Ahead of the rerelease of his chapbooks Weekend Revival and What the River Was, I sat down with Andrew Mack, Loblolly’s very own founder and editor (not to mention wildly talented writer!) to discuss what goes into a rerelease and reflect on the current state of indie publishing. He discusses the creative and practical decisions behind reshaping the books, from new covers and formats to revisions, photography, and the relationship between visual design and the reading experience.

The conversation also gives us a glimpse into FURY, an ambitious full-length collection shaped by family history, regional identity, archival research, and the complicated landscapes of South and North Carolina. Along the way, Andrew discusses the role of music, Appalachian folklore, environmental records, and found poetry in his practice, including the collage-based work at the heart of What the River Was. He also offers some candid advice for writers navigating both the solitude of making art and the entrepreneurial, communal work of bringing it into the world.

Get the bundle

What inspired you to do this rerelease?

I'm doing this re-release now because when I was originally designing my books, the inspiration was really just: I want to get my work into the world, I want to control how it looks, how I market it, and build my own following. I was entrepreneurial about it. But I didn't have the design skills or the resources to produce a great cover or a great interior. I'm proud of what they looked like at the time, but when I put them side-by-side with what the press produces now, they didn't feel like they fit. At the same time, I knew the work was something I was really happy with — I wanted to be able to sell them alongside all of our other books. So I took the design skills I'd built doing titles for Loblolly and applied them to new editions of Weekend Revival and What the River Was. I also changed the trim size of Weekend Revival — it was an 8½ x 5½, and I brought it to 5 x 7 to match our other chapbook formats.

What, on the publishing end of things, goes into a rerelease? How do you balance being not just the author, but also your own designer and publisher?

On the publishing end, a re-release is pretty manageable. I did all the design work myself, and I had most of the material — though there is some new work in the collection, so if you already have a copy, there’s new stuff in there. I pulled from my journal from that time period and looked at everything with fresh eyes: what could be improved, what still felt true to the period in which I wrote the originals. I wanted it to feel like a really nicely packaged thing. The photography on Weekend Revival is from the Broad River in South Carolina, where I grew up — from an old trestle bridge that inspired a lot of the feelings in those poems. Weekend Revival is really all about voices speaking through time. There’s a story of a doctor who died on that bridge on his way to give medical care in another town, and that always stayed with me.

I was never really happy with the design of What the River Was — specifically how the cover turned out. Being able to redesign it with the skills I have today was great. I also got to reformat a few of the poems in ways that felt like they really helped the reading experience. Format is just such an important part of how people read poetry.

I’d love to hear more about this full-length collection!

FURY is my full-length collection. I've been working on it for the last six years. I've been talking about it for a while, and I really wanted it out this year but honestly, it's just been a lot harder to write than I thought it would be. It's at first a personal exploration of my family's history, the interaction between both sides of my family tree, who comes from where. I take into account what it was like to be raised in South Carolina and now live in North Carolina, and I trace some of that journey. South Carolina is one of the states I love the most, and I also know it's history, intertwined with mine, is fraught. I want to engage with all of the elements of the place I consider home and shine a light on its untold stories.

One of my favorite bits in the design of Beasts of Chase is your choice to include a short list of songs that had a role in inspiring the poems. I’m always really interested in the interaction of different mediums and so this, to me, was a really fun choice. I’m wondering if in the redesign on this, and this can be for any of the three, any of those songs changed as your vision developed? Could you name a song or two that is feeling inspiring for your full length collection?

Beasts of Chase is my most recent chapbook and is actually not being re-released — I'm just really happy with how it turned out. And honestly, how well that one came together is part of what made me think about repackaging the previous two. There's a list of songs at the end — the songs I listened to on repeat while writing it. I was lucky enough to write the book at a friend's house on Lake Lure over the course of one weekend, with some editing done on another weekend. They've since moved, but it was a really important place for me to write. The book started with an inspiration and fascination with history, which you'll find throughout my work. I'm interested in family history, oral history, Appalachian folktales. One of my nerdier things is that I like to read old forestry documents from the US Forest Service — surveys, animal population data — to understand the impact of our actions on the environment. My work is very often grounded in truth and in shining a light on facts — things that show up in survey documents like the weight of the largest bear ever harvested. I find those words and I flip them, to reveal their brutality, especially around animals. I never want to be insensitive; I always want to respect those animals and tell their story.

I feel that same way about FURY, but it's even harder to get that granular about my own history. I'm using archival documents, pulling in history from the region and from where my family comes from. This new project is less about identifying a personal arc — "where I come from" — and more about where we all come from. What's the unifying factor we share? I believe in something larger than myself, and that thing is a shared experience of a place. How we experience that place is different for everyone and changes over time, but the physical landscape, it's geography and history, is something we share.

The music I listened to you while writing needs to be rhythmic and almost trance inducing — not everything but I definitely find things that I like to keep on repeat and it helps me just stay focused on the creative moment. It's really important for me to be present while I'm writing so one song I'd say that's really inspired FURY and keeps FURY going is Shady Grove the Taj Mahal verison.

In What the River Was, you collage and reorder language from articles published in National Geographic. I can’t tell you how much I love this; I am particularly fond of found poetry. I’d love to hear you speak to the intentions behind this, and how you feel the form contributes or interacts with the themes of the collection.

In What the River Was, I do collage — I reorder language from articles published in National Geographic. It's called found poetry, and I think a lot of young writers get a lot of inspiration from it partly because it's playful, and language should be playful. Building a collection based on reordering words — and for me, using physical collage to do that — is one of my favorite things I've ever done, though it's sometimes hard to get back into it. I used to have huge stacks of National Geographic magazines around the house. But it's similar to what I said about flipping the meaning of historical documents: you can read something from 1952 and just placing it in the context of today — and then taking the words and turning them into something new — can reveal things that weren't visible before. Music does this too — thing about how many versions of any particular song can exist in the world and still be so different. Found poetry is just the cover song of the poetry world.

One of the pieces I've written comes from an article about exploration in the Arctic Sea. What interested me most was how inhospitable that place is for us, and yet how much we crave extraction from it. How much harm we do to it even though we're so fascinated by it. It's not all monetary — there's something about the end of the Earth. The further north you go, the more people are drawn to it, and the same is true of Antarctic exploration. I built that found piece around three letters — I took words and created three letters from three different time periods, starting in the 1800s, moving into the 1900s, and then something closer to the present — tracing the impact of climate change on the psyche of the people who are there. They're written as letters from the past, but between people I've made up. That's part of the power of a found poem: I don't have to focus solely on the words. I get to focus on how to repurpose language in a way that is interesting, new, and also visually compelling — which operates more like a visual art practice.

As someone with access to both the creative and publishing side of writing, what advice would you give to writers looking to be published?

For writers looking to be published, the first thing you should be thinking about is what the work feels like to you. We don’t write to get published. We write because we’re interested in something and we want to share it with others — and that’s very different from getting published. If you want your writing published, write something and share it with your closest friend, your partner, your parents. Seek feedback and also enjoy the encouragement. Enjoy the process of doing it. I find that when I’m really in the writing headspace, I’m closer to my own spirituality than almost anywhere else. I felt that way writing all three books.

I’d also say: writing requires solitude. I don’t think people understand how much of writing is spending time with your own thoughts and being comfortable with that.

That’s the creative side. The publishing side is business. It’s how you build something around your work. And no matter what anybody says, being an author means being an entrepreneur. People will want to read your book not just because of what’s in it, but because you are interesting — you are part of it. There’s this myth that you can be a writer who never talks to anybody. Maybe some people can do that. But most writers have to get in front of people, share their work, and understand that they are also performers and that they are thinking about business applications of their creativity. Writing is the first part of the work. If you want to publish, you have to be open to the idea that it’s not just about the art anymore. It’s about getting your work into as many hands as possible — and how many hands that is, that’s a goal you get to set.

If you desperately want to be published by a large publisher, there are certain steps you have to take. But if you're like me and you wanted to do it on your own — you can. It's harder in some ways, but in others it's easier. You have the freedom to design your own work, plan your own tours, connect with the people you want to connect with. That autonomy mattered a lot to me. For others, maybe not — maybe you want someone to handle that side so you can focus on writing, and that's fine too. But I don't think you can pretend that writing and then trying to publish isn't, at its core, an act of community.

⁂

Andrew Mack is the Founder and Managing Editor of Loblolly Press. He oversees editorial direction, acquisitions, and author partnerships across the catalog. His work at the press is grounded in a commitment to sustained editorial care, transparency, and building space for writers whose work is often sidelined elsewhere. Andrew is the author of three poetry collections, Weekend Revival, What the River Was, and Beasts of Chase.

For more recommendations, reviews, and literary talk, subscribe to Loblolly Press!

Subscribe now

Until the age of eight at which I, embarrassed, put a stop to things, my mother sang “You are my Sunshine” to me each and every night. I slept then in a lofted bed, and she would climb two steps up the ladder and sing, sometimes two or three times over. I can hear it now. As is the case with most lullabies, the purpose was twofold: to comfort a restless child to sleep, and to impart some story, message, some pearl of wisdom. Namely, in my case, that she loved me, would love me through the night, and love me still when I awoke the next day.

Nearly two decades later, as my grandma’s health began to decline, my mother sat at her side and dutifully recorded her story, eventually organizing the pages into a binder, and later, typing them and binding them into a book. So, when I finally got around to reading Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, the plot was, in so many ways, familiar. Tom Lake tells the story of a mother recounting her youthful summer affair to her three adult daughters, all in their early twenties. From the narrator’s perspective, it is a fable and a lullaby: a mother recounts her story not only to satisfy her children’s curiosity, but to pass on her lessons learned. Her children take on the role of inheritor and archivist, as my mother did for her mother—they take in her history, and in remembering and learning from it, preserve it.

The familial oral tradition as presented in the novel is one that has long been deeply intertwined with Southern Appalachian culture. As Dave Swinger puts it in his article “Oral History throughout the Centuries,” “Isolated by rugged geography, many Appalachian families and communities preserved their history, folklore, and traditions through storytelling, music, and spoken narratives rather than written records. These stories were often shared in homes, on porches, and at community gatherings, serving as a means of entertainment, education, and moral instruction.” It is a practice that is inherently tied to the land, and also one that is, in many ways, inherently tied to womanhood. In the domestic setting, storytelling is a key responsibility for women caring for children: whether through picture books, fables spun before bedtime, or lullabies, women often call on the oral tradition for the comfort and care of their young.

In her article “Gender Aspects of Folklore: Woman as the Keeper of Tradition,” Xabibova Nuriddinovna says that “Folklore is not only a collective artistic form, but a means of organizing cultural memory.” Through this responsibility of storytelling, women act as a sort of custodian of cultural memory, but also an instrument in how that culture is understood and carried on. Daily storytelling through the folk tales, songs, and lullabies offered to children allows women to pass on narratives which serve as a pedagogical act that helps shape a person’s inner world and sense of belonging. In this way, folklorist Dr. Barkha Singh’s insight that these stories become “the repositories of the dreams, hopes and fantasies of generations of girls” highlights how women’s storytelling sustains the emotional and imaginative inheritance of a culture.

Through this lens, the act of storytelling not only carries on a tradition of preservation, but it serves as a way for women to gain agency over their own narratives. In the novel, our protagonist Lara is constantly considering what level of detail she should reveal to her daughters. There are elements of the story that we, the reader, know to be true, since we have access to her internal monologue, but which she explicitly chooses to omit from the story she shares aloud. The motives behind some moments, such as the sex scenes, are obvious, but there are also more significant plot points that Lara will not disclose, simply because it is her life and her story and her decision to make. Some of these memories are of times when young Lara was powerless, or taken advantage of, and in omitting them or even through the careful choice of phrasing, she is able to regain agency over her past.

Lara also considers her daughters, the inheritors of this story, when she decides what details to include. There are moments in the novel where she pauses, ponders whether to lie about some aspect of her story for the sake of shielding her daughters from some of its harsher truths, or to tell them the truth, in case that truth should be useful for their own lives. This tension is an example of the storyteller’s ability to shape the cultural understanding of history through the presentation of a narrative, and is another sense in which women are imbued with a cultural capital: the subtle, but very tangible, ability to alter how future generations understand the world around them.

It is worthy to mention here that Ann Patchett is herself a Southerner: raised in Tennessee since the age of six, she is the founder of Parnassus Books, an independent bookstore operating out of Nashville, as well as the author of 18 books, including five nonfiction titles and three children’s books. In a way, Tom Lake is itself an example of the Southern storytelling tradition, a reflection on how this tradition carries on in contemporary life, and also a closer examination of the figure so often overlooked in studies of folklore: the speaker. While there is, of course, endless content to dig into within the study of oral folk tales, such as themes, cultural context, and origin, the speaker is the singular stagehand that makes the whole play possible. The staying power of the oral tradition speaks to the power of language on the whole: what is spoken is what is heard; what is written is what is remembered.

⁂

Thanks for reading Theodora Bonis’ thoughts on Tom Lake. Love what you read? Tip the writer! 100% of tips go straight to the writer.

Leave a tip!

We love to hear from you! Leave a comment below!

Leave a comment

It’s here!

From award-winning author Spencer K.M. Brown, SLOW FIRE is a collection of Southern stories about people living at the edge of belief—religious, familial, and personal—where grace is rare, suffering is ordinary, and endurance becomes a quiet form of love.

Set among frozen hollers, decaying motels, burning fields, and small towns hungry for spectacle, these stories follow mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, preachers and murderers, and outcasts and wanderers confronting loss, disability, violence, and moral uncertainty. A woman watches her past collapse beneath the blade of a bulldozer. A self-anointed preacher nails himself to a cross, convinced the end has arrived, only to discover that the world, indifferent and unrepentant, continues without him.

Written in a clean and lyrical voice, SLOW FIRE examines faith without romance, suffering without self-pity, and love as something practiced daily rather than proclaimed. Redemption here is not spectacle. It arrives through survival, attention, and the stubborn refusal to abandon grace—or one another.

The best way to support a book is to read it.

Order SLOW FIRE now from the Loblolly Press shop.

