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Apple Slices
essay by Todd Boss
Our Past
Browse past issues and articles from the last 30 years
Photo Essay
The Eudora Welty House
by Kate Medley, Michael Pickard“The Welty House speaks to the author’s love of travel, art, music, and the centrality of family to her life. But it is, above all, a home designed for work, which, in Welty’s case, meant reading and writing.” Twenty-five years after the author’s death, Eudora Welty’s home phone number remains the same as it ever »
Essay
An Excursion to the Swamp
Joseph Mitchell's Fairmont
by Scott Schomburg“Often what is hidden in Mitchell’s portraits of New York is a reflection of his life in North Carolina.” One November day some years ago, at the midpoint of my obsession with legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, I drove two hours south from Durham, North Carolina, where I was living at the time, to »
Fiction
For the Pleasure of the Writing
by Tayari Jones, Leoneda Inge“That’s always been part of the mission of my work—to write about the sheer breadth and wonder and scope of our southern lives.” Leoneda Inge: I understand that this book came at a critical time for you, health-wise. Was writing this novel a healing experience for you? Tayari Jones: I feel like this novel really »
Dear Reader
by Marcie Cohen Ferris“We see how the literary tradition of southern letter writing is fundamentally relational, notsolitary; that writers work and are inspired by somewhere specific.” As this is the Arts & Letters issue, it seemed only appropriate to write a letter to you from the historic Love House, where I work and where the Center for the »
Music
“Can’t Keep a Good Hoedown”
Reimagining Country Dancing and Queer Community in Atlanta, Georgia
by Joshua HowardTaking advantage of low property values caused by white flight during the 1960s, many LGBTQ+ individuals made their way into the heart of Atlanta. They established bars, clubs, businesses, and bathhouses in Midtown and Cheshire Bridge, transforming these neighborhoods into hubs of queer nightlife and culture. At the same time, the city was becoming a »
Poetry
Scribbles After the Fourth Funeral This Year
by James Daniels“Everybody I love / is dead or wants to be.”
Essay
Holding Ground
Climate Change, System Collapse, and Home in New Orleans
by Shannon Dosemagen“New Orleans is a weather city. Our relationship to the atmosphere is daily, immediate, visceral.” Home is identity and inheritance, memory and continuity, and a place where intellectual knowledge and emotional allegiance often collide without resolution. In a city like New Orleans, home perhaps takes on a denser meaning because of the interwoven social structures »
Essay
A Mecca for a Million
Lincoln Beach and the Struggle over Black Public Space
by Shruti GautamIn the summer of 2023, I followed behind families toting floaties and foam coolers, trudging up an incline on the side of a levee. As I fumbled over a fence and down a ladder, the families walking ahead of me nimbly stepped over long and wide railroad tracks. In the distance, a canopy of oak »
Memoir
That’s No Way to Live Your Life
My Family’s Gay Hairdresser
by Harry Thomas Jr.“Me-at-seventeen badly needed a queer mentor, someone who could open the gate to the gay world and give me a tour, answer my questions.” Hearing the line that will stay in my head for weeks and years and decades to come goes like this: I am fourteen or fifteen or maybe even sixteen. I am »
Memoir
Cousin Jimmy
by Michael McFee1 One drizzly Tuesday night in Chapel Hill—April Fool’s Day, 1975—my girlfriend and I were studying in the student union at the University of North Carolina. We’d found a vacant room then shut the door, spreading out books and notes to prepare for upcoming exams. After a few hours, we needed a break. Walking into »
Essay
How to Fire a Professor at the University of Florida
Two Historical Blueprints
by Ben Wise“The historical pattern is clear: Political interference with the mission of the university has the power to shape the faculty population, influence campus culture, and ruin individual lives.” The university classroom is a recurring setting in the theatre of the American reactionary imagination. For those possessed of nightmarish and creative minds, the classroom is a »
Essay
Collecting Ourselves
Archives, Family History, and Black Southern Migration to Chicago
by Sumayya Ahmed“By searching for the archival traces of my family’s pre- and early migration life, I become my family’s historian, putting primary sources in conversation with family lore and oral histories.” In summer of 2020, the Alabama State Archives issued a statement acknowledging its role in upholding systematic racism by, among other things, putting into practice »
