Mid/South Anthology

by Casie Dodd (Editor), Laurie Marshall (Contributor)

Mid/South Anthology features forty talented writers from Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and other surrounding states that represent a unique part of American culture. While this region is often misunderstood as one type of place, the Mid-South belongs to a little bit of everywhere: part Southwest, part Midwest, part South—always wild. Our area of the country is both a space of its own and part of a larger, complicated Southern world: the “Mid/South.” In this collection, poetry, short stories, and essays offer glimpses into this in-between place as they explore the complexities of our relationships to each other as well as to the natural world. Whether through vivid landscapes, family dramas, or bittersweet love stories, each piece brings more insight into what it means to be from around here.

This is the first publication by Belle Point Press, a new independent small press based in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Our mission is to celebrate the literary culture of the American Mid-South: all its paradoxes and contradictions, all the ways it gets us home.

With contributions by Kathy M. Bates, Jim Beaugez, Jack B. Bedell, Cassie E. Brown, Katy Carl, Lesley Clinton, Eli Cranor, Shome Dasgupta, Geffrey Davis, Heather Dobbins, Will Justice Drake, Renee Emerson, Elisheva Fox, Melissa M. Frye, Christian Anton Gerard, Kristen Grace, Taylor Greene, Carolyn Guinzio, Bryan Hurt, Dewayne Keirn, Emily Key, Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster, Timothy Kleiser, Laurie Marshall, Bryan Moats, Scott Morris, Benjamin Myers, Todd Osborne, Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, Whitney Rio-Ross, C.T. Salazar, Gerry Sloan, Tyler Justin Smothers, Carrie Lee South, Casey Spinks, Holly A. Stovall, Bud Sturguess, Gloria Williams Tran, Madeline Trosclair, Seth Wieck

271 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2022

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This anthology is the first publication of the press that will be publishing my book late next year. But I hope you won’t think I’m praising it because of that. If you're interested in regional writing from an area the publisher calls the Mid-South, you will enjoy this. I knew of exactly one writer before reading it—Jack B. Bedell, a former poet-laureate of Louisiana who here writes of swamps and their “monsters”—and now I have a whole range of writers, some with amazing credits to their name, to follow. As I read on, the collection continued to surprise and delight, ending on a perfect note, an essay by Carrie Lee South about Brinkley, Arkansas, and birds.

Other favorites were “Y’all,” an essay about the times this Southern word has made the writer Holly Stovall feel either excluded or included; a historical short-story, Scott Morris’s “The Industry, 1838” about the forced relocation of Native Americans by ship during an icy February in Little Rock; “One Bad Mother,” a contemporary short-story of a fireworks stand and a meth head by Eli Cranor; poems by Renee Emerson (I just discovered via GR that she and I had work in the same compilation, From the Porch Swing - Memories of Our Grandparents!), and Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, the present-day poet-laureate of Arkansas. (If you’re not a poetry reader, don’t be afraid of any of these poems; they’re accessible.) I know I’m forgetting others, but you get the idea. Even the introduction by Belle Point Press's founder/editor Casie Dodd touched me deeply. Y’all, there are great writers everywhere.

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

It has some good stories and poems from the region, but there were too many sad stories for my tastes.

[Holly Stovall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Casie Dodd has found some of the most compelling prose in the country.