Order Your Copy Now!

…and the second best way is to hear it live!

Spencer K.M. Brown is going on tour! Check out the dates below to hear from the author himself.

READ MORE

PEEK BEHIND THE CURTAIN

“Edith Wharton spoke of ‘the hard considerations of the poor,’ and her quote is apt for this exceptional book of stories. In a world filled with bad circumstances and bad choices, Brown’s people exhibit a fierce integrity as they seek to endure, if not transcend, their plights. Striking language, wisdom, and a profound empathy make Slow Fire one of the best story collections I’ve read in a long while.”

—Ron Rash, NY-Times Best-Selling Author of The Caretaker

SLOW FIRE is out now in the Loblolly Press shop.

Order Now!

This post marks the start of a new series here at Loblolly Press: The Southern Publishing Spotlight, a chance to highlight a selected independent press and share a bit about them! In this first installment, the spotlight lands on Iron Oak Editions. This independent book publisher originally began as a literary journal, based out of Charlotte, North Carolina, titled West Trade Review (still active both online and in print if you would like to check it out). In 2024, along with the team that was working on the journal, Ken Harmon founded Iron Oak Editions. While planning this blog, I reached out to Ken to see if he would be open to an interview, and that conversation will be available to read next week! In his initial email back to me, Ken spoke about his own connection to the South, posing a series of questions, and writing, “Am I personally very Southern and have a strong connection to the land and place? Oh, hell, yeah. Do I like everything about the region? Absolutely not, but do I love it anyway? Yes.” And I thought that about summed up the complex love that is tied to one’s home, my own included.

Iron Oak Editions publishes a diverse array of literature. Fiction, poetry and nonfiction are all considered as long as the work conveys authenticity and humanity. In their own words, their mission is as follows:

Our mission is to perpetuate the work of artists both well known and yet-to-be-known, simultaneously enriching our world through the written word. We strive to reflect diversity in style, content and perspective throughout poetry and prose and seek to publish work that is authentically human, which for us means beautiful, messy, and complicated; work that is fearless, honest, and unafraid of judgment because that's where truth lies; work that is carefully crafted and takes artistic risks.

When I began looking into this press, I was initially drawn to the term “authentically human.” As I explored the work that they published I found that this trait was noticeably present throughout. In my own tastes, I have always been drawn to this same characteristic and find it to be lacking more often than one would think, especially in the realm of literature (a medium that is so tied to conveying the human experience). Yet, when reading something that has grasped the realest form of what it means to be human—of what it means to inhabit a body throughout love, grief, despair and hope—you can feel it, and it is not as easy to come across as it might seem.

While Iron Oak Editions does not exclusively publish work that is notably Southern, and is built up of a team of folks from all over as Ken pointed out in our exchange, there are two upcoming books that are, in fact, distinctly Southern.

The first is titled Permanence and Flux: Poems by Bill Griffin and will be published on March 30th, 2027. Griffin is a resident of the North Carolina foothills and a full time naturalist. For a taste of his writing, I found a quote from an artist statement he had posted that I enjoy quite a lot. He was responding to an Arthur Sze quote that regarded the idea of knowing and he wrote,

Knowing has been the false hare speeding in front of me, dragging my greyhound brain around and around this crazy dog track of a life. Learn another thing, cinch it down into the sack of knowing with all those other squirming things…

This is only a snippet, but it resonated enough for me that I now feel quite anxious to get my hands on his upcoming collection.

The second southern title that Ken pointed me towards was the upcoming poetry collection of Judy Jordan, What the Land Remembers, forthcoming in the fall of 2027. Raised near the border between the Carolinas on a small farm, Jordan has an undeniable connection to the American south that has seeped into her writing throughout her career. Her first poetry collection, relevantly named Carolina Ghost Woods, received the Walt Whitman Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. For a taste of the “authentically human” that Iron Oak Editions cultivates—the beautiful, the messy, and the complicated—read Judy Jordan’s 1999 poem, “Help Me to Salt, Help Me to Sorrow.” It is a poem that contains the impossible multitudes of a human life and it is a poem that, to me, will continue churning in my mind for days to come.

Make sure to stay tuned for the next installment in the Southern Publisher Spotlight series, where we’ll get to hear from Ken Harmon on the joys of founding a Press, and more on what it means to be “authentically human”!

⁂

Thanks for reading Finn Hummel’s southern publishing spotlight. Love what you read? Tip the writer. 100% of tips go straight to the writer.

Leave a tip!

For more recommendations, reviews, and literary talk, subscribe to Loblolly Press!

We also explored why Spencer made the pivot to the short story form, what writers and musicians have influenced him, and what he’d recommend as a next read for anyone who’s been pulled into Slow Fire.

Slow Fire is available for pre-order now, and will be widely available from Loblolly Press on August 6!

Pre-order SLOW FIRE

Can you talk about your relationship with the Southern landscape and culture? How has it informed these stories and your writing process on the whole? Characters frequently experience a “homesickness for somewhere that doesn’t exist”or feel “borne back ceaselessly” into the same places. How does this figure into the book’s—or perhaps your—relationship with place?

I grew up and lived in the South my whole life, so in one sense, I’ve had the opportunity to witness firsthand how a place changes and goes through a sort of metamorphosis over decades. I grew up in a small town in the foothills of North Carolina. It’s always been very rural; tobacco fields and pastures and clean creeks and old forests—these were the places that shaped my childhood and imagination. To a child, the world tends to have a sort of magical wonder about it. Especially for me, everything had an Edenic quality, as if I were the first person to ever wade barefoot through a creek, or to smell the farmers harvesting tobacco in the late summer, or to ride in my father’s car with the window down on an empty back road. And over the years, things simply change. Much like Robert Frost wrote, “Nothing gold can stay.” I’ve watched those fields and forests get leveledto put up shopping plazas and neighborhoods; creeks rerouted to cool down factories or data centers. Mankind’s hunger for progress and expansion has always been there, I think. But as you get older, you do look out at that shopping center and remember what it was once like. You can recall wandering through a field that is now paved over. It is very much a homesickness. But the beauty of memory, of imagination and art, is that it can never really die, not entirely. For me, stories are the way to memorialize such places and times. And they’re also a means to offer signposts to those who come after us, as if to say, “Slow down, pay attention now. Take all this in, because it won’t always be this way.” It’s highly important to observe and be attentive to the present moment. That’s all we have. The characters in these stories sort of embody that same ideal, or at least finding themselves in conflict with it—that of wishing for things to go back how they were, because they find themselves sorrowful for not having paid attention.

In the opening story ‘I’m Bound to Leave this Dark Behind,’ Mr. Mason describes land development as ‘progress,’ while Eli sees it as ‘killing everything that makes here here’. Do you view your writing as a form of preservation or a call for change? Both? Neither?

I wouldn’t say I’m an environmental writer per se, not in any formal sense of it. For that story in particular, Eli is a character on the brink of despair. He’s lost or losing everyone dear to him, he’s left with a mess of a family business and obligations he doesn’t know what do to with. And so when the possibility of a windfall, of an easy-out presents itself, he’s torn between what he wishes to do and what he feels he should do. Suddenly, the one who was just bad-mouthing his family land and his father’s orchard is now defending it. It’s the paradox of Eli’s character that I think most of us, at one time or another, can fall into. When you think of it, what really makes a home home? What is that one thing that gives something its inherent essence? It’s a difficult question sometimes, but for Eli and many of these characters, that question is at the center of their troubles most of the time. Is it that things change and they can’t handle it? Have they lost someone or something dear to them? I think that, if anything, most of these stories are a call to be searchers and seekers of truth; sojourners trying to find our authentic self and to gain that faith and hope we’ve lost somewhere along the way. For Eli, there’s not necessarily a right or wrong decision, but what’s more important is the intention behind it.

Is there a single story that you consider to be central to SLOW FIRE’s thesis or understanding? Or perhaps a story that acts as a sort of axis on which the rest of the collection revolves? How would you describe the collection’s thesis, if it can be described in so simple a word?

I’m not sure if there is a single story that acts as an axis to the rest. They’re all linked through the characters searching for something more, in a way. If I had to choose perhaps a thesis for the collection, it might be a line from the story “Green Valley Motel on Paterson Street.” The main character, Sheryl, when she’s arguing with her father about keeping her child who will be born handicapped, she says, “It’s still life, and it’s still beautiful.” Sheryl, like nearly all of the characters throughout, come to realize that: life does not become beautiful after suffering ends; it remains beautiful even while suffering continues. In the words of St. Sebastian Valfre, “At the end of it all, we won’t regret having suffered; but we will regret having suffered so little, and suffered that little so badly.”

Your past two published works, Hold Fast and Move Over Mountain, were both novels. What inspired the pivot to the short story form? Did the shift in form allow you to explore themes and ideas that a longer narrative could not?

I’ve always had a love of the short-story form. It’s very different from novel, of course, in that stories often have to be condensed in and carry a harder punch at times. You don’t have 300 pages to get characters moving toward change—you get ten, and so suddenly, every scene, every word carries a new weight with it. To write a good story is quite a difficult thing. As a writer, you’re forced to pear away at it over and over, removing everything down to its heart as much as possible.

Can you talk a bit about your literary and non-literary inspirations for SLOW FIRE? Any songs, poems, films, visual artworks that inform the work?

I’m always reading, so there are definitely a number of authors and books that have been huge inspiration to my own work. But specifically when it comes to short stories: Flannery O’Connor, Breece D’J Pancake, William Gay, Denis Johnson, and Thom Jones have been long-time favorites. The poetry of Robert Frost, Charles Wright, W.S. Merwin, A.E. Houseman, John Keats. For music, I don’t often listen to anything while writing, but driving in the car or cleaning the house I usually have something on that will come back at certain times. I’m a great fan of classical music and even more so a lover of jazz. “A Love Supreme,” “Take Five,” “Kind of Blue,” and “Saxophone Colossus” are some favorites—they’re famous records, of course, but that’s because they’re masterpieces. I’m often rotating through the music of Bill Callahan, Songs: Ohia, Fionn Regan, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, and honestly too many to name here. Perhaps the biggest inspirations come from my sons though. Taking them out to explore the woods and creeks near our home is always aweing. They see the world in such a beautiful, raw, innocent way and it makes me step back and look at things anew each time. They’re constantly bringing me to experience new wonder every day.

Lastly, if you could have your readers follow SLOW FIRE with one book, what would it be and why?

I’d highly recommend any work by Flannery O’Connor. The Movie-Goer by Walker Percy; A Feast of Snakes, by Harry Crews; or I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, by William Gay—All beautiful Southern works.

⁂

Spencer K. M. Brown is a finalist for the 2023 CMA National Book Award for “Best Novel,” winner of the 2016 Penelope Niven Award, the 2018 Flying South Fiction Prize, and a finalist for both the 2019 Doris Betts Fiction Prize and the 2019 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize. His short fiction and poems have four times been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in numerous publications. He lives in North Carolina, with his wife and three sons. He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast, and one chapbook of poetry, Cicada Rex. His debut collection of stories Slow Fire is forthcoming from Loblolly Press, Fall 2026.

For more recommendations, reviews, and literary talk, subscribe to Loblolly Press!

Subscribe now

Alannah is talking and cracking pistachios open with her teeth. She’d smoked all the cigarettes and the butts sit in a Styrofoam cup by the open window turning yellow in the little bit of water she was snuffing them out in. She’s jittery from sitting in the hotel room all day and cracking shells with her teeth and now she’s talking.

“You work any today?” she says.

“No, couldn’t find nothing. Besides, we’re still sitting on some cash.”

She sits crisscrossed next to a pile of empty shells and green dust on the white bed sheets.

“So you’ll just go to bed and forget all about this and we’ll just do the same thing tomorrow, is that it? Thought you said we came here because you had a job to do?”

I don’t say nothing to her and sit at the desk by the open window and straighten out a half-smoked cigarette she was saving.

“I have a plan,” I tell her.

“And what’s that.”

“We’re going to drink tonight and make love and sleep.”

“I’m bored, Jamie,” she says and she cracks a closed shell open with her back teeth. “It’s boring here. You said it would be fun, that we’d live a good life and be happy if we came here. But it’s just the same as it was back home. It’s just as boring.”

“It’s boring everywhere,” I say.

“Where are we going to go drink tonight?” She talks around the nuts that are in her cheeks and she looks like a squirrel and widens her eyes, sticking out her salty tongue at me. I don’t feel much like laughing but can’t help it. “How about The Lodge,” she says.

“We can go to The Lodge.”

“Or maybe that Harlem’s place, over on Seventh?”

“We can go wherever you’d like, babe.”

She stops chewing and suddenly looks out the window past me and past time.

“I want to go home, Jamie.”

“We are home, babe. This is where we live now.”

“No, my real home. Momma is probably planting flowers for the spring. I used to help her with that every year. I want that again, Jamie.”

“It’s gone,” I say. “There ain’t no real home, no planting or any of that. This is where we live now.”

She goes quiet and dusts off her jeans onto the sheets and gets up and walks to the bathroom. She leaves the door open and I can see her bent knees and I drop the cigarette into the cup of murky looking water.

“Then when do we leave?” she says from the bathroom as she messes with her hair in the mirror.

“Soon as I take care of what I came here for.”

“You don’t have to, you know.”

“I do. And we’ll be getting on after that. We can get married after that.”

“In a church?” she says, coming out of the bathroom and she sits on my lap.

“If that’s where you’d like to get married.”

“And flowers, lots of flowers.”

“Sure, flowers too.”

“You’re not going to really do it though, are you.”

“That’s what I came here for. I have to do it.”

“I was talking about marrying me, Jamie.”

“Sure I will. That whole time I was locked up I was only thinking about them two things, marrying you and killing him.”

“But you’ll just go right back to jail. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To go back for another five years, only this time it would be forever.”

“I ain’t going back, never will.”

“Promise me you won’t never leave me again.”

“No one can promise something like that, babe.”

“Promise me,” she says.

“Promises only lead to someone getting upset.”

She stands and pulls off her shirt and looks through the drawers for something clean to wear out.

