Literature (part II)
Literature (part II) includes Memoirs, Autobiographical Reflections, Interviews and Essays and Features. Part I is here. Part III is here.
Memoir, Autobiographical Reflections, Interviews
Smoke 'n' Guns
A Preface to a Poem about Marginal Souths, and then the Poem
by Conor O'Callaghan
"Addressing a jubilant crowd in Belfast shortly after the declaration of the original ceasefire in 1993, Gerry Adams reminded his audience that ‘they haven't gone away, you know.' He meant that even as ‘the cause' was dwindling, its upholders-‘the boys'-were still among us. He might just as easily have been talking about the Klan."
Full Issue for Kindle ($6.95), for Nook ($6.95), or for Sony Reader ($6.95)
Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2011: The Irish
"My Idol Was Langston Hughes": The Poet, the Renaissance, and Their Enduring Influence
from a talk by Margaret Walker Alexander
edited and introduced by William R. Ferris
"As a small child in the 1920s, I was very much affected by the Harlem Renaissance. As early as age eleven, I had read poetry by Langston Hughes."
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.96) or for Nook ($8.35)
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2010: Southern Lives
Albert Murray's Magical Youth
by David A. Taylor
"In America they get away from race by saying 'minority.' But who the hell's the best minority in the world? The hero! You know what I'm saying? That's always a minority."
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.96) or for Nook ($8.35)
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2010: Southern Lives
Just As I Am Not: A Poet Visits the Billy Graham Library
by Michael McFee
"Do they keep an eye out for the possible wayward soul (like, say, a middle-aged guy with scraggly, graying hair who stays at the margins of the group and keeps scribbling in a little black book) and hope—no, pray—that the cheerful performance of their duties and the powerful unfolding of Billy Graham's life and message might lead this poor lost person to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior?"
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.96) or for Nook ($8.35)
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2010: Southern Lives
Alex Haley: Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1989: Angels, Legends, and Grace
by William R. Ferris
"I think in a lot of areas an almost mystic thing happened, given the backdrop. When I was a boy there was pretty strict segregation, and it was so much the historic custom that really relatively few people even questioned it. Then came the 1960s and their challenges to the system."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2008: Civil Rights
Machelhe Island
by Bland Simpson
"Who else has journeyed and taken their turns around this little island? The natives, the Algonkians in their cypress dugouts, who skirted Machelhe for a thousand years or more before they ever glimpsed a European, before the island ever had a name in English."
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2007
I'm Talking about Shaft
by Michael Parker
"Now we were about to premiere, for an audience suspecting more anemic halftime show standards, the hottest jam of the Black Moses, Mr. Hot Buttered Soul himself."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2006
The Duke
by Duncan Murrell
"The Dukes linked sex and the cigarette, which was audacious not only because they were abstemious Methodists but because there’s no earthly reason burning a foul weed in your mouth ought to invoke the pleasures of sex. And yet it does."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2006: Tobacco
Harold Burson on interviewing Faulkner for the Memphis Commercial Appeal
by William R. Ferris
"He'd go in his back woods and drink himself insensible with some of his sharecropper friends."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2006
Teaching Southern Lit in Black and White
by Michael Kreyling
"I had to stop. It wasn’t funny, and the bravura failed to lift any literary hearts. In this reading in this place, these words, whatever I might think about their literary merits, described white men on horseback with dogs hunting a defenseless black man on foot."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 2005
Teaching Gone with the Wind in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam
by Mart A. Stewart
"'There were a lot of Scarletts in Vietnam after 1975.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 3, Fall 2005
Robert Penn Warren: "Mad for Poetry"
by William R. Ferris
“I said, ‘Couldn’t we go a little slower?’ And he said, ‘With a white man sitting in this front seat with me? You won’t catch me going less than ninety miles an hour. Mister, you’ll just have to take it. I’m saving your life.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 4, Winter 2004
Alice Walker: "I know what the earth says."
by William R. Ferris
“I love B.B. because he loves women. They can be mean, they can be bitchy, they can be carrying on, but you can tell he really loves them. He’s full of love. I would like to be the literary B.B. King.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2004
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
by Lee Smith
“We often had dates for the revival, since there wasn’t anything else to do in that town, or anyplace else to go, and that oftentimes your date would be holding your hand while you both got all wrought up together. So there was a sexual thing going on there, too.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2004
Float Fishing in the Ring of Fire
by Hal Crowther
"I suppose I'd be a secular humanist, except I'm not so high on humans at this point."
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2004
Eudora Welty: "... standing under a shower of blessings"
by William R. Ferris
“One, two, three. I just waded out . . . through the muck. And then I got in his sailboat. Of course I was wet, but you can’t ask William Faulkner to wring you out, I guess. It hadn’t occurred to me until this minute that I might have.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2003
Southern Nigerian
by Elaine Neil Orr
“What I most recall is the sun slamming down, ricocheting off tin roofs of mud and plaster houses that duplicated one another endlessly down a thousand bicycle paths, splashes of puddles during the rains, and a hundred women on their way to market.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2003
The Fruits of Memory
by Amy E. Weldon
“What I most recall is the sun slamming down, ricocheting off tin roofs of mud and plaster houses that duplicated one another endlessly down a thousand bicycle paths, splashes of puddles during the rains, and a hundred women on their way to market.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 2, Summer 2003
Through the Cumberland Gap
by Doris Betts
“For hours I would practice in front of a mirror that trick of merely narrowing both eyes with anger, a tiny movement sure to strike terror into crooked card players and rustlers.”
