A Southern Journey from the Summer 2019 issue. 

Holy Mother Lode. I rose straight up out of the driver’s seat and fairly levitated for the next six minutes/miles. New Grass on the radio is rare and precious enough, but where was I headed that very morning? Up to Bristol, Virginia, and then a winding ramble northeast to speak about writing, heading to Roanoke via one of my favorite roads: U.S. Route 11, a.k.a. the Lee Highway. Cosmic? You bet!

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. 

Music enters us unmediated by the intellect. Every other form of art goes through the brain on its way to your heart, your gut, your soul. We don’t “enter into” music, the way we do with a book, a movie, a piece of visual or tactile art; it enters us. And it enters whole.

Interviews with Dwight—at least mine—always occurred on Dwight Time and largely in Dwight Space. About two hours before that first phone interview, Dwight called to apologize and say his day was crazy. Could we reschedule? I said sure, we set a time a few days later, and then he proceeded to talk for at least another hour.

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. 

If you are unfamiliar with Texan Kevin Russell, the singer/songwriter and guitar, mandolin, and ukulele player who lately goes by the nom de pluck Shinyribs, as does his brilliant funking, picking, and punking band, it is totally misleading for me to introduce you, as I just did, as if he were a man of constant sorrow. In fact, Russell—clad in his pistachio green, or orange plaid, or lip-blotting pink/red booty-shaking suit, and backed by a core of ticking, riffing sidemen, the Tijuana Trainwreck Horns, and the Shiny Soul Sisters—leads one of the finest party bands around and, when called for, a heckuva crowd rousing conga line.

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. 

It became impossible for me to jibe the romanticized South with the reality of what that war was actually about, and what it cost. And as I put away childish things, I came to understand that the monuments weren’t there to remind us of history. They were, in fact, its cover-up.

1. Stand in the garden where you plucked it and eat it warm, out of your hand.
2. Stand over the sink and eat it, sliced, between two pieces of light bread held together with mayonnaise.

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. 

I wrote once about a close friend of mine who celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas alone. She described the simple joy she had in preparing her special breakfast on those sacred days; the hours she spent poring over fat newspapers on the floor, savoring the decision of what movie to go to later; the ease of coming home to make a candlelight meal, with fine wine, alone.

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. 

The Kentucky I knew looked verdant and sun-dappled as my family drove through the palisades and then the gentle bluegrass on our way to the mountains from the city of Louisville. And even when we reached the mountains themselves, which so physically display the significance of shadow and mystery, I was still in a place that all the grownups around me treasured for its nurturing, its sustenance, its mothering. Even those who’d lived away for decades, in other states, in other countries, still called the mountains “home” because that was what they believed.

My mother was an instinctive cook. Words and directions did not hold much for her. She was a keen observer. She learned to cook from watching her aunts; her grandmother, Maw; her own mother. She loved recipes. Clipped them from the newspaper, kept them crammed in cookbooks and stuffed in bowls around the kitchen. She read them like fiction, intrigued by the possibilities they suggested, but hardly foolish enough to take them as literal instructions for real life.