“What about that place that does karaoke?” she says. “I want to sing.”

“We can go there.”

“Are you really going to kill him, Jamie?”

“Sure I am.”

I sit outside of Miller’s Pub and drink a bottle of cold beer as Alannah stands at the bar talking to a woman with bleached hair and a tattooed guy hanging close by her shoulder. Alannah used to be a hairdresser so she thinks that gives her the right to talk to anyone and ask them all sorts of gossip.

I sit and think about the last time I saw Henry Baxter. Almost five years now. He’d come and seen me when I was locked up, just to laugh at me really. He was going with my sister then and had beat on her pretty good one night. There had been plenty of nights before that, plenty of other fellas she’d gone with who all did the same, but Henry was the worst of them. Has this look in his eyes that is just as hollow as the devil hisself. First time I ever saw him in town, something in meknew I’d kill him one day. That’s the only reason I got locked up the first time. When the Law found me sitting in my car outside Henry’s place and asked me what I was planning to do with the gun on my lap, I told them, just like I told everyone else. Said, I’m going to kill him. I’d been planning on killing him for some time, and today is the day.

Inside, Alannah tosses her head back as she does a shot with the woman and her tattooed boyfriend and the bartender. I watch them through the window and bum a smoke from this lady sitting on a bench by the door outside with me. A car pulls up to the curb and a guy gets out, starts unloading speakers and a laptop and a case full of microphones. They do karaoke here on Fridays and every drunk in a five-mile radius comes out and they butcher all the songs we hold dear. But not Alannah. She has the voice of an angel, plays guitar and piano some. She’d always dreamed of becoming a real singer. Playing shows and having her pretty face on the cover of an album. She could do it too. Could have, anyway. But I guess I took that away from her too. Same day I told her I was going to marry her and took her away from home.

She always said that as soon as she saved up enough money she was going to move to Nashville. After that, it would be just a matter of time before she became a star. Before she got “discovered.” There were only two ways out of Jackson County where she grew up: leaving and never looking back, or dying. And dying’s a whole lot easier than leaving, she said, seemed to be what most folks did anyway. She said that part of why she loves to sing is because she doesn’t have to think about living all that much, she doesn’t have to think about her Momma or the sisters I made her leave, doesn’t have to think about me. She always had songs to escape to. She said her Daddy always knew she’d become a real singer. Just before he took off on Alannah and her family to move across the country, he told her that he’d always listen to the radio so that he would hear her voice one day. I think Alannah still imagines him sitting in his house somewhere in Santa Fe browsing all the country stations for his little girl.

“You singing tonight?” the lady says to me.

“Not much of a performer,” I say.

“Hell, if that was the requirement, this shit wouldn’t ever happen. I wouldn’t mind that one bit.” She lets out a rasping laugh, one that makes my eyes water. I want to tell her to go ahead and cough up whatever shit is in her.

“What about you?” I say.

“No, I can’t sing. I’m fighting a sore throat and going through a divorce.”

“All right then,” I say.

“He was a real bastard, but he loved me, that was for sure.”

“Not sure those can go together,” I tell her.

“Sure they can,” she says. “He loved me so much it was killing him. He would get all worked up about it and start drinking and telling me how much he loved me. That’s when he’d get mean. One time he dragged me around the living room by my hair and just kept saying, ‘I love you, you bitch, I love you, don’t you see!’ And he was shouting and all the rest. That’s the sort of man he was, the bastard. He started coming home saying that one day soon he was just going to kill the both of us so we would die at the same time, like in Romeo and Juliet.”

“Romeo and Juliet?”

“He was a romantic,” she says, talking slowly with each syllable. “But when he started not sleeping and just staying up to watch me sleep, I got a little creeped out.”

“I can understand that.”

“But that’s love, that’s what that is.”

“I don’t see how.”

“It’s something a little different. Darker, maybe, but still love,” she says. Thinking this one person is the only reason you’re alive, that they give your life salvation, they give it light, well that’s enough reason to keep on living. Just a glimpse of something beautiful, just one in all this shit can be enough to save you.”

She stands up and walks back inside and I look through the windows at the guy setting up the stage.

I wonder if that’s what I’m doing to Alannah. Killing her because I have no other path but her. Taking her light, because mine’s gone out.

I watch as she takes the stage first and a Fleetwood Mac song plays and her voice rings out. She sings great but she’d never make it in Nashville. She wouldn’t make it anywhere, I tell myself. She can’t see it but I can. She knows we’re not going there, at least I hope she does. I just couldn’t put her in that position, building up her hopes and all. Because I can’t do what I’d planned to do by myself. She could be a star, could bring people real joy with a voice like she’s got. Only no one will ever hear it. Not the crowds in Nashville, not her old man sitting on his couch somewhere out in Santa Fe, not after I do what I came to do. They’ll all have to just forgive me for that.

It’s late when we get back to the motel room and Alannah is a little drunk and she won’t look at me. The pistol pokes in my pocket and I take it out and set it on the desk near the window. She’s on the bed with her legs crossed and her head tapping against the dirty wall behind her. She stares straight ahead and I pour us some leftover wine and she takes a drink. My hands won’t quit shaking and I hide them from her in my pockets, walking into the bathroom. I run cold water and hold my hands under the faucet and look at myself. I look different somehow, a little meaner, not dead but closer to dying.

I can hear her cracking pistachios with her teeth and I walk out and sit at the chair by the window.

“You didn’t have to do it,” she says.

“It’s all over now,” I say. “No use talking about it.”

I can still hear the sound of her crying from the car. Can see Henry Baxter’s hands reaching out to shake mine and that’s when I gave him three to the chest. He seemed both glad and frightened to see me. I had a brief thought of getting back in the car and forgetting about Henry and the gun, about taking Alannah to Nashville and finding a church.

“It’s over now, he’s dead. We can go anywhere we want now,” I tell her.

“I want to go home,” she says.

“Anywhere but home, babe.”

“What about the mountains?”

“We can go to the mountains.”

“We can find a little church and get married.”

“We can find a church, babe.”

“And we can fall in love all over again?”

“We are in love,” I tell her.

“How can you go and do something like that and say you love me?”

She won’t look at me and cracks shells with her teeth and turns on the television.

“I love you more than you know, babe. I love you so much it kills me sometimes.”

“I just want to go home now, Jamie. Back to my Momma’s house. I just want to go back and live like we used to live.”

“No, you can’t leave, we’re here now. We’re free to go anywhere. Anywhere, babe. Where do you want to go?”

She doesn’t say anything and drinks her wine. I reach for a cigarette and my hand brushes against the gun on the desk. I take a smoke from the pack and pick up the pistol and hold it up to my temple. She looks over and I blow air out of my mouth, pantomime pulling the trigger and she smiles.

“We can go anywhere?” she says.

“Anywhere,” I say.

She smiles and cracks a shell with her teeth and crosses her eyes making a face at me. I light my smoke and she gets up and walks over to me, kisses me on my forehead. She goes to the bathroom and runs the shower and pulls off her clothes, leaving a pile on the floor. She closes the bathroom door and locks it behind her. The shower curtain rings scream against the metal rod and I can hear her crying under the hot water. She starts singing to herself and I sit and smoke and listen to her sweet voice. I listen and know no one else will ever get to hear it, not her Daddy, not Henry Baxter. Only me. She cries and sings and I wonder if she will ever forgive me.

⁂

Spencer K. M. Brown is a finalist for the 2023 CMA National Book Award for “Best Novel,” winner of the 2016 Penelope Niven Award, the 2018 Flying South Fiction Prize, and a finalist for both the 2019 Doris Betts Fiction Prize and the 2019 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize. His short fiction and poems have four times been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in numerous publications. He lives in North Carolina, with his wife and three sons. He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast, and one chapbook of poetry, Cicada Rex. His debut collection of stories Slow Fire is forthcoming from Loblolly Press, Fall 2026.

For more recommendations, reviews, and literary talk, subscribe to Loblolly Press!

Subscribe now

“Some people think a writer can’t drive a nail. Look at Thoreau and you know that’s bullshit.” — Larry Brown, Billy Ray’s Farm: Essays from a Place Called Tula

I read Joe in 2015, right after I got back from a trip to Alaska. I had been on National Student Exchange, and that transition back was hard — back to dorm life after months of adventure, and then the first serious bout of depression I’d had as an adult, though I didn’t have the words to name it at the time.

I was a junior at Winthrop University, just learning that I wanted to write. I didn’t even know when I started watching the movie, Joe (2013), that it was also a book. I watched the lumber crews poison native trees and replant pine in long rows. It looked like so much of the land I grew up on in the midlands of South Carolina. I understood innately the hard labor of Joe’s dual protagonists (Joe, Gary) because there was a direct lineage between their work and my father’s work as a carpenter.

Joe, played by Nicolas Cage of all people, was not unlike my father actually, and I watched Gary, who at fifteen pines for a father figure he can actually model himself after since his own, Wade, is abusive and an alcoholic. Cage called his depiction of Joe, “an ode to those people that we come across in life — those angels, if you will — that really embody what a father is.” My own father falls somewhere between Wade and Joe, certainly not an angel, but some amalgam of alcoholic and abuser. All of this approximated a version of my own early life, one that I’d managed to set aside until I realized that at least some part of me (and probably so many other kids from the South) lived inside of Tye Sheridan’s portrayal of Gary.

I ordered the book the same night — a first edition, hardcover. It arrived and I read it in two days. On the night I finished it, I was up until 2:15am. I’ve kept a journal since I was 18 so, embarrassingly, I can confirm how much this moment meant to me. I loved it so much that the day after I finished it, I started it again. My last journal entry in the month of February, just a few days after reading Joe, was, “In February I felt alive again.” This book lit up my world.

As I reflect now, my infatuation with Joe and the work of Larry Brown and his contemporaries stemmed from how I saw my own experience within the story. I was actually lucky to even be getting a college degree. My dad, at my age, was already working construction with his dad, whose dad before him had been a farmer. The forces surrounding my life at an early age — poverty, alcoholism, addiction, hard labor — were the same ones many of Brown’s characters lived through.

My relationship to the work now is more complicated. Larry Brown’s Mississippi is real, but it’s also a specific perception of place — one built almost entirely around white working-class men, and one that leaves out entirely or oversimplifies dramatically the people of color and the women who are actually in the book. The question of authenticity and abstraction of a literary aesthetic like “grit lit” and the “rough South” is one that I’m in engaging with here. Zackary Vernon writes, in his essay “Romanticizing the Rough South: Contemporary Cultural Nakedness and the Rise of Grit Lit”:

“The commodification of Grit Lit is problematic in that it enables readers to consume an ostensibly “authentic” version of southern culture with a safe degree of remove, rather than having to face the real-world hardships endured by the actual inhabitants of the Rough South. If readers romanticize the Rough South for its refusal to surrender to the homogenizing forces of global capitalism, then we run the risk of not confronting and ultimately not addressing the social and economic problems faced by those down-and-out southerners who have become the principal subjects of the genre.”

Loblolly Press, my own work as a publisher and as a writer, is still in dialogue with this question of authenticity — and what it means to be a Southern writer in 2026. You can see it in our mission:

I haven’t read Joe again in the intervening years since those first two times. I also haven’t returned to the movie. I do often return, though, to the actual design of the book, and especially so while working on the design of Spencer’s collection, Slow Fire.

The complexity of Spencer’s character’s and stories stem from a kind of moral underpinning influenced by the work of Flannery O’Connor and through her own influence the work of Southern writers since then. The design aesthetic is influenced by this as well which you can in Molly Renda’s cover design for Joe and the work of many other designers from the same time period:

You can even see this style present in book design today with something like James by Percival Everett (a native South Carolinian) that has a jacket design reminiscent of Joe.

The simplicity of the large type on a stark black background, the brown-paper-bag styling of the title, the roughness of all of it — the design of the book makes way for the moral complexity of what it contains, made all the more interesting and difficult by what the characters choose within and by the history of the region underneath it all.

As Spencer writes, early in the first story:

“I never understood how someone could own land. Whose is it? Who’d we get it from? Who’d they get it from? And somehow it always comes back to someone having to die because someone else wants something.” — Spencer K.M. Brown, “I’m Bound to Leave This Dark Behind,” Slow Fire, first published in Salvation South

That’s where the design of Slow Fire starts to take shape. It’s grounded in the analog and in the working class. Lib Ramos, founder of Good Printed Things and our lead cover designer for this collection, shared:

“I wanted to capture a hazy, layered look with this design, and adding a subtle halftone pattern really helped add some depth and interest. Creating something in this yellow-orange color scheme is definitely out of my typical color comfort zone, and it was a really great design challenge.”

We built on that for the interior of the book while also paying homage Joe’s book design. Joe opens on plain reportage: “The road lay long and black ahead of them and the heat was coming now through the thin soles of their shoes.” Slow Fire opens on a line that could sit right next to it: “I dreamed the hills were burning again last night.” The design of the text inside the book steps back and in its own way, allows the words (and story) to really come through.

This kind of work comes out of a slow gathering of influences over time — we’re really proud of the work we put into taking Slow Fire from manuscript to book. We would love for you to read it —it comes out August 6. Pre-order now to receive it by release day. In the meantime, here’s a gathering of other Southern writers expanding the definition of Southern lit and what it means to be a writer in the South today:

⁂

Thanks for reading Andrew Mack’s essay. Love what you read? Tip the writer. 100% of tips go straight to the writer.

Leave a tip!

For more recommendations, reviews, and literary talk, subscribe to Loblolly Press!

Subscribe now

Friends,

We know our titles have been in and out of stock lately. Keeping everything available in print all the time is a tough job, especially on a lean budget — but as of today, we’re fully stocked on every item, including our bundles, pre-order titles, and merch.

The 15% off applies to everything so add whatever you’d like to your cart. Use the code RESTOCK-2-DAY at checkout or click the link below and it will apply automatically. Orders over $35 ship free.

We’re hoping to stay in stock for a good while this time, but the sale ends tomorrow.

