In his striking interior and exterior glimpses of the funeral industry in the rural South, Tim Hursley’s photos feature shots of errantly parked hearses, casket showrooms, ranks of carved granite, and portraits of rusted silos and warehouses that look, too, by nature of their juxtaposition, like rows of planted headstones.
A featured short story from the Fall 2018 issue.
Our distant ancestor Harriett Moss made a living painting portraits of dead children. But before her career began in earnest, she sketched only cows. It was her husband, Thomas Moss, who painted from corpses, memorializing deceased sons and daughters for their families. People often said Thomas had the constitution for the work because he and Harriett had not been able to have children of their own. While Thomas traveled the countryside—following up with commissions, measuring cadavers that he would reanimate in two dimensions—Harriett was left alone at their farmhouse.
A Points South story from the Fall 2018 issue
“I just have this fear every day that somewhere there’s another load going to the landfill of the only known copy of something that helped change American music,” Darden told me. So he started the Restoration Project, which aims to “collect, digitize, and archive” all of the recordings available from “gospel’s golden age,” roughly 1945–1975. Because there is no reliable discography of extant gospel recordings (creating one is another ambition of Darden’s), Darden and other scholars have trouble even estimating how many songs that may turn out to be.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
“Be careful you’re not romanticizing it,” my husband said a few days later as we talked through the experience. I knew what he meant, but it made me feel lonely that he and I did not agree; I thought this could be the moment when my beliefs allied with a South African’s, but it wasn’t.
In A Southern Myth, Yarbrough’s photos grapple with the persistent tropes, misconceptions, and pressures of belonging in the South, and assume a photographic language where “‘myth’ is used as a poetic device to narrate a struggle for both the artist and the region to maintain a sense of identity.”
A short story from the Fall 2018 issue.
He saw no need to damn a place just on the face of it; he figured there must be a flower blooming somewhere in West Memphis, though he had seen no sign of one, and that maybe East St. Louis had a park where children played tag-you’re-it together while old men read newspapers from benches and spoke of last night’s ballgame.
A feature essay from the Fall 2018 issue.
Why was my great-great-grandfather always referred to as “Robert Singleton, the Civil War veteran who lost his leg at Murfreesboro, then went on to become Clerk of the County Court” rather than “Robert Singleton, whose life was saved, twice, by the black man his family had enslaved”? Moreover, what did all of this say about the America Papa so revered?
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
I felt many days like I was no one and like nothing mattered and that I couldn’t write myself out of it. I wanted to be someone or something that I couldn’t be. Now I was a guy from Brooklyn in Mississippi. When I sat down to write Gravesend, all of that came into play. I thought of the way we bring the place we’re from with us, no matter where we are. I could’ve called the book Gravesend and not had a single scene set in my neighborhood. I carried the streets with me.
Mangrove swamps occupy a vital role in the health of a coastline, particularly under the threat of increasingly powerful storms and rising seas. Inspired by his recollections of mangrove swamps while growing up on Florida’s Gulf Coast, Benjamin Dimmitt decided to revisit the shoreline, paying close attention to the unsuspected beauty and vitality of these resilient organisms.
A feature essay from the Fall 2018 issue.
I first devoured Robert Gipe’s books and plays because I wanted to understand Appalachia. I was searching for deeper insights than the victim-blaming bootstrap narrative espoused in J. D. Vance’s best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy—and where else but one of Gipe’s plays would you see convicted felons on a stage, acting right beside probation officers, teachers, and recovery coaches, all of them already bonded in their mutual need to talk about the hard problems around them?
Merriam-Webster’s take on cornbread is “bread made with corn meal.” A definition so simple leaves ample room for creativity, which is exactly what Arkansans have found since 2011 at the state’s annual Cornbread Festival. Inspired by ancient Native American culinary customs, cornbread recipes have been perfected in southern family kitchens for generations. Considering the deep roots of this commonplace staple, it’s no wonder a festival in its honor has become one of the region’s most beloved and anticipated.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Because of her story, I’ve seen the way that wars secure land at the cost of great violence, hate, and marginalization. Sometimes the so-called losers win. Like the Alamo that the Mexicans won, whose descendants lost everything. What about the downtown real estate? Mary Lou doesn’t know what happened to it. Apparently, not all heroes die rich.
