Please don't send anymore submissions to my email. Go here instead:
Chris Tusa thinks so, and makes his case in the Spring 2011 issue of Story South.
Anyone who’s spent any length of time living in the south knows that history is important to us. In the south, we cling to words like “tradition” and “heritage.” If you search the term “Deep South” on Wikipedia, you’ll find headings like History, Civil War, and Reconstruction. The recent debate concerning the Confederate battle flag only further demonstrated this, immediately prompting the construction of southern-based websites with titles like “Preserving the Southern Heritage” and “History not Hate.”
So why is this? Why, as southerners, are we so obsessed with the past? Is there something hidden in our redneck genes, something wriggling deep in our southern-fried DNA that causes us, as southerners, to cling to the past? One answer might be that as southerners we are so obsessed with the past that we simply aren’t interested or concerned with examining our present or our future. Some might even argue (mostly northerners I presume) that it’s precisely this kind of backward thinking, this constant looking to the past, that has led to the south’s obvious lack of progress, especially in terms of education, pollution, unemployment, and poverty. Regardless of your opinions one way or the other, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that these days young southern writers seem inexorably drawn to the south’s past, rather than its present. Over and over, young contemporary southern writers seem much more content to drudge knee-deep through the south’s bloody history than explore its present. And, when they aren’t exploring the south’s past, they seem much more compelled to rewrite great southern literary traditions than explore the south’s present, or even its future for that matter. Who can forget Susan Lori Parks’ wonderful tribute to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or Alice Randall’s rethinking of Mitchell’s Gone with The Wind. Don’t get me wrong. These are all wonderfully creative and skillful books, but as a southern writer in my thirties, I cannot help but wonder why such writers aren’t as equally concerned with examining the south’s present. More.
I think Tusa's essay (by the way, I read his book Dirty Little Angels and really liked it) hits me in some ways–the search for the new, however you find it, and in whatever time period–ought to be a primary goal of good regional writing, for instance. Not being from the South myself, I feel hesitant to say what I think of the thing in its entirety except to list books and writers I've read that argue against his view–Silas House's Clay's Quilt, the stories of Paula K. Gover, who no one seems to care about but me, Amy Greene's Bloodroot and so many more–doesn't really address the point. There are other names I could add and anthologies and books closer to home and among my friendslists I could suggest, but I see his point overall and don't want to distract, though my instinct is to kick against the idea. I do think Tusa could expand his reading, though.
I apologize if the rest of you saw this essay already, but I thought it worth mentioning here. I'm away from the computer for a few days and so won't approve comments until probably Saturday or so, but have at it if you like and I'll do the best I can to approve quickly.
.
I MISS THE WOODS
It’s easy to worship the world
but hard to worship people.
Life should be like fight to a dog.
But all modern life consists of
is society,
learning how to negotiate society
how to deal with the pressure of other people.
The suffocation of too many rules,
too much forced equality
and the moral strong arm.
So many lives go by
without ever setting a foot
in the forest,
wilderness like a wormhole to sanity,
a corridor to the ancients,
a mainline to the heart and essential life
and what is beyond life.
Every problem society frantically tries to solve
is caused by society itself
and society can’t just
solve itself
except for one way,
and we don’t like to talk
(kaboom)
about that one.
DOWN AND NOT PROUD
I am beginning to understand how someone
could drive their car
over an animal
on purpose, as they’re driving down the blacktop
at night in their truck,
how they could rev the righteous
engine into a furry creature
just wandering out in the cold
dark beauty of the earth without
favor or expectation,
how seeing pure fear
in tiny confused eyes can make
one glad, hideous, how dumb
one is with the need
to feel superior
to something, to anything, to bend
a life to a
will
when one is weak
and alone
and no one is watching.
GATHERING
I don’t know if you know anything
about chickens,
but they lay a lot of eggs.
When I was a kid every morning we’d go out
gathering.
Some of the hens liked the coop
but if they set their tiny minds
on getting out they
will,
clipped wings or not.
Don’t worry, there were plenty
of eggs, it was Easter every
freakin' day.
Brown ones, white ones,
double yolks, some even had
embryos in them.
These were the ones that made
my sister barf.
After a while we just let the wilder
ones go,
truth is you just get
tired of them
and we couldn’t sell the eggs
because everybody around had their own
troubles.
Sometimes we ate
the chickens themselves, but we were too lazy
to pluck the feathers,
instead skinned the stringy critters
and ate a tough meat
without the best part.
We were all thin
and mean, squabbling
and kicking in
the dirt.