👉 Shop the restock →

— Loblolly Press

⁂

For more recommendations, reviews, and literary talk, subscribe to Loblolly Press! Subscribers receive a free digital chapbook and paid subscribers receive 20% off every order from loblollypress.com

Subscribe now

When I was 13, I stopped writing stories.

My Google Drive, filled with scrapped drafts and half-developed plot lines, became the hobby’s mausoleum. The bits of dialogue and character details I’d scribble into the margins of my math notebook began to wane. It was more a descent than a decision, slowly creeping until I had stopped entirely.

It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy writing anymore; it was just that it was simpler to fall into academic essays and scripted presentations than to write something that required me not to dissolve into someone else. As I went through school, it was easy to mimic—easier to copy the language of a Shakespearean sonnet than to write something that sounded even close to mine. It felt good to disappear behind someone else’s voice, leaving every sentence perfectly impersonal, but it felt better to make it seem like I was never there at all.

In my last full semester of community college, I took an Introduction to Creative Writing course. I had already blown through nearly all of the English electives and was determined not to get stuck in another science lab if I could help it. The class was new and worth just enough credits to round out my spring semester, so I enrolled. I figured I could write a couple of generic sonnets about love and whip out a quick story about an evil janitor or something equally as distant from myself and be done with it.

When the course started, it was different from my expectations. Instead of the two-seated tables smushed into rows, they were pushed together to form one long rectangle that crowded the center of the room. People talked, unafraid to chatter over one another when a point came up they disagreed with, voicing their opinions without restraint. The instructor guided us through conversational lectures, encouraging us to take his feedback with the same weight as our peers’.

I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I almost missed the static rows and boring lectures; at least those I knew what to do with. I felt off-kilter every time the woman diagonal from me noticed I had something to say or the guy beside me asked what I did that weekend. I hated how I embarrassed myself every time, slowly trying to sink into the background and make people forget they ever saw me.

For the first workshop, I did exactly what I initially planned. I submitted four poems, two of which were sonnets, and patiently waited for my workshop date. As I read through my classmates’ pieces and wrote editorial letters, I felt stupid. Their work was beautiful, all striking imagery and heart-wrenching lines, and mine was nothing. I felt my writing was bad—felt it was sloppy and overly lyrical and generic—but seeing other people’s work made my stomach curl with shame.

When my workshop came, it was, to my surprise, fine. Everyone was kind and open with their critiques, explaining why they felt each piece would benefit from their possible suggestions, and I hated it. I wanted them to rip the poems apart. I wanted them to point out the fact that they were all terrible. I wanted them to forget they read the poems at all.

After class, I found myself stuck reading one sentence from my instructor’s editorial letter over and over again: “My biggest concern is there is no desire here to take risks or break the rules.”

That sentence stung more than I wanted to admit.

Once all of the poetry workshops were complete, the instructor moved on to the nonfiction unit. I didn’t think I was going to enjoy it, as I didn’t have much familiarity with nonfiction, but I was pleasantly surprised. The stories he assigned were fascinating, ranging from personal accounts to journalistic pieces. His big question was always “Why share this story?”

The first time he asked, I thought it was kind of obvious: You share something because you want something in return. For that piece, it was awareness; for the next, it was policy change. By the time I started writing my own, I figured I was right.

I picked something I was ashamed of—something that I hadn’t shared with anyone—because I wanted a better grade on my second workshop. I hated writing it. My skin ached and I couldn’t sleep, but I thought that if I showed that I was taking a risk, I would do better.

And I did. The workshop was good, and the instructor gave specific critiques about places where I could improve. Everyone was the same as they were in the first workshop: kind and understanding of all my mistakes. I wanted to drop out.

I couldn’t understand why no one would just tell me the truth: that my writing was meaningless and achieved nothing. I hated knowing people now knew something about me — something personal and close and terrifying. It felt like I’d given a bit too much away, like they could suddenly slip past the seam of my skin and claw their way into my skull if they wanted. I was nauseous the entire drive home.

The last note I made during the workshop was “Why did you write this story?” At the time, I wanted to believe it was because of a grade, or to raise awareness, or any reason other than the fact that I just wanted someone to see me. In retrospect, it was never about anything else.

I still feel scared to share pieces with people. I worry that they’ll pick every part of me out of a story and agree that it really doesn’t mean anything to anyone. I’m not always sure that it does, but it’s easier now to think about why I write than why I don’t. It’s not a product or an end goal, but a process of connection. I could write a million stories trying to use someone else’s voice or ideas, but none of them would mean a thing to me, because I would have no reason for writing them.

Stories are a gift, an invitation to share what it means to be human in all of its struggles and imperfections with someone you may never have met otherwise. They offer a glimpse into what it would be like to be someone else, to escape into somewhere that forces you to take a new perspective. And as terrifying as it may be to create, that makes it worth it.

⁂

Thanks for reading Ari Pohl’s “Why Write?”. Love what you read? Tip the writer. 100% of tips go straight to the writer.

Leave a tip!

For more recommendations, reviews, and literary talk, subscribe to Loblolly Press!

As a lifelong fan of Appalachian folk music, and as a songwriter myself, I often find myself lost in the lyrics of the songs that I love. Knee deep in the stories that they tell, wading through decades of tradition and generations of community, I follow the words that flow through the lips of Doc Watsons, Elizabeth Cotton, or any of the other writers that were raised under the pines of Appalachia. Listening to these artists and the stories that they tell, I can’t help but wonder, how does this differ from the act of writing literature?

When we write poetry, what is it that we aim to achieve? When we read it, what do we gain? These are not questions that can be answered easily, and I would go so far as to say that these are not questions that can be answered at all, at least not universally. Each writer has a unique motivation. Each reader derives a distinct meaning. Yet, how different is the outcome of a writer publishing a book of poems from that of a songwriter releasing an album? Of a reader annotating from that of a listener reflecting? The form is practically the only difference. The substance inside is just the same.

So, below I have compiled a collection of Appalachian folk songs that can be read as poetry. With the removal of the resonating strings and the prancing melody, what you are left with can only be described as a poem.

Seeds of the Pine by Martha Scanlan

Cottonwood a-shakin in the breeze
Surrounded by a starry sky
Easy to forget the things we need
Easy to stumble around mostly blind

I could tell you not to come in from the storm
I could tell you not to be so kind
I could tell you not to close the door
I could say I never wanted you for mine

Picking what to highlight in the quote above felt like a gargantuan and entirely impossible task. I say this to emphasize the profundity of every single lyric in this song. “Seeds of the Pine” is a pinnacle of writing that blends imagery, metaphor and a conversational tone seamlessly. Yes, it is a song about being in love, but it is also saying something entirely singular, something that needs to be said and can only be said in this way. That is the mark of every poem that I have truly loved. One cannot summarize it or explain it away. That would eliminate the need to write it. It is only itself and it is only saying exactly what it must.

Rains fell cold through June
Grass is up to my thigh
Say if it dries up it’ll burn just like the moon
Say it opens up the seeds of the pine

The chorus of the song, pasted above, returns to the image of a wildfire. She writes of pine cones opening from the blaze, an allusion to serotinous cones, a type of pine cone that is naturally glued shut with resin. Underneath the hard protective layer, mature seeds lay dormant for years. It is not until wildfire melts through that they cast the seeds to the wind and to the soil, allowing for new growth. I read this as a metaphor of the walls we build around ourselves in hopes of self preservation. The fire, on the other hand, signifies the force that would be necessary to take down these walls. I also notice her use of simile, “it’ll burn just like the moon.” It is counter intuitive, the cold image of night, an icy blue moon. Yet, the moon casts light because of the sun’s reflection. It is the indirect force of the raging sun, diffused by thousands and thousands of miles. It is this distance that she writes from when she sings, “Say if it dries up…” By adding the “say” she is no longer the speaker. She avoids the danger of facing what she needs, protected by indirect speech.

Bury Me Beneath the Willow

Oh, bury me beneath the willow
Under the weeping willow tree
So he will know where I am sleeping
And perhaps he'll weep for me

So reads the repetitive chorus of the iconic ballad. Although popularized by The Carter Family in 1927, the original writer of the song is unknown. However, for this example I will link to my favorite version by Emmylou Harris. The song takes the perspective of a woman who is separated from the man that she loves by her own death, that occurs before their wedding day. She longs to be buried beneath the willow tree so that her love may mourn her there. The willow acts as both a metaphor for grief, the word weep reflecting both the verb and the name of the tree (weeping willow) and as a symbolic representation of the southern Appalachian landscape. By establishing the listener in this postmortem point of view, a rare and unique look at love and grief (or lack thereof) is achieved. Yet, the repetition of the chorus, and the speakers refusal to give up hope that her love will someday return to her place of rest to mourn her, emphasizes a truly devastating denial. Even from beyond the grave, the trivial resilience of human hope lingers, attached forever to the soul. It is this disembodied and eternally optimistic spirit that haunts this morbid take on love after death.

Angel From Montgomery by John Price

Make me an angel
That flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this livin'
Is just a hard way to go

This is a song that sticks with you. Like a piece of gum on your shoe, it’s got words you can’t shake. And there is a universality in it that leads me to believe that to be the case for anyone who might listen. The lines tell the story of a life drained of meaning. Monotonous and stagnant, the protagonist—a middle aged woman who feels very old—dreams to be an angel, one that can fly away from her life and towards a better one. Now, I know there are some who may claim that this doesn’t neatly fit into the Appalachian folk genre and that would be fair—Prine is from Illinois after all. Yet, the cultural wake of Appalachian music is wide and far. Its influence is challenging to measure. And, the center of the story told, as the name suggests, takes place in Montgomery, Alabama. So, allow me this wiggle room to honor a piece of poetry that has nestled deeply into my life. There is no way to expand on every detail of a song as vast and pervasive as “Angel From Montgomery.” Prine captures the resignation of exhaustion, the upstream battle of living in the face of decades gone by, of a past that came and went. The song is a plea for anything worth holding. It is a grasp for meaning that makes it all worth it. There is one line from this song that I always return to when considering why it is that I write. It reminds me why it is always worth it to put words on a page. It reads, “How the hell can a person go to work in the morning then come home in the evening and have nothing to say?”

Down in the Willow Garden

My race is run beneath the sun
Hell is waiting for me
For I did murder that poor little girl
Whose name was Rose Connelly

This old tune is another that has been around for too long to track the author. In that lies a notable difference in form between poetry and song. The act of singing, folk music especially, is a communal act. It is built upon sharing and passing along. The history of folk music began with word of mouth, many who sang could not write, and many who listened could not read. This accessibility allowed for a universal community, especially compared to the more solitary act of writing poetry. Still, the words persevere to this day and “Down in the Willow Garden” also referred to as “Rose Connelly” is proof of just that. From its untraceable origins it has been passed down and immortalized in hundreds of songbooks and in thousands of minds. It tells the cautionary tale of greed, murder and retribution. A man lies with his love, eaten by guilt just above the river bank where he killed an innocent girl. The song is an admission of fault, but the man does not beg for forgiveness or pray for holy mercy. He instead imagines his father tears upon seeing his son hanged and accepts his fate in hell.

⁂

Thanks for reading Finn Hummel’s Appalachian Folk as Poetry. Love what you read? Tip the writer. 100% of tips go straight to the writer.

Leave a tip!

For more recommendations, reviews, and literary talk, subscribe to Loblolly Press!

Check out The Computer Room here!

Blair lifts her shirt over her head in the front seat of her Volvo and fumbles around in the back for her scrubs.

She’s hungover and prays it’s not obvious, smoothing out her greasy blonde hair, messy from the shirt swap. Her phone buzzes. Nurse Vicky.

You’re coming in? Birthday party today.

“Fuck,” Blair mutters, turning off her car with one hand and slipping a shoe on with the other. She’d almost forgotten. Birthday parties always require extra setup.

She weaves through the parking lot, patting the last giant, ceramic Cabbage Patch head for luck.

“Hey Emilio,” she says, passing by the front desk, twirling her keys around her finger. Emilio is the only Babyland General employee remotely close to her age and the best source of gossip. He’s always got a story about some crazy field party or secretly hooking up with football players.

He looks up, eyebrows arched. He’s been here for an hour already. “You’re late again.”

She turns and puts a finger over her mouth before heading to the back to put on her stethoscope and name tag.

“Finally.” Nurse Vicki stands. “Let’s go.”

Blair started working at Babyland General early in the summer when all her friends began leaving for college.There aren’t a ton of employment options in her tiny North Georgia town. There’s the Bojangles down the street and the Party City that she worked at a few summers back.Growing up, her mom always told her she could be a doctor. This was the closest she would get.

Nurse Vicki reaches into a cabinet and pulls out the

Cabbage Patch-themed paper napkins and plates as she briefs Blair. “Marley. Turning 6 today.”

Babyland sees hundreds of kids daily, but birthday parties get special treatment: back room access, snacks, punch, and the opportunity to be first in line to adopt the Cabbage Patch doll born that day. 85 dollars for some beady-eyed baby with yarn for hair. Money down the drain.

Blair hates kids. She never wanted any of her own and when she was a junior in high school and saw the white stick in her palm grow a little pink line, she took all her Party City money and got her brother to drive her 45 minutes down the road to Atlanta.

“I can’t believe they’re not allowed to teach us about sex in school, but there’s a whole tourist attraction telling kids that babies come from tree roots,” Emilio once said to her, when they were closing together after a particularly busy day. He was straightening up some cowboy-themed dolls on the shelf. “I can’t wait to get out of here.”

Blair didn’t know if he meant Babyland General or NorthGeorgia altogether. She could see him in downtown Atlanta in some skyrise apartment holding a martini. Maybe even New York City performing on Broadway.

“Marley,” Blair repeats, assuredly to Nurse Vicki, setting the napkins down at each tiny spot on the table. Marley and six of her friends arrive in smock dresses with bows in their hair. They are a loud bunch, and the shrieks they make when they pick a doll off the shelf make Blair’s headache worsen.

Nurse Vicki doesn’t seem to mind. Blair watches as she ushers them around the store, gently guiding their sticky hands away from the places they aren’t supposed to be and complimenting their shoes and bracelets.

