The Editor’s Favorite Writing
Our editor-in-chief picks his favorite pieces from Salvation South in 2024.
I can't claim to be an authority on this year's best books or music. I can, however, claim to have immersed myself in every word Salvation South has published this year.
It’s been an exceptional year. Our literary output has been substantial: approximately 175 pieces of prose and poetry, not including our podcast episodes and weekly radio commentaries. It's a testament to the vibrant creativity flowing through our region. Salvation South’s ability to attract the work of our region’s finest authors—and to surface the work of exceptional talents you haven’t heard of—makes me proud.
To cap off the year, poetry editor Andy Fogle and I are inaugurating what we hope will become an annual tradition. We're taking a moment to reflect on and curate our favorite works from Salvation South's 2024 catalog. In this piece, I'll share my top picks from our prose selections. You'll find Andy's poetry choices in a companion article.
For an extra treat, we're also swapping roles. Look out for "The Prose Editor's Favorite Poems and the Poetry Editor's Favorite Prose," where we step into each other's literary shoes.
We value your thoughts on our selections. Feel free to share your opinions in the comments at the bottom of our lists or via email. Your engagement enriches this literary community.
As we wrap up another year of Southern storytelling, we extend warm wishes for whatever holiday you celebrate—be it Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, or even Festivus. And here's to 2025, when we'll keep working to give you writing that'll complicate the world's understanding of the South.
Chuck’s Favorite Nonfiction From 2024
Alphabetical by title (with one exception)
“The Only Lie” by Anita Garner
Anita Garner grew up in 1950s Arkansas, a child of Brother Ray and Sister Fern Jones, a married couple—preacher and musician, respectively—who traveled the South evangelizing. Garner’s sharp, approachable writing takes us into the odd (and oddly Southern) lives of her parents, but focuses on her father’s choice to keep a friend’s dark deed hidden for decades. “The worst part about the secret we kept is that because of it, one person’s entire life was allowed to disappear, swept back into a corner where memory eventually fades, as if by not speaking the name, the deed could be erased,” Garner begins her story. “I was eleven years old then and my brother was thirteen. Decades later, we still wondered how things might have turned out if everyone had known the truth.” And from there, you won’t be able to put it down.
“Preservation” by Erica Abrams Locklear
Like Erica Locklear, I too grew up eating leatherbritches—or sun-dried green beans. They are a mountain thing, born of self-sufficient country people who needed to feed themselves over the winter, in the days before canning became possible. But “Preservation” is far more than a story about Appalachian foodways. It’s about the tenacity of Appalachian people—specifically embodied in the person of her father, who kept at work in his garden and putting up leatherbritches as he fought cancer. Her daddy lost parents and grandparents when he was a teenager, and spent his final year of high school living alone in the house where he grew up. “He was and is interested in preserving the foodways of his childhood, including how to make leatherbritches,” Erica writes. “But my father preserves so much more. He is a walking local history of Big Sandy Mush and the only person I know who can identify every mountain peak in sight. Sometimes I wonder if hours spent making food ‘the old way’ provides a memory path to happy times, one that takes a detour around the years when, as he puts it, ‘everybody started dying.’”
“A Stranger Goes on a Journey” by Laney Lenox
Two of the toughest stories for any Southerner to write are: 1) how the South is viewed from afar, and 2) how the South is viewed from within. When Laney Lenox proposed to write the former for Salvation South—specifically, a piece about how the South looks from Europe—she was still exploring which conclusions to draw. But her search for answers yielded this elegant essay. Lenox, an anthropologist, was born in Louisiana. She began her academic career in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she lived for nine years. Now, she lives and works in Berlin. The homes of her birth and current life carry similarly burdensome legacies: slavery in the American South and the Holocaust in Germany. “For me, a white Southerner, I wonder how to write about home without confronting my own complicity and inherited responsibility, as well as the joy and connection I feel to this place,” Lenox writes. As she continues, she begins to wonder if the prospect of such a confrontation is what has kept her in Europe: “In Germany or Ireland, although both of these places have become homes to me, I can rest in the comfort of not having a past or a history in the place.” Lenox’s internal dialogues Are eye-opening and mind-expanding for any Southerner.
“Seeing the Country, Whole” by Lenny Wells
Speaking of the two most difficult stories for Southerners to write, Lenny Wells chose the second one: how to see the South from within. Wells is a South Georgia pecan farmer and professor of horticulture. Family connections have caused him to visit southwestern Montana regularly over the past several years. Through his eyes—so finely attuned to nature’s wonders—we get compelling descriptions of how he came to “feel the landscape” of the mountain West. “But our home ground,” he writes, “that place we know best, can be hardest to see. Especially if it is as plain as my home.” But in Wells’s reckoning, the Georgia coastal plain feels anything but plain. It feels wondrous. “Seeing the Country, Whole” is one of the finest pieces of nature writing I’ve read, not just because it beautifully describes landscapes, but also because of how it quietly and wisely reveals our places inside them.
“Testifying and Telling: Frank X Walker’s Poetic Civil War History” by Jacqueline Allen Trimble
Normally, in choosing my favorite pieces of nonfiction writing, I would be inclined to skip an interview presented primarily in Q&A format. But this conversation between two poets of monumental talent—Kentucky’s Frank X Walker, the founder of America’s longest running group of writers, the Affrilachian Poets, and Alabama’s Jacqueline Allen Trimble—is utterly captivating. Their explorations and revelations of African American history in the South begin from the poems of Walker’s latest collection, Load in Nine Times, which are based on his meticulous historical research into the lives of the U.S. Colored Troops, who fought for the United States in the Civil War. His book, Walker tells Trimble, is “about Black families and what we were doing as Black families—before the war, during the war, and after the war—to hold our families together.” That statement alone sent a chilling new understanding through my body. This discussion about the purposely hidden and wantonly overlooked truths of the Black experience in the South should be required reading.
Chuck’s Favorite Fiction From 2024
Alphabetical by title
“A Single Green Feather” by Ron Rash
There is obsession, and then there is obsession. In this gripping short story by the great Appalachian author Ron Rash, a North Carolina high school teacher finds a feather that looks for all the world like the plumage of an extinct species. The feather leads him to seek a meeting with a rich and reclusive art collector named William Roderick, who has lived alone in his family’s mountain manor for nearly fifty years. Roderick fixates on the rarest of objects, but believes that to allow anyone except himself to see them is to diminish their value—at least, their value to him. When Rash asked Salvation South to publish “A Single Green Feather,” his accompanying note said it was “not my usual kind of story.” It is most certainly not, because it seethes with a sense of impending danger rarely found in this Southern master’s writing.
“Crossed Signals” by Thomas G. Easterling III
Imagine that a nationwide church proposes to erect a cross, 175 feet tall, in your small Mississippi hometown—the loftiest crucifix in the entire state. If you were a good