The roosters slept around us
in the trees
and always woke us up
in the middle
of a dream.
THE SPINS
Theresa gets tired of me trying to kiss her
so she throws my bicycle
into her El Camino and drops
my fifteen year old
drunk-on-rhubarb-wine ass
on the lip of a gully out
by New Fayetteville,
five miles from my mom’s,
middle of nowhere,
and pushes me away.
I fly down the gully's green throat
my hair straight back
like a high dive into the future
watery as blood
distorted and dizzy
and faster than summer
comes the one lane bridge
with the silver flash
of creek beneath it,
a red river springing
like a roar from my mouth
into its mirror image,
the giant seemingly endless
climb in front of me,
and one small quick fish
below
swimming in circles.
Mather Schneider is a 40 year old cab driver from Tucson, Arizona. He is happily married to a sexy Mexican woman. His poetry and prose have appeared in the small press since 1993. He has one full length book out by Interior Noise Press called Drought Resistant Strain and another full length coming in the spring of 2011 from New York Quarterly Press
Yeah. It happened to me, on my oldest computer, which I trusted, and it let me down, as computers will. This again delays shipments of Ken Clark's wonderful chap, Eggs of American Songbirds., to some of you. I trust the issues will work themselves out this week, but I know, I'm really really late. Late shipments will have other oddments of gifts to try to make up for the criminal wait. I'm sorry.
There are those among us / sanctimonious pricks, soul searchers, religious fanatics, etc. / who counsel that anger is bad, to be avoided / but let me tell you in no uncertain terms that good old red-ass anger, blind fury, mad as hell is the only way to purge certain feelings / like when that son of a bitch up the street, even after you told him to slow down, still ran over your neighbor’s dog, regardless of whether it was in the road or not / or some bully, bigger and stronger, kicks your ass just because he can / or when you find out your wife is fucking another man /
piss on that turn the other cheek shit, forgive and forget, rise above it, be a better man / nope, go fucking crazy, so mad you’re crying when you beat the living shit out of the bastard / so bat-shit red-eyed fevered that you’re in her face and want to eat her nose off / or, I guess you could jot down a few pithy phrases, register your complaint via email, be all sophisticated and French about the whole thing / I don’t know, there’s something about being wronged that just brings out the confederate-flag-waving bourbon-crazed redneck in me, makes me want to drink brown liquor, drive fast and wax poetic about what a load of buckshot will do to a man’s ass when he’s trying like hell to flee after you confronted him about his sins /
yeah, preacher, I could forgive him turn the other cheek and let Jesus have his way with him at some point down the road / but can you honestly tell me that even in your saved by the grace of the Lamb, washed-clean soul you don’t feel the power of the blood that surges through your veins when you get really good and pissed off about something? / remember, no lying / Jesus is listening.
Based in Asheville, North Carolina, Gary Carter's most recently published work is Eliot’s Tale, a reverse coming-of-age road trip novel that contemplates things done and left undone. His short fiction and poetry also have appeared recently in Dead Mule, Burnt Bridge, Muscadine Lines, Read Short Fiction and Dew on the Kudzu.
Andre Dubus is one of my five favorite writers and has been for nearly twenty years. One of my fondest memories is sitting in Jim Thomson's backyard just chatting with him the one time I met him. This was shortly before he died and I was there ostensibly to sell books, but mostly what I was doing was admiring him at a near distance.
Open Media has released his work in e‑book format, which is incredible news for those of you on the forefront of e‑reading technology. Go get 'em, if you don't have them. I personally guarantee they're worth the money and more.
First thing you notice is the color.
“Red” doesn’t do it justice.
This shade only exists in Technicolor.
They haunt my dreams in late February,
when a foot of snow covers the ground.
Not ruby, not scarlet, not cardinal.
“Pulsing red” because they beat
like hearts on my plate.
There are four left.
Last harvest of the season
sitting on the counter.
I won’t have the chance to taste them again
til next summer.
The knife sings, ecstatic as it releases
nectar and haloed seeds.
First bite: rapture.
Summer sun and rich soil
created vine-ripened ecstasy.
Sweetness of refreshing rains,
respite from 100 heat,
adds a grace note to the aria
bursting as I chew.
Far too soon, all that’s left
is juice.
I raise the plate to my mouth and drink.
Jenifer Lee Wallace is a writer and poet from St. Louis, with family roots in the farmland of southeast Missouri.
