MASTHEAD
Editors-in-Chief
Rachel Choi & Lauren Underberg
Editorial
Rachel Dickerson, Hailey Ham, Merritt Hughes, Meg Richards, Emma Siebold
Design
Rachel Choi, Alyssa Clark, Gabriella Garza
Contributors
Aly Buford, Nola Crumpton, Piper Greene, Rachel Grey, Hailey Ham, Merritt Hughes,
Amelia Oei, Emma Siebold, Susanne Salehi, Zahara Trent, Lauren Underberg, Anna Woods
LETTER FROM THE EDITORS
Dear reaDers,
We greet you with excitement, trepidation, and love through the first— our very first—issue of Front Porch Magazine.
Our magazine grew from a question we’ve all received at some point in our lives: Where are you from?
As people from the South, often from marginalized groups, this question carries different weight for each of us, both in context of its implications from the questioner and the answerer. It could be asked out of genuine curiosity—other times, it may be a suggestion that we’re not from here. We don’t quite belong.
Whatever the motive is, the answer isn’t always as straightforward as it seems. Some of us have lived in many places throughout our lives, so it’s hard to respond without retracing our steps, carrying the questioner through the rapid river of our history. Other times, we feel disconnected from the answer, or even reluctant to say, even if it’s factually correct.
Despite it all, we start to think about home—or the closest thing we know to it.
Homesickness is defined as “experiencing a longing for one’s home during a period of absence from it.” Our theme, “Homesick,” reflects how we may feel disconnected from or disillusioned with the South. We struggle to reconcile others’ perceptions of it with our own complicated and ever-evolving feelings toward it—but for many of us, it still holds the significance of being our home, if not the only one we’ve known.
In reality, the answer is never black and white. Our identities as Southerners look different for each of us. The bounty of writing and visual art received from creatives nationally shows how each of our meanings of home and the South vary in a multitude of ways. There’s no consensus of what it means to be from the South, nor will there ever be. After all, it’s this rich sentiment and heart that makes this place—this flawed, ugly, beautiful, human thing we call the South—our home.
We invite you to see for yourself. Thank y’all for your interest, your love, your passion, your questions, and your ongoing, forever-running answers.
Sincerely,
Rachel Choi & Lauren Underberg Co-Founders of Front Porch Magazine
HOMESICK
Letters to My Grandmother
MERRITT HUGHES | LOUISIANA
April 2025
I can’t believe you’ve been gone four years this month. It was a year into the pandemic and I hadn’t visited in months. My sister and I didn’t want to expose you to COVID, so we isolated ourselves, saw you last Christmas and Easter with masks on and ten feet apart in your living room. We were foolish, trying to buy more time when really, we wasted the last year of your life.
***
April 2021
I don’t know how to live in a world without Ann Rhoads, but I am trying to figure that out.
My mom asked me to save the photos from your phone. I never realized how many you took of me—at Strawn’s during our Saturday morning breakfasts, at my embarrassing 3rd-grade school play, at my countless childhood birthday parties.
I’m sorry I stopped inviting you into my life. It was selfish, but I was scared you wouldn’t love me if I told you I wasn’t the girl in those pictures anymore.
***
May 2021
I spoke at your funeral. I didn’t want to—it petrified me, actually, to stand up there in the bright lights, reading a eulogy I wrote in between studying for AP tests. I’ve always prided myself a writer, but
no sentences I could craft felt adequate that day.
Everyone you ever met filled the church that day: It was busier than a Christmas Eve service. I told them of you, read the poem you introduced to me that made me start writing. ***
December 2021
I came out six months after your death. I had known for a while but was scared of what our family, our town would think. Our extended family came down for Christmas that December—we gathered in your house, your living room, your kitchen, but it would never be the same. We were sad, baking the cookies just like you did, powdered sugar over the counter and floor. Your
Photo by Merritt Hughes
daughter, my aunt, told me how you cheered in the streets of San Francisco in June 2015 when the news broke of Obergefell. You couldn’t have known then you were celebrating my love, but I like to think part of you did.
***
July 2022
I’m about to start my senior year—it’s harder to enjoy all the milestones with your absence screaming at me. I’ve never really believed in the afterlife, but I’ve still prayed you are there. I’m not sure how it would work, but I like to think you read the letters I write.
I’m sorry I haven’t visited you recently. I swear I wish to be bringing you flowers weekly, talking to you about all the good in my life, but I can’t. I don’t recognize the church we buried you at anymore. They turned hateful, pushed me out onto the street, abandoned me because of a mistranslated verse. Our family left. Your husband, the Methodist preacher of more than 50 years, walked away when they gave up on me. I wish we could bring you home but my mom doesn’t want to disturb you. But I can’t go back yet.
***
May 2023
I graduated high school last week. I thought of you a lot; the graduation celebrations mirrored my sister’s three years ago, except your seat was filled by someone else. It isn’t the same. You were supposed to be here for this, supposed to hug me tight and visit me in Boston.
I’m going to school in Boston. That’s something you will never know because I hadn’t even considered college when
you were last here. I’m pursuing journalism. I know the last time we really talked about it, I was still convinced I was going to be a professional hairdresser and have sleepovers at your house every Friday night.
I hope you get to meet your granddaughter someday. She’s grown up a lot since we last talked. I think you would really like her.
***
March 2025
It’s been harder to write to you from Boston—we’re separated by too many years and distance. I have so much to tell you of my life now, but I’m scared you won’t recognize me anymore.
I think I will spend forever mourning you. As much as it hurts to lose you, it hurts more because it feels like you never truly knew anything about me. You will spend forever thinking of me as your stubborn granddaughter who never wanted to go shopping or wear dresses to church. I feel like it would make sense if I could just come out to you. I think we could have had a good dynamic—not one-sided, but actually really saw each other—if I had just come out to you.
I’m sorry I wasn’t the granddaughter you wanted. I know how much I hurt you when I didn’t attend the sorority lunches, didn’t let you show me off like a doll. I have to live knowing that you never knew me, and you never truly loved me. Anyone you thought you loved—my 15-year-old self, my 5-year7 old self—was not me, and I will never know if you would have loved her, too.
