12/29/2020 0 Comments level:deepsouthAre you from the American South? Are you proud of it? Embarrassed by it? Maybe a little of both? Or are you a non-Southerner who has some preconceived notions of what the South is like? Regardless of your answer, I encourage you to check out the level:deepsouth anthology. And I don’t just say that just because I’m a contributor.
This level:deepsouth anthology covers a time and place you may not hear too much about...the southeastern U.S. during the seventies, eighties and nineties, and reflections since that time, as seen through the eyes of Gen-Xers. Uh, Generation X? You know, the people who get left out of so many discussions of generational trends. Younger than Boomers, older than Millennials, born between 1965 and 1980. The South at this time was a place where American pop culture collided with Bible belt beliefs, desegregation, and all the cultural trappings that made life in, say, Knoxville, Tennessee a little different from life in Manhattan or Lansing or Oakland. In these stories, you’ll find album covers, concerts, and promises made in church basements. It’s a close-up on the last little bit of life before cell phones and the internet flipped human engagement on its head. Curious yet? Here’s a couple of my favorite gems. “Bitter Melon Soup” by Rob Linne describes a white teen’s friendship with a Vietnamese refugee family in haunting prose. “Dinner on the Grounds” by Luisa Kay Reyes describes how a college student with roots in Alabama and Latin America shared Southern traditions with her campus friends. Ben Beard’s “Southern Christian Punk and Other Unicorns” documents a push-pull between the cultures of church youth group and punk rock. And the latest I’ve unwrapped is a gorgeous tone poem on the death of a hippie coffee shop: “At the Epitome” by William Nesbitt. Check them out. They’re worth your time. And if you want to laugh at a neurotic preteen, you can check out my memoir of life as a young outdoorswoman, “Camp Earl Wallace.” The level:deepsouth anthology is edited by an Alabama-based author and creative writing teacher, Foster Dickson. He’s still taking submissions, and there’s room for essays, short form pieces, book and album reviews, photos, and more. To learn more: https://leveldeepsouth.com/submissions/ Thank you, dear reader, for letting me share my passion for this project. And let me leave you with a meme that one of my age-mates posted recently. “The first rule of Gen X is, ‘Don’t talk about Gen X.’” Yeah, the anthology broke that rule. But it’s not the first rule or the last rule you’ll see us break.
0 Comments
|
Elena Vale WahlI blogged much more when my kids were small. Hoping my quality supplants quantity. Archives
June 2022
Categories |