Essay
BUY ACCESS
by Marcie Cohen Ferris
“The South has much to teach about the dangers and opportunities of belonging and exclusion, of being inside and outside the American experience.” In which I out myself as a southern outsider/insider. Raised a Jewish southerner, I am married to an agnostic folklorist from Mississippi with whom I share progressive politics. My household supports small-scale »
Essay
by William Sturkey
“What will come, I hope, is an honest reckoning that will one day finally set all of us free.” “I just want to let you know,” the older white man told me at a late-summer fish fry, “that my family owned slaves, and those slaves were happy.” This was mid-September of 2014, my second year »
Essay
by Randall Kenan
“But he’d have to acknowledge that the soul of his country is southern; the soul of his country is black.” At elegant gatherings and august meetings, I often scan the room and wonder aloud why I am, as people like myself are often given to ask, the Only Negro in the Room, or ONR, as »
Photo Essay
Selections from the South
by Jess T. Dugan,
Vanessa Fabbre
“I know the next relationship that I go into, that person’s going to be damn lucky. Because I’ve got my shit together. I’ve got my game on.” Representations of older transgender people are nearly absent from our culture and those that do exist are often one-dimensional. For more than five years, we traveled throughout the »
Essay
BUY ACCESS
by Erin N. Bush
“‘Delinquent’ girls like McNamar became the victim, the problem, the cause, and the evidence of other urban dilemmas within the reform rhetoric and agenda.” When sixteen-year-old Marie McNamar escaped the Virginia Home and Industrial School for Girls in May 1913, she intended to go home. She had gotten word that her father in West Virginia »
Photo Essay
BUY ACCESS
by Oliver Clasper
“These landscapes hold the remnants of five thousand distant voices.” If all photographs are abandonings, as the American critic Henry Allen once wrote, then how might we view photographs of lynching sites? Located for the most part in the geographic margins and the shadows of our collective memory, these landscapes hold the remnants of five »
Music
Kris Kristofferson, Authenticity, and Country Music's "New Breed"
by Alex Macaulay
“As the noted Music City chronicler Peter Cooper put it . . . . ‘Death, taxes, and backlash are inevitable for those fortunate enough to be successful.’ Such was the case with Kristofferson, whose fall paralleled his rise.” Attendees at the 1970 Country Music Association awards were startled when Roy Clark announced that Kris Kristofferson’s »
Essay
BUY ACCESS
by Emily Lieb
“Every ‘inside’ has an ‘outside.’ Every boundary has a sentinel. Almost every backyard has a NIMBY.” In 1910, the Baltimore City Council made Jim Crow concrete. It passed an “ordinance for preserving order, securing property values and promoting the great interests and insuring the good government of Baltimore city,” which was intended to make it »
Memoir
by Monique Truong
“We cannot understand the power and the meaning of food until we understand hunger.” We cannot understand the power and the meaning of food until we understand hunger. Hunger at its most basic is the lack of food, and therefore a body’s need and craving for food. If we are very lucky in this world, »
Photo Essay
by Joanna Welborn,
Melinda Wiggins,
Lucia Constantine,
Daisy Almonte,
translated by Alejandra Okie Hollister
This article appears in the Inside/Outside Issue (vol. 25, no. 2: Summer 2019) and has been condensed. To view the article in its entirety, visit Project Muse (link below). This is more than one story. This is twenty-five years of narratives from farmworkers, mostly in the Carolinas, told in labor camp kitchens, on trailer porch »
Poetry
by Savannah Sipple
“My mother says she can remember the snap. I wasn’t there, / but I can hear it, too . . . “ I’ll tell you what, Papaw was a drunk, the sweetest man alive.Sober: A good husband; a loving father; he worked hard regardless,but I’ve never heard tell if he was able to keep a »