“You look 6 years old today,” Nurse Vicki says gently to Marley, whose eyes light up.

“I am 6 years old today!”

“There’s a birth in 10 minutes at Mother Cabbage!” Emilio says, theatrically, over the loudspeaker. “I repeat, dilation is 8 leaves, all staff on standby.”

‘Births’ happen once an hour, on the hour, and are the highlight of most people’s trip to Babyland General. By this point, Blair knew the script by heart, but she rarely performed the births, choosing instead to be a support from the sidelines.

During a ‘birth’, a nurse stands at “Mother Cabbage” —a giant tree housing fifty Cabbage Patch babies in its roots. The tree’s branches are decorated with several little fairies, tied to twinkle lights, which flash different colors throughout the show. Surrounded by bald heads peeking out from cabbage leaves, the nurse guides the tree through labor.

Children guess if the baby is going to be a boy or a girl by chanting “pink, pink, pink” or “blue, blue, blue”, something Emilio once described as “antiquated and disgustingly binary.”

The tree receives a shot of “Imagicillin” for pain, a term that’s become a running joke between the employees. “Time for my Imagicillin” nurses say, before heading to the Mexican restaurant down the road for half-off margaritas.

On the nurse’s cue, the crowd yells “Push!” A floppy doll with an oversized head emerges from the leaves, held up high like Simba.

Marley loves it. She claps and cheers and holds her hands to her face in excitement as the baby crowns. “My baby, mama!” She says, keeping her eyes ahead, grabbing at her mom’s skirt. Her mom is watching through an iPhone screen. “Mama, my baby.”

“I’m too hungover for this,” Blair says out of the corner of her mouth to Emilio, who has walked up beside her in the back corner. He smiles. Mother Cabbage amuses him, even after months of the same show. He still laughs at all the corny jokes.

“Rough night?”

Blair spent her evening on the couch with her brother, drinking most of a bottle of wine and watching an old season of The Real World.

“I guess.”

Nurse Vicki signals to Blair, agitated. Emilio places a hand on her shoulder. “You’re up.”

It’s Blair’s job to take the freshly born doll into the doctor’s room, a small pink room, with big glass windows where the kids and parents can watch a staff member perform a series of fake medical measures. She takes the doll’s vitals. Weight, height, blood pressure—periodically lifting the doll up to wave to the ogling crowd. She emerges with a birth certificate and a carrying case for the birthday girl. Marley has chosen the name Kylie Peaches. Once Kylie Peaches is handed over, Marley squeezes her with all her six-year-old might.

“My baby.”

Vicki arrives at Babyland before anyone else, flicking on the overhead lights until fluorescence hums above. Her routine, honed over the years, is a sacred ritual. She starts in the school room, methodically adjusting each doll at its tiny desk. Yarn-haired heads turn towards the oversized cloth teacher propped up at the front.

The nursery comes next. She places chubby-cheeked babies into pastel-lined cribs, tucking blankets around them with practiced efficiency. She dusts shelves lined with tiny shoes and bottles.

Sometimes, in these quiet moments, Vicki will take a doll and cradle it in the corner rocking chair. She sways back and forth, the weight in her arms a comforting illusion. There, there.

Vicki got married in 1979 and a decade later had given up on ever having children of her own. She tried and tried but her body never allowed it, and then her husband got sick, and priorities changed.

For years, Vicki tended the church nursery on Sundays. Muffled hymns drifted in as she watched babies grow, join their parents, get baptized, and return to the nursery with families of their own. There were always new babies to care for.

At 8:30 Vicki walks out to the main entrance and sees Emilio arriving, wiping his eyes. He never spoke much to Vicki, but always showed up right on time and greeted the guests with a level of enthusiasm she appreciated.

“Morning,” she says and picks up a stray rubber band next to the sign-in sheet.

Birthday party days are Vicki’s favorite. The facility feels so lively when a party is taking place; noisy and hopeful.

She spends a few minutes sweeping the floor of the party room and putting some pink and yellow cardboard party hats on the Cabbage Patch dolls. Setting their bobbing heads upright, she whispers to herself, “Perfect.”

Emilio sits in his car, staring at his phone. There’s a text from the football player:

Hey. Miss you. Can we talk?

Emilio’s thumb hovers over the message. He types out several responses, deleting each one.

Finally, he pockets the phone without replying and heads inside. As he walks through the parking lot, he passes thegiant Cabbage Patch Kid statues. He pauses, looking at their frozen, cheerful expressions.

“Morning,” Nurse Vicki says as he enters, finishing her preparations for the day.

“Morning,” Emilio responds, forcing a smile. He moves behind the front desk to put on his name tag. He hopes he doesn’t look like he’s spent the morning crying.

He boots up the computer, arranges the sign-in sheets, and prepares for another day of manufactured cheer and make-believe births. As the first customers of the day approach, Emilio takes a final steadying breath. Show time.

“Helloooo! Welcome to Babyland General Hospital.” Emilio is relieved. “If I could have you sign in on this sheet before you head back,” His tone is convincing. “That would be lovely.” He pushes the sign-in sheet toward the blonde family in matching red seersucker. The kid in the mom’s arms is trying to jump out, reaching out toward Emilio.

“First time here?” He asks, waving gently at the reaching toddler.

“First time,” The mom answers, somewhat exasperated. She switches the toddler to her other hip. The older boy, standing next to her leg, looks up at Emilio.

“We’re going to a football game.”

“Yes,” The mom clarifies, “Heading down to Athens this afternoon.”

Emilio raises his eyebrows, “And you get to stop in here first? What a lucky day.”

The boy nods, eyeing his oblivious sister. “Dolls are for girls. For babies.” As if this place made sense at any age.

Emilio bends down, eye level with the boy, and hands him a sticker with a Cabbage Patch head on it. He catches a glimpse of Blair, hurrying through the front door, her scrubs wrinkled. He smiles. “Dolls are for everyone.”

After Marley and her friends have had their share of white frosting cake and apple juice, Emilio finds Blair in the break room eating a packet of toasted cheese crackers and scrolling on her phone. She barely looks up.

“Will you tell me something good?” Blair says, folding a leg up into the plastic chair that she’s perched in and placing her phone on the table, screen down. “Something juicy?”

Emilio cracks a Coke, leaning against stark cabinets. The hostile lighting makes him self-conscious. Are his eyes still puffy? “Nothing to report,” he shrugs.

Emilio had spent the summer divulging every thrilling detail of his love affair with the high school’s star running back. How they exchanged a few flirty texts and then started meeting up in the drama club room during lunch. Their first kiss in the front seat of the athlete’s truck. Everything, happening in secret. Exciting and devastating.

Emilio and Blair would pour over text messages searching for hidden meanings.

“He’s actually so sweet,” she said one afternoon in the lobby, holding Emilio’s phone. It was open to a small list that the football player had sent to Emilio. All the reasons he liked him. Your t-shirts.

Blair’s face falls. “Did something happen?”

Emilio looks down into his can of Coke. “I—”

“Alright, break’s over.” Nurse Vicki’s head appears at the doorway and then disappears just as swiftly.

Blair stands up and reaches into a cabinet for a spray bottle of disinfectant and a dish rag. “She’s not happy with me.”

Emilio takes another sip of Coke before placing it back in the fridge. They walk out together, Emilio making his way to the loudspeaker at the front to announce yet another birth and Blair returning to the Birthday Party room to help Nurse Vicki undo the damage Marley and her friends caused.

She’s not surprised to find that Nurse Vicki has already done most of the clean up.

“Sorry I was late this morning,” Blair says quietly, surprising herself with the level of sincerity in her tone. She knows this place is important to Nurse Vicki. More important than it is to her, Emilio, or most of the other staff members. When she first started, rumors were circulating that Nurse Vicki would take dolls home at night. She’d heard that there was a baby nursery next to Nurse Vicki’s bedroom and that she would treat the dolls like real children, changing them into pajamas and waking up in the night to rock them. Someone even said they saw a car seat in her Camry.

At first, Blair was unsettled by the rumors, but as she got to know Nurse Vicki, it began to make more sense. She was lonely and while Blair couldn’t understand the instinct to mother, she did understand loneliness.

“Just don’t let it happen again,” Nurse Vicki says.

Blair nods and begins to make her way out the door, eager to take her stethoscope off her neck and go on lunch break, but Nurse Vicki stops her.

“You know,” Nurse Vicki says, tracing her finger along the colorful mural on the wall. “This place has been around for over 40 years.” Her eyes follow her finger. “250,000 people come through the doors each year.”

Blair knows this spiel from orientation, but doesn’t stop her.

“I was there when it first opened, back when it was still downtown.” She looks at Blair who nods. “I had just gotten engaged.” Her usual stern expression has transformed into something soft, making her look years younger.

“We went to the ribbon cutting and he bought me my first Cabbage Patch doll. Xavier signed it himself.”

All the Cabbage Patch dolls had founder, Xavier Robert’s signature on their ass, something that thoroughly disturbed Emilio and Blair. They would joke about getting it tattooed someday, once they had left the hospital and had new jobs. “You could get my signature and I could get yours,” Emilio would say, smacking his own ass.

“We loved that doll so much, Blair.” Nurse Vicki continues. “It’s one of the few things I have left from him.” Blair shifts her weight, unsure how to respond.

Nurse Vicki’s eyes meet Blair’s, and she appears to return to reality. “This is a special place, whether you think so or not.” She doesn’t blink. “So, please, just be on time.”

Blair slumps onto the sun-warmed bench outside Babyland General, unwrapping her sandwich; a measly two slices of turkey she had thrown between some bread. She scrolls through Instagram with her spare hand, pausing on a photo of her former lab partner, now beaming in front of ivy-covered brick buildings.

First day at Emory! Can’t believe I’m here!

#CollegeLife #NewBeginnings”

She drops her phone into her lap just as Emilio plops down beside her.

“What is that?” he asks, eyeing her poor excuse of a lunch. “Looks awful.”

She glares up at him. “Rough morning, remember?” “I can pick you up something.” Emilio sits down.

Blair shakes her head, accepting her shitty sandwich. They sit in silence, watching minivans and SUVs circle the parking lot. Blair’s eyes follow a young couple entering the storefront, baby on hip. Her voice drops. “God, last year I thought I might have one of those.”

Emilio looks at her, confused. “What, a sandwich?”

She glares at him, then nods towards the retreating family.

“Oh. Shit, Blair. I had no idea.”

“Yeah, well.” She crumples her sandwich wrapper. “Crisis averted, I guess.”

Emilio considers placing his hand on Blair’s shoulder for comfort, but stops himself.

“What’s going on with you?” Blair finally asks. “I thought you and football guy were endgame.”

Emilio lets out a laugh. “Yeah, I don’t know. Turns out being someone’s little secret isn’t as romantic as the movies make it seem.”

“He wouldn’t–”

“He wouldn’t even say hi to me in the light of day.” Emilio shakes his head. “I get it, I do. But I couldn’t do it anymore. I want... I don’t know, a real life? Whatever that means.”

A family walks by, leaving with their young daughter clutching a freshly adopted Cabbage Patch Kid to her chest. The parents kneel down to snap pictures as the girl beams.

Blair and Emilio exchange a look.

“Real life.”

“Yeah,” Emilio smiles, getting up and heading to his car. “Whatever that means.”

Emilio returns from his lunch break with a greasy paper Bojangles bag filled with exceptionally seasoned fries.

“For the hangover,” he says, sliding the bag towards Blair, across the break room table.

“Oh my god, lifesaver,” She immediately takes a handful, hoping the starch and salt will finally do the trick.

Emilio glances at his phone, winces at a wall of blue text, and pockets it quickly. “Back to it,” he sighs, heading towards Mother Cabbage for the afternoon birth.

The fluorescent lights flicker as Emilio’s finger hovers over the intercom button. He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes for a moment, then presses down.

“Dilation is at 8 leaves!” His voice echoes through the store. “All staff to Mother Cabbage for an imminent birth!”

Emilio weaves through the gathering crowd, nodding at the excited faces of children tugging on their parents’ sleeves and taking his place by Mother Cabbage.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he begins, his voice quieter than usual. A few heads in the back crane to hear him. Emilio clears his throat and tries again, this time projecting to the back of the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls!”

A child in the front row giggles, and something shifts in Emilio. His posture straightens, his gestures become more expansive. “Mother Cabbage is ready to bring another

beautiful Cabbage Patch Kid into the world!”

He reaches for the oversized syringe of Imagicillin, twirling it in his hands like a baton. “First, we need to make sure Mother Cabbage is comfortable. Who wants to help me give her some Imagicillin?”

A forest of small hands shoots up. Emilio picks a shy-looking boy near the back. As the child presses the plunger, Emilio lets out an exaggerated sigh of relief. “Ahhh, much better! Can you feel the magic in the air?”

The crowd leans in, captivated. Emilio’s voice rises and falls dramatically as he narrates the birth. He mimics the contractions of Mother Cabbage, his face contorting in exaggerated pain that has the children both concerned and delighted.

“It’s time to push!” Emilio calls out. “Everyone, on the count of three, yell ‘PUSH’ as loud as you can! One... two... three!”

The room erupts in a chorus of “PUSH!” Emilio reaches into Mother Cabbage’s roots, his movements deliberate and theatrical. With a flourish, he pulls out a doll, holding it high above his head.

“It’s a girl!” he announces as the crowd cheers. Emilio cradles the doll, gently wiping its forehead, and then his own with a cloth.

As he hands the doll to Blair for vitals, she gives him a thumbs up, mouthing “Wow.” It was his best performance yet.

The last birth ends and Blair finds herself straightening shelves near the adoption center. Her mind is still on the lunchtime conversation with Emilio. She pushes away worries that she shared too much.

A flash of red catches her eye. A little girl with curly auburn hair, no more than five or six, wanders away from her distracted parents. The child reaches for a doll on a high shelf, her small fingers grasping at air.

Blair watches, waiting to see if the parents will notice. They don’t. With a sigh, she approaches.

“Need some help?”

