An essay from the Place Issue
This congregation is the only one in eastern Alabama and was born out of a potluck dinner for Rosh Hashanah in the early ’80s when a local couple invited four friends over, telling them to extend the invitation to everyone they knew. Eighty people showed up, all surprised at the number of other members of the tribe around them; many had assumed they were one of the only Jewish families around.
An Omnivore essay from the Summer/Fall 2020 issue.
Johns has said that, even as a child, he wanted to be an artist—only he didn’t know what an artist was. “In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art so I didn’t really know what that meant,” he said. “I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different from the one that I was in.”
An essay from the Place Issue
My dad wanted his death, like his life, to be a work of art—a tomb he designed and filled with ceramics—and one that would allow him to define death on his own terms. My mom, for her part, said, “I never planned to put anything in the tomb, but heck, who knows.”
A feature essay from the Summer/Fall 2020 issue.
This is how so many black families lose their land. One person wants to sell and starts an action that can force a sale. And if a developer wants the land, he or she can buy a small interest in the property from an heir and through a series of legal maneuvers, force the sale of the whole lot.
A poem from the Place Issue
Friend, what else is there to do / but learn to use the word undulating in a sentence
A featured conversation from the Summer/Fall 2020 issue.
“The pandemic in the United States opened up the truth of what that nation is about. Like a volcano, truth just came pouring out. Just layers and layers and layers. I keep hearing this stuff about, well, in America, we’re exceptional. Are you kidding? I never thought that, never felt that, never even considered it. American exceptionalism? Please.”
An essay from the Place Issue
As a music writer and amateur New Orleans obsessive, I’ve known of Buddy Bolden for years—known what there is to know, that is, about a musician who left no recordings. The shotgun on First Street was deemed a New Orleans Historic Landmark in 1978, but the last ten years for this house, his longest and final residence, have been a saga of demolition by neglect, the City Council’s term when levying fines.
A Points South essay from the Place Issue
Being a restaurant’s regular, whatever that looks like to you, even in the midst of a pandemic, is still a beautiful thing. Even if that dedication means never actually stepping foot in the establishment at all, let alone eating a meal there.
An essay from the Place Issue
Much has changed in Stone Mountain since that piece was published in 1999, and much has not. The Confederate heroes still perch proudly on the mountainside, defacing the granite, mocking its full potential for glory. And yet the city surrounding the mountain keeps getting blacker and browner, fueled by a surge of immigrants from such countries as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, Somalia, and Burma.
by Peter MacKeith, Dean and Professor of Architecture
Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, University of Arkansas
An essay from the Place Issue
Today, I venture proudly and safely into the straight world outside the confines of bars and clubs once designated specifically as “gay” spaces. I can be free. This wouldn’t have been the case a generation ago. Within my lifetime, queer behavior has put people in jail, in exile, and in danger. For many who faced their truth in the decade before Stonewall, often the only safe choice was to leave the small towns where they were shamed and muted and to run away to cities—though even in Atlanta, a town with well over a half million people in 1960, the year Frank arrived, gay bars were dangerous and illicit places.
A Points South essay from the Place Issue
As of today’s journey, our family has been in quarantine for more than a hundred days. Summer camp plans have fallen by the wayside, much like those color-coded home-school schedules parents passed around at the top of the pandemic. In their place are daily, valiant, sometimes pitiful, efforts to educate our kid, get our work done, love each other, and stay alive. The shelter-in-place sameness was beginning to feel a little like Groundhog Day—that is until late winter, early spring when death came in threes.
