Yellowhammer Press

Blizzards be damned.  Nothing warms the soul like Southern food.  Cornbread and peas, greens, fried chicken, and sweet potatoes will cure any ailment and drive the cold from your bones.  The Southern Foodways Alliance, a wonderful organization, has produced numerous short documentaries on Southern foodways and folk culture.  “Buttermilk Can Help” are must-sees, but [...]

Much of Faulkner’s work is, arguably, unfilmable.  Rendering Go Down, Moses or As I Lay Dying on screen would simply show them as narratives, unable to properly convey the depth of characterization and power of his characters’ internal monologues.  1958’s The Long, Hot Summer, however, attempts a more modest feat.  Based on one of Faulkner’s [...]

Once again, one of the best portrayals of rural Southern life comes from Ginny Mule Pictures.  The production studio behind the Oscar-winning short film The Accountant (and very possibly my favorite film of all time), led primarily by actor and director Ray McKinnon and actor Walton Goggins, is now responsible for the understated but forceful [...]

“Dangerous” is not how one is likely to describe The Queen Family: Appalachian Tradition and Back Porch Music.  The short documentary (< 30 minutes) chronicles a rural North Carolina family whose roots in mountain music reach centuries into the past, and even across the Atlantic.  92 year-old Mary Jane Queen, the charmingly lucid matriarch of [...]

There is no monolith of Southern literature.  We’re not all Faulkners, or Wolfes, or McCullers or Weltys, though most readers of Southern work  know those names by heart as part of the Greatest Hits of Southern Literature.  The casual reader often regards Southern writing not simply as the product of a region but as a [...]

In a review aptly titled Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching, philosopher and critic (and a man upon whose work much of my graduate studies orbited) Terry Eagleton says the following of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have [...]

Like many of its fans, I first came across The Accountant after learning it was the inspiration for “Sinkhole,” a song by Athens, GA band The Drive-By Truckers.  I tracked down the film (no easy feat at the time — it’s a relatively  hard thing to get a hold of, especially now that the Ginny [...]