Southern Stories Reimagined: Our Vision of the South
“Through This Dust These Hills Once Spoke.”
—Epitaph of T.S. Stribling
There are many quotes from Southern writers pertaining to the art and craft of writing about their home region. One can quote Faulkner, Welty, O’Connor and Hurston all day, but I tend to enjoy the philosophy and thoughts of those Southern writers whose works were significant but get less attention in the 21st century.
T.S. Stribling is a special Southern writer for me.
Perhaps obscured today, he was celebrated and well-recognized in his heyday. Between World War I and World War II, he was the best selling and most recognized novelist of the era, outselling Hemingway, Fitzgerald and all other authors of fiction of the day. A native of the bluffs of the Tennessee River in Clifton, Tennessee, his epitaph succinctly declares his existence and how it was spent. Through Stribling, his South spoke and was heard.
Over the decades, Southern writing and the South itself, through its literature, has been portrayed in so many lights. Some call it complex. Often, the South is portrayed as a dark, haunted region full of decay.
Many writers have written of the Southern connection to the land and how the region bears the burden and weight of its history and complicated past. All of these depictions are accurate to some degree and in their own context.
Many Southern writers have been as troubled as their place of origin. Being a native West Tennessean, I often call to mind those who inhabited my home territory as their own.
The novelist Jesse Hill Ford once said about writing, “To catch a character in trouble and to tell about it is the basis for almost any story.” Ford’s novels, including The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones, Mountains of Gilead and The Feast of Saint Barnabas, all grapple with characters in trouble. It was often and is still often a region in trouble full of characters living out their own melodramas. Ford himself would become a character in trouble and his fall from grace is the story for another time and place.
Despite the usual characterizations of the American South, we at Front Porch have a vision and a perspective of the South as we view it, as we perceive it and as we have lived it thus far.
Many of these past depictions are now historical in nature and should be viewed in that context. As much as I enjoy…no…love…reading Southern novels and short stories of the past one hundred years, I try to see them through the lens through which they written and that of the times in which they were written. I try to understand their limitations, their vices, their virtues, their prejudices and their vision. Sometimes that is difficult.
Still, with luck and good fortune, each new era brings the opportunity for a rebirth of my homeland and its future.
The South into which I was born in the early 1970’s was known by politicians and others as the New South, not the first incarnation of that term.
Liberal Democratic governors like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter governed states long accustomed to segregation and Jim Crow just a decade earlier. The literature of the South in my birth decade dumped the old Lost Cause myths and idealized version of the South of antebellum days and saw the rise of grittier and far more realistic writing about a South reckoning with its complicated background.
Now, we find ourselves entering the second quarter-century of the 21st century and once again, the South is undergoing a transformation. Is it regressing or is it progressing?
That answer seems relative, depending upon whose voice you happen to hear. While there has been a disturbing trend toward a disdain for diversity and a troubling embrace of the concept of a homogenous Southern populace, those concepts are simply as mythical as the old Lost Cause itself was and is. In fact, the South today is a wildly diverse region. Its population is black, white, Hispanic, Asian, you name it, you’ll find a community full of heart and soul. Its people are straight, gay, religious, agnostic, atheistic, liberal, conservative, radically right wing and some are progressives.
So, where does that leave us in our thoughts on a reimagined South and its stories.
I think it leaves us with an obligation, a duty and a choice to make. For me, it is the duty of the Southern writer to tell the truth about our home, ugly as it may be, hurtful as it may seem and complicated as it’s likely to be. It is our obligation and it should be our burning desire to see that every Southern voice is heard, regardless of race, economic background, sexual preference and religious views. We are, in fact, a melting pot of voices and views. Where some seek to repress the diversity, at Front Porch, we celebrate it.
For us, it is about the opportunity to learn from others, to hear their experiences and to see a South that perhaps we’ve never seen before. One region can be vastly different places to different people. We want to hear about those places and we want to hear those stories.
We want to know the experiences. We want to know life in the South in the late 20th and early 21st century. How was it to grow up Hispanic in South Mississippi? How was it to be a black child in either the rural or urban South just before Covid or shortly thereafter? These are just examples of the types of experiences we seek to discover.
Southern literature doesn’t exist in a vacuum, neither a time nor a cultural vacuum. It is a growing and evermore diverse body of writing. It knows no limits and is definitely not homogenous. It represents different people, different backgrounds and deliciously varied experiences.
Front Porch seeks to be an active part of this new era of storytelling as yet another New South emerges from the past that has been.
Like Stribling of yesteryear, through new voices the land and people that are the South will speak, and speak clearly.
Continue this exploration
Reimagining the stories from our region is a living conversation. Continue this exploration by diving into the different posts that live in our Blog, learn more about us and why we believe in the power of storytelling to share the different perspectives of the American South.
You can also meet The Front Porch Circle, they are the people that share our vision and are helping us bring it to life, or connect with us on Substack or Instagram and share with us your vision on how southern stories can be reimagined.
