A poem from the Fall 2018 issue.
Working. The vacation
I need is on your mark,
Get set, go. It’s been years
Since I’ve seen the light
A Points South essay from the Fall 2018 issue
My suitcase is full of batik and baby cologne. One bar emulates the American South. The cover band plays Journey.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
My first full hurricane season in the Bahamas in over twenty years found me struggling to ensure we were storm ready while adjusting to our family’s new normal.
The images in Michael Wriston’s project, Ask and it Shall Be Given to You, traverse the often unseen, rural corners of Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, capturing the stillness and vivid life of small towns, their residents, and the land that holds them.
Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South is an unprecedented photography exhibition comprising fifty-six photographers’ visions of the South over the first decades of the twenty-first century. Accordingly, it offers a composite image of the region. The project’s purpose is to investigate senses of place in the South that congeal, however fleetingly, in the spaces between the photographers’ looking, their images, and our own preexisting ideas about the region.
Anne Spencer’s ecosystem of art and activism
As I read, I fell in love with Anne Spencer’s fierceness and wit. In some ways, she reminded me of my own grandmother—a voluble woman, gardener, and scrawler of notes on the back of lists. Finding Spencer’s scraps, I felt the same sort of matriarchal literary presence amid the dailiness of domestic life: glimpses of how an ambitious, literary-minded woman might manage a house.
A feature essay from the Fall 2018 issue.
Prine radiates a sense of well-being, along with a sort of amused nonchalance toward potential disaster. This is a good thing, because the Coupe, as it turns out, has no passenger-side safety belt. Or rather it has the shoulder belt, but the thing on the seat into which it is supposed to latch is missing. I noticed this awhile back, and it worried me for a few minutes. But then I thought, If you’re going to buy the farm it might as well be in a ’77 Coupe de Ville with John Prine.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
San Antonio is the patron saint of lost causes, and Rolando created a statue of him in faux-marble white with the Alamo perched like a hat, except that the saint is upside down, so the Alamo is at his feet. When you want something, Rolando says, you flip the statue upside down.
What’s that? Who’s Cosmo, you say?
The Oxford American magazine’s celebration of its twentieth annual Southern Music issue, this year featuring North Carolina, will be held Monday, November 26 – Saturday, December 1, 2018. This weeklong celebration, co-presented by Hillsborough, North Carolina-based Yep Roc Records, and designed in partnership with North Carolina-native singer-songwriter Tift Merritt, will be comprised of music events featuring a Statewide Singing Circle and literary readings highlighting stories from the issue.
A poem from the Fall 2018 issue.
A young couple scutters by
On a motorbike. Harley, I think.
On their way to the beach. I can
See his feet are bare, resting inches
From the muffler’s burning heat—oh
The recklessness of young men
That makes them so exciting
To fuck, and sends them off
To war, whistling and marching.
A Points South essay from the Fall 2018 issue
I've come to have a friendship with a raven in Paris. I call him Cleitus, a name that I picked up from a Dukes of Hazzard episode or Greek mythology. The fact that it could be either reveals much about my raw ingredients, the stuff from which I am made.
