Richard Sexton’s forthcoming book, Enigmatic Stream: Industrial Landscapes of the Lower Mississippi River documents, in close to one hundred images spanning nearly twenty years of work, the role of industry along the riverbank.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
What is it about this malignancy that pulls me like the moon pulls on the tides? Why does he live in my head? Maybe I am a soft touch. Maybe I’m a mark. Like so many women, I can’t resist a half-handsome smart guy with a ready and witty remark. That’s on me. I got hooked on a single song: “I Was in the House When the House Burned Down.” But that was years after 1982.
A Points South essay from the Fall 2019 issue
We all hear them, nearly two thousand young women making a joyful noise and heading this way in a ritual officially known as “Bid Day,” but called “Squeal Day” by pretty much everyone. The sound is less a squeal than a soprano roar, high and triumphant, louder and louder as they round the corner, a delirium of girls in shorts and sneakers, cantering behind sisters bearing huge cut-out Greek letters.
Male romantic friendships in art and life
Everything about my reading and living felt belated. I’d missed by one hundred fifty years the cultural context that somehow explained my intimacy with Luke Henry better than I could, and my education in nineteenth-century romantic friendship came too late.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Church steeples still lay on the ground, blue tarps turned homes into extensions of the sea. A human’s arms cannot encompass that loss. We make small boxes instead; we attempt to foil fate, we laugh, and we wait.
“As the grandson of a well driller, I learned at an early age that water does not originate from a faucet, nor simply disappear after going down the drain.”
A Letter from the Editor, Fall 2019.
As a nonprofit, independent publication, the OA exists in an undefined space between literary journal and glossy general-interest magazine. We can embrace the best of both traditions as we see fit: publishing multi-page poems and longform reportage, fine artwork and photojournalism.
A commemoration of the No Tears Suite from the Summer 2019 issue
I hadn’t been to Little Rock until the performance, and to be able to go to the museum across the street, to be reminded with videos how horrific that moment was, to actually play in that school, that was deep. To know that this is something that’s so heavy, something we’re still going through, even. To be there in the same town, on the same block, in the exact same building and onstage, in that beautiful auditorium. It was an emotional time.
A featured short story from the Summer 2019 issue.
You’ve always wished your mother, who is so deft with the cards, would learn to read fortunes. You want her to tell your future, holding nothing back. You want all of it confirmed, your luck and your losses. You haven’t asked her, though. You can imagine her shaking her head, incredulous again that you, superstitious girl, are her daughter. That you long to convert each game into a prophesy.
A Points South essay from the Summer 2019 issue
In 2007, the fossil remains of a severely disabled prehistoric man were uncovered in what is now Vietnam. The skeleton revealed the fused vertebrae and weak bones characteristic of a congenital disease called Klippel-Feil syndrome. The man was a quadriplegic, unable to feed himself or keep himself clean, and yet he survived to adulthood—during the Stone Age, mind you—because others in his community took care of him.
A veritable who’s-who of icons, legends, today’s hot finds, and tomorrow’s trendsetters Wednesday, October 9 through Saturday, October 12. Four days of bliss on the banks of the Mississippi in historic Helena, Arkansas, will see more than 100 performers ranging from legacy icons to tomorrow’s stars on six stages, taking fans from around the world on a journey that brings the legacy of America’s music to life.
Learn more at KingBiscuitFestival.com.
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.