If you look at the dropdown menus at the top left corner of the FCAC home page, you'll notice that Redneck Press now has pages up for each of the chapbooks we'll publish this year as well as the anthology White Trash, which we'll publish in 2012. I want to reiterate, as I have elsewhere, that FCAC and Redneck Press are committed to printing work from women in the next year or two. We'll do this by announcements via WOM-PO and VIDA as well as our normal promotional outlets, in the hope and trust we'll get more submissions from women. Submissions for the 2012 chapbook series (three slots) are open. Please email me a manuscript of no more than twenty-five poems in .pdf (preferred), .odt, .doc, .docx, or.rtf formats, attached to an email (rusty DOT Barnes AT gmail DOT com) with details of why you think Redneck Press/FCAC is the right press for you. Please don’t send me bullshit. Read the blog, the stories, the poems, the manifesto, and be sure you’ve read a published poem or two in the last century and can demonstrate that knowledge by what you’ve written. You could buy and read our first chapbook release, too. That wouldn’t hurt your chances at all.
I said I wasn't going to post much on this anymore, but this article strikes me as helpful. Consider who wrote it and why, and assume that everything in it is probably understatement. At least, that's my suspicion.
Disclaimer: This article focuses on the changing sights and sounds you and your neighbors may experience once natural gas exploration, development, and production begins on your land. It is not intended to discuss the political, environmental, or legal aspects of the decision, or to consider your contract in depth.
Most landowners leasing land for Marcellus natural gas development are inexperienced with drilling and industrial-scale operations, leading to misunderstandings of even well-intentioned information. One family in Bradford, PA, for example, was told that they’d see a “house-sized propane tank” from their house. The father said, “We thought they meant like a residential tank, not one the size of a house.”
However, when an engineer who works with industrial heating and cooling equipment heard this story, he thought the company’s description was clear. Air conditioning units the size of small school buses are common in his line of work; he connected immediately with the scale of the equipment. Most people, however, think air conditioners fit in the living room window — our sense of scale doesn’t match industrial-sized equipment, and so some people may feel they misunderstand what operators tell them.
This article offers an accessible description of what landowners experience at different stages during the process of drilling into the Marcellus Shale layer. Most of the factual information in this article was provided by either Brad Gill, director of Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York (IOGANY) [2] or by Mark Scheuerman, director of government and media relations for Talisman Energy, a prime player in Marcellus Shale development in New York and Pennsylvania, unless otherwise indicated. More.
Once they are born, we fall in love. Irrevocably. The little toes, the little fingers, even the arch to the eyebrows we identify as our own, passed down from generations. The tiny ear is masterfully perfect, whorls to covet a mother’s whispers, the touch of my lips, sometimes electric, brings tears. I am humbled, and the child is baptized in a Greek Orthodox Church, though I am neither religious nor Greek Orthodox. I am angry and filled with fears.
I want nothing to do with anyone, just to be alone with my son, but putting on a false face I throw a big party after the christening, renting tables and chairs for the driveway of the house with the sunken living room and cathedral ceilings, the fireplace with a broken flue where each Christmas I tried to burn a Yule log, causing my husband to scream and tong it, still smoking, out to the snow, with the whole house filled with smoke. I so wanted to be happy for all the holidays I missed as a child. And though I knew nothing about flues or motherhood, I was certain I was capable of real tenderness. I had cooked for days: dolmathes (grape leaves stuffed with rice and hamburg), pastizio (macaroni and hamburg covered with a béchamel sauce), baklava ( filo, stuffed with crushed walnuts and honey)- and then came the iconic moment as I was putting the spinach pie back into the oven to crisp, when my mother spoke: “I didn’t know you could cook!”How could the spoiled child in me hate her for such an inane comment? Chalking the whole thing up to stress, because of the baby’s imperfections, I hid my feelings. I was not brought up to be disrespectful, but would I never stop feeling so breakable? We were not a hugging, back-slapping kind of family. Negativity is an inheritance of a kind. But I was 28, married for 5 years. What did she think we had been eating all that time, pizza?
I always felt my mother was scanning for faults and exaggerating my shortcomings. She insisted I fly to Florida on spring break when the kids I’d planned on going with by car never made it. The passenger in the back slid under the front seat with the force of the collision. It could have been me, hobbling about campus on wooden legs like the girl who invited me. I never even thanked my mother, let alone tell her she was right.