Down by the Banks of the Hanky Panky
Where bullfrogs jump from bank to banky singin’ aye eee eye owe you bamboo!
Night rains down on us in mammoth sweet drops.
Crickets cry, calling “Come back!”
“Dance with us a little more!”
PIPER GREENE | TEXAS, TENNESSEE
We tell them, “you can’t ride in our little red wagon!” (the front seat’s broken and the axel’s draggin’)
See the mist kiss the river,
Tight squeeze, cool breeze, now you’ve got the shivers!
Goosebumps, hairs stand up on end of summer blues
East of the bank, take a blade of grass between our fingers and blow our name through the night
I’ll whistle ours back
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
Cattail and meadow garlic giggle at our ignorance
Double dog dare you electric chair you
Our ghosts, from past and future, gaze at us through the dawn A sorry sight to behold, we’re sure, yet we hold it ever tighter.
Lemonade, iced tea
Coca-Cola, Pepsi
If you listen closely the grass will play its symphony of the inevitable
We watch from afar, tightlipped but knowing What do we think?
That it is cruel, this sweeping undertow of passing time.
An Ode to the Hills
RACHEL GREY | WEST VIRGINIA
Mountain Mama
Divine twist in the road
—winding path
Exuding flora and fauna
Blue hills on the horizon
Smell of a sunny day
Honey and wildflowers
Burning coal,
Burning cardboard
Home to hard workers
Hardly any work
Those who live rough
Free as the chirping birds
Home to simple souls
To me
Childhood spent outside
Wandering woods
Ankle deep in creeks
Fingers stained red
—picking and eating
wild raspberries from the yard
Playing on my grandparents farm
Whirl of side-by-sides down thegravel road
Stories shared on the woodenporch
Bare feet, bees buzzing
Wind blowing my dark curls
Tight-knit family
Appalachian meals
Home cooked and grown
Bountiful, from the garden
Almost Heaven
Humming hymns
Guitar and fiddle play in old country churches
Across the Dollar General selling beer on sale
Teenage drives with friends
Music blaring, windows down
Cigarette smoke
—weed in the air
A blur of green passes by
American flags waving
Wild and Wonderful
mountains watching from a distance
Pink and purple sky,
sun fading from view
Crickets
Rustling in the woods
Coyotes; foxes
The only sounds that fill the night
Running Home
EMMA SIEBOLD | TEXAS
I’ve always been runnIng.
I ran through sprinklers on the front lawn. Then ran circles around our little house in San Antonio, a house I have to rack my brain to remember. I raced my classmates in P.E., ran to beat my sister in the annual Easter egg hunt, ran in soccer practices that spanned fourteen years. I’ve run on roads and tracks, through forests and meadows, up and down the hilly terrain of the Texas Hill Country. I ran my first marathon last February, and those 19 years of running did not prepare me for the brutality of that 26.2 mile race under the Austin, Texas, sun. My legs nearly gave out as I ran up the final stretch, a steep hill that plateaued in front of the Texas Capitol. For four hours, my inner monologue told me that I could not walk, could not stop, could not fail. So I kept running, and running, and running. I’ve always been running.
When I chose Emerson College, I was on the run. The idea of moving to the other side of the country to pursue journalism was a dream, and it felt like a wish that staying in Texas would never grant. I don’t remember when I started to think so lowly of the Lone Star State; was it the politics? The fact that you could drive down a highway and see no one and nothing for miles? Perhaps it was the six country songs that played on infinite shuffle at my job, the fact that you couldn’t step outside without breaking a sweat, or the monotony of spending 18 years in the same one-horse town. My family has lived in the same 100-mile radius for generations—my mom graduated from my high school; half the streets in our town share the last names of family friends. I was a rather odd kid growing up, and instead of facing my own issues, I developed a convoluted and elitist idea that Texas was to blame for all of my problems. The solution? Leave, and never come back.
Emerson College was promising for multiple reasons, the biggest being change. Big city? Check. Journalism being treated as a serious profession? Double check. A hub for creatives, innovative thinkers, and academic visionaries? Sold. Yet I haven’t once felt like this is the amazing college experience that people talk about for the rest of their lives. I felt like I was in high school again, where I played on the soccer team. Even if I was a starting player on the field, I never really did anything. I ran hard, pushed myself and encouraged my teammates, but I never scored. I might have had a couple of assists here and there, but no one ever walked off the field thinking that #19 was any more
important than a traffic cone. I feel the same way at Emerson: joined all the clubs, got a job, went to all my classes. I didn’t connect with the on-campus social scene, so I explored the city to try and find something off-campus. Nothing. I exercised and continued my passion for running, and eventually my scheduled run was the only thing getting me out of bed every morning.
Despite my misery, I never let the thought of leaving Emerson cross my mind. I am so privileged that my parents can afford to send me here, and I felt like it would be a waste of their money and my efforts to just pack my bags and go home after two years. I figured that I’m almost halfway through,
Photo by Emma Seibold
so I might as well stick it out. But last fall, my mental health collapsed. I was beyond anxious and depressed, and was in the throes of a serious eating disorder. My dorm room—the single suite that I worked so hard to earn as a resident assistant—became a jail cell. I used to walk by the harbor and gape at its beauty, but it soon became a place I went to at midnight to stare at the black water and sob. I spent years hating where I came from, and tried so hard to make Emerson and Boston the home I always wanted.
When I went home for winter break last semester, I let the idea of leaving truly cross my mind, and I had never felt such relief. The very thought of coming
Photo by Emma Seibold
home took so much weight off my shoulders, and I knew that it was the right thing to do. Still, it wasn’t an easy decision to make. Despite receiving support from everyone I told, I can’t help but feel like I’m failing them, that I made a huge mistake by coming here and I just couldn’t handle it. No one has given me any judgement or any reason to feel this way. I think I just spent so long wanting to get out of my house, it feels silly to be shedding tears of joy about going back. But I am coming to terms with it. I am so eternally grateful for the opportunity to have come to this institution, and even more grateful for the home and support system waiting for me back home.
