An excerpt from Carter Sickels’s new novel The Prettiest Star.
The killer whales are the most misunderstood of the whales. To begin with, although everyone calls them whales, they’re actually dolphins. For hundreds of years, people believed killer whales were man-eaters. It’s not true.
A feature essay from the Spring 2020 issue.
I moved to Texas in 2017 and returned often to Dilley. When I would chat with residents—after a city council meeting, at the nail salon, before a cook-off—they’d ask if I was in Dilley to write about how depressing or messed up the place is. Or they’d scoff: I was just another journalist coming to write about the detention center. Or they couldn’t figure out why someone would want to study a town they found so dreadfully boring. In reality, I was struck by how the town is at the crossroads of three industries: oil, confinement, and smuggling. I wondered what it might take to revive a small town like Dilley—and at what cost. I kept sticking around.
When tornado relief efforts intersect with a global pandemic
In my family, the women of generations past—and sometimes present—often found themselves without choices or options, hemmed into lives they could not escape. I recognized them in the pages of Lee’s novels, and I was able to better comprehend their experiences. But I also heard whispers in her chapters, invitations to escape and understand, yes, but also to imagine..
A Letter from the Editor, Spring 2020.
Over the years, I have come to admire a certain kind of story that the Oxford American, as a quarterly magazine untethered from the demands of a rapid news cycle, is especially well suited to publish. With love, I call it the “OA special,” though “passion project” works just as well: stories that writers have been chasing for years, often to the point of obsession, hooked by a question or a place or a character.
An installment in our weekly photography series, Eyes on the South
With an eye on exploring the folklore of Appalachian culture, Riley Goodman’s From Yonder Wooded Hill captures “the vision and the values of the folk” of Appalachia, using artifacts and ephemera to create a visual narrative that challenges the boundaries of “historical truth.”
A Points South essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
What I want is to love Southern rock without being implicated in the Old South politics. I want progress but I want it surgical. Take secession and Strom Thurmond, take Bob Jones and his university, take the racism and the guy wearing the sandwich board, all bad eye and venom, and leave me the Chattooga River, leave me my grandparents on the porch, leave me the fish fries and Ronnie Milsap and the old man at Open Arms Church who played the dobro so lovingly you swore he was cradling his child.
A Points South essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
Lillie’s sound is not readily identifiable as black or white but seems a merger of the two as she effortlessly blends country and blues in a haunting song about family loss. Noticeably absent is the Gullah Geechee accent, and she finds little use for vibrato. Instead, a pure, unadorned, angelic quality characterizes her soprano. Such simplicity proves effective in conveying Lillie’s innermost thoughts—her pain.
An installment in our weekly photography series, Eyes on the South
With a commitment to celebrating the people, landscapes, and beliefs that make the Sunshine State a captivating place, photographer Scott McIntyre has captured the curiosity and the wonder of Cassadaga, Florida, a small village known as the “Psychic Capital of the World.”
Track 6 – “Guitar Song” by Marshall Chapman
I have written hundreds of songs over the years. And of those hundreds, there are ten or twelve I call my lifesavers. It’s like, if I hadn’t written that particular song in that particular space and time, I would have died some sort of spiritual death. “Guitar Song” is one of them.
A Points South essay from the South Carolina Music Issue.
Let me take you back to a time before algorithmic music recommendations (If you like this, you’ll definitely like this), to a time when you never rode in a friend’s car without flipping through their fat, floppy binders of CDs, heavy as an X-ray blanket in your lap, to see what they were digging. Let me take you back, in other words, to the mid-nineties.
In Memory of Charles Portis
The “Words of Remembrance and Appreciation” delivered by Ernie Dumas, Portis’s longtime friend and colleague from the Arkansas Gazette, was, like the man it honored, by turns hilarious, insightful, wry, and affecting. We are grateful he has permitted us to publish a version of it here.
An installment in our weekly photography series, Eyes on the South
Documenting a tradition unique to New Orleans, Brown captures the lively atmosphere of “masking” on parade day, with a particular focus on Big Chief Pierre “Monk” Boudreaux and his family. Ostrich plumes and intricate beadwork adorn the participants’ suits as they take to the streets on Mardi Gras.
