A video supplement to “Oaxaca Wreck” by John T. Edge, published in the Spring 2019 issue.
“When I moved to Mississippi in 1995, I became a quick regular at Bottletree Bakery, just off the square, across from the church that my family would subsequently join. At that low counter, with a thick china mug in hand, I ate scones pocked with crystallized nuggets of ginger and pored over grad school texts. I befriended the charming misfits and dreamers who poured refills and stared at their shoes and beamed guileless smiles. And then I quit the place. Because I got jaded. Because I got busy.”
—John T. Edge, “Oaxaca Wreck”
A feature essay from the Spring 2019 issue.
Kris’s threat to leave was a loaded one. No West Virginian makes that decision lightly, and to be the cause of someone’s leaving is a terrible thing. I personally knew the weight of missing home. During all my years away, even as I enjoyed the freedom of living in a community where I felt completely comfortable talking about my sexuality, I kept my eye on returning to West Virginia. I had never found a place that felt as good to me, both in terms of the natural beauty and also the sense of a close-knit community—that feeling of being a part of something unique and true. Ever since I left I’d had a hope that someday I could return and my queer self and my Appalachian self wouldn’t have to be so split.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
If you’ve never been a young person on a big campaign, it’s hard to convey how thrilling the atmosphere is—part cult, part war, with stolen intervals of shore-leave. It went on for six months, through a January run-off, and it was a euphoric experience.
Based in Oxford, Mississippi, White has spent the past twenty years exploring reservoirs, and her project, Southern Oceans, relies on “photography’s potential to de-familiarize the harnessed water of enormous public-works projects, transforming them into newly imagined landscapes.”
For Sasha von Oldershausen, the physical landscape of West Texas is as rich in stories as the communities that populate it.
“To walk along these paths feels like you’re accessing the long history of the land.”
An installment of Chris Offutt’s Omnivore column, Cooking with Chris.
Every prepper magazine carried an article on water, mainly because there are a lot of overpriced devices out there for gathering, purifying, and transporting it. This gave me a sense of ease because as a rural man, I have my own well and am not dependent on external sources! My mitigation was fleeting—the pump runs on electricity. Just like that, I became a selfish, uncaring, deficient man, dependent on the power grid. A section on “Clean Water Wares” gave me serious concern due to its opening line:
With very few exceptions, water is the most important element required to survive an extended emergency.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Understand my irreverence was never situated in disrespect or unkindness. First he was a man and then he was a star and then he was a legend and then he was a caricature and finally an abstraction. This is the life cycle of commodification. By the time I first heard the name we were well into the weeds.
In 2010 Ashley Jones began documenting the homes, businesses, and churches affected by the Earl T. Shinhoster Bridge on Interstate 16, one of Savannah’s “flyover” highway structures.
Poems from the Spring 2019 issue.
I didn’t see the line when I crossed it—
only light, making everything new;
here, they say the winters spill out,
white a boll inside my palm;
here, gold adorns the trees,
the sun sheds its effervescence through the leaves;
I touch the place where the master split my head with iron,
even that imperfection is brilliant here;
A Points South essay from the Spring 2019 issue
Listen to the first two notes Raphael plays on his solo on Nelson’s “Georgia on My Mind” and it’s impossible not to hear Mickey singing the word “Georgia” through the instrument, the second syllable bending upward, just the way Willie sings it. Raphael’s harmonica grounds the song in its call-and-response gospel impulse: one voice means little without the other’s ghostly affirmation.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Looking for souvenirs to take back to your lovers, to prove you thought about them once in the midst of heat, toil, and hardly thinking about them at all? I recommend rebar. I recommend marbles. I recommend shards of shingles, nineteenth-century medicine bottles, forks, mountains of old bricks hoisted from the dirt, as if a whole other city had been built beneath this grass and sodded over. Keep your prize finds, a shelf of rust and porcelain and plastic, as if an archaeologist might one day stop by.
A feature short story from the Spring 2019 issue.
Their romance has started in earnest this summer, but the prologue took up the whole previous year. All fall and spring they had lived with exclusive reference to each other, and were viewed as an unspoken duo by everyone else. Little remarked, universally felt, this taut, even dangerous energy running between them. When that began, it was harder to say.