Boston will always be here for me. If I stay, I don’t know if I will still be here. As I book my one-way ticket home, I hold no ill-will for Emerson in my heart. It has its flaws—a lot of them actually. I mean, since I’ve started here, the administration has shown time and time again that this place is a business first, and an institution of learning second. There is a strange disconnect between students who work five jobs to be here, and those so blinded by their own privilege. And I get that journalism can be a dog-eat-dog world, but —students do everything they can to one-up each other here. I’m not naive enough to think that going back to Texas is going to be the blanket solution to all of my problems. I hope to attend The University of Texas at Austin, which itself is not a perfect institution, either. But I’m ready to feel like my feet are on solid ground again. I’m ready to run towards something instead of running away. I’m ready to say “Good morning” to people just because, to drive down backroads with the windows down, to bake kolaches with my grandma and not wonder if it’s the last time we’ll get to do it.
I’m running home.
Proof of Existence
AMELIA OEI | OKLAHOMA, GEORGIA
every now anD then, I wake up in a state of nostalgic longing. I’m sure that everyone has days like these, the morning sun shining through the windows, slowly reaching the comforter before making its way to the pillows and sleeping eyes. The sleeper will wake with a fondness for past memories and what is no longer. When I wake up with this wistfulness, I often visit a variety of times and places—before living in Oklahoma for ten years, I had moved around to different parts of the country. So my longing feels more distant, less tangible, than others’, too many physical moves to keep contact with what could have been lifelong connections.
Stepping outside to an organic irony, a cold and sunny day, I catch whiffs of a breeze strong enough to have traveled the 1,700 miles from my old home in Oklahoma to here in Boston. In a rather unexpected way, this Boston campus reminds me of home, of high school: brightly colored hair, intentionally questionable patterns on skirts, and clouds of smoke wafting away from groups of young people. But I miss the defining characteristics of what once was—the sunsets, the smiling faces, the crispness of the air, the roads etched in my mind. And more so, I long to know if my friends ever think of things in this manner.
It was September of 2020, the first time I had seen my sophomore friends—or anyone besides my family and girlfriend at the time, Alex, in six months. An uncharacteristically chilly day, the breeze was more still than usual, allowing the dense fog to sit unbothered. During the Covid-19 pandemic, businesses in Oklahoma City were only shut down for a few weeks in mid-March before returning to normalcy. But I was adamant about staying safe; the fear of possibly spreading the virus controlled my actions for the remaining two years of high school, and this kept me extremely isolated for months. But at this time, my friends told me that they had all been recently tested and declared negative, so I was intent on having the opportunity to finally see them.
I drove five minutes to Vivian’s house, the all-time spot for convenience. Before the pandemic, every afternoon of sophomore year was spent at Vivian’s house, ranging from a single minute to the entirety of the evening. Our group of mists and punks would sit on the couch, which resided on the porch, sharing cigarettes with a skeleton dressed in the clothes Vivian had outgrown. We never used the front door, instead opting to struggle through a window to enter their palace of collections,
knickknacks of all sorts swallowing every wall and habitable surface. The doors were covered in piles of cheetah-print fabric, old and fresh stains of hair dye, tattoo and piercing needles, and 13
gravity-defying heapings of avant paintings and eerie sketches. So for comfort’s sake, we spent most of our time on the couch outside.
To pregame our next adventure, or perhaps to just “game,” we piled into Jewel’s bulletproof car and began to suffocate ourselves in smoke. The car finally died three years later, a few months ago, after surviving ten bullets and two crashes. Despite losing close contact, Jewel still has me on their “close friends” story on Instagram, so I was able to grieve the automobile and memories within it from afar. Maybe three bowls in, I decided to take pictures of everyone in order to document the excitement of finally seeing my friends. I still view the photos fondly, though I question if they are an accurate representation of who the subjects are like now. At the time they were captured, Jewel’s hair was bright yellow and green. But it changed the next week, and every week after, it seemed. I’m not sure what color their hair is now. I yearn to know if the photographs capture reality, or if our closeness was all in my head.
After fifteen minutes or so had passed, Vivian’s mom—or Ms. Smith, my history teacher at the time—came outside to the front lawn. We opened the car door, smoke billowing out into the atmosphere; the yellow-tinged cloud mixing well with the fog. Ms. Smith was unsurprised to see the smoke leaving the car with us, but her face wrinkled into an expression of astonishment upon seeing me at her house, as opposed to on her computer screen. We exchanged kind words, as if we hadn’t spoken earlier that day, and then she went back inside, probably to grade my most recent essay.
Too anxious to drive high, I packed into the backseat of the bulletproof car with Jewel, Alex, and three others. I was the smallest of the bunch (this has been a constant theme throughout my life and friend groups), so I sat on Alex’s lap. Windows rolled down, we blasted Shaka—the band formed by our dear friends, who are now taking over Oklahoma City with their shows. I see their years online and wonder if they ever remember me while playing them. Dancing, moshing, making new friends…do they ever wish I could be there to see them grow? I do.
We decided that our newest adventure would be to go to one of the free parking garages in downtown OKC. On another five minute drive, we pulled up next to two old ladies at a stoplight. Smelling us, or perhaps seeing our brightly colored hair, they waved their own joint out the passenger window to say hello. The light turned green, and all I can recall is Alex’s grip around my waist as we recklessly raced our future selves from 10th street down to 4th. Then they turned left, and we kept on straight. I wondered how long those ladies had been friends—did they meet in adolescence or later on in life? I look back now and wonder if my fate will ever reflect the same connections.
We parked on the bottom level, unpacking our skateboards, 14
rollerblades, and backpacks quickly. There were probably only six levels we had to climb, but once we reached the roof, our reign over the city was confirmed. The fog perfectly blended hues of pink, purple, and orange to create yet another astonishing piece of art. The flat land allowed the sunset to seem to go on forever, to reach everywhere. I could see our school and its prison-like industrial exterior, the three highways that managed to interconnect the entire state, elds of horses, of wheat: simplicity. The memories persist. Does Alex recall this sunset, this evening? Or has this night blended into nothingness, forgotten, just an echo of our abrupt ending? Does Jewel remember that evening—do any of them? Their smiles in the few photos I took are all I have to prove that this evening really did occur, that I existed.
