blood at Amelia Courthouse when Lee’s miserables were forced to skedaddle west and south by the Yankee hordes.

I travel on foot, in my thoughts, and sometimes in my dreams to the high mountains of the Old North State as often as possible. Their pull on me is strong. I like to write about them and their mysteries. They are as old and inscrutable as the moon.

I love Southern writing, though I find Faulkner a bit dense and claustrophobic. I prefer Pat Conroy, Howard Bahr, and James Lee Burke.

Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda was appointed Poet Laureate, 2006-2008, for the Commonwealth of Virginia by Governor Timothy M. Kaine. She is the author of several books and anthologies. Her poems have appeared throughout the United States and abroad in numerous publications. Her many poetry honors include three Pushcart Prize nominations. She has been named a Virginia Cultural Laureate for her contributions to American Literature. And yet, when the Mule asked her for poems, she replied by saying, “How kind of you to write to request a poetry submission.” The last three poems are from Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda’s newly released book, River Country.

Please welcome our newest Poet Laureate Mule Poet, Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I said to my friend Tim, “I don’t know how poets in other parts of the country have anything to write about. We seem to have such a monopoly on the bizarre, the pathetic, and the passionately contradictory.” I said this after telling him about my mother’s seventh husband’s father who lived in the same four-room house with his wife and his ex-wife. They were sisters. They lived in the same community where everyone I knew under the age of 18 was taught to say “yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am” and switched or backhanded if they didn’t. It is the South’s brutal civility, stubborn independence, intolerant faith, and other everyday idiosyncrasies that constitute the seemingly inexhaustible source of the Southern writer.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Will it help if I say that I was so homesick for South Carolina two weeks ago that I got into Google Earth and called up a tiny corner of Williamsburg County, my mother’s birthplace, and then moved to the small town of Sumter, where I was born, to find the exact neighborhood where I once played with my brothers in the dirt with our coal bucket in the backyard? It’s possible that living where I have lived for twenty years, southern Appalachia, could make me a southerner, but that’s not the case. My roots are in South Carolina, and when spring comes I’m like a dog catching a scent in the air. I want to get in the car and drive down the mountain to the low country where I was born and bred, where generations of my family were born and bred. Two years ago I brought my mother, Mama, up near me to live, and you’d think that having her with her equally southern accent and charm ten miles down the road in a cozy nursing home that I visit almost too much would make me feel as if I’d brought the most important part of South Carolina, my father already buried down there, up to me. I’ll tell you the truth. When the two of us get together and sit on the porch (since I picked her nursing home because it has a porch and flowers she can tend and horses across the street that we can watch and all the loving care you’d get in a big extended family living in a big house the way her family did a few generations ago), it’s almost like being back on her porch. But it’s not quite the same.
Would I lose points if I said I qualify for Colonial Dames but am not at all likely ever to join? Having moved away from the South Carolina where my family had lived for generations without straying far, having married a man from New Jersey, having borne a son who doesn’t talk like he comes from South Carolina—these things should not be held against me.

I currently live in Meadowview, a rural town in Virginia near the border of Tennessee, and work in Emory, an even more rural town in the interior of Meadowview (Emory is a village within a town, a very small village within a very small town).

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I live in the Deep South—southwest Louisiana. I am a Cajun woman who loves her culture, its traditions, music and food. I am the Gumbo Queen. I make a mean crawfish étouffée. I can gut and skin a catfish, play bourrée (A Cajun card game) and sing hundred-year old songs in French. I love our coastal wetlands, mossy oaks, Cypress swamps, prairies, muddy bayous and all manner of flora and fauna which thrive in our natural areas, especially those organisms which can be baked, stewed, roasted, fried or fricasseed.

