Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Does being a vegetarian disqualify me from being “southern”? I have accepted grits, cornbread, okra, and ridiculously sweet iced tea, but I can’t abide collards and barbeque. I don’t have loquacious uncles spinning yarns at huge family reunions or eccentric aunties that out-butter Paula Deen. All I have is a developed love of the land as I have lived over half my life now in North Carolina. I have hiked in the Great Smokies and splashed off the Outer Banks. I have gardened in the Piedmont’s red clay and in the flat sand of the coastal plain. Elizabeth City is the fourth NC city for me, trending eastward from High Point. A remnant of the Great Dismal Swamp is in my back yard along with the Pasquotank River. They inspired these poems.Read more
A word or two from our Poetry Editor EmeritusRead more
April – May 2013: Twenty-Eight Poets featuring Joseph Bathanti NC Poet Laureate 2012-2014 Two Original Poems Written in Celebration of Poetry at the Mule April will meld into May here on the Mule… New Fiction. Fabulous Fiction.Read more
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My family has been farming in the South for fifty years; longer if you count cotton. I don’t count cotton. Read more
SLS: Most of my family was born and raised in the Deep South, and remains there (Mississippi, Alabama, and East Texas). Things get a bit confused by some in those areas when they find out that I grew up in the Upper South of Tidewater, Virginia. When they hear my soft accent or that I prefer to be asked first before my tea is sweetened, I am sometimes accused of being a Yankee (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Not so with my family, though–I’m still Southern through and through–and proud of it. I’m so Southern that I can go into great detail about my usual scratch staple of grits and its historical importance to the South’s survival. True, but I eat them so often (always stone ground–never instant) because they’re soooo good.
Plus, I know the difference between a chicken house and a hen house, and have met both chicken catchers and chicken sexers.Read more
About mid-way through this Mule’s life, I worked for Popmatters.com as the Books Editor. We had around 70 critics in my department and back in that day, digital previews were not available. I had toRead more
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My yard dogs are polite and only bark when strangers walking by neglect them and forget to speak to them. The voices of people I’ve never met will waft up to the second story windows of my home, “Hello there, everything okay today? How ya’ doing? Sweet pups. Nice pups … “Read more
Southern Legitimacy Statement: It was probably around age seven in the middle of a winter night that I realized how southern I was while dangling my legs in Granny’s outhouse.Read more
Southern legitimacy statement
my grandmother made fat back sandwiches at lunch for all the grandchildren and our cholesterol is just fine.Read more
Southern Legitimacy Statement: A snapshot of the South. A line of watermelons laid out in the grass. The road, just glorified gravel. My wife pointing through the windshield at the hand-painted cardboard leaning against the fence post. A smile playing across her face in the shifting sunshine. An empty gumdrop jar gleaming beside the cardboard sign. “Take a melon” on one line, “Leave a dollar” on the next.Read more
Southern Legitimacy Statement: When she was 8, Hannah attended a weeklong Kay Yow Lady Wolfpack basketball camp at NC State University, where dribbling was optional but prayer mandatory. Read more
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in Lexington, Virginia steeped in summer afternoon storytelling that winds its way late into the night. I walk 74 percent slower than most people I know here in Washington State. I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who orders grits at the diner here in town. I have that way we have that makes us really tiresome at the grocery store in places like Seattle and New York. I’m descended from Felix Grundy. I’ll let you Google him.
*ValNote: I google’d him. Read more
This month’s poetry rises above the pocosin and flies over our heads toward the astral plain. Having North Carolina’s poet laureate, Joseph Bathanti, join us to create an issue unparalleled in lyrical superiority seemed toRead more
I moved to Virginia at age seven and was baptized by vernacular when on my first day at the new school my teacher told me to do something “right quick.” The whole world sounded different. Decades later, I can make fried green tomatoes without a recipe, and (not so) secretly enjoy going to the Bass Pro Shop.Read more
* * The 2013 April (Poetry Month) Issue of the Dead Mule is dedicated to the memory of Elsie R. Jones May 13, 1921 – March 12, 2013 Beloved Mother of Poetry Editor Helen Losse.Read more
The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
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The Dead Mule
1996-2018
In our 22nd year online!
“No good Southern fiction is complete without a dead mule.”
–Val MacEwan, 1996
This Literary Journal publishes on the first day of the month. Check out 23 years of Dead Mule wonder, start here and then go to our sister site: the Dead Mule Archives.
Southern Legitimacy Statements
You’ll find the statements at the forefront of everything. These statements are the heart and soul of the Dead Mule. Enjoy! They are the Southern Legitimacy Statements required of every contributor.
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