BUY ACCESS
by Harry L. Watson
“Charleston’s antebellum proclivities only opened the path that the rest of the South would follow soon enough. There’s plenty of haunted madness to go around.” Few people besides Charlestonians and literary experts know that Edgar Allan Poe spent about a year in 1827 and 1828 on the outskirts of the Holy City, while stationed on »
by Scott Peeples
“The fact that Poe set his 1843 story ‘The Gold-Bug’ . . . on and around Sullivan’s Island should give the small town and nearby Charleston bragging rights among Poe places. There is no Poe story with an equivalent emphasis on place set in the American cities where he spent considerably more time.” While researching »
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by Marko Maunula
“‘I never did see Decatur Street with an ice pick, with a pistol . . . But I saw men and women walking up and down the street—ice picks, and pistols, and knives—and then talk about the street. The street ain’t never cut nobody’s throat. It was you! It was you!'” Reverend J. M. Gates »
Memoir
by Meredith McCarroll
“I took my groceries from a buggy and put them in a cart. I (nearly) stopped calling my hat a toboggan. I forced my vowels into shape. It worked. I got into graduate school. I got a PhD. I learned to pass. But I lost my voice.” Accent your reading. Sign up for our newsletter »
by Bryce Lankard
“My youthful fantasies were of Huck Finn floating down the Mississippi, and my realities were tubing down mountain streams in water so cold it turned your lips blue. I did build a raft once . . . It sunk.” We are drawn to water for many reasons: for our health and survival, for rites and »
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by Gavin Paul Smith
“Katrina, Ike, and Sandy—are these extreme events the new normal?” Katrina, Ike, and Sandy—are these extreme events the new normal? The emerging realities of a changing climate, as manifest in sea level rise and more intense storms, further exacerbate risk in ways that we are struggling to understand and prepare for. The associated challenges are »
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by Michael McFee
“A commission! I thought. My big break, at last! And then I went off to sober up.” I’ve always enjoyed giving poetry readings. To me, each one is a literary entertainment, a chance to hold the attention of listeners in a hospitable way, an opportunity to engage and delight them with some well-chosen language. It »
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by James McNaughton
“It must have been these stories that convinced me to go with him to a Texas gun and knife show. Camera slung to my chest, an AR-15 assault rifle strapped to his back, we walked into the Longview Civic Center.” He let himself in the house without knocking, as had become his habit, and placed »
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by Bernard L. Herman
“Birds flock, flutter and fly, strut, preen, and roost through the art of Thornton Dial.” Birds flock, flutter and fly, strut, preen, and roost through the art of Thornton Dial, citizens in a remarkable graphic menagerie that speak, sometimes forcefully, sometimes joyfully, to what he termed “hard truths.” Tigers, signifying the artist as well as »
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by Eric Janken
I could not bring myself to warn Joe,doing so would cause his legs to give out,his heart collapse: you told me every life is sacred. Army of the CumberlandFebruary 5, 1862, cold and snowing Dear Father,More pitiful than packs of feral catsthe horde staggered into camp,their black faces smothered in clay,arthritic fingers mangled with dirt,echoes »
by Southern Cultures
Over our 22-year history, we’re proud to have published 22 articles by our esteemed colleague and friend William Ferris—from interviewing B.B. King to finding Faulkner in Bulgaria. William Ferris is one of the greatest documentarians of the twentieth-century South. His collection of photographs, audio, film, and writings at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Southern Folklife Collection encompasses some »
by Southern Cultures
“For fifty years I sweat my dues, / wept salt liquor from the blues. / This story I tell wherever I go.” —Lenard D. Moore, “A Black Man Tells His Son the Whole Story” For some cultured southerners, Southern Cultures has published very little when it comes to Arts & Letters. Sure, we’ve shared a »
