Status Updates From Grit Lit: A Rough South Reader

Sometimes, I get the feeling most people don’t believe the Rough South exists. It’s a myth, a foggy tale told in lantern light. While this belief can be frustrating, I find a certain joy in telling the Truth that everyone believes is a lie.
—Alex Taylor

As if memory could be a decision, he accepted it all, knowing now that the only thing worse than reliving nightmares until the day he died was enduring a life full of strangers.

“And he looked up then and said, ‘You’re going to have to kill me to get rid of me, Bailey. I love her.’ So I pulled out the pistol from my pocket and said, ‘All right.’ And I shot him. All five rounds.”

There are events so terrible in this world their echoes roll world on distant world like ripples on water. Tug a thread and the entire tapestry alters. Pound the walls in one world and in another a portrait falls and shatters.

“I think people are the sums of all their influences and I don’t know whether you seek out those influences when you’re young or whether they’re the ones you’re exposed to…”
—William Gay

No amount of traveling can save us from ourselves. We simply people new places with old sorrows and hopes…Somehow, we would have to learn to inhabit this new space our love and its dissolution had created, where counterfeit promises were not acceptable payment for safe passage.

“I also believe the phrase dysfunctional family is redundant.”
—Dale Ray Phillips

“Something about me believes that comedy comes out of darkness and that all comedy is underpinned by loss.”
—Lewis Nordan

“…I developed the conviction that those of us born poor, or queer, or people of color, or simply different in any of the many ways this culture holds the different in contempt—that we were intrinsically better than those who had never been tested by adversity.”
—Dorothy Allison

“I’ve often said that some people find salvation in church, others in a bottle of Jim Beam. Both are an escape—something to guide you—of course, alcohol in a downward spiral.”
—Tim McLaurin

Joe Lon said: “Hard Candy, if you don’t quit walking like that somebody’s gone foller you out in the woods and do sompin nasty to you.”
“I wish to God somebody would,” she said.
—A Feast of Snakes (Harry Crews)

“When I left the South, I had felt trapped for so long…It is only by being away that I have understood the culture I was rejecting.”
—Lewis Nordan

“God protect me from the upper classes, at least as writing material. I will take my people, for better or worse.”
—Rick Bragg

Because of the stories I’ve heard about him, his recklessness, his tendency to stay up all night and stay in the woods when he probably should have been doing something else, and his whiskey drinking, I have often wondered if in some way that he could not or would not have said, he felt his own early death just around the bend.