We spent an hour or two messing around on the roof, teaching each other how to skate, spray paint, and interact again. Maybe it was just memorable for me because it was my first time seeing them in months. Or maybe because I only saw them a few times after this, then moved away. They all knew each other since kindergarten, so the pandemic was just a blip in their timeline together. I had met them that year. Did they feel the power of being on that roof? Of conquering a pandemic, high school, and stereotypes in a city resistant to change? So many places to see, people to meet. Memories to make or forget.
I didn’t understand the potential of living in Oklahoma City until I moved away. No, I did not take adventures and friends like these for granted, but I do feel as if my story in that city is unfinished. I have missed 438 sunsets, likely all breathtaking against the bland landscape that goes on forever. Have my friends kept track? Probably not, but I don’t hold that against them.
I don’t know if they deleted the pictures from that day—maybe they needed the phone storage, maybe it was just another day for them, maybe they no longer needed to remember with tangible evidence. If the photos are still somehow within reach, would they recognize my face? We have all changed so much, both externally and internally, since that time. I was the chosen person to take home the polaroid of all of us together that evening, and it still hangs on my wall, three houses later. Having experience with large, distant moves, I don’t need confirmation from any person that I was a part of their life. I must find solace on my own. But when I wake up to familiar smells, sounds, or an environment in which to self-reflect, it often feels as if my past was a dream, unreal. And each version of me was from a different life, dream, and past. This is my solace to the blurry confusion as to what really happened in those past lives. This is my proof of existence, then and now.
Gardenia Angels
HAILEY HAM | TEXAS
there Is nothIng quite as sweet as the scent of a real-life, live gardenia.
This is something Evie Buckley knew all too well. Each and every perfume having fallen short—much like a pathetic Icarus with tangy, alcoholic wings that burnt up the moment they hit her fiery, grieved nose. Too clean, too green, too sweet. She had once even gone so far as to ask her aunt to express mail her one of the flowers from the beginning of spring. And so, that flower had traveled all the way to Maryland from sweltering central Texas, and when it came, shriveled and browned, she had felt stupid for even believing that it could ever survive the journey.
She could, however.
And that is how she found herself drunk, buying a ticket back to Wimberley at 2 a.m. a couple nights before. That is how she found herself on this shitty old train, with shitty old seats, and shitty berths with equally shitty bedding.
It had startled everyone—her coworkers, her friends, her girlfriend— even herself, when she realized what she had done, seeing the email notification pop up on her computer—as if her hands were possessed by some entity other than her own conniving brain, her own treacherous heart.
But she finally had enough. This phantom scent had been lingering in her mind constantly, and with each new attempt to move on she only felt like she was sinking further into the metaphorical quicksand.
God willing, she would finally get one of those flowers, and make the perfume her own-damn-self.
It had been done right before, so it can be done right once more. That’s what she had always told herself.
The scent had always followed her mother, her grandmother, and aunts like a loyal spaniel kissing at their perfectly hosed heels. If she could have anything from home and take it with her, it would be that perfume that clung to their skin, like it was a part of them.
She hadn’t thought about it in so long. Not for years. That is, until her mother passed. Then suddenly, she had nothing. Nobody. Nothing to show for all the years and tears she had spent. She began to smell the faint floral scent around every corner, both a comfort and a curse. It was all she thought about, somedays—
“One plate of cheesy shrimp grits?” The young, absurdly perky server
chimed in, balancing a steaming plate on her palm. Today was one of those days.
“I didn’t order nothin’,” Evie mumbled, barely bothering to 16
glance at the waitress over her wire-rimmed glasses.
The waitress’ smile faltered slightly, and she moved on, murmuring something about the kitchen getting the table number wrong.
It didn’t matter if she was hungry in the first place. Evie wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of her and her mission. The landscape passed by, blur after blur, and even though her stomach gnawed at itself—she didn’t stop. Not until the bell rung, and the other people rushed the doors and the luggage compartment. Somehow, she came out on top of it. She was out of the train car without another word.
From there, it had taken her about half an hour to walk through the winding roads of the small town she had grown up in, the sun fading into the horizon as quick as her mother would finish a glass of wine, the abyssal night following soon after.
Walking through the temporarily abandoned neighborhood streets, old pastel houses blending into nothingness one after the other, until she stood in front of the one that had haunted her so.
Her grandmother on her deathbed had always joked it would take hell freezing over for the sickly yellow of the house’s painted exterior to chip. Either that came true, or the paint job they claimed they did hundreds of layers of wasn’t really as good as they said. Because the house was now freckled with chipping paint, a dark, unforgettable forest green peeking out of the offending outer layer.
When she had finally had the strength to at least try and forget about it, she moved through the house like a phantom, various memories playing out from behind her eyes. Though most of the house was trashed, she remembered where her cousin had once hid her aunt’s perfume, the old antique spray bottle tucked neatly underneath the floorboards where her vanity once stood.
And when she smelled it, spraying it into the mildewed air, she had never felt so disappointed in her life. For it had grown rotten and stale, stained a visceral piss yellow. It was home, but it wasn’t the home that she had come for.
Maybe she was wrong, earlier.
Maybe she wouldn’t survive this trip like she thought.
Memphis
SUSANNE SALEHI | TENNESSEE, GEORGIA
you have lIveD here your whole life, know well enough not to venture out onto the mile-wide Mississippi River, not to trust anything too vast to see across or too muddy to see below. There are tales about what lies beneath, anyway: a wide, gaping mouth, something quick and quiet enough to swallow the fisherman behind you without a ripple. Of course, you know about the missing divers from the 1930s. To recover a wreck, they sent four into that vengeful, suffocating dark.
