As part of the Southern Studies Fellowship in Arts & Letters, I am researching the ways that communities access to news. According to the Local News Initiative, there has been a "net loss" of nearly 2,900 newspapers…
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I feel the need to write you a letter that I never received.
As news focuses on a war building in the Middle East, divergent perspectives argue vehemently over the value of human life. Folded in the commentary are a thousand opinions on how politics, history, and zealotry are to blame for the fighting. Although this war may have temporarily shifted focus, it seems a pointed opportunity to remind you, as a queer kid, that you are not cast aside and forgotten.
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In some aspects, markers of Southern identity can sound clichéd and near-monolithic: sweet tea; church politics; kudzu, honeysuckle, and privet hedges. Yet, every Southerner understands the divergent vibrancy across the region, whether it’s as benign as the never-ending debate of vinegar vs tomato-based barbecue or as fraught as racial divisions in the Mississippi Delta.
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The strike of a tuning fork resonates foggy images for me of middle school science experiments and the distinct elementary school smells of stale crayons and brown pungent erasers. Learning about the physics of sound waves and frequencies of vibrating objects didn’t dispel …
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If family trees are credible sources, Peter Allison Lewis, who lived in Spartanburg, SC, from 1725 until 1801 (give or take), is a direct ancestor. It’s hard for me NOT to have some skepticism over family trees: how many of us truly understood, when we first learned about Sarah and Abraham in Sunday School, what lifestyle they lived that gave birth to Ishmael? Go back far enough, I have little doubt that baby Daddy secrets have happened at least once in every family.
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