Resource Roundup #24
For the week of November 12th.
Are you from a rural community or the American South? Share your story with us to be published in an upcoming newsletter!
It’s Friday and warm and sunny here. I have been writing more in the last two weeks than I have in the last two months. My students are working on National Novel Writing Month, and just hit 25K collectively. Life seems to have slowed down slightly, and I am finding myself connecting with people who it seems I have waited all my life to connect with. It’s good. It’s all going to be good.
As always, plenty of things to dive into for your weekend, below…
The Center for Fiction is partnering up with The Decameron Project for their National Teen Storyteller Contest, theme friendship. I’m having some of my students submit, and if you know of a youth in your life who writes, this is a great opportunity.
A great podcast episode from Gravy and Southern Foodways about rural nightlife in Alabama’s Black Belt. For anyone who thinks rural life is boring, uneventful, or slow, this is for you.
And if you, like me, prefer to read than listen, I also loved this essay in Gravy about cultural tradition and North Carolina barbecue. Gravy is just publishing some amazing stuff lately, but as someone who grew up in North Carolina, became a vegetarian, left, moved back, and has been experimenting lately with eating meat, I feel like I’ve been trying to explain a lot of what this essay brilliantly puts into words for a long time.
I’ve spent a lot of time lately digging through the canon of new Southern authors I deeply admire and hope to work with one day. This is a great throwback from 2017 by Silas House in Oxford American about Southeast Kentucky and Country music.
One day I want to have something in Joyland Magazine. In the meantime, I’m reading this story by Graham Irvin.
Lauren Groff is one of my favorite authors, but I really hated the first half of this essay about visiting North Carolina prepper camp for the way in which it seemed to deeply look down upon anyone who did not identify as a “good liberal”. But then I got to this part, and wow, I think I have felt this way for a long time: “Perhaps doomsday libertarians do secretly long for a chance to rid the earth of people who threaten their supremacy; but there is something equally anarchic in me that longs for society to break so that we can rebuild it to be kinder, more generous, more equitable. Deep down, perhaps I am a prepper because I believe that the only way we are going to pry the world’s wealth out of the greedy, grasping hands of the billionaires who are willfully killing the environment is through a total collapse of the status quo. Perhaps I am a prepper because I have had enough: I am goddamn ready for the guillotines.”
Wrote the whole last chapter of my novel with this song on repeat:
And lastly, my life philosophy, summed up in words:
Love all of this! 💫