The Press-Scimitar reported that only one surfaced and the force of his screaming tore his vocal cords beyond repair. Each of the missing has a headstone in Elmwood Cemetery, three hungry graves longing for their bodies.
Summers settle over your body like a hot, wet sheet, a gummy hand compressing your lungs. The heat is as inescapable as the cicadas, each shriek an ode to how you love this place, how you have to leave this place.
Though you live in a city possessed by a holy shrine, you have never visited. You hear about it on broadcasts from the outside world, from strangers on pilgrimage who speak to you in feverish tones about royalty everlasting. They tell you the King waits undying in that hallowed mausoleum, that you should let his silken voice slither into your brain. They wheedle at you to enter those echoing halls, to listen to the thrumming, to let it guide you to the water.
Instead, your belief lies with the martyred King. You visit the site of his murder, ponder
the cost of his dream. Your city swears it will not forget but cannot seem to remember. Your city still uses zip codes to divine futures.
Most days you do not know why you are crying. You make an escape plan. Get a job and an apartment in brand new geography, pack your things with care. Everything is so breakable.
It goes well for the first few years, but you start noticing little things. The accents sound flat and strange. The colors fade and run together. The food tastes silty, heavy and gritty on the tongue. It’s fine, you think, except there is a persistent tickle in your throat, no matter how much you cough. You tell yourself not to worry so much when you hack up grayish phlegm, until it starts to move. When you look closely, the gobs resolve into mosquito larvae, wriggling and whole. Beckoning.
What is left to do but obey your revolting body and the city that still inhabits it? You return to the place that does not welcome you home with open arms but drags you backward by the hair.
You live in Memphis again, and no one even remembers that you left.
Photo by Susanne Salehi
Big Terrible Texas
PRAYER GROUP IN ALABAMA:
Joan of Arc and American Postmodernism in Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter
ALYSSA BUFORD | FLORIDA
whenever anyone (who is no one) sits and asks me what piece of media perfectly describes the South, it’s exactly what one would expect: Ethel Cain’s (born Hayden Silas Anhedönia) postmodern folk rock opera, Preacher’s Daughter. Before leaving for Boston last June, I contemplated who and what I would take with me from the South, and the album always came to mind. I remember being 17, lying out on white, quilted bed sheets listening to “American Teenager.” The song itself serves Cain as a time capsule of the life that many teenagers in this same Florida suburb before me lived, their names and quotes carved in overgrown branch marks under metal bleachers that get cold every October. For Cain, the album itself was a preservation of one’s home, the religious and cultural imagery itself cementing why music for southern creators is so important.
I like to think that the secrets to survival in the South are built on storytelling. The act of hearing your first story at six on a patio among the swaying breeze of limbo trees and the fall of smooth rock in stream water as your Jamaican grandmother tells her tale of eating Taco Bell for the first time (she now makes it a point to always speak kindly of public toilets). When listening to the songs of Preacher’s Daughter—the way each track moves in, out, and between themselves—I was back on my grandma’s patio, picturing a child overhearing a Baptist sermon from a nearby Sunday school, as I did on Alabama’s border once before.
The album itself, though, has a narrative structure akin to that of a novel in the Victorian era, told chronologically, centering one person at a time and one perspective at a time, in long-form with both retrospective and prospective reflections. The album moves between utilizing rhythms and lyrics as visions, reflections, common interpretations, and resolution. When I pitched this piece, I referred to Cain as Alabama’s own Joan of Arc, making a comparison between the narrative aspects of their respective stories and how both women use mysticism and paternal violence to make their voices heard in a paternalistic universe.
In the first track, “Family Tree,” Cain establishes the year 1991 with a voice echoing throughout her father’s church. The voice
comes from the preacher himself, and the song’s sullen tone and lyrics serve as a response to the preacher’s words.
Jesus can always reject his father
But he cannot escape his mother’s blood
Jesus is known in Abrahamic religious text to be the son of God and the Virgin Mary, making him half human. The travels and journeys of Jesus in the human world that precede his eminent crucifixion shows that the divine origins of Christ do not stand as a haven from his own humanity. Through the humanity that was bestowed upon him by his mother, Christ was a being of mortal blood. This becomes both his savior and his undoing simultaneously: Mary holding the fate of her only son in her hands of human flesh, Cain’s fate being held by her father, the preacher. The album is an expression of Cain’s anger existing outside of herself and a part of a greater industry, leaving the public to make sense of her cause.
The preacher’s decision to plant the seed of small-town faith and the stone of isolationism that comes along with it back in 1991 speaks to the experiences of anger in women within and throughout the Anglo-Euro pean religious sector. I consider Ethel Cain to be the American South’s Joan of Arc. The narrative of Cain as a woman betrayed by an institution of organized religion coupled with the opera’s mystic audio/visual style parallels how the female sphere has altered popular represen tation of hyper-religious com munities. The religious trauma inflicted upon both Cain and Joan represent a larger systemic dilemma, a conflict that remains historical and transcendent of the boundaries of expression, religion, and origin.
In addition to these concepts, I will also utilize some far-off and potentially audacious southern charm to articulate another point, but it’s possible the album itself inadvertently makes room for an ontologically comparative viewpoint between Cain and
the Saint, of which the intentionality can be debated. Depictions of Joan align with a narrative structure with her immolation at 19 being established as both the climax and resolution of Joan’s legacy. The deaths and religious perceptions within both Joan and Cain and the trajectories/ beliefs that both women leave behind are the linking factor.
For Joan, her strong religious convictions work against her perception from an objective standpoint. Her stance and convention to belief was one that was not meant for her to take, due to her status as a woman. Despite this, Joan’s famous visions of Saints Margaret and Catherine that called on her to save the French from the English—the visions that were acted on by Joan and facilitated by the court of Charles VII to take and pass examinations of orthodoxy—granted her an army. The act of orthodoxy exams and external recognition of her belief mimics the experiences of Cain in the opera’s seventh track, “Thoroughfare.”