The girl nods shyly, pointing to a 1996 Olympic-themed doll. Blair reaches for it, but as she does, the girl bumps into the shelf. The doll tumbles down, along with several others.

“Oh shi—shoot,” Blair mutters, dropping to her knees to gather the fallen dolls. The little girl’s eyes well up.

“Hey, accidents happen. Want to help me pick them up?”

The girl nods, sniffling, and begins carefully placing dolls back on the shelf. Blair watches her small hands move with surprising care.

Blair picks up the Olympic doll the girl had been reaching for. She holds it out in front of her and really looks at it for the first time. Its big eyes stare back, its rounded nose slightly askew. Red yarn sprouts from its soft head in unruly curls.

Hideous, Blair thinks. But as she looks from the doll to the little girl, she sees something she hadn’t before.

“You know,” Blair says, “she kind of looks like you.”

The girl’s eyes widen, a mix of surprise and delight. “Really?”

Blair nods. “Yeah, look at those curls. And those freckles? Definitely twins.”

The girl giggles, reaching for the doll. Blair hands it over, watching as small arms wrap around it in a fierce hug.

“I love her,” the girl lisps.

As the last visitors file out, Nurse Vicki begins her nightly routine. She moves through the nursery, straightening tiny bonnets and adjusting blankets with care.

In the back room, she pauses at a locked cabinet. With a quick glance to ensure she’s alone, she opens it, revealing a worn Cabbage Patch doll. The signature is faded but still legible: Xavier Roberts.

Vicki cradles the doll, her eyes misty. “Hello, Charlie,” she whispers, running a hand over its yarn hair. “Did you have a good day?”

She walks to the rocking chair in the corner, sitting down with Charlie. As she rocks, she speaks softly. “Red hair, just like daddy’s.” She holds him to her chest, feeling his heartbeat against hers. “Just perfect.”

⁂

Emma Ensley is a fiction writer, artist, and graphic designer living in Asheville, North Carolina. She grew up in North Georgia and on the internet, and considers both places equally influential to her work. Her short fiction has appeared in Joyland, The Quarterless Review, and Peach Mag.

Thanks for checking out Babyland by Emma Ensley! Let us know what you thought in the comments!

Leave a comment

“I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write - on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there… I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not… Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”

I’ve been doing a bit of thinking on this iconic, and all-too-often misquoted passage from Joan Didion’s 1968 essay “On Keeping a Notebook.” Time and again, I’ve seen this excerpt cut at the knees—many a quote about these wonder-drained mornings, while the latter half goes forgotten, perhaps even intentionally discarded. And why not? What a dream it would be, as a writer, to have a vault of material always at the ready! This line of thought, though, this notion of note-taking for the sake of its future potential, is ouroboric and backwards. One’s experiences need not serve as fodder for future creative endeavors for them to have meaning. Didion has it right: it is the act of jotting it down, whatever it may be, that is valuable, and it is valuable for its own sake.

All this being said, I have never been much of a journaler. I’ve tried. It never seems to hold. I am, however, vastly sentimental, and I share Didion’s impulse to remember what it was to be me. So, this past May, when I set out with my partner on a five-week, cross country roadtrip, we made it our goal to get it all down, and not purely in prose. On our first stop, we purchased a small mixed-media sketchbook, and throughout the trip, we took turns writing notes, keeping various tallies, drawing, and taping in ephemera.

This journal, over the course of the month, became the beating heart of the trip. At the end of the day, or during the course of a long drive, one of us would flip through and update our records, adding a new recipe or campsite. A memory. Something that made us laugh. If one of us wrote a poem, we copied it in. We scrawled in graffiti we liked. We ranked each variation of tinned fish we ate, complete with drawings.

What surprised me was how much the keeping of a notebook tinted how I experienced our time. After only a few days, the habit of jotting it down was so integrated into my routine that I began to reflexively pay just a bit more attention to things around me. We wrote down our swimming spots, so I learned the names of the rivers and lakes. We kept a list of interesting road names, so I began to read the signs. What joy can come from an intentional look at the world! What gratitude!

Did this practice allow me to remember what it was to be me in this one wild and transitive month? Yes, yes. In many ways, it did. And ultimately, in its roundabout way, the journal did wind up as creative fodder. From our inside jokes and observations, we wrote several songs, which evolved into an EP. The road signs turned into poems. Just the holding of a sketchbook prompted many a drawing. But this was, of course, never the point. It was our looking intentionally that made space for the art. That intention, as well as the book itself as a physical object, is the gift of this practice. It is a relic; it is a time capsule; it is a footprint, a fossil. I hold it in my hands and trace the contours of those beautiful days. I read and laugh, and tears prick at the corners of my eyes.

Like many writers, I have a tendency to see the world in words. In her memoir An American Childhood, Annie Dillard describes this tendency forming at a young age, at a time when her greatest ambition was to be a police sketch artist. She would study people she encountered on the streets of Pittsburgh and articulate their features so that when, later, she sat down to draw, she could call upon those sentences and render them with greater accuracy. “I hoped,” she tells us, “that the sentences would nail the blowing scraps down. I hoped that the sentences would store scenes like rolls of film, rolls of film I could simply reel off and watch. But of course, the sentences did not work that way.” It was for her, for me, and I suspect for many writers, a frightening realization. Writing cannot capture everything. But I believe truly it can give us a nudge, and a glimpse.

At the end of June, I said goodbye to my partner at his home in California, and now I drive back to the East Coast alone. I’ve brought the notebook with me, and continue to keep my own log of the journey home. It is my steadfast companion. I turn to it in moments of quiet for a bit of conversation, and in moments of noise for a bit of solitude. I’ll keep it for all my days.

⁂

Thanks for reading Theodora Bonis’ Notes on Note-Taking. Love what you read? Tip the writer! 100% of tips go straight to the writer.

Leave a tip!

We love to hear from you! Tell us about your journaling practice below!

Leave a comment

“This is Kentucky, not New York, and I am not important.”

Ada Limón moved to Lexington, Kentucky in 2011. In one poem, titled “The Last Move,” quoted above, she touches on the feeling of leaving Brooklyn for the open pastures of the south. She wrote of the unfamiliar bugs, the strange calls of birds she had never heard before, and a seemingly empty landscape that she did not recognize. The language she used during that time, a time of disorienting transition, was almost violent, singed, dipping into discomfort. How does a land that is unknown to you become your home? And yet, with a good look at the writing of Ada Limón, it is easy to see the south bleed into her verse. Kentucky horses and open spaces are sprinkled throughout every one of her poetry collection’s that have been released since and the motifs of the land that she inhabits are entirely inseparable from Startlement.

Last year I had the privilege of meeting Limón at a small Q&A of about 15 students and professors at the University of Vermont. As an aspiring writer myself, I was fascinated by her process. I wanted to know how the muddy mess of emotions and themes that are wrapped in each of her poems made their way onto the stark white of the page. She told me that, upon beginning a poem, she never knows what she is writing about. There is no sitting down to write about love, no decision to capture grief in the form of a poem. Now, knowing this, I am able to see how this approach lends itself to the wide scope of so many of Limón’s poems. There is a vastness that she is able to achieve without spreading thin, without losing clarity and weight. And her latest release of new and selected poems, Startlement, does just that.

“Carrying”

This poem, originally from her 2018 collection, The Carrying, opens to the harsh white of November sky, a dying tree, the cold beginning to settle into the hardening late autumn soil. Her descriptions of the Kentucky landscape evoke a complete lack of growth, a barren-ness that is inescapable. It is this initial tone that brings us to the core subject of the poem, her own infertility. When she introduces the “I” it is from afar. She is small on the horizon, like “a fence post” or “a hedge of holly.” It is from this removed perspective that she is able to explore, however vaguely, the way in which a motherless woman is perceived, how little space she can take up, if she allows it. Much of the poem, however, orients itself around descriptions of horses in the browning grass. Weanlings under the same stark white sky and her own horse, with a “belly barrel-round with foal.” In the pastures of Lexington, a mare is a good investment largely because her potential to produce a winner in the races. Thus the mare becomes a metaphor of the immense value placed on motherhood. In this poem, Limón wrestles with her own body, empty of child, yet capable of carrying the heavy image of a pregnant mare that leans against a black fence. In this way, she asserts her own value and her place in the world as bearer of meaning. She is a poet. She carries the weight of her words.

“How Far Away We Are”

In contrast to the poem above, “How Far Away We Are,” stands firmly in the blistering heat of summer. It is a poem concerned with contradictions, death, a country gone sour, and yet the immutable drive to connect lingers on. As you can usually count on in Limón’s writing, it is rich with vivid imagery (a cracked white window ledge, pink slippers, a cheap picnic table and a maple tree). These images are a window into her little world that she shares in order to be understood. This poem to me, is a call to community. It is the declaration that exchange (the give and the take of connection) allows a home establish itself. It allows the sugar maple tree to cast shade from the intolerable sun of isolation, all the while throwing down “its winged seeds,” inevitably involving itself in the eternal and branching game of give and take. This poem is a favorite of mine and it was shown to me by someone that I care about, emphasizing the very thesis of the piece.

⁂

Thanks for reading Finn Hummel’s review of Ada Limon. Love what you read? Tip the writer. 100% of tips go straight to the writer.

Leave a tip!

For more recommendations, reviews, and literary talk, subscribe to Loblolly Press!

Before we dive into today’s newsletter, I’d like to introduce a new voice at Loblolly Press! Finn Hummel is a writer with a love for folk music, fiction, and a good swim! He’ll be contributing to our weekly newsletters with reading recommendations, book reviews, and author interviews. Welcome Finn!

Without exaggeration, I have spent the whole of this summer swimming and reading. Ideally with a mango, my guitar, and a friend. Ideally on a large and sunny rock. And, ideally, with the perfect soundtrack. One of the ways I immerse myself into a book is by crafting very specific playlists that match the atmosphere and themes of whatever my current read might be. Each is enhanced by the other: the poem or novel is now a multi-sensory experience, and the song is infused with narrative. Even years after I’ve finished a book, a certain song can bring me right back to the exhilaration, heartbreak, or relief that I felt while reading. So, in this spirit, we at Loblolly Press have gathered five books perfect for a riverside, sun-soaked afternoon, and five songs to listen while you read. Let us know in the comments if you have any other book & music pairings!

As always, if something here catches your eye, make sure to support your local bookstore, or order through one of the affiliate links below. We receive 10% of every purchase, which is a huge help to our small Press!

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg & Betty and Dupree by Tia Blake

Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a now-classic novel about two women: Evelyn, who’s in the sad slump of middle age, and gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode, who’s telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women—the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth—who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, offering good coffee, southern barbecue, and all kinds of love and laughter—even an occasional murder. And as the past unfolds, the present will never be quite the same again.

This novel left its mark on me, and it did so in the best way. It’s a book that highlights the universality of human connection, the scale of time as it passes within one’s brief life and the way our world changes around us as we age. By setting the primary story in the past, told through glimpses of the present via the meetings between the awkward and lost Evelyn and the elderly Mrs. Threadgoode, the reader is allowed a unique perspective on the events of the past that I truly enjoyed. The selected song for this pairing, “Betty and Dupree” by Tia Blake—originally written by Chuck Willis—centers the mystery of the future amidst murder, robbery and romance (all of which just might find themselves sprinkled throughout Fannie Flagg’s iconic novel). Not to mention, Tia Blake’s jaunty picking, prancing slide guitar, and smooth southern tilt can’t help but evoke the setting of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.

Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard & The Ballad of Keenan Milton by Devendra Banhart

Veering away from the long, meditative studies of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard explores and celebrates moments of spirituality, dipping into descriptions of encounters with flora and fauna, stars, and more, from Ecuador to Miami. There is no writer quite like Dillard when it comes to the mysteries and wonder of the natural world.

Annie Dillard is a pioneer, a pilgrim, a priestess of nature writing. Teaching a Stone to Talk wanders and, at times, frolics, through history, the natural world, and the spiritual, weaving the three together into a collection of essays that span space and time. Devendra Banhart’s “The Ballad of Keenan Milton” perfectly matches the thoughtful, focused meanderings of Dillard’s prose, and its instrumental nature lends the track a universality that is able to span the many places and themes covered in the collection’s fourteen essays.

For a deep dive into Dillard’s ecological wonder, read our piece on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek here.

James by Percival Everett & Police Dog Blues by Blind Blake

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. 

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before.

In this retelling of Twain’s classic, Everett centers Jim’s voice and gears the tale of the duo’s grand adventure towards a true understanding of Jim’s character. Partially, this is achieved by actually writing from the first-person perspective of Jim. By giving space for him to take the “I” and allowing the lens of this American classic to peer from the eyes of this character, a voice that was silenced is finally heard. Although Blind Blake’s “Police Dog Blues” was released after the abolition of slavery, it was written in the heart of Jim Crow, a time when finding a large scale platform for Black voices was not a common achievement. However, as ragtime blues guitar emerged as a prominent genre in the south, Blind Blake found himself at the center. “Police Dog Blues” tells the story of a traveling man in love, faced with the violent threat of the racist environment he inhabits.

Brutes by Dizz Tate & Rill Rill by Sleigh Bells

In Falls Landing, Florida—a place built of theme parks, swampy lakes, and scorched bougainvillea flowers—something sinister lurks in the deep. A gang of thirteen-year-old girls obsessively orbit around the local preacher's daughter, Sammy. She is mesmerizing, older, and in love with Eddie. But suddenly, Sammy goes missing. Where is she? Watching from a distance, they edge ever closer to discovering a dark secret about their fame-hungry town and the cruel cost of a ticket out. What they see will continue to haunt them for the rest of their lives. Through a darkly beautiful and brutally compelling lens, Dizz Tate captures the violence, horrors, and manic joys of girlhood. Brutes is a novel about the seemingly unbreakable bonds in the "we" of young friendship, and the moment it is broken forever.

