Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My mamma was old school and would slap me silly when I was a kid if I did something stupid, like fart at the dinner table. While she’d only strike once, her hand was so unavoidably fast that it was just a blur. I rarely did the same stupid thing twice, which has paid off in adulthood.

Southern Legitimacy Statement
I am a Yankee.

Because of my deep concern that you may find my roots both despicable and unworthy of consideration in Southern Literary society, I have copied on this e-mail the names of two respectable Southerners who, I believe, will vouch for my sincere love of the South and hopefully assuage your concerns that publishing something of mine would in some way attenuate or otherwise weaken the forward progress of Southern culture for which we have fought on both sides of the Mason-Dixon for the better part of one hundred fifty years.

There is, in the South’s climate, a heat that enlivens the intellect, causes brain to sweat with the heart, making them one, to produce writing that stirs the reader somewhere deep. Anyone who has had so much as a taste of that heat never forgets it.

The reason I know I’m country through and through is that even in Atlanta Georgia, only one hundred miles away, friends laugh at my dialect. You know something though, I don’t have any desire to change it. I am too proud of my southerness.

I grew up hating the first bars of Dixie because more than once I was yanked by my ear to a standing position by great aunts at football games, the same UDC aunts who sometimes drove Carrie, the maid who raised me, home, her house in a different Atlanta, Buttermilk Bottoms,where the streets were alive with people and smells, so removed from our quiet house where Daddy’s fist came down on the dining room table whenever the name, Martin Luther King, came up. But . . . wasn’t he like Carrie? It was all so confusing. Unlike my first election where the choice for Governor was Jimmy Carter vs Lester Maddox, and when the people of my state chose the man who handed out ax-handles to use on black people, I knew I had to leave the South, college; and so in San Francisco, I became a spiritual hippie, but after three years my teacher decided our new community would be located in Tennessee, where, when we arrived, no one could understand a word of the locals’ hard twang, which meant I was pushed forward as a “Georgia boy” ambassador, urged to “talk and act Southern so they’ll accept us,” which I did . . . because it had never left me.

Essay on Politics by CIA Renditioner Robert Seldon Lady. The byline is “William Lady.”

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Although I do not claim to be Southern, I myself come from a long line of Okies. These farmers and hog-raisers lived in the Boggy River region of the state’s cypress-covered, southeastern corner until moving to the cotton town of Florence, Arizona after WWII. This makes us, as we like to think, “Desert Okies.” My family was kind enough to pass on their predisposition to heart disease and diabetes, along with a passion for purple hulls, well-crafted stories and gravy-covered foods; hopefully with hard work and some horse-blinders, I can avoid the family’s cardiac tradition and narrative one.

My better half currently lives in the NC Piedmont, and when I’m fortunate enough to visit, we eat at Beef Burger a lot and hike in and around the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest.

A high school girlfriend of mine died on Monday. By all accounts it was as tragic as a death can be. She was married to a loving husband and had two beautiful children. She had a 20 year teaching career where we grew up. Life was idyllic till the breast cancer showed […]

Southern Legitimacy Statement
Being Southern is not something I chose. Who would volunteer for the mosquitoes, the destitution, the suburban sprawl, the closed-mindedness, the good ole’ boy governments or the deteriorating cultural identity?

No, Southerness selected me, and owns me despite my embarrassment or my contrarian’s instincts. This is because Southerness is more than the geography that constitutes the south; thus we can’t escape it by moving (though my own Southerness did not do so well in Philadelphia or Cincinnati). But it’s also because what allowed my ancestors to set up shop in the swamps of Florida was a primordial drive that they passed on to via seven generations of roughin’ it.

Because of them, the Southerness pulls at my guts like the flu when I drink tea that’s been sweetened after it has cooled, or when I listen to someone gush about Florida’s theme parks and not its oak hammocks or its formerly infinite pastures.

Hell, sometimes I fantasize about being from New England or the Midwest—areas that have retained a degree of authenticity due to their lack of in-migration—because there’s so little that’s Southern about the Florida I live in now. Orange groves were uprooted for subdivisions with foreign names, and the $8 open air rodeo, where I spent my gum-chewing years sitting on the fences and pulling up my feet when the bulls came careening by, is now a $55 multi-use event center.

