by John Shelton Reed,
Richard Rankin
Each year we marshal the troops for another subscription drive in order to bring Southern Cultures to a larger audience, and often during these efforts we encounter the war stories of subscribers who have been burned before when they’ve tried out a new read. Ed Talley from Arkansas wrote just after signing up with us »
by Harry L. Watson
“On a recent road trip from Atlanta to Auburn, Alabama — once the heartland of the land of cotton — I did not see a single cultivated field and scarely even a pasture.” “The heart of the southerner has been in his land,” reflected Howard Odum in his magisterial Southern Regions of the United States. »
by Michael Halminski,
Jan DeBlieu
“The taking of the Hatteras Light is a powerful statement about our society’s reluctance to accept change and loss, and our refusal to embrace the consequences of living in a world shaped by natural forces.” One mild Saturday morning in November 1998, my six-year-old son and I went to a party at the famous, black-and-white »
by Henry Taylor
“‘We sell the world to buy fire . . . our way lighted by burning men.'” The name of Wendell Berry first came to my attention about forty years ago. I was then a student at the University of Virginia and a part-time employee of Noonday Book Shop, where a book called November Twenty-Six Nineteen »
by Donna G'Segner Alderman,
Derek H. Alderman
“Perhaps no other part of the natural environment is more closely identified with the South than this invasive and fast growing vine.” City leaders in Tallahassee, Florida, recently started a program that uses sheep to graze on large, troublesome patches of kudzu within the city. Several summers ago, Greenville, South Carolina, hosted the filming and »
by Charles Dillard Thompson,
Rob Amberg
“We were behind one another praying to get out of that water.” When Hurricane Floyd visited North Carolina almost exactly two years ago, it was the worst natural disaster in the state’s history. According to the North Carolina Division of Emergency Management and the Charlotte Observer, Floyd and its floods left fifty-one dead, sixty-six counties »
Poetry
by Charles Wright
Autumn’s Sidereal, November’s a Ball and Chain After the leaves have fallen, the sky turns blue again,Blue as a new translation of Longinus on the sublime.We wink and work back from its edges. We walk aroundUnder its sequence of metaphors,Looking immaculately up for the overlooked.Or looking not so immaculately down for the same thing.If there’s nothing »