The principles of postmodern media call for a randomness, a desire to make reachable connections between movements and contexts in how the viewer perceives art and the artist’s intentions. Postmodern media transcends time, storytelling, and linearity, holding on to the idea of viewing art as a culturally constructed concept that is constantly evolving as certain social concepts become more rigid or fluid. Preacher’s is often characterized by its portrayal of change; yes, the opera follows one woman but not necessarily one story, as the synthesized and melancholic electronic sounds and effects throughout each track emphasize the postmodern cause for an absolute interpretation of the album.
The exposition of the song is introduced narratively, Cain beginning a seemingly healthy relationship with Isaiah, a man who offers to take Cain on a cross-country trip from Texas to California after Cain runs away from her home in north Florida. Cain vividly recalls how they met as well as his demeanor, describing the events in a Blanche-Dubois like innocence in true southern fashion. The dynamics of their relationship are detailed in an almost Victorian-style novelistic structure that emphasizes the relationship between Cain and Isaiah, with the tone, melodies, and lyrics of the song detailing their dynamic that emphasizes both adherence and deviation from Cain’s previ-
ous romantic and sexual encounters. The two confirmed lovers of Cain confirmed by the preceding tracks articulate Cain’s adverse dating experiences with two men: Wiloughby Tucker and Logan. Both men leave Cain via abandonment and death, respectively. Despite this, “Thoroughfare” is considered to be the track that initially depicts Ethel’s demise, even though like placing Joan in charge of a fleet, Cain envisions their relationship to be a sign and hope for a stable and fulfilling life that her father’s hurt and her small-scale town robbed her of.
A major turning point of the demise for both Cain and Joan parallel one another, with attribution as a stark difference. Cain’s death is attributed to the ulterior motives of Isaiah in “Strangers,” the final track. In earlier songs on Preacher’s Daughter, we learn that Isaiah kidnaps Cain for exploitative measures, the latter being murdered and cannibalized by Isaiah when she attempts to resist sexual abuse at his hand, with the last three tracks being significantly more amby-heavy to symbolize Cain’s reflection on her death whilst in the afterlife. Joan’s end is attributed to a collective, her execution being defended at the time as a response to her legal status as a relapsed heretic due to her claims of divine guidance returning, heresy being considered a capital crime in 15th-century France. The parallels of the fate of both Cain and Joan, too, also correspond to how the perceptions of cannibalism evolved over time and how cannibalism transitions from a thing people actually did and what we know it now to be a metaphor for intense passion and desire. The Early Modern period saw a near-normative perception of cannibalism in potential response to outbreaks and famine, with even cookbooks from the period calling for human flesh or bone to be utilized in a recipe, the practice becoming a catalyst for the plot of Shakespeare’s Titus Adronicus. The cannibalized body of Cain symbolizes regression for Cain—the destructive outcome of misplaced hope and desire coupled with the lack of agency Cain has to possess this desire the same way her ex-lover possessed anger.
Overall, Preacher’s Daughter is an album of reflection, cataloguing how worldbuilding and storytelling tells the ultimate story of a Southerner existing and reflecting between the worlds of abuse, trauma, forgiveness, and reckoning that is not unlike the figures we know of throughout history. Cain’s opera centers on the many thresholds and perspectives that come with one’s regional identity, positioning her southern roots as the sole witness of her demise.
SOUTHERN TRANSPLANT:
What Happens When “Home” Becomes a Place That Feels Unfamiliar?
ANNA WOODS | KENTUCKY
“This is not the place that I was born in, that doesn’t mean it’s not the place where I belong.” - The Ballroom Thieves
thIs quote Is actually the final line from a song called “Bees.” I heard it for the first time in middle school when I was on my way to visit family in New England. As a kid, it meant so much to me. It gave me so much hope that the displacement I felt where I was would one day not be true. I had been surrounded with people who loved the area I lived in. Phrases like “There’s no place like home,” “Pineville pride,” “I can’t imagine living anywhere else” followed me everywhere I went. I clung to lines like that at the end of “Bees,” hoping I wasn’t crazy for feeling the way I did.
I grew up in a very small, very poor, very conservative town in southeastern Kentucky, and while there are a lot of things I love and appreciate about my hometown, I never really felt at home there. I love my family, and despite my financial situation, I’d consider myself to have had a very fortunate upbringing. Nevertheless, being surrounded by people who thought differently from me, acted differently from me, and enjoyed things very different from the things I enjoyed made me feel a lot like an outsider in the place that was supposed to be “home.”
When I moved to Boston for college, I heard those final lines of “Bees” when I was passing a restaurant that was playing it outside. I hadn’t heard the song in years, but it felt symbolic in a sense, and it was the first reminder that things were different here. The music I listened to wasn’t “underground” or “weird” here, it played in the restaurants. My fashion sense was no longer “strange” or “out there.” The Fjallraven backpack that had been one of a kind at my small southern high school was lost in a sea of many here. Although it was difficult to come to terms with the fact that I felt like every ounce of my individuality had been sucked from me the second I got off the plane at Logan, it quickly became so comforting to belong. Boston became home for me without even trying. All the years I’d spent wondering if I couldn’t make friends because something was wrong with me were rectified in the first week when I made friendships I still hold today. All the years I spent worrying
that I was weird or odd were absolved so quickly here. For the first time in my life, I actually fit in.
Boston gave me the space to be myself without making me feel like a freak for it, and in finding a home, I grew to appreciate my former one. Coming home from school back to the South became a lot more bearable with the knowledge that it didn’t have to feel like home and instead, it was the place I was raised in. I could appreciate the fact that this place gave me some of my lingo and a sweet tea addiction without the pressure of feeling like I needed to be like everyone else here. I didn’t feel guilty for missing the South sometimes because the knowledge that I belonged somewhere gave me freedom to love the places I didn’t without the obligation to hold on to the “No place like home” mentality.