But if Southerness has a mythology of preservation that parallels its tale of destruction, it is evidenced only in the literature it produces.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I grew up having maw maws and a paw paws and a distinct view of life. I say ma’am, swear that barbecue is a noun only and is made from pork, and know that chivalry is not dead, if you know where to look. And even though I chose professions of technology and literature, my memories will always be of playing outside on humid summer nights, catching fireflies in an old mason jar, wondering why the ice cream maker was so slow.

Meet one of the newest poets in the Mule family as Helen Losse, Poetry Editor for the Dead Mule, interviews poet Evie Shockley. The amazing, in-depth, insightful conversation is poetry itself. I hope our readers enjoy the interview as much as I did — V. MacEwan, Editor/Publisher

Southern Legitimacy Statment:
I am a true son of the South. I was born in Tupelo, Mississippi. My mother once said to me that myself, Elvis, and US Highway 45 were the only three things that ever came out of Tupelo worth mentioning. I was raised in Corinth, Mississippi. I graduated from Corinth High School and ventured forth into the big world beyond Alcorn County in 1983.

I hunt and fish and purposely seek out mud holes to whip my pickup truck through, even though mud in California can some times be at a premium. I have a cousin named Larry Joe. I have been known to pick up fresh road kill on occasion. I believe barbequed Raccoon on a hot biscuit is one of life’s more special pleasures. I love my Mama and visit her twice a year no matter if I can afford to take the time away from my West Coast life or not.

I am Southern, first and foremost. Everything else is just, well…….extra.

Author interview by Valerie MacEwan, editor The Dead Mule

Joseph Finder, Power Play

Joseph Finder is the author of five novels, all of them thrillers. His website, JoeFinder.com (duh, betcha’ never thought that would be the domain name) is updated daily. Go there and take a look around, get some free stuff… I’ll save you a […]

A native of Hiawassee, Georgia, I appreciate my heritage and try not to stray too far from its teachings. For example, I know what the word, “Gaum,” means. I’ve heard my grandmother say many times over the years, “This house is a gaum!” I still cherish sayings such as, “He’s a snake in the grass!” or “I’m fair to middling! As we speak, I am cooking a mess of soup beans, and will later bake some cornbread to go with them.

by Thomas Scott McKenzie
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 short story acceptances and has published a novel with MacAdam/Cage. That novel, Welcome to the Fallen Paradise, was named […]

Various members of the community were given highly fictionalized analogs in the novel, from a vegan restaurateur to a sex-toy manufacturer. But most of the book came straight from the imagination. I thought by giving Pick qualities nobody would ever attribute to me it would inoculate me from criticism. I was wrong.

My family name, Fain, is French Huguenot. We were the Protestants who fled France and persecution to come to the American South in the 16th and 17th centuries to experience religious freedom. Arriving in Georgia to settle, my people, over the centuries, eventually found their way to Texas where my ancestors worked the land furiously and with dedication. My family continues to practice as Southern Baptists today with the same fervor for the Protestant faith my French forebears did. I, on the other hand, fell in love with a Cleveland Jew while going to graduate school in Boston. One summer I dragged him down to Houston in mid-July and married him in front of all our family andfriends. (I have 45 first cousins.) As fast as we could, my Yankee husband and I moved to Atlanta to begin our life together, finally settling in Chapel Hill, NC with our two school-aged children. We are happy and settled. We are the new American South, or at least a part of it. To tolerance.

Except for an occasional trip to Utah, I spend my time in South Georgia, writing about grits, molasses, and my grandfather’s mule (whose name was Old Kit). To be sure, all of the above show up in the piece that you are about to read.

The female protagonists in Connie May’s books don’t become “one” with their adulthood by hitting a triple and sending Frankie in for the scoring run. These girls don’t have a fumbling, poignant, first sexual encounter that is both bittersweet and endearing, and they certainly don’t become mature adults by sucking it up and just “getting over it.”