From Underneath the Pier to a Tidy Suburb

This week’s stories range from the hard life in Myrtle Beach to the good life—even during the pandemic—in a Birmingham suburb.

By Chuck Reece

Jul 8, 2023

Stacy and I hope y’all had a great Fourth of July. As for me, I ate more than I meant to, including the largest hot dog I’d ever seen in my life, thanks to the Stripling’s General Store in Bogart, Georgia. If you are not familiar with Stripling’s, there are four other towns in Georgia—Cordele, Perry, Brunswick, and Tifton—where you can find these magnificent meat markets. Lucky for us, the one in Bogart is right close to family.

The next day, abundance digested, I dove back into editing our two lead stories, which could not be more different from each other. One, “Sand Dollar,” comes from novelist Patti Meredith, and it’s a fictional account of a woman who’s just one shot away from redemption after too many years on the streets. No more spoilers from me. Just dive in. The other, from Alabama journalist and regular Salvation South contributor Jennifer Stewart Kornegay, is a story about how regular folks came to solve the loneliness and separation that fell on us and stayed during the pandemic. And the way they did it involves putting on KISS makeup, so…fun!

We’re also pleased to have the poetry of Hillary Joubert, a first-time Salvation South contributor who lives and teaches in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

We also are overjoyed to welcome the hundreds of new readers who’ve been turned on, one way or the other, to Salvation South. Our job here is to keep a refuge for Southern storytellers. We depend on your financial support to keep this thing going, and we’d appreciate it if you could chip in.

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Chuck Reece

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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.