The Nature of the Southern Thing
I am a child of the American West, actually the Southwest. Having grown up in Arizona I am used to that arid land. A love of mountains, desert, clear mountain streams, volcanoes, red sandstone sculpture, ghost towns, ancient Indian ruins, Native Americans, Mexican Americans. The culture of the West still feels new and fresh.
My contact with the South has been sporadic and mostly based upon business travel. A few days in various cities like Nashville, New Orleans, Winston-Salem, Atlanta, Tampa, Birmingham, Austin, Houston, Dallas. These were brief contacts that informed little of the place. Airports, hotels, high tech offices, local food, and local engineers and business people.
With the exception of a narrowly avoided bar fight in the Carolina Western Saloon involving a truck driver named Peanut and my colleague breaking a pool cue and a very short waitress pressing herself between potential combatants, (Everyone was very drunk and judgement was not at its best.) my cultural contact was extremely limited.
To be fair some of my best business partners were from the South and part of the charm is the softspoken politeness and even at times warmth in working with them.
Still I must confess that the South seemed as foreign a place as I could imagine. Damp, hot, dark tannin or mud stained rivers all seem anti-thetical to the part of the country I love and inhabit.
After I became active on SubStack the algorithm brought me more contact with the American South. I learned a little more about other lives and the culture of the South.
Then I came in contact with Boyce Upholt and his project to build a magazine about what he paraphrases as 'the nature of the Southern Thing' a line from a Drive-by Truckers song.
His magazine is called 'Southlands' and I was happy to contribute to his effort.
I am now halfway through the 120+ pages of his first effort and I feel my modest contribution is well worth it. The magazine is thoughtfully edited and curated. I think the success is that the articles embrace a range of topics around the environment, recreation, food, culture, differing ethnic backgrounds.
It is special to tuck into a genuine magazine and spend some time being educated and informed about a part of the world one may not have much knowledge about. I suspect that many Southerners would enjoy it as well given the breadth of subjects and the magazine's enthusiasm for the region.
I wish Boyce well in his endeavor and look forward to the next fruit of his efforts.
