An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
It is easy to dismiss a person as ignorant; it is hard to recognize the ways in which I am still ignorant. My ego retaliates violently against this possibility because it threatens my self-image as a Good Person, the moral superiority that enables me to pity those with whom I disagree from the relative safety of higher ground.
Peyton Fulford’s Infinite Tenderness explores notions “of intimacy and identity among the LGBTQ+ community in the American South.” Her images, which often depict young people in pairs or groups, and bodies in intimate poses of flux, suggest the vulnerability inherent in “growing up and identifying oneself.”
A Points South essay from the 100th issue.
New Orleans loves to celebrate and romanticize its French and Spanish influences. But so much of the city’s culture—the food, the music, the dance, Mardi Gras itself—is indebted to the Caribbean. New Orleans has reaped the benefits of an exported culture, while leaving Haiti behind.
An installment in Chris Offutt’s Omnivore column, Cooking with Chris.
According to the exuberant advertising, my Echo was in full possession of sixty thousand recipes, which is why it’s worth writing about in a “food essay.” I have a very large collection of community cookbooks—three shelves’ worth, totaling seventy-five inches. My wife has another forty cookbooks, all much taller and thicker than mine. Still, we didn’t have sixty thousand recipes between us. Then again, who the Sam Hill needs that many?
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Across two lanes of traffic—an alarmingly short distance—he executed a round-off, back handspring, and back flip. He was so high in the air I could see him over four rows of cars in front of me. The heat shimmered up off the pavement and broken glass around him. He fetched a cup from the curb, and I watched him pass every car window, including my own, without collecting anything. The light turned green.
Tupelo, Mississippi, is an upbeat, happy city where people believe they can accomplish anything. Here, a young boy from the wrong side of the tracks with a $7.75 guitar grew up to be king. An unconquerable tribe called this place its homeland. A trail over 8,000 years in the making still beckons visitors to slow down and explore. In Tupelo, anything is possible.
Poems from the Spring 2018 issue.
One white anemone,
the year’s first flower,
saves the world.
A Writing on Writing essay from the 100th issue.
I found myself in Jones’s writing. Kentucky. Black. Rural. Woman. I was especially taken with how she drew characters from the oral storytelling tradition and then broadened that form into her own literary style. I saw Jones’s act of making black speech the core of her work as revolutionary.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
For me, obsession with art is also about survival. I’m after the next thing, the next moment that will give shape or purpose to existence. It’s always been important for me to fill my days like this, to give definition to who I am and who I will be by engulfing myself in what I’m watching and listening to and reading. Getting lost in art that moves me just makes things make sense.
Isabelle Baldwin’s Sleepy Time Down South depicts a quiet “life protected by the mountains,” and embraces the wash of romantic nostalgia that sometimes colors childhood when we recollect it as adults. Inspired by Louis Armstrong’s 1930s track, “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” her photographs are sun-drenched and peaceful.
A feature short story from the 100th issue.
When the real estate agent first drove us up the gravel driveway, I felt I’d been to this place before. I wasn’t sure at first, for I’d first been there at night. Over fifteen years before. A dinner of academics after a lecture at UNC on Southern food. I was still living in New York then, and found the idea of owning a two-hundred-four-year-old restored farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by cornfields to be the height of fancy. Nothing in my future. Much too Town & Country for my tastes. Back then I fully expected to die on the twenty-first floor of a high-rise in the middle of some urban engine. How odd.
A Points South essay from the 100th issue.
If the earth is wet enough and acidic enough, the first thing you’ll find when you start digging up a grave is a coffin-shaped halo in the ground. That’s the mark left by the pinewood walls of the casket as they decayed into deep umber in the dirt. Everything else—the lid, the body itself, and whatever earthly treasures went into the hole along with it—has been pushed down to the bottom. The halo descends about a foot, until you reach the grave’s lowest stratum, where you can find scraps of bone, or metal, or just more multicolored dirt. In drier conditions, you might find a lot more than that.
