Resource Roundup #58
For the week of December 9th.
Hello folks,
What a week. If you missed it, the county that much of our community calls home, Moore County in North Carolina, made headlines this week after the power was shut down due to attacks on three substations. It’s always a really bizarre feeling to watch a place you call home make national news, but this one felt especially strange. Sometimes I feel I live in my own little Southern bubble where it feels easy to believe this place has changed. Things like this always seem to burst that, and bring me back to reality.
I think often of this interview with author Claire Vaye Watkins, where she discusses her home of the Mojave Desert: “‘I don’t want to be writing about the West from far away anymore. And I didn’t want to write about it in an elegiac or nostalgic mode.’ Instead, her fiction knows that paeans are lovely, useless things. The West needs to come alive in fiction, but also to die. It needs to make humans hurt the way humans have hurt it.”
I feel similarly about the South, and these days, I am most interested in using fiction as a way to investigate the realities of the South— good and bad. It was beautiful to see Moore County come together, and it also raises questions of why we couldn’t have come together like that in the first place. Where was this kind of support for the counter-protests in support of the Southern Pines LGBTQ+ community? Where was this rallying in the weeks leading up to the drag show that served as a starting point for all of this? I can’t help but ask myself these questions, and— still, always— to wonder how safe this place is for people like us.
All that being said, the lights are now back on in Moore County and I hope this place can move forward with love. I’d like to give another shout-out here to the post that Vic, our podcast producer, wrote this week for the newsletter. Vic grew up in Moore County and is still living there, and has been on our social media all week long sharing resources. In times of darkness we must learn to be the light we cannot find. We must not let that fire burn out.
I’m always thinking of this Maya Angelou quote, but especially lately:
“You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.”
What I would do to be going to Sundance, just so I can see Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s film, King Coal, described as “the journey of a coal miner’s daughter exploring the region’s dreams and myths, untangling the pain and beauty, as her community sits on the brink of massive change.” Just look at that image still! Gorgeous.
A beautiful piece on metamorphosis and insects by Sabrina Imbler.
I was very lucky to read Emily Hilliard’s introduction to Making Our Future a few weeks ago, and I’m pleased to report that you too can now read it in Southern Cultures— as well as buy the book, out now from UNC Press!
Not at all Southern, but my god, this SZA and Phoebe Bridgers collab…
There’s a story about becoming:
There’s so much, all the time. And this is part of why we should all better support local news (and on that note, New York Times workers are on strike right now. No to crossing picket lines, including digital!):