This summer, I’m home, and my grandmother told me something felt different. She said, “I’ve never seen you so excited to be back here.” I’m working in my small town’s local pub, making 70% less than I did at Tatte, and I miss Boston; I miss “home,” but I have no problem soaking up every once bright and good thing that the place I was raised in has to
Because Something Can be Cruel and Deserving of Gratitude
NOLA CRUMPTON | ALABAMA
I see the chain from the first fence created by man. It is the same one we’ve all seen— the one that lives in Gadsden, Alabama. Houses a tree and a swing not found in the picture. A girl pushing us on the swing, her father watching, spitting tobacco out of his mouth, & commenting on the heaviness of her mascara. The same old fence that housed the raccoon, the one that lived and breathed & died in those pages. Took the boy with the hatchet bubbling in his chest as a sacrifice. It is the same old sun, & the weeds you swear you will forget. You never do, the image staying with you—the way the mundane and forgettable remain firm in your mind. Not because there is some hidden beauty or deeper meaning, but because you so fervently wished to forget it. And to wish is to immortalize a thought into something beyond reason, it is to learn that faith is quiet, that wisdom is lonesome, solitude, a death wish, and once you know what it means to be lonely, it’s hard to unsee that which serves as a reminder that you weren’t always. So it gets hidden, with all that scorn and despair in the thickness of the
air. And despair is a lot like humidity, it is an indication that something has yet to be let go of. And the South holds on to her past. I watch it chew away at her and adopt those same self-destructive tendencies. Call it culture, taste it in my mother’s
from landfall
NOLA CRUMPTON | ALABAMA
Things are easier to encompass when they are young.
My mother spent her Sundays choking weeds in the garden. It has become a jungle of dandelions and gravel and before night killed day out of envy, out of pure goddamn spite, she complained to me that the neighbors stole her idea to build a greenhouse.
What isn’t yours won’t appear in front of you.
We watch Dead Poets Society, I know he is set to die within the first ten minutes, some people are set to die in the rising action and my sister howls and curses me for my
cleverness, my goddamn wickedness. My mother
looks at me with astonishment, asks me, “How did I know?”
How was I supposed to tell her I just did. Same way I knew magic does not work if there is a mirror present and she praised my mind and crooned over my face. “How did you get so beautiful?” she would always ask and I would tell her I never knew, but I did and I do, same way I can spot what comes before it does. It is because of her, and in spite of her and in conjunction with the fact that the beginning has choked her out and she is gone for good, for goddamn good, I hope.
ART IN ALABAMA:
An Interview With Visual Artist Rose Kimbrough
LAUREN UNDERBERG | TEXAS, GEORGIA, ALABAMA
Rose Kimbrough is a 19-year-old artist born in Birmingham, AL, and working out of Tuscaloosa and Alabaster. She is a student at the New College at the University of Alabama, exploring the connection between art and culture. She works at the Sarah Moody Gallery and has had work most recently shown in the West Alabama Juried Exhibit, “Heirloom” in New Orleans, and “ALABAMA” at the Bells Gallery in Dothan. She focuses on how printmaking can connect individuals through the shared experiences of the South. She also believes that if you make art, then you are an artist, no matter the stage or level you are at.
Alongside being a talented artist, Rose is also my friend and former classmate from when we attended the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA) in Birmingham. This spring, I had the pleasure of catching up with her about her recent work and exhibits, alongside discussing her practice as an artist in the South and what advice she has for other emerging artists.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity—the unabridged version can be accessed online!
You mentioned that you’ve gravitated toward printmaking, specifically in how it connects people through the shared experience of being in the South. What drew you to focus on printmaking as an expression of this experience?
Well, historically, printmaking has been used as a form of art to communicate things—like, the earliest form of it was used to make replications of the Bible, and then it was used to make replications of food menus or newspapers, or the first printed books. Even street signs are a form of printmaking. So printmaking has this deep history of being used for the creation of things that you need to communicate with other people. And that communication is very mundane, and it’s something that everyone can relate to—like, everyone has seen a menu, everyone’s picked up a book. Everyone knows what a newspaper is. It’s kind of that mundane, everyday-ness that drew me to it, ‘cause it’s something that everyone can understand. Like, you don’t need to be specially equipped as an artist or
an art historian in order to understand it. 30
What was your first introduction to printmaking, or how did you learn the process?
So I first started printmaking in—I think it was actually eleventh grade, like halfway through the year, ‘cause I used to be an oil painter, and then I had a really bad critique. And my teacher, Darius Hill, was like, “Okay, you need to scrap painting, don’t paint anymore, do something else.” And so I was like, “Okay, what do I do?” Then he introduced me to printmaking, and he just showed me how to do the basic black and white, like, wood-carving, and then I was kind of like, this isn’t for me, so then I taught myself glass etching, which is what I do now.
Last year, your senior show had a focus on the forgotten landscape of the South: all those weather-beaten sheds on the side of the road, and houses overgrown with weeds. Ironically, these are the parts that we encounter most in the South, yet tend to overlook or deride as eyesores. What drew you to these subjects as a Southerner and an artist?
Art by Rose Kimbrough
I was kind of thinking about abandonment a lot—like it started out really singular with me just thinking about my own life and my own childhood, and where most of my qualms come from, or why I react a certain way to certain things. And I started to notice a commonality within that is the theme of abandonment. Then I was thinking about southern-ness and, as the South, we have a lot of used car lots or we have a lot of houses that got missed by red-lining or gentrification, or someone couldn’t buy that land for some reason—so it just has this abandoned home sitting on top of it. And you can look at a home and you can think about your own home and you can imagine a family growing up in that home; you can imagine, like, a mom cooking, you can imagine a 31 dad mowing the lawn, but when you actually look, there’s no one there—it’s just abandoned. And anyone can buy the lot and fix up the house, but the thing is, who wants to put that much work into things when there’s replications of them ready for move-in?
So it’s this underlying appreciation for what’s there and the fact that it survived so long. Like these abandoned places have weathered so much and yet they still stand, but it’s also like a memorial, too, for the family that was there and no longer is, and I just feel like it’s a really southern thing.
You recently had an exhibit at the nonprofit artist collective East Village Arts in Birmingham called The Sunbelt; The Convex Inverse of Rings. What was your inspiration ... and could you describe what your experience was like putting it together?
