Richard Schramm captures the town of Enfield, North Carolina—a place that is currently “looking back so that it can look ahead.” Enfield has a rich agricultural history, but like many towns of its kind, mid-twentieth century mechanization upended the local economy. Today, Enfield is home to many abandoned storefronts and warehouses.
Some of our favorite memories take place around the table, where friends and family come together to celebrate good food and good fortune.
Reading Florida.
You see one thing when you look at the state from a distance, but if you come closer, dig deeper, you always find something else. This probably has something to do with Disney World, but it also relates to the entire construct of Florida—the mythology of the state as a paradise preserved in time just for you.
A Points South profile from the Summer 2018 issue
There was no telling how long the stoplight at the base of the 8th Street hill would stay green when Grant Taylor began bombing toward it. He was in a low crouch, muscling his skateboard against the blacktop, popping ollies and carving tight S curves down the center stripe of one of midtown Atlanta’s steepest streets. With each push of his left leg, exponentially more asphalt roared past him.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Even when Ridley pans a movie, he does it with heart. His takedown of Luc Besson’s The Messenger is written as “a short story that imagines a film executive in purgatory summoning Carl Theodore Dreyer [director of the ethereal and perfect The Passion of Joan of Arc] to his office.” Haruch says this is “a doff of the cap, of sorts, to Godard’s notion that one should make a movie to criticize a movie.”
Elijah Barrett’s collection, Rockport, chronicles the weeks and months following the devastation of Hurricane Harvey. His photographs reveal the devastation enacted upon the landscape, and give insight into the lives of those who are now suspended in a state of wondering what comes next, and who are left to make sense of what happened.
A Southern Journey from the Summer 2018 issue.
We are hunting Jerome Boyatt, a Plateau fugitive who remains elusive even after his surrender and brutal death more than eighty years ago. In 1933, when he was twenty-two years old, he got into a gunfight with two county lawmen sent to arrest him at a logging camp where he was selling moonshine. He killed them both. Then Jerome hid in the rugged country around his home, No Business, a community laid along a creek hollow that joined the Big South Fork River. The manhunt for him, and the vengeance that marked it, count among the Plateau’s most infamous events.
Brother Dynamite in reflection
Hounded throughout by the Man, busted, shot at, Big Man managed to stay out of the jackpot. It probably helped that he was a quiet cat who played things close. He’s like that nowadays, not particularly keen on self-promotion, almost to a fault. He can be leery, circumspect. Sharing just isn’t his thing, let’s put it that way. But probably it’s why he’s lasted so long.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
In the spring and summer, I make a habit of sitting on our deck in the mornings and as far into the afternoons as the Kentucky sun, heat, humidity, allergies, and mosquitoes allow. I also like to sit up in the treehouse in our yard that my husband built for our children—but he and I love and use it too—with my books and my fizzy strawberry pop.
In Scattered Feathers, Dason Pettit documents the probable extinction of the ivory-billed woodpecker, exploring the “persistent existential crisis” embodied by the search for this bird.
Poems from the Summer 2018 issue.
How convenient when the brain
starts to glow. You can help
an injured peacock out of the road
without being pecked to death.
A Points South story from the Summer 2018 issue
In our collective memory, this land made it possible to take from so many. Now, I want it to give something back.
