Category: southern

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“What It Took for Me to Stop Hiding My Politics in the South”: An Interview with the Founder of Y’all Ain’t Right

Over the past six months, my wife, Melissa, has been working on Y’all Ain’t Right, an umbrella site featuring our podcast, This Ain’t It, a blog, and products filled with Southern “sass, smarts, and social consciousness.” This project originated as her way to use her talents to voice her opposition to the atrocities we see enacted around us on a daily basis. It also arose … Read More “What It Took for Me to Stop Hiding My Politics in the South”: An Interview with the Founder of Y’all Ain’t Right

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“Everything Burns”: Facades and Identity in S.A. Cosby’s “King of Ashes”

Last year, I read three of S.A. Cosby’s novels (I still need to read Blacktop Wasteland), and I was instantly hooked. When I heard about his latest book, King of Ashes, I knew I had to pick up a copy and read it right away. Like My Darkest Prayer, Razorblade Tears, and All the Sinners Bleed, King of Ashes didn’t disappoint. As I read, I kept recalling why Cosby’s works engages … Read More “Everything Burns”: Facades and Identity in S.A. Cosby’s “King of Ashes”

Nothing Happens in Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path”

As I was organizing my American literature survey course this semester, I knew that I wanted to center it on short stories. I did this because I wanted to provide students with a broad swath of literature and literary movements from 1865 to the present. With this in mind, I knew, as well, that I wanted to include Ernest Gaines’ “The Sky is Gray,” because, like … Read More Nothing Happens in Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path”

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“I’ve always done what is right”

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know that while I typically write essays, I occasionally write short stories. I’ve published “Paper,” “Adieu,” and “This Story is Continuing to Develop” here over the past few years. Today, I want to share another story that I wrote back in 2020. I’m not, really, a huge horror fan, but someone asked me to write … Read More “I’ve always done what is right”

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Writing Process for “Paper”

Two of my favorite short stories are Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” and Ernest Gaines’ “The Sky is Gray.” Each of these stories, in different ways, interrogates the deployment of language and how language serves as a foundation to the social construction of race the subversion of that false construction. Morrison states that “‘Recitatif’ was an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a … Read More Writing Process for “Paper”