Kevin Blankenship served as a Poetry Co-Editor of the Dead Mule.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I drink tea that’s sweet and eat cornbread that ain’t. I somehow feel responsible and guilty all the time, I’m polite to all, I put my enemies back on their horses and I let them tilt at me again! I raised chickens and rabbits in the dirt in my backyard before and after school. My daddy took me hunting on Sundays. While I stood frozen and dumb, amazed at the birds and the four-leggers who sprung from their hiding spots, my daddy would shake his head at me, and with an expert shot, drop them. His shot was so expert he had time to chastise me with a look - before he took down the quarry. Hell even the dogs would look disappointed in me. I rarely rode my horse, and instead just enjoyed feeding him ’til he looked like a barrel with legs. But when I did ride him I tried to joust - I jousted against posts, and bottles set on rocks - and fell off… losing to branches and made the horses laugh and laugh. I fall in love too much. Girls have told me, I’m TOO SWEET. Every summer I forget about the chiggers and I get well over 300 bites on my ankles that make me lose about a week’s worth of sleep - and so I write these insane stories. I practiced getting rid of my “Y’all”, and “might could” - because I wanted to be a punk rocker, and I never knew that I could be a southern punk. I’m always miles behind.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Will it suffice to say that I wish I was from the South—I have ‘Southern Envy’ or whatever you’d like to call it. We all know the best writers come from the South. Who wouldn’t want to read Carson McCullers or Ellen Gilchrist? Who wouldn’t want to write like them? I almost went to LSU for my MFA, but then I couldn’t afford it. Oh, and there was that time I had a mullet in college, but that was really an accident.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up in Joliet Illinois, which is just Southern enough to have kidnapped from the Southern repertoire. Joliet is just close enough, tough enough, and within close proximity enough to the South to qualify as Southern. If you travel a little further east into town and purport not to know what collard greens and grits are, you may get beaten up. If you don’t have just enough quarters to play Lynyrd Innard’s on the jukebox, or have perused the poetry of Joe Bolton—who hails from Cadiz, Kentucky—then one has yet to experience the finest art the South has to offer regardless where one was raised.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born in a swamp. Really. I have seen alligators crossing the road. I have (illegally) eaten said alligators. When I was in middle school I had to write “‘Ain’t’ is not a word” 28,366 times thanks to one English teacher (supposedly a carpetbagger) whose mission it was to beat the southern out of us. So I grew up and studied linguistics in college. I now pray silently for the day when a teacher tries the same trick on one of my children, so I can throw my weight around in defense of our culture. We must not be punished for our dialect. Ya’ll.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

As most of yawl may or may not be, I am a self professed proud country boy from the Bar B Q soul food and Blues capital of the universe—Memphis. If there is anything I need in the world to survey outside of women (plural) and my family, its my Rifle, my pickup truck and house shoes, and a news paper or two won’t hurt none either. And please, don’t look at me funny when I am in a restaurant and pull out my hot sauce, because it is way different from Tabasco.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I am Southern because I was born and have always lived in the South. I am not sure I could be objective enough to point out what qualities I might have that are Southern since I have never lived anywhere other than here, but I know that I do have some of those qualities. Well, at least the ones that someone from North Carolina would have.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Land surrounds my home, so beware of the dog.
I eat beans from the can and I love pot liquor.
My boots track mud, my pickup blows smoke, and I still pledge allegiance to the flag.
Sundays are devoted to God and NASCAR.
I’m southern and country.
The kindest asshole you’ll ever meet.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born and raised in the Carolinas. My long distance family members live in Virginia, and have passed down the great love that I have for gravy and biscuits in the morning and beans, fried potatoes and cornbread at dinner.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up mainly in Missouri, which would probably make me a Southern Yankee…

I recently moved to North Carolina, with my wife, who is a native Texan from a very Southern family. I came to learn how Southern her family was in an entertaining, and semi frightening, manner. One of her brothers jokingly called me a Yankee. Hearing this, my wife’s grandma became agitated, and demanded to know what a Yankee was doing in the house.

So I guess you could say I am Southern through migration, marriage, and initiation.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My life in the South began with the ridiculous transition from a metropolis in the land of the rising sun to a small town in Georgia five minutes from the Alabama border. A child without any English speaking skills absorbing all the goodness of southern hospitality. I lived on Dixie Street in a historic house and had an accent recognizable by locals in Colorado during summer vacation trips. I forgot my native language and was forced to attend Saturday school sessions for Japanese students living in the United States. I have grown, as has my love for the South.

It’s a full slate of Poetry at Its Finest. Starting April 1st and we’re not fooling. Helen Losse, Poetry Editor, put together an amazing collection of the best poets, just for our dear Mule readers.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up playing baseball on fields with chicken wire backstops and no outfield fences. We named our dogs after the ones on the Beverly Hillbillies. We weren’t farmers, but we raised two acres of potatoes, an acre of peanuts, and slaughtered a black angus bull every other year. We named the bulls after famous explorers. The biggest dare was riding a bike across the top of the textile mill dam.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

In one sense, my response to the idea that “southern legitimacy” is something I need to demonstrate exists in the form of a poem: “cause i’m from dixie too.” (It appears in my book a half-red sea.) On the other hand, since this a requirement for all contributors to The Dead Mule, my poem is not exactly apropos! So I will simply say that I was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee.

[Don’t miss the Dead Mule interview with Evie. Just click on “essays.”]

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I have lived in North Carolina my whole life (except the first 6 months of it and the first 6 months after graduation from undergrad when I lived as far away as Virginia). I grew up in Pasquotank and Perquimans Counties, went to college in Greensboro and ended up in Charlotte.

My great-grandfather was supposedly Cherokee. But his last name was Driggers AND he may have changed it to hide from the law. So . . .