I think I’d been working on that piece for a couple months, and I wanted to combine 2D and 3D art and see what I could make out of that. And the more I worked on it, the more I realized 3D work can be more interactive. So I started printing on the front and the back of the work, and then I suspended it within space, so it could dangle freely from the ceiling and people could walk around it. Depending on where you’re standing, you can see the entire picture, or you can see one side of the entire picture. So I had just created the work, and I needed somewhere
for it to go. East Village Arts—they don’t have a lot of funding or a lot of traction, especially not from younger artists, so I was also thinking about the community that I wanted to reach, and I contacted them because they just kind of embody the community that I’m interested in.
And I was also thinking about this homely eclectic feeling from the space, so I decided to ask other artists to put up their work in order to retain that homeliness. So I’m also thinking about how work has a conversation with other work within a space. And it was pretty good—I mean, I set it up, we had the reception, gave a little artist’s talk. A lot of people came, so that was nice. It felt special in its own way.
Art by Rose Kimbrough
In your bio, you say you believe that if anyone makes art, then they’re an artist, regardless of their experience or skill level. How has your view of an artist been
shaped by your experience growing up in and working as an artist in the South?
When I was younger, I heard stories about my great-grandmother being a knitter and making dresses because of the Great Depression. And I feel like that’s a form of creation—like it was a form of creation made out of necessity, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it was a form of creation made by two loving hands. So to me, that’s a form of art. And southern folk art is so deeply rooted in the everyday life that I feel like anything can be considered art, like the way we cook is an art, and the way that Southerners have relationships with cars, or guns, or their hunting dog—like that’s a form of art. Art doesn’t necessarily have to be something physical, it just has to be something personally meaningful.
So when you apply to galleries, oftentimes you’ll see a warning, and it’ll either say “For artists at any stage,” or it’ll say “seasoned artist” or “professional artist.” But seasonal or professional—to me, those don’t mean anything within the art world, ‘cause it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing something; the work will speak for itself. If the work is good, then the work deserves to be seen. If the work is meaningful, if the work is thoughtful, then that’s the only thing that matters. I feel like people have these preconceived notions of what it means to be something; we always just put people in a box, and it’s detrimental to contemporary art because oftentimes those people who are making this impactful, meaningful work—they don’t have the resources to be a “seasoned artist” or like a “professional artist” (which I just think is stupid), and so then they’re never recognized.
What were the most valuable and challenging parts about developing your practice as an emerging artist in the South?
It’s been really rewarding because most of the people who view my art are from the South because my art is within the South. So people usually connect with it, and they’ll tell me stories about how the image reminds them of, like, their grandparents, and it makes me really happy. Those relationships are really important, and it just helps remind me that I need to keep a level head and stay humble, and that the artist is overrated, and the work is what matters. And I feel like that’s helped me stay the 33 person that I am.
But it’s also been hard because in the South, everyone is extremely opinionated, and I think—I mean, that’s the beauty of it, but it can also be pretty bad because you’ll have people who just dog on
you for what you’re doing, or they’ll question what’s the point of this or why do you do this, or aren’t you worried about not making any money or being nothing? Because southern people have these very strong ideals of work ethic. So when you do something that isn’t, like, physically or mentally laboring—or conceived as those things—then it’s hard for people to connect. But I try to keep that southern work ethic within me when I create my work, so I’m kind of always physically and mentally laboring over my pieces, and, to me, even though that’s a hardship, I also feel like it’s extremely beneficial because then
Art by Rose Kimbrough when southern people go to see my art, they connect with it more because I’ve spent so much time laboring over it.
What’s a piece of advice that you’d give to a young or emerging artist from the South?
I would say put down the paintbrush because that’s probably what you’re doing right now. And then I would tell them to close those “How to draw” books that are at the public library and just put a pen on some paper and make sure it’s unerasable, and just see what happens. ‘Cause I feel like southern art is all about finding things and making things useful and the resources that you can create for yourself. And so you don’t need to be born into some artist’s family, you don’t need to be born into anything. Like you’re born with two hands and even if you’re not, you’re still born with the capabilities to make art, so just make it. And stop concerning yourself with what you think other people should think about it or what it should look like because there’s no formula for it—like it’s not gonna look any way that you want it to look. Art has a mind of its own, and it’s born out of your subconscious, so your upfront conscious—you just don’t listen to that, and you just let everything else flow to you.
CONTRIBUTOR BIOS IN THEIR WORDS
Rachel Grey
Rachel Grey is a filmmaker, writer, and artist currently majoring in Media Arts Production at Emerson College. Born and raised in Morgantown, West Virginia, Rachel’s work aims to highlight Appalachian culture and identity.
Piper Greene
Piper Greene is a freshman journalism major from Knoxville, Tennessee. She’s an ardent lover of national parks, Waffle House, loitering outside of gas stations, and the Alabama Crimson Tide. While life in the South has its challenges, she believes it has given her a deep-rooted respect for tradition, community, and the land. Like an old man from the holler once told her, “This country is ours to tend, young’uns, never you be forgettin’ it.”
Hailey Ham
Hi there! I’m Hailey Ham, I’m a big literature, art, and music nerd. I’m currently an English major at Texas State University with an art history minor, and I predominantly write short stories and opinion essays.
Amelia Oei
Amelia Oei is a senior at Emerson College pursuing a Bachelor’s in Writing, Literature, and Publishing, alongside a Master’s in Publishing and Writing. Their writing has been published in Lunchbox and Milk Crate, and she has experience in editorial and production roles, including as Editor-in-Chief of Green Magazine. Passionate about storytelling, she aims to create work that informs and inspires positive change.
Susanne Salehi
Susanne Salehi (she/they) is a queer Iranian writer. Their partner and two cats are the loves of their life and they live in the American South, which you can pry from their humid, sweaty hands (please don’t). They’re happiest when gardening, reading, cross stitching, or accumulating silly tattoos—they’re particularly proud of the screaming possum. Find them at www.susannesalehi.com.
Anna Woods
Anna Woods is an Emerson student studying journalism and publishing. She is originally from Pineville, Kentucky.
