From Floods to Gunfire

Southern writers respond to our region’s current troubles with words that offer human healing—and pointed challenges.

By Chuck Reece

Oct 5, 2024

Salvation South’s method of responding to the news cycle is to not respond to the news cycle. We wait for the writers of the South who contribute to our publication to process the news and respond to it. Usually, it takes a few weeks. But sometimes, only a few days.

I had a video call set up for earlier this week with a young writer, whose still untitled, fictional short story we had accepted for publication. The plan was to get together on Thursday morning to talk through a few editorial suggestions. But late Wednesday evening, I received an email from her that began this way:

Chuck,

I am in the Ingles parking lot hoping this will send. My hometown was washed away this weekend and I am just now getting the ability to get to wifi and cell service. I am safe, but have no reliable access to wifi or service so I won’t be able to meet tomorrow.

Many people have rescheduled many meetings with me over the decades, but no one, before Grace Buckner of Hot Springs, North Carolina, had asked to rearrange things because where they live had disappeared. But before Grace signed off, she added, “Good news is I’m still writing. And if you would be interested in a dispatch from the flood zone, I’ve got material for you.”

It had taken writers a few weeks to get to us with their responses to the horrendous shootings at Appalachia High School, and we had just finished setting up “Echoes of Gunfire,” the pairing of poems you’ll read this week, when Grace wrote to us about her hometown. We said yes to her offer of a dispatch from North Carolina. Thus, we find ourselves more responsive to the news than we typically are.

It has indeed felt in the last few weeks that too much horror has been visited on our region. It’s beyond my capability to offer prescriptions for bringing an end to the sort of gun violence that resulted in the deaths of two teachers and two students and the wounding of nine others at that high school fewer than thirty miles from Salvation South HQ. I can only say it’s heartbreaking to see a young man who needed psychological counseling unable to get it, but plenty able to get an assault rifle and start killing. The whole episode speaks to the misplaced priorities that seem so common in the modern South.

—“A Love Letter to a Drowned Land”: a dispatch from the French Broad River by Grace Buckner
—“Echoes of Gunfire: Laments”: a pair of poems birthed by school shootings
—“Into the Eye of the Dragon”: an exploration of Kentucky's foreboding Nada Tunnel by Amelia Loeffler

But what we can do at Salvation South is to provide a home for the affecting and piquant words of Yvonne M. Johnson, a member of the revered Affrilachian Poets, and Georgia writer Lillah Lawson, whose poems this week should inspire all of us into action, with the aim of resetting those priorities.

To say we hope you enjoy the writing we share with you this weekend would not be on the money. But we do hope you can feel it. And that it moves you to help in whatever way you can with any of the problems that plague the South we love so much, here in late 2024.

Until next week, do anything you can to help the thousands in need throughout Appalachia, and make sure you are registered to vote.

With gratitude for your readership,

P.S. Don’t miss our upcoming online event featuring acclaimed Appalachian authors Silas House, Neema Avashia, Willie Carver, and Robert Gipe. This special reading and discussion on October 16 will raise funds for the Kentucky Youth Law Project, which supports LGBTQIA+ youth across the state. Signup is free. Donations will be welcome and passionately encouraged.

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.