And then there was that time in high school when I said “ya’ll” in front of a German exchange student and then had to explain. Good thing he didn’t ask me the name of what I was eating and drinking at the time. Heaven forbid I had to explain an RC cola and a moon-pie.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I live in Louisiana. Most of my recent writing has taken place on airplanes or in airports on my travels between the South and the Non-South. We are our own breed. As Flannery O’Connor put it, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I have one uncle and my wife has one uncle. Both uncles are certain that the War of Northern Aggression is still being fought. Either will bend your ear, at supper or a funeral, about how the South is on the cusp of victory because them fools north of the Mason-Dixon still don’t realize the war never really ended. My wife and I bristle a little at this talk, and wish we could dissuade our uncles, but how could we? They’re South Carolina boys, and we both had the poor sense to be born, schooled, and settled in North Carolina. What could we possibly know about the South?

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up in Michigan, but my mom is from Tennessee, so I suppose my first language was Southern. Every summer my mom would drive us kids down to Chattanooga to visit with my Gran and other relatives. Banana pudding, Rock City, sweet tea, cobwebby Confederama*, 8-ounce Cokes = childhood summers. Funny that I married a Nashville musician — I’ve lived here almost 20 years now.

*Confederama is now called The Battles for Chattanooga Museum. (Rolling my eyes.)

Folks, if you don’t know Carter, then you ain’t been reading the Mule.

my southern statement thing:

I lived the first major chunk of my life near Little Rock, Arkansas and the second big chunk, the one I’m in now, in Birmingham, Alabama. Sometime in there, I spent four years in Memphis. Yes, my life has been sort of like a Civil Rights Movement bus tour.

I’m grateful for the experience and mindful of all my beautiful neighbors along the way.

Southern Legitimacy statement:
I grew up on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas. When I was a boy, I had a redboned hound named Red. My sister, though, had a cat named Dog.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My favorite food is chicken and sausage gumbo—and I have to add boiled crawfish too, yeah. I’m plenty educated, but my accent still drips with that Cajun patois, cher. I love Cajun, Zydeco and Blues music—I play it in my pick up loud enough to drown out those rappers booming out of those rap mobiles. If God is not Cajun, I’m not sure there can be a heaven. Oh yeah, I think beer is food.

I was born, raised, and still live just barely south of the Mason/Dixon line, also known as the Ohio River. I eat okra and fried catfish and buttermilk cornbread. I know how to make doughballs to catch the catfish. I read Faulkner, I’m bored by Updike. I cried all the way through Their Eyes Were Watching God and can just about begin to know what Flannery O’Connor meant by “Good Country People.” I subscribe to The Oxford American, I don’t subscribe to The New Yorker. I listen to Muddy Waters, I’m bored by Tony Bennett. I knew all the words to “Goodnight Irene” and could belt them in roadhouses before I could read. I consider Robert Johnson one of the best poets of the twentieth century.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Will it help if I say that I was so homesick for South Carolina two weeks ago that I got into Google Earth and called up a tiny corner of Williamsburg County, my mother’s birthplace, and then moved to the small town of Sumter, where I was born, to find the exact neighborhood where I once played with my brothers in the dirt with our coal bucket in the backyard? It’s possible that living where I have lived for twenty years, southern Appalachia, could make me a southerner, but that’s not the case. My roots are in South Carolina, and when spring comes I’m like a dog catching a scent in the air. I want to get in the car and drive down the mountain to the low country where I was born and bred, where generations of my family were born and bred. Two years ago I brought my mother, Mama, up near me to live, and you’d think that having her with her equally southern accent and charm ten miles down the road in a cozy nursing home that I visit almost too much would make me feel as if I’d brought the most important part of South Carolina, my father already buried down there, up to me. I’ll tell you the truth. When the two of us get together and sit on the porch (since I picked her nursing home because it has a porch and flowers she can tend and horses across the street that we can watch and all the loving care you’d get in a big extended family living in a big house the way her family did a few generations ago), it’s almost like being back on her porch. But it’s not quite the same.

Would I lose points if I said I qualify for Colonial Dames but am not at all likely ever to join? Having moved away from the South Carolina where my family had lived for generations without straying far, having married a man from New Jersey, having borne a son who doesn’t talk like he comes from South Carolina—these things should not be held against me.

I currently live in Meadowview, a rural town in Virginia near the border of Tennessee, and work in Emory, an even more rural town in the interior of Meadowview (Emory is a village within a town, a very small village within a very small town).

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, I’m a related to Margaret Mitchell on my mother’s side of the family and I once kissed Butterfly McQueen. It doesn’t get any more southern than that, ya’ll.

