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An Update about Me and this Website
This website was created to serve as my digital portfolio during the job hunt that consumed my final semesters of graduate school, and after I found and secured a job this website was abandoned in the absolute whirlwind that was finishing my thesis, moving, and getting settled into my new life. On top of all that, my first child was born in March of this year, creating a new layer of chaos in my life that has slowed down any external efforts I have. So I wanted to share an update about what this website will be going forward, as well as what I am working on and what can…
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ANNOUNCEMENT-Short Story News
My short fiction “Anatomy of a Waterfall” was chosen as the third place winner of the Tishomingo Arts Council 2022 Fall Writing Competition. As a result of this, the piece will be published in the next edition of THE VIEW FROM WOODALL. I cannot begin to explain how honored I am to have this piece chosen for this. My life has been strange the past couple of years, and all of that came together to create this piece. I lost my grandmother to an aggressive cancer in 2020, had my first child this year, and have been busy trying to make something of my writing. So I’m happy TAC has…
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A Short Story: Key to the Heart
An Author’s Note: This short story was written for the first time in 2015, then heavily revised in 2018. Since then I’ve struggled to find a home for it in the world of fiction magazines and journals. Its shocking nature, reliance on fast paced action, and lack of real metaphorical weight has made it a difficult sell to the magazine world, which tends to focus on more contemplative fiction. However, it has found a wonderful home with the Author Shoppe, a unique bookshop in Hattiesburg, MS. I have referred to Hattiesburg as my home for most of my life, even though I’ve never lived there but have always instead lived…
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Looking for Plot in Strange Places: Dood, Juanita, and the Importance of Narrative Context
A Note From Me: The Ballad of Dood and Juanita, and how it shows us to examine a narrative in context, has been on my mind lately. This is a longer one, so thanks for reading! Spoilers for the plot of Dood and Juanita Concept albums, or albums meant to explore a concept beyond musical composition itself, aren’t a new–well, concept. David Bowie was famous for his Ziggy Stardust concept albums. Actor and all around eccentric man, Christopher Lee wrote and performed a number of heavy metal concept albums based. Rock acts, Rap artists, indie darlings (see the phenomenal Phoebe Bridgers), and instrumentalists have taken on the task of telling…
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The Center of their Universe-Part Two
Wyatt-Brown’s 1982 work Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South laid a foundation for scholarship on Southern honor and ethics that continues well into the modern day. His arguments on the lives of poor whites, much like any other topic the books touches, are not contained to a single chapter, but instead interwoven throughout his discussions of economic status, family, and personal morality. He situates poor whites in direct contrast with a classical view of “Southern Gentlemen,” which, despite his best efforts to avoid Gone with the Wind-esque stereotypes, can at times conjure as many images of Jefferson Davis as it does Colonel Sanders. The book roots the…
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The Center of their Universe-Part One
The historiography of White, Southern identity is expansive. However, while the rise of modern conservatism and the massive resistance to the African American Civil Rights Movement has received a great deal of attention, the identity of Antebellum poor whites has not. However, that does not mean that the topic has gone entirely unexplored. In reality, two Historians contributed far different interpretations of poor whites thirty-five years apart from one another. Bertram Wyatt Brown’s Southern Honor: Honor and Ethics in the Old South (1982)and Keri Leigh Merritt’s Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (2017) serve as both complementary and contradictory pieces of the historiography. Intense ideological and…
