In anticipation of their annual gathering next month, we’ve partnered with SlowExposures, a “juried exhibition celebrating photography of the rural American South,” to curate this special edition of Eyes on the South.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
I have seen how engaged service of a certain kind can result in being treated to a top tier dining production, and gotdamn, that is a show.
A Southern Journey from the Summer 2019 issue.
He began the letter by asking Larry to cremate him and scatter his ashes next to his second wife’s ashes at Johnson Beach in Perdido Key, Florida, “approximately 75 yards from end of road, then straight out to the beach . . . where lovey’s ashes were scattered.” Then, Tom addressed the business of his art. “Now Larry,” the letter read. “I know you don’t know shit about art but DO NOT destroy my work.”
A Points South essay from the Summer 2019 issue
Much of what they’d tell me next was legend—tall tales, rumors, exaggerations. Perry Martin adopted an orphan girl he found on the riverside, raised her up as his own, paid her way through college. He killed nine people, or eleven, or a dozen. One of his alleged victims was his own stepson: the younger man had rocked a boat they shared too violently, which angered Martin. Apparently, despite his life along the river, this outlaw did not know how to swim.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
My family has always believed that American cooking is basically about following scientific steps in order to recreate a taste, but that Chinese cooking is about creating flavor using only what we have on hand and in our imaginations. I was putting that theory to the test.
In an ongoing series of startling black and white images, Andrew O’Brien captures landscapes along Stringer’s Ridge, a nature preserve near Chattanooga, Tennessee, and annotates them by overlaying pixelated dots, slashes, and abstract shapes to create otherworldly scenes.
A Southern Journey from the Summer 2019 issue.
Lenny did all he could to hang around it over the next couple of years, cleaning lines, fetching balls, brushing the clay to maintain a smooth surface. Eventually, after cocktail hour ended and the guests went home, Gibson set him in front of a backboard and showed him how to rotate his back foot and drive the ball. She even imparted a few life lessons, foremost among them, he remembers now: “Every time you come to this gate, you better be ready to go.”
A Southern Journey from the Summer 2019 issue.
I am journeying north. I want to see the infinite yellow flat of the Texas panhandle. Stables and barns. The dipping heads of pumpjacks. Enough to situate a fictional ranch along the Caprock Escarpment, a location I need to depict for a novel-in-progress. My mother’s family comes from the region, but I’ve never been there. My plan is to drive the seven hours north from Austin to Palo Duro Canyon, where I’ll camp for the night. Often, a single detail will bring a scene into clarity, and I’m off to find it.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Over the last three years, Alex and I have spent a total of eight summer nights in the Carlton Marion Inn. It’s a tidy motel with a gravel parking lot and a pool overlooking Crooked Creek Valley. This year, though, there’d be no fun to be had in the pool. Not even any fishing. We didn’t know that yet, but maybe we could feel it. Maybe we were afraid of what was coming, what was already there and would not stop.
In his series Palimpsests, film photographer Sean Crutchfield documents the places “where the past and present collide” in small-town Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.
A featured short story from the Summer 2019 issue.
Mother had no shortage of repulsive qualities, but the most disturbing was her laugh. Otherworldly. Piercing. A stranger would fall on the ice or a double-crossing cop would get his comeuppance from a mobster on television and this wretched, menacing cackle would emerge as though she kept a raven on a choke-chain between her gargantuan breasts.
A poem from the Summer 2019 issue.
before looking out the window
