The Editors are spiking most of my copy now, unread. One has described it as “hopeless crap.” My master’s degree means nothing to this pack of half-wits at the Blade. My job is hanging by a thread. But Frankie, an assistant city editor, is not such a bad boss and it was she who, out of the blue, gave me this choice assignment. I was startled. A last chance to make good?
A Letter from the Editor, Summer 2017.
For the second year in a row, our summer issue contains a special section of Southern Journeys. In typical Oxford American fashion, these five journeys aren’t your average trip itineraries or travel guides, though we hope they’ll encourage hunger for exploration: physically, intellectually, even spiritually.
An excerpt from a play by Charles Portis, with an introduction by Jay Jennings.
MR. PALFREY: Oh, I know what I want. I just don’t see it here. What I want is a fat yearling coon roasted with some sweet potatoes. What I want, young lady, is some salt-cured ham that’s been hanging in the smokehouse for about two years, along with five or six big cathead biscuits, and some country butter and ribbon cane surrup. But I can’t get that, can I?
KATE: You can’t get it here.
An essay published in the Oxford American’s Winter 2008 Southern Music issue.
On Elton and Betty White.
Letter from the editor.
Oxford American readers will want to know what to expect now that the magazine has again changed editorial hands. The OA has always published vital, important stories—from the borderlands, the Gulf Coast, Appalachia, and many locales in between. This will not change.
A Southern Journey from the Summer 2017 issue.
Although some Food Network stooge would surely find the One Stop eventually, for the moment it lacked any officious culinary sanction, which seemed important. Joann was cooking for her neighbors, sawdust clinging to some of them, others redolent of fish slime and beer and gasoline, excepting the ladies of course, painted up ferociously in brilliant crimsons and blues. Everybody momentarily at peace. The hottest part of the day gone. Not an ironic moustache in sight. Fried catfish like you couldn’t get anywhere else.
The way I listened to music began to twist on me, becoming less theatrical, more interior, and a time came when I needed to be spoken to more than I needed to speak. And that was when I found Iris DeMent.
How can we make solar energy sustainable?
A Points South essay from the Summer 2019 issue
As an evangelist, I have showed “Miracles” to many people by lying about what it’s actually about. Generally, I describe it as a sort of joke, a curiosity. I don’t tell folks that when I first heard Frierson sing about being “only human” I was lonely and confused, and I listened to it so much that the music morphed into a personal manifesto about redemption, as if he had boiled down the obsessive and impossible task of purity into a formula. On first listen, how I feel about “Miracles” would seem ridiculous.
