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Stories

We Are a Choir

The South’s greatest poets assemble to sing the truths of our region for National Poetry Month.

What a Lovely Weekend

That’s not a statement about the current weather, because it’s gray where we are. It’s about a weekend of love (and, naturally, football).

Chippendales, Winnie the Pooh, and Mississippi Corduroy

What he learned as a child in Mississippi left him unable to come out to his family—or even to himself—until he was thirty-one years old.

Preservation

Old ways of preserving food run deep in the culture of Appalachia. It turns out that preserving life requires the same principles.

Every Story Is a Confession

Is renewing an old friendship always the right thing to do? Maybe not.

Myrtle’s Malapropisms

A writer remembers pickling beans with her grandmother, “the Appalachian Gothic version of Yogi Berra.”

Sacred Bones

“Hold tight to history,” Appalachian poet E.J. Wade writes, so we might be awakened.

Long Gone and Gone Far

The Great Recession forced more than a million Americans into nomad land, traveling in search of seasonal work. Bill Scott chose that life forty years ago.

The Happiness of Saying Goodbye

Long ago, a pair of larger-than-life families—two couples with seven kids between them—rang in the new year together every year. Some bonds never break.

Family Ties

We discover our family is connected to this other one, and that friend to another one, until we all learn how we are woven into the great sweep of Southern history.

Dreamwalking

With otherworldly clarity, a New Orleans poet details the depths of trying times.

Good Money

The Buckleys were, you might say, entrepreneurial. Particularly on Fourth of July Eve in the Waffle House parking lot.

Moccasin

“There is love that walks in fallows,” this Louisville poet writes. Ain’t that the truth.