Greg Stidham (Dec. 2018)
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Dear Ms. MacEwan, I should not feel the need to apologize for living now in Ontario, for your name suggests first generation roots in Scotland, or at least Nova Scotia. My claim to a southern heritage comes from...
June Rogers: Sweet and Tart :: Dec. 2018
Southern Legitimacy Statement: East Texas food figures prominently in my memory of childhood where I lived in Longview (and later in Dallas and Austin): cornpone, grits, collard greens, cornpone, fried chicken, the catfish and green jello at Luby’s Cafeteria, and of...
Jim Finley: Ned the Mule :: Dec. 2018
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born and reared in Texas, but graduate schooled three years in Starkville, Mississippi, and spent three years teaching at LSU in Lafayette, Louisiana. Lived and wed a talented and sweet Cajun in Crowley, La. With mind and soul...
Chris Espenshade : The Course of a Season (essay) Dec. 2018
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Relative to this piece, I have run throughout the Southeast, for North Forsyth high school, the University of Virginia, and Wake Forest University. I raced Peachtree back when we thought 1,200 was an astounding number of competitors. I...
Donna Walker-Nixon : Straw Man (fiction) Dec. 2018
Southern Legitimacy Statement: When I was ten, eleven, twelve years old, I dreamed of moving up North to live in a garret and write novels–never knowing exactly what I’d write about, but it would be lofty. Fifty years later, I...
Laurie Brown-Pressly : Jo’s Funeral (fiction) Dec. 2018
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My given name is Laura Ruth, and I am a sweet tea addict. I grew up in Woodruff, South Carolina–home of the Wolverines. I won a shagging contest in college at Clemson University, and, no shagging is...
Monica Bellon-Harn : Piggly Wiggly (fiction) Dec. 2018
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I spent the first seven years of my life straddling the Sabine between southwest Louisiana and southeast Texas. Even though across my life I dotted the map in Puerto Rico, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Mississippi, I kept circling...
Allison Chestnut: Queen For a Day (memoir) Dec. 2018
Southern Literacy statement: I am a spinster with a Bible and a gun who grew up reading Fannie Flagg, Jerry Clower and Lewis Grizzard. I have seen a squirrel get loose in a Baptist church. I have ridden a mule...
Geoff Balme : Quadrophenia (memoir) Dec. 2018
I’ve published with you a couple of times, but I don’t mind updating my SOUTHERN Legit statement. I identify weeds, mushrooms, trees, bugs, and wildflowers. I’m fond of dwarf irises, rue anenomes, foam flowers and, of course, hen of the...
Marijean Oldham : Airline Lost and Found (memoir) Dec. 2018
My Southern Legitimacy is in evidence when I tell you that yesterday I wore a dress and stockings to attend a ladies’ tea party where we drank champagne all afternoon. Most of the ladies are aging exotic dancers, and had...
Robert Beveridge : Three Poems Dec. 2018
The Southern legitimacy statement: I was raised by jackalopes. Among them were Jim Boatwright, Liz Morgan, and Dabney Stuart. Floyd A pregnant spider twists on the end of her line her web breaks my cigarette’s smoke into a hundred pieces...
Con Chapman: Hard Times (fiction) Nov. 2018
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Missouri, a border state, the site of a skirmish in the Civil War. I was raised in a county seat with a population of around 23,000, which doesn’t necessarily sound like a small...
Lynda Black: Love Lesson #6 – Room At The Inn (essay/memoir) Nov. 2018
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in North Carolina, within six miles of the land where my ancestor settled in the 1700s. Lacking frequent snow fall as children, my siblings, cousins, and I improvised. We used dried horse manure in our...
Charles S. Stover: The Slop Detail (micro-fiction) Nov. 2018
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in West Virginia and grew up in West Virginia and Kentucky. I remember when I was a child in West Virginia, running through the fields in the summer, stirring up grasshoppers and bumble bees, and...
Sean Lyon: Momma’s Letter to Inmate (Fiction) Nov. 2018
Southern Legitimacy Statement: The house I lived in as a child had to be abandoned when my parents got divorced. It sat on 54 acres of land, every inch of which I walked as a young man, sometimes eating apples,...
Poetry
Essays
