A Toast to Unforgettable Stories and a Call to Join the Family Circle

There isn’t one South. There are 10,000. Join us on our journey to tell the stories of them all.

By Chuck Reece

Dec 9, 2023

We began our membership drive three weeks ago—this celebration of our second birthday and this plea to you, our readers, to contribute to our ability to make it to our third. We would happily fry chicken for you who have joined the Salvation South Family Circle recently, and we’d add deviled eggs for those who have been members all along. As always, we invite our members and nonmembers alike to share your thoughts with us about what we publish, either in the comments section at the bottom of each piece, or by just hitting the reply button to one of these emails.

I hope your opinion of what we’ve published during these recent weeks is high, because we worked hard to amaze you during this drive. We’ve brought you:

A remarkable short documentary about the dying gasps of the coal industry from Oscar-nominated West Virginia filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon.
The first short fiction in seven years from the acclaimed Mississippi novelist and screenwriter Michael Farris Smith.
A fiery poem called “A Note to Florida Legislators on the Skills My Ancestors Allegedly Received During Their Period of Enslavement,” in response to the ridiculous Black History curriculum put in place by the Florida public schools, from Jacqueline Allen Trimble, the award-winning poet and National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow.
Collections of poems from the acclaimed writers Kari Gunter-Seymour, a ninth-generation Appalachian and Poet Laureate of Ohio, and William Woolfitt, the acclaimed Tennessee writer.
A thoughtful and moving personal essay about the power of feeding each other by the Rev. Justin Cox, a North Carolina preacher gone north to New England, known to his followers as the “Black Sheep Baptist.”
Another powerful essay from acclaimed novelist Jonathan Odell about how the mythology of the Lost Cause crumbled before his eyes in a 1963 Mississippi classroom on the day President John F. Kennedy died.

Salvation South has been so proud over the past year to bring you writing of such a high caliber. This is pretty high cotton for a publication that comes to you every week from a tiny house and a tinier red barn in Clarkston, Georgia—or, as our mayor likes to call it, “the most diverse square mile in America.”

Living here, we see the real South every day—filled with faces of people from all over the world who come here to find refuge, to build new lives, and to add their own flavors to the ever-simmering gumbo pot we call Southern Culture. We are the publication that brings you stories from that South, the one forever wrestling with itself to find new sources of hope. And in our stories and poems and films and photographs, we hope you can find your own reasons to reflect on—and take heart in—the wonderfully mixed blessings of being a Southerner.

My wife and business partner Stacy and I believe that bringing you these stories is our calling. We’ve been blessed this year to expand our audio production relationship with the good folks at Georgia Public Broadcasting. The Salvation South Podcast, which for eighteen months was limited to carrying the three-minute commentaries from me that GPB airs every Friday on its twenty-station radio network, this month expanded to include new monthly episodes that take a longer form. They are super special interviews with and stories about people who are changing—or already have changed—our region. They are so special, in fact, that we are proud to label these episodes with a special name: Salvation South Deluxe.

Click that skillet to join the Salvation South Family Circle

We do this work only through the support of folks who join what we call the Salvation South Family Circle. Our readership and listenership number in the tens of thousands, but our Family Circle membership numbers in the hundreds. We are deeply—eternally—grateful to those hundreds of folks who support our work with their annual or monthly subscriptions. But we truly need to expand their number over the remaining week of our membership drive.

If you have not yet stepped into the Family Circle, please do so today. Or certainly by Friday, which will be the final day when your membership will bring the sweet swag—hoodies, T-shirts, kitchen towels, stickers—that comes around only once a year at membership drive time.

For two years now, we’ve kept our doors open, never hiding our stories behind a paywall, and always telling folks to come in and stay a while. We hope that you will return the hospitality by throwing your dollars into the love-offering plate that we call the Family Circle.

As we said when we began, we love you, and there ain’t a damned thing you can do about it. Especially our members.

With gratitude,

Chuck and Stacy Reece

Chuck Reece

Website

Chuck Reece is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Salvation South, the weekly web magazine you're reading right now. He was the founding editor of The Bitter Southerner. He grew up in the north Georgia mountains in a little town called Ellijay.