Yellowhammer Press

“Reading the South” will be an ongoing series about beginning an understanding of the South through literature, music, and art.
A reader wrote me this week inquiring about a number of things, and where to find good Southern writing was at the top of his list.  My answer was long and, I admit, a bit [...]

Much of the work we discuss here isn’t new.   We’re not solely concerned with new books, new authors, or new artists.  I learned firsthand that educating oneself about actual Southern art — more than just ceramic roosters — is a process that requires some digging.  Investigate on your own, teach yourself about what Southern art [...]

Gregory Donovan’s “Is There a Dead Mule in It,” is a wonderful piece of poetry and an homage to Jerry Leath Mills’ now-famous essay Equine Gothic: The Dead Mule as Generic Signifier in Southern Literature of the Twentieth Century.Don’t let the academic title fool you — it’s a delightful analysis of Southern Lit and the [...]

When I was a child, my grandfather sang me odd, halting songs, seemingly atonal and operating within a structure I could scarcely remember, let alone master. Lyrically they were very simple and very much about the Crucifixion and its attendant imagery.  The lyrics were preceded by syllables more akin to shouts than notes, and though [...]

The enemy of every Southern historian is sentimentality.  It and its louche cousin, romanticism, are seductive enough to derail any attempt at actual scholarship.  Few undertake to tell some fragment of the Southern narrative without being suckered in by marauding Union cavalrymen or the tale of some poor-but-proud widow scratching an existence from a rocky [...]

Flannery, Flannery, Suits, and Whiskey
Paul Elie at Commonweal sheds some light on Flannery  O’Connor’s tumultuous personal intersection of intellectualism, Southernism, and Catholicism and just how difficult it is to keep all 3 balls in the air without letting at least one drop.

Christopher Benfrey reviews Brad Gooch’s new Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor. Typical TNR — [...]

And that’s William Alexander Percy’s recipe. From his incomparable memoir Lanterns on the Levee comes the only recipe one will ever need for that perennial summertime cocktail:
Father and General Catchings and Captain McNeilly and Captain Wat Stone and Mr. Everman would forgather every so often on our front gallery. These meeting must habitually [...]

Take Me to the Water from Dust-to-Digital on Vimeo.
Take Me to the Water is, above all else, a book about spectatorship. Largely without text, the photographs are without any sort of context and are in no certain order. After all, you’re looking at photos that, as collector Jim Linderman says, were “found in flea [...]