Jillian was raised by a pipe organ builder and a Montessori teacher, neither of whom have accents or ancestors who participated in the War Between the States, but her mamma makes the hands-down best pecan pie anywhere in the world. As further proof of her southern legitimacy, please note that Jillian dated a NASCAR fanatic (yes, she’s been to Bristol) and a paintball junkie, then married an Arkansas catfish farmer’s son, who is, as her father-in-law puts it “landed gentry”. If that don’t make her southern, nothin’ will. You wanna fight about it?

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born a “Telfair baby” here in Savannah, Georgia. Telfair was the Woman’s Hospital that faced Forsyth Park in historic Savannah. My parents walked next door to have me as they lived in the Round House, meaning the porch went all the way around, circling the old home , built before the Victorian era at 10 East Duffy Street.
When I would “go missing” they’d find me taking a tour of the hospital with one of the nurses showing me off. I got off onto the social ladder in this way.

Being Southern means knowing the etiquette handed down by the genes and knowing when to draw out that twang a little longer when there was an audience. I milked it for everything it was worth.

My father was assigned to the USS Savannah, a Naval Destroyer Escort that made her maiden voyage from Savannah. He met my mother as she was walking her dog through Chippewa Square (famous now for Forest Gump’s “life’s a box of chocolates”. They were
married shortly after they met and went on to raise eight children in those huge houses that the south is noted for from way back. I was raised on hoe cakes and cane syprup and grits with tomato gravy.

The south is more than tradition for me. It’s a religion of heritage and pride. I’ve traveled the world since my birth and the one redeeming factor with all people all over is when they hear the southern accent, a huge grin comes over their faces and they ask you to say …waw ta (water) again and again. Being a true southern belle is an institution that isn’t found anywhere else in this world and reason enough to be proud of the passion found only in the great tradition called “Dixie”. I’m a proud part of that institution and endear the tradition in my heart and I wouldn’t trade Dixie for all the high cotton on earth.
~Susan Kathryn de vegter~

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I am Southern because I choose to be. I was raised in the very cold Midwest. I then moved to sunny Los Angeles where I met my husband who was born in Baton Rouge, LA. Every time we would go to Louisiana to visit family and friends we never wanted to return to California. Then Katrina. We decided that we would rather be in the muck with our friends than two thousand miles away, frantic with worry and helpless to do anything about it.

Less than a year later we sold our house, packed up our animals and bought a house in Lafayette and I couldn’t be happier. The people are friendly, lunch is an enjoyment of company, not a meeting and then there is the matter of crawfish and po-boys!

Southern Legitimacy Statement
Although I was born beneath the Mason-Dixon line, I grew up in the Midwest, and only after graduate school did I return for a decade to my southern roots. First my wife and I lived in San Marcos, Texas, where our next-door neighbor was an elderly woman named Eula Sutherland, who hailed originally from Georgia and who would invite us at every opportunity into her apartment to share long conversations and her homemade cake or pie, sometimes which had ants crawling on it: she never seemed to notice. Next we moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, taught at Virginia Tech, and fell in love with the Blue Ridge Mountains. When we finally returned to the Midwest, we had grown so accustomed to the effusive friendliness of the people of the South that we at first thought everyone we met was brusque and rude. Since then, of course, we have adjusted, and, indeed, are probably brusque and rude ourselves.

My friends here in Ohio are always asking me to tell them about where I grew up. They love to hear stories about entertaining myself in the piney woods of south Alabama by stirring for doodlebugs, tying strings to Junebugs and flying them like kites, making necklaces from chinaberries, and watching the boys play ball on sandspur lots. They want me to have them over for purple-hulled peas, vegetable eggs (otherwise known as eggplants), fried anything, sweet potato pie, and Luzianne coffee. And they know my #1 comfort food is grits. Even my Yankee husband knows that.

I think my love of Southern writing blossomed the summer after 10th grade, when every ladies’ club around Bradleyton asked me to give a program about To Kill a Mockingbird. Later I was one of the founders of the Unofficial Pike County William Styron Fan Club and (the summer Nixon resigned) went to the first Faulkner Symposium.

What I miss most about living in the South is the voices, the accents, the “bless her heart” that no one in the Midwest seems to offer.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Though I live near DC now, I am still a country girl at heart. I grew up on the border of North Carolina, and I am here to tell you that the sky really is bluer there than anywhere else. It’s Tarheel blue actually. I miss mornings waking up to eat my biscuits with Karo syrup with Granddaddy in front of the wood stove. There will never be anything more enjoyable than running the paper route with Granddaddy in his ‘73 Dodge Ram and eating peanut butter crackers while drinking Mama’s sweet tea from a Mason jar. It’s times like those that my poems are trying to hold on to.