No novel balances thrill and poignancy, violence and sisterhood, horror and innocence, quite so well as Dizz Tate’s Brutes. Set in an oppressively hot town just outside Orlando, the novel follows a group of seemingly feral young girls as they prowl the blazing asphalt of their theme-park-ridden home, weaving between tourists on their search for a missing older girl, the local preacher’s daughter. The novel accomplishes formally something I had never seen before: it is told in the collective first-person, “we.” Sleigh Bell’s 2010 song “Rill Rill” captures the sheer joy of girlhood, as well as its insecurities, questions, antics, and superstitions. The “we” of sisterhood also rings out here, and its jangly guitar and layered vocals compliment the girls’ narrative perfectly.

Startlement by Ada Limón & Dragon Eyes by Adrianne Lenker

With a tender curiosity, Ada Limón wades into potent unknowns--the strangeness of our brief human lives, the ever-changing nature of the universe--and emerges each time with new revelations about our place in the world.

Both a lush overview of her work and a powerful narrative of a poet’s life, this curation embodies Limón’s capacity for “deep attention,” her “power to open us up to the wonder and awe that the world still inspires” (The New York Times). From the chaos of youthful desire, to the waxing of love and loss, to the precarity of our environment, to the stars and beyond, Limón’s poetry bears witness to the arc of all we know with patient lyricism and humble wonder.

Although raised in Norther California, former U.S. poet laureate made the move to Kentucky in 2011. In an interview, Limón recalled an encounter she had soon after her arrival: a cow that stood in the middle of the road. She reflected, “Seeing that beautiful white cow just standing there in the middle of the road made me wonder about what it means to choose freedom and to choose home.” This quote seemed to capture so much of what I love about Limón’s writing. She is able to witness something innately mundane and transform it into a question that is too big to ever answer, yet impossible to ignore. And the posing of the question brings you closer to the answer than you’ve ever been before. The only songwriter who, to me, achieves this same remarkable feat, is Adrianne Lenker. And in “Dragon Eyes,” she uses stunning imagery and metaphor to capture a warm summer night that you spent under the stars as your definition of home changes from under your feet. Listening, I can’t help but think of Startlement.

⁂

Thanks for reading Theodora Bonis and Finn Hummel’s Song and Book Recommendations. Love what you read? Tip the writer. 100% of tips go straight to the writer.

Leave a tip!

For more recommendations, reviews, and literary talk, subscribe to Loblolly Press!

Subscribe now

As June comes to a close, we interns at Loblolly Press wanted to spotlight some of our favorite LGBTQ novels and short story collections. From atmospheric sapphic romances to the struggles of a queer gang member in Dublin, this list explores queer books across genres, paired with our personal endorsements.

If any of these books speak to you, please support your local bookstore or click the attached affiliate links to order through our Bookshop.org. With every book purchased through our bookshop, you are helping to support our wonderful Loblolly Press writers, as we receive 10% of every purchase.

Ari’s Picks

We The Animals by Justin Torres

Mariner Books

Centered around an unnamed narrator and his two older brothers, We the Animals examines the tumultuous, heart-wrenching relationships between the boys, their abusive parents, and the love that binds them together through a series of vignettes. Through economic hardship and the constantly oscillating nature of their parent’s marriage, the boys grow up as a unit, tied together by age and experience. However, as the novel progresses and the boys grow, the narrator discovers a distance between them, finding himself isolated from his brothers due to his sexuality and his inclination for education.

We the Animals is truly my favorite novel because of how Torres captures the different family dynamics and the narrator’s internal struggles. The contrast between Torres’ lyrical language and the characters’ harsher colloquial dialogue mirrors the shifting relationships within the family as their actions fluctuate between violence and tenderness. Torres’ emphasis on connection, the complicated nature of abuse, and the inescapable bonds that simultaneously shape and contain us echo throughout the novel, pulling readers to its devastating end.

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Little, Brown Paperbacks

Inspired by the true events of the 1617 Vardø storm in Finnmark, Norway, and the subsequent witch trials in 1621, The Mercies follows two women from vastly different backgrounds as they’re drawn together through a story of love, evil, and obsession. Following the death of all forty men in the Vardø storm, Maren Magnusdatter and the women of Finnmark are forced to fend for themselves and their children. After three years of independence, Absalom Cornet, a witch hunter from Scotland, and his Norwegian wife, Ursa, arrive with orders from the king to cleanse Finnmark of what Absalom perceives as a mighty evil. As Maren and Ursa bond and begin to find solace in each other’s company, they must face the threat of Absalom’s obsession and the dangers that emerge as a result.

The Mercies is a great pick if you are interested in literary fiction, novels inspired by historical events, or complicated relationships. Hargrave does a great job of navigating the brutality of survival through the women’s desperation to provide for themselves and their children despite their grief. Her exploration of organized religion as a means of oppression and the consequences associated with nonconformity are fascinating, making The Mercies a novel that is not easy to forget.

The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer

Clarion Books

Forced onto the same spaceship, Ambrose and Kodiak, two seventeen-year-olds from opposing countries, are sent to respond to a distress signal from Ambrose’s sister, the first settler on a faraway moon called Titan. However, when Ambrose awakens with no memory of the launch and struggles to make sense of the strange occurrences happening aboard the ship, he and Kodiak must work together to survive and discover the truth.

While I am not typically a big science fiction reader, The Darkness Outside Us is definitely in my top five favorite novels because of its complex characters, who are forced to make impossible choices that will change their lives forever. The mystery and horror elements Schrefer weaves throughout the story make it hard to put down, as you can’t help but want to know what will happen next. This novel is so much more than just a romance, and the constant tension between not only Ambrose and Kodiak but also them and the threat of losing everything they’ve ever known is only part of what makes this book so amazing.

Crier’s War by Nina Varela

Quill Tree Books

Set in the kingdom of Rabu, where mechanical people called Automaes rule over humans, Crier’s War centers on Ayla, a human girl with a desire to avenge her family’s deaths, and Lady Crier, an Automae made to inherit her father’s rule. As Ayla rises in the ranks as a human servant to get close enough to kill Crier, fate thrusts the two together, and they begin to uncover the truth about Crier’s father and the past.

In Crier’s War, Varela explores themes of corruption, oppression, and power, while creating a tense, powerful romance between the two main characters. Packed full of mystery, betrayal, and love, Crier’s War is great for readers looking for a slow-burning enemies-to-lovers novel that confronts what it means to be human.

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

Tor Books

When Linus Baker, a forty-year-old case worker at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, is given the highly classified assignment to assess the six children of the Marsyas Island Orphanage, he is forced out of his comfort zone. From a gnome to the Antichrist, the children of the Marsyas Island Orphanage are like nothing he’s ever experienced, nor is their caretaker, a charming man named Arthur Parnassus. As Linus’ assessment progresses, his bonds with the island’s residents grow until he’s finally confronted with the choice to either shut down the orphanage for good or watch the world burn.

The House in the Cerulean Sea has a special place in my heart, as it was one of the first queer books I read when I was a teenager. Klune’s ability to immerse his audience in a rich, cozy setting that feels like home is truly a marvel. This book is playful and witty, and leaves readers with a profound sense of hope while still confronting the challenges of stereotypes and shame.

All Them Dogs by Djamel White

Riverhead Books

After spending five years lying low in the UK after committing a murder, Tony Ward returns to his hometown of Dublin seeking the same type of work he left five years prior. With his mentor dead and his best friend out of the gang life, Tony finds a job working for Flute Walsh, an enforcer for the notorious crime boss Aengus Lavelle. As Tony tries to prove himself as his own man and resist the familiar draw he feels towards Flute, his life begins to unravel as his past comes back to haunt him.

All Them Dogs is grim, capturing the brutality of Tony’s life as he struggles with not only his situation, but his place in the world. White’s depiction of Tony is fascinating and indescribably compelling, never shying away from the grit of his bad decisions and the consequences that follow. I love White’s use of first person in this novel, as it allows us to really get into Tony’s head and understand his thought process. While this book is certainly not a happy one, the lasting devastation that comes along with it is truly one of a kind.

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez

Del Ray

Told through various perspectives, The Spear Cuts Through Water follows Jun, a guilt-stricken guard, and Keema, an outcast, as they help an ancient god across a five-day pilgrimage in search of a way to end the tyrannical rule of the Moon Throne.

The Spear Cuts Through Water is truly like nothing I’ve ever read before, as it shifts between all three points of view, breaking typical conventions to tell a story of identity, legacy, and belonging. Jimenez does a fantastic job of creating an atmosphere throughout the novel, unafraid to show both the beauty and the horror of the world around Jun and Keema. This novel, while challenging, is a great pick for readers looking for something fresh, unexpected, and raw.

Ashley’s Picks

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

Graywolf Press

Machado’s memoir follows her experience in an abusive queer relationship and the aftermath of this abuse. Each chapter features a narrative trope that is otherwise reserved for different kinds of literature, like the “choose-your-own-adventure” chapter, where you get to spend an average day in this relationship, or the origin of fairytale villains and their motivations in comparison to real-life abusers. Machado isn’t afraid to mix unconventional storytelling styles to depict the typically overlooked story of abuse in queer relationships.

There is a taboo around talking about the potential negative aspects of queer relationships, like divorce and abuse. It’s tempting to paint queer relationships in a positive light to proactively avoid criticism or discrimination. In this memoir, Machado pulls back the curtain on what people perceive to be a perfect relationship. She reflects on how her determination to project perfection in her relationship from the inside out clouds her judgment and blurs the lines between normal conflict and consistent abuse.

Fruiting Bodies by Kathryn Harlan

W. W. Norton & Company

In Fruiting Bodies, Harlan follows mostly queer female characters on the edge of change through fantastical, gothic, and uncanny short stories. From the belief of two young cousins that their new family member may be a supernatural creature to a pair of partners feasting on the mushrooms sprouting from one of their bodies, the stories of Fruiting Bodies echo themes of discovery, hunger, and growing up in times of crisis.

My favorite part about the stories in Fruiting Bodies is that with each story, there is a wholesome undertone that invades even the most disturbing imagery of strangers in the dark and underground gambling rings. It’s reminiscent of finding out the original Brothers Grimm story of your favorite Disney movie as a child. You still find it comforting even after knowing how gruesome the story once was.

Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth

Melville House

Set in the Irish village of Crossmore in the early 1990s, a teenager named Lucy falls desperately in love with her school friend Susannah over the course of a summer. Horrified of being rejected by her small community, Lucy begins to keep the most honest parts of herself for her moments with Susannah. But as school ends and opportunities to move arise, Lucy is forced to choose between her life as it is and the chance of freedom somewhere new.

Sunburn’s main strength is depicting flawed and realistic characters. Each character jumps from the page into real life as you watch them make mistakes and hurt one another in a painfully accurate way. Their progression is natural, and while you may not agree with the characters’ decisions, their thought processes are full-fledged. Pair that with the moody atmosphere of Crossmore, and you can’t help but grow connected to each of these characters as if you knew them in childhood, too.

Stag Dance by Torrey Peters

Random House Trade Paperbacks

Containing a novel and three accompanying short stories, Stag Dance follows a group of lumberjacks planning a dance where some of them will attend as women. When the largest of the men declares he will dance as a woman, he finds himself in a bizarre rivalry with a younger man that escalates into a series of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal.

Stag Dance’s novellas serve as a well-needed reminder that queerness has always, and will always, existed in humanity. This book takes queer and trans identities out of their current connotation as a controversial talking point and drops you into historically accurate accounts of transness. Peters isn’t afraid of depicting trans people’s flaws, but instead embraces their humanness, which is exactly what the world needs to see: that trans people are just people, not a monolith or something to fear.

Girl’s Girl by Sonia Feldman

The Dial Press

After an unexpected kiss with her two best friends, fifteen-year-old Mina’s world begins to collapse as their friendship unravels. As Mina looks back as an adult, she reflects upon the yearning that shaped her first experience of desire and how loving one person changes how we love everyone else.

This book has the best portrayal of a modern young queer experience I’ve ever read. Accurate representations are hard to come by without cringey, out-of-touch references that take the reader out of the story. Social media and the internet play a large part in this friend group’s connection, which I can really identify with. Girl’s Girl is for those of us who watched our Sims swim in a pool without a ladder for hours and questioned their feelings about their best friend for years without saying a single word.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Vintage

While spiraling into an obsession with martyrs and reflecting upon the mysteries of his past, Cyrus Shams, an orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, sets off on a search for a family secret. After discovering a terminally ill painter living in the Brooklyn Museum, Cyrus is forced to confront his addiction and the purpose of his life.

Many people who only know of this book from reviews wouldn’t know that this is a queer book. The main character of Martyr!, Cyrus Shams, is a bisexual man who has dated men and women in his past. The quiet influence of sexuality and queerness on this book is what makes it so good. It’s not a main theme, but it’s not undersold in worry that there will be too many themes for the reader to follow. Sexuality can mean so many things to anyone, and there is not one singular correct way to portray your sexuality. It’s refreshing to see queerness casually in literature, just as a straight relationship would be mentioned and fleshed out naturally.

⁂

Thanks for reading Ari and Ashley’s 2026 Pride Picks. Love what you read? Tip the writers. 100% of tips go straight to the writers.

Leave a tip!

Andrew sits down with Nathan Spainhour, designer and author of The South Carolina BBQ Project: Signs, Symbols, & Stories from the Pit, and Lib Ramos, founder of its publisher, Good Printed Things. We drop straight into the hardest part of the story — Maurice’s Piggie Park, the Confederate flag, and the racism woven through South Carolina barbecue — and follow it all the way to a quieter, more beautiful place: whole hog bbq’s Black roots, hand-poured maps, and the food memories a single plate can hold. It’s our pick for the perfect summer book.

In this episode

We start in the difficult part on purpose, because you can’t tell the truth about South Carolina barbecue without it. From there the conversation opens outward — whole hog as a Black Southern tradition, barbecue as the clearest lens on a state’s history, and Nathan’s idea of “graphic design as a mode of inquiry.” We get into the source map he made by pouring real sauce onto newsprint, why a book this analog had to stay in print, the open-source ethos of the pit, hash and the I-26 hash corridor, and the difference between a polished logo and a ramshackle stand the locals swear by.