Essays and Features
A lengthening chain in the shape of memories"
The Irish and Southern Culture
by William R. Ferris
"Eudora Welty spent two memorable weeks with Elizabeth Bowen in Ireland. She loved hearing Bowen and the artist Norah McGuinness telling stories together: 'Such Stories as those two told--these whole family stories unrolling.' Welty was inspired by her trip to write 'The Bride of the Innisfallen' and noted that most of the conversations in the piece were 'overheard ones.'"
Full Issue for Kindle ($6.95), for Nook ($6.95), or for Sony Reader ($6.95)
Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2011: The Irish
Tara, the O'Haras, and the Irish Gone With the Wind
by Geraldine Higgins
"Into the debate about place, race, and the second-best-selling book of all time, we can also bring Irishness."
Full Issue for Kindle ($6.95), for Nook ($6.95), or for Sony Reader ($6.95)
Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2011: The Irish
The View from Mencken's Tomb
by Hal Crowther
"He was a verbal bully with a bully pulpit, more entertainer than sly persuader; in terms of reach and impact, a modern equivalent would be someone like Rush Limbaugh, although Mencken's demographic share was predominantly young and intelligent while Limbaugh's is old and stupid."
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.96), for Nook ($7.96), or for Sony Reader ($9.45)
Volume 16, Number 4, Winter 2010
On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry: Nostalgia, Sex, and the Souths of William Alexander Percy
by Benjamin E. Wise
"'What I wrote seemed to me more essentially myself than anything I did or said.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2008
William Faulkner's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
by William Faulkner
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2006
Best Novel Still Unwritten, Falkner Admits At Oxford
by Harold Burson
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2006
Promoting the Gothic South
by Rebecca C. McIntyre
"Taking a boat ride down a swampy southern river was a thrilling escape into the unknown, a peep show of the grotesque, a blending of the realistic and the fantastic, which thrilled in a strange and disturbing way."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 2, Summer 2005
"A World Properly Put Together": Environmental Knowledge in Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain
by Albert Way
“It has been more than seven years since the publication of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, and it has become nothing short of a phenomenon.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 4, Winter 2004
Zelda Sayre, Belle
by Linda Wagner-Martin
“There are few more memorable wives in twentieth-century American culture than Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, who was married to the successful young author F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 2, Summer 2004
Locals on Local Color: Imagining Identity in Appalachia
by Katie Algeo
“Movies, television, comic strips, and postcards feature the lanky, gun-toting, grizzle-bearded man with a jug of moonshine in one hand and a coon dog at his feet.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 4, Winter 2003
A Conspiracy of Dunces? Walker Percy's Humor and the Chance of a Last Laugh
by Bryan Giemza
“‘Percy took a punch intended for Foote—from an outraged woman, no less—and had the good grace to earmark the scene for fictional purposes. ’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 2, Summer 2003
Yankee Interloper and Native Son: Carl Carmer and Clarence Cason: Unlikely Twins of Alabama Expose
by Philip D. Beidler
“‘Like a fickle lover, the South has a way of tormenting those who care most about her.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2003
Robert F. Williams and the Promise of Southern Biography
by Timothy B. Tyson
“But nonetheless I have been lurking in the shadows, plotting and sulking like one of William Faulkner’s vindictive barn-burners.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2002: Biography
Hamlet Rides among the Seminoles
by Robin O. Warren
“When William Forbes and his company of actors steamed out of Savannah in May 1840, they were about to enter the Second Seminole War. Before they had been in Florida for more than a full day, the actors were ambushed by real-life Indians, lost two of their number, and had their props and costumes sacked.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 4, Winter 2001
"All Goes Back to the Earth": The Poetry of Wendell Berry
by Henry Taylor
“‘We sell the world to buy fire . . . our way lighted by burning men.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 3, Fall 2001: Environment
The Raney Controversy: Clyde Edgerton's Fight for Creative Freedom
by George Hovis
“‘There were a lot of people who supported Clyde, but they just did not feel comfortable voicing any kind of support. There was this element of fear.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 2, Summer 2001
The Well Wrought "Durn": A Postmodern Writer in the Southern World
by Anne Goodwyn Jones
“‘Southerners can’t grasp anything that isn’t couched in a Br’er Rabbit tale. They got cornmeal mush for brains.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2001: Reed
The Dead Mule Rides Again
by Jerry Leath Mills
“Uncle Jimbo ‘once won a twenty-dollar bet by eating a bologna sandwich while sitting on a dead mule.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 4, Winter 2000
The Redemption of Atticus Finch
Letters to the Editors by Marcus Jimison, Wayne Flint, Jewell Knotts, and Joe Crespino
“Joseph Crespino’s interpretation of To Kill a Mockingbird must be politically motivated, because it certainly is not based on the text.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 4, Winter 2000
Good Country People
by Linda Flowers
"If they didn't yet work at the sewing plant or Hamilton-Beach, they kept up with As the World Turns and The Edge of Night, and they'd put supper on the table some nights out of a can."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 4, Winter 2000
Browse
New Content,
Fiction and Creative Nonfiction
at Literature (part I).
Poetry, Book Reviews at
Literature (part III).