Then came my gimpy yiayia Sophie, a lifelong Jehovah’s Witness, leaning a bit to the left, off kilter, about a foot shorter than my mother, who was, at the time, a foot shorter than me. She had refused to attend the baptism, not respecting any religion but her own, but she wanted to give me what I assumed would be a blessing or some old-world advice I could profit from. A clove of garlic in the ear if he got an earache or maybe a cotton ball dipped in olive oil. My grandmother was so mean she made Cruella de Vil look like the Good Fairy. THA FAS XILO (you will eat wood), was a threat she made good daily with a wooden spoon when I was little, but I’d long since quit hating her.
“This boy,” she said, intuitively, “will leave you as soon as he’s grown to live with his father.”
I could hardly wait to call the taxi for the airport! And just to show how borderline psychotic they were making me, instead of Mexico as I’d wanted, because the pediatrician warned me about the water there, I was flying to Greece.
The baby was 3 months old and traveled well. I stocked up with plenty of formula and diapers, checked into a hotel in Athens for 15 dollars a day, which included a raisin breakfast cake and coffee, anxious to visit my grandmother’s sister. My mother’s first cousin, Lambros, who didn’t look a bit like her, with his long, craggy features and shifty eyes, lived with his family on the top of a building in Athens where there was an outside shower and a chicken running loose. They were very poor and when I pulled up in a taxi, I think they were embarrassed, worried maybe what the neighbors would think. The wife was squat and ugly and not very hospitable. I guessed the only reason Lambros would drive me to Pyrgos to visit his mother was to help their older daughter, Tina, a girl of about 17, as long-faced as her father, but with a much sweeter personality. Unfortunately, she reeked of B.O. and wore a hair net like Ruth Buzzee on Laugh-In, the then popular comedy show. The middle child, a boy of fifteen, resembled his mother in face and body type. He’d been diagnosed as having a case of hysterical paralysis so that Lambros had to carry him from room to room. He’d been walking fine for his first 10 years, but when the youngest daughter had arrived, now a darling Shirley Temple look-a-like, with curly black hair and long eyelashes, all the boy could do was sit.
To hear my grandmother tell it, she’d walked barefoot for 200 miles, to get to Piraeus, the seaport near Athens, escaping this tiny village of Pyrgos Ilia on the top of the Peloponnesus Mountains. The whole town came out to greet me, the granddaughter of the cause célèbre Sophie, the only one to have left for America in 50 years. The sister, Christina, dressed in widow’s black from head toe, as is the custom, was sitting with her knees spread plucking feathers from a chicken when we pulled up in a Renault. Considering she was in her 80’s, she was very sprightly, jumping up the minute she saw us, her face wreathed in toothless smiles. I was a little shocked to see how tiny she was compared to her sister.
When I gave her a loaf of store-bought white bread, as had been suggested to bring for a gift, she called it “cake.” She acted as excited as if she’d never seen a loaf of white bread in her life. Her living quarters had a dirt floor, no electric or inside plumbing. The toilet was a pipe in the ground outside. The first thing she showed me was an old chest, filled with used clothing my grandmother would send her to sell; a blue and white dress I had sewn in home economics, I hadn’t even missed.. Christina was described by a neighbor as the village beggar. She gave me so many hugs and kisses, nearly all my feelings of deprivation faded. My grandfather had owned a restaurant in a pretty chi-chi part of Boston, but the sisters’ relationship had been stormy ever since Christina’s husband murdered their beloved brother and my grandmother never forgave.
Close by lived Christina’s daughter in a one room house along with her husband and ten children. Another shockeroo for this spoiled brat of an Americanista! Where did they sleep? How did they have any privacy? The woman, in her thirties, took me aside, as soon as the introductions were over. The doctor had told her if she had any more children she would die and she didn’t know what to do. Her husband, she said, without any embarrassment, was always after sex. She’d never heard of the birth control pill nor any of the other methods of contraception. What could I do but explain? This news, along whatever communication lines they afforded, traveled from Pyrgos to the states to my grandmother’s ears like the old game of gossip we played in kindergarten. Not only was I, an unmarried woman, guilty of disseminating birth control pills, just discussing sex the way we had was an abomination. Instead of being one of the 144,000 going to heaven along with my grandmother who claimed her only two sexual experiences had been for the sole purpose of bearing children, I was destined for hell.
No, there had been no babies born like my own, that Christina knew of. If they had, they would have been left on a mountain-top for wolves.
Rachel Cann has received awards from the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation and a Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center. MFA Emerson College 1989. Her stories have been published in dozens of literary magazines. Greece is part of a memoir-in-progress called Connected:Love in the Time of the Mafia.Social Widgets powered by AB-WebLog.com.