Topics covered

• Diving straight into the hard part: Maurice’s Piggie Park, the Confederate flag, and reckoning with the racism in barbecue’s history

• Whole hog and its Black Southern roots — from Rodney Scott back to its origins in Hemingway, SC

• Why food is the clearest lens on a state’s history — “we can’t just pretend that’s not the case”

• “Graphic design as a mode of inquiry”: why this is a design study, not a straight history book

• The source map: South Carolina’s four official sauces, hand-poured in real sauce on newsprint (process photo and all)

• Print, analog, and no shortcuts — a record of barbecue artifacts in a craft that still takes 14–16 hours and can’t be faked

• “Open source” barbecue, by way of Ryan Fertel’s The One True Barbecue: what pitmasters gladly share, and the one thing they never will

• Hash, the “thick meat gravy,” the I-26 hash corridor, and the vanished hash houses

• Polished branding vs. the ramshackle roadside stand — the upstate pig-logo “map,” and which one the locals trust

• Polished places as an entry point that leads back to the roots; Nicholas Carr on culture renewed by every generation

• Change, preservation, and a vanished small-town “coffee shop” — ending on food memory and why everybody has a barbecue story

About the book

The South Carolina BBQ Project: Signs, Symbols, & Stories from the Pit is part history, part design study, and part love letter to the state’s most treasured foodway. Through hand-painted signs, roadside architecture, styrofoam plates, and everyday ephemera, Spainhour reveals how design shapes our sense of authenticity, memory, and tradition. Published by Good Printed Things. 5.5” x 8”, ISBN 9798992199352. As featured on Walter Edgar’s Journal, GDUSA, and Vessel Magazine.

Get the book: https://goodprintedthings.com/products/the-south-carolina-bbq-project

About the guests

Nathan Spainhour is a designer, artist, and lifelong enthusiast of visual culture from Anderson, SC. He’s the founder of Spainhour Creative Work, a studio focused on brand and creative strategy, and the author of The South Carolina BBQ Project, which began as his MFA thesis in graphic design. He has led creative work for national brands and taught graphic design as a full-time college professor, and he keeps circling the intersection of design, storytelling, and place — with a soft spot for architecture, maps, and analog practices like screenprinting. He lives in South Carolina with his wife, Jess, and two very persuasive small dogs.

Lib Ramos is the designer and founder of Good Printed Things, a small press in Greenville, SC, that publishes meaningful, small-batch books celebrating connection and creativity. Founded in 2021, the press grew out of her love for art, reading, and good design, and her belief that good things belong in print. She’s also a co-founder of the Indie Craft Parade. She lives in Greenville with her husband and two kids.

Mentioned in this episode

• The One True Barbecue by Ryan Fertel — the pitmaster road-trip book that inspired this project’s case-study approach

• Robert Moss, barbecue historian — source of the definitive “thick meat gravy” description of hash

• Nicholas Carr, on culture needing to be renewed and honored by every generation

• Places along the way: Maurice’s Piggie Park, Rodney Scott’s BBQ (Charleston & Hemingway, SC), Lewis Barbecue (Charleston), Henry’s Smokehouse (Greenville), Buxton Hall / Elliott Moss (Asheville), Easton Barbecue Co., Bear’s Barbecue (Asheville), Midway Barbecue, and Sticky Fingers

Listen & subscribe

Loblolly Press: In Conversation is a literary podcast rooted in the American South and reaching beyond. We are not here to define Southern literature. We are here to expand what it can hold.

Spotify:

Hosted by Andrew Mack. Guests: Nathan Spainhour and Lib Ramos.

We're celebrating Juneteenth (also known as Freedom Day) with 15 books of poetry from Black southern writers —some debut collections, some from poets with deep and storied careers. We’ve centered poetry specifically because poetry is where a record of experience lives. It’s what we read, feel, and learn from. It’s how we’re taught, again and again, how to be with each other. Poetry is often oral tradition as well and when we think about Juneteenth and the significance of how the word of freedom was passed, we take seriously the literal weight that words carry in Black Southern poetics.

These are some of our favorites. We’d love to hear yours — drop them in the comments. If you can, pick these up at your local bookstore, or ask them to order a copy. That request matters more than most people know: it’s how booksellers know there’s hunger for Black Southern writing in their community, wherever you are. Where we’ve been able to find them, each book also has a bookshop.org affiliate link.

We earn 10% on purchases made through these links, and we’re committing 100% of affiliate revenue from this list to CoThinkk in Asheville — an organization dedicated to empowering Black creators, founders, and entrepreneurs in our region. We believe in keeping resources local, and keeping them in communities that have been historically shut out of Asheville’s economic story. If you buy a book from this list, that’s where our cut of revenue goes.

See the full list @ Bookshop.org

Scorched Earth by Tiana Clark Washington Square Press March 4, 2025

2025 National Book Award Finalist. The striking sophomore poetry collection from the award-winning author of the “beautiful, vulnerable, honest” (Ross Gay) I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood. Dive between the borders of ruined and radical love with this lyrical poetry collection that explores topics as expansive as divorce, the first Black Bachelorette, and the art world. Stanzas shift between reverence to irreverence as they take us on a journey through institutional and historical pains alongside sensuality and queer, Black joys. From a generational voice that “earns a place among the pantheon of such emerging black poets as Eve L. Ewing, Nicole Sealey, and Airea D. Matthews” (Booklist, starred review), Scorched Earth is a transcendent anthology for our times.

Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry by Nikky Finney TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern University Press 2020

Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of Black American life. National Book Award winner Nikky Finney returns with her first collection in a decade — an astonishing weave of lighthouse poems, narrative hotbeds, and treasured artifacts: copper coins struck from a new matrix for poetry, one that testifies from the witness stand. The ancestors arise and fly; the Black female body is portrayed as the “insurgent sensualist,” hunted but fighting to live and love; a father’s handwritten notes shadow the collection like a ghost. Part lyrical insurgency, part memoir, part fantasy, this is Finney at the full height of her powers.

The Song of Everything by Glenis Redmond Good Printed Things 2024

The Song of Everything is Glenis Redmond’s poetic exploration of South Carolina’s state parks — a pocket-sized collection of poems about the connection between the natural world and our internal landscape. Redmond, Greenville’s first Poet Laureate, moves through forest, water, and field to trace what nature holds that language barely can: grief metabolized into root and stone, beauty that doesn’t ask permission, the quiet persistence of living things.

The Other Revival by Salaam Green Pulley Press June 17, 2025

The Other Revival is a story of homecoming. This collection of poems revolves around a house built in Harpersville, Alabama in 1841. Thirty-nine people enslaved by Samuel Wallace, the owner of the property, constructed the house and worked the land. For generations, the house remained in the Wallace family and is now a reconciliation center where Black, white, and mixed-race descendants come together. Salaam Green — the inaugural poet laureate of historic Birmingham, Alabama — has led many of these gatherings and worked with descendants to create these, and many other, poems. The Other Revival is her poetic journey to one rural place that is a crossroads of racial, economic, and enslavement heritage. It is an elegy and a blessing.

Dead on Arrival by Jaki Shelton Green Carolina Wren Press / Blair Originally published 1984; reissued

A reissue of Jaki Shelton Green’s acclaimed premier collection of poetry. Green’s early work pulses with the intoxicating rhythms and fierce clarity of image that made her one of North Carolina’s most beloved poets. Here is an artist at turns angry and wickedly funny, demanding justice yet possessed of a refined grace. The first African American and third woman to be appointed as the North Carolina Poet Laureate, Jaki Shelton Green announced herself with this collection — and it has not stopped speaking.

Love Poems by Nikki Giovanni William Morrow February 14, 1997

In a career that has spanned more than a quarter century, Nikki Giovanni earned the reputation as one of America’s most celebrated and controversial writers. This stunning collection includes more than twenty new works — from the revolutionary “Seduction” to the tender “Just a Simple Declaration of Love,” from the whimsical “I Wrote a Good Omelet” to the elegiac “All Eyez on U,” written for Tupac Shakur. These poems embody the fearless passion and spirited wit for which Nikki Giovanni is beloved and revered. Romantic, bold, and erotic, Love Poems expresses notions of love in ways that are delightfully unexpected. “If there was a need for poetry that galvanized and inspired, there was also a demand for poetry that comforted and unified — and Ms. Giovanni provided on both counts.” — The Washington Post

God-Damned Eden by James Daniels Bull City Press (Inch #65) September 30, 2025

Selma is a community that, despite its pain, holds a depth of spirit that deserves love and care — a place where redemption is sought through the resilience of its people. God-Damned Eden speaks to the tension within a place that is both deeply flawed and deeply loved. Like the fallen earth in scripture, Selma is marked by human shortcomings and struggles, yet it remains beloved, resilient, and layered with beauty. This Eden-like quality isn’t pristine; it’s a paradise that bears scars — a place both blessed and “damned” by the realities of history and hardship. Yet within those imperfections lies the work of restoration, an ongoing call to see and honor the beauty that persists.

What the Mirror Said: The Necessity of Black Women in Poetry by Ashley M. Jones University of Michigan Press April 21, 2026

When did you feel the pull of poetry? For Ashley M. Jones, the moment she knew she would be a poet was at seven years old — reciting “Harriet Tubman” by Eloise Greenfield. That moment, that poem, showed her there was a place for her in the world of literature as her full Black self. Part critical essay, part personal essay collection, What the Mirror Said traces the influence of nine Black women poets in Jones’s writing and life. She brings together historical biographical information, personal reflection, and close readings as she explores personal connections to poets from Phillis Wheatley to Patricia Smith. Jones — the first person of color and the youngest person to serve as Poet Laureate of Alabama — makes the case for the need to study and celebrate Black women poets.

A Black Doe in the Anthropocene by Artress Bethany White University Press of Kentucky 2025

A Black Doe in the Anthropocene confronts brutal truths unearthed by the present-day descendant of an enslaved American family. Following her ancestors’ enslavement in 1700s Virginia and North Carolina, White weaves together data from Hairston family plantation archives and her Black Hairston mother’s inherited oral slave narrative to create searing poems on a history of Scottish genes and African ancestry. White expands the historical narrative far beyond plantation grounds to examine the lives of freed people who emigrated back to Africa to reestablish themselves in a Black nation, and to chronicle her own life in the US.

Sweetwater Mass by Shakeema Smalls Blair (Polaris Poetry Series) January 26, 2027 — Pre-order now

A powerful and innovative debut collection — the first in Blair’s new Polaris Poetry Series — that captures the rhythms of Black girlhood as it navigates the spaces between city and southern roots. Through poems rooted in Hoodoo spirituality and the author’s Gullah Geechee heritage, Shakeema Smalls uncovers ways of knowing that transcend physical and temporal barriers, boldly addressing the lived realities of racism, classism, and economic struggle while simultaneously journeying toward joy and transcendence. Smalls’s work finds lineage in the voices of Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton, and Nikky Finney, while offering something wholly unique that broadens conversations about systemic violence, poverty, and the complexities of Black girlhood.

For My People by Margaret Walker Yale University Press Originally published 1942; reissued October 22, 2019

An exploration of race and heritage, For My People is the first book by poet and novelist Margaret Walker (1915-1998) and the 41st volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Considered among the most important collections of poetry written by a participant in the Black Chicago Renaissance, For My People is a series of ballad poems with memorable characters, including the New Orleans sorceress Molly Means; Kissie Lee, a tough young woman who dies “with her boots on switching blades”; Poppa Chicken, an urban drug dealer and pimp; John Henry, killed by a ten-pound hammer; and Stagolee, who kills a white officer but eludes a lynch mob. The memorable title poem evokes the power of resilience not only for black people, but for all people.

Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry edited by Camille T. Dungy University of Georgia Press December 1, 2009

Black Nature is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets — a genre that, until now, has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated. Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history, broadening our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. The collection features major writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson, as well as newer talents such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington.

Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts by J. Drew Lanham Hub City Press April 20, 2021

“You are a rare bird, easy to see but invisible just the same.” That thought is close at hand in Sparrow Envy, as renowned naturalist and writer J. Drew Lanham explores his obsession with birds and all things wild in a mixture of poetry and prose. He questions vital assumptions taken for granted by so many birdwatchers: can birding be an escape if the birder is not in a safe place? Who is watching him as he watches birds? With a refreshing balance of reverence and candor, Lanham paints a unique portrait of the natural world: listening to cicadas, tracking sandpipers, towhees, and wrens, and cataloging fellow birdwatchers at a conference where he is one of two Black birders. Lanham is Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson University.

Perfect Black by Crystal Wilkinson University Press of Kentucky August 3, 2021

2022 NAACP Image Award Winner. Crystal Wilkinson combines a deep love for her rural roots with a passion for language and storytelling in this compelling collection of poetry and prose about girlhood, racism, and political awakening, imbued with vivid imagery of growing up in Southern Appalachia. In Perfect Black, the acclaimed writer muses on such topics as motherhood, the politics of her Black body, lost fathers, mental illness, sexual abuse, and religion. It is a captivating conversation about life, love, loss, and pain, interwoven with striking illustrations by her long-time partner, Ronald W. Davis.

Night Animals by Yusef Komunyakaa Sarabande Books June 2, 2020

The poems in Night Animals, by Yusef Komunyakaa, climb so deeply into the being of various beasts, from cricket to leopard to snowy owl, that we read them with an uncanny shiver of recognition. Without ever fully abandoning his human skin, Komunyakaa inhabits both the outer and inner lives of these creatures. The images are a brilliant match for the poems, each of Rachel Bliss’s surreal animals populate a realm somewhere between our two species — birds with teeth, men with antlers, a duck wearing suspenders. Both image and word are dense and dark, intensely focused around a kind of hunger. The poet has been startling us with his rich, disturbing, and important poems for many years. Night Animals extends Yusef Komunyakaa’s remarkable oeuvre.

⁂

Read more

Ahead of the release of their debut poetry collection, OF WATER NEVER CEASING, I sat down with Kristin Entler, writer and editor here at Loblolly Press, to talk all things poetry. The collection centers at its heart a body and a life shaped by illness, care, and persistence, and I am beyond thrilled for these poems to make their way into the world. Pre-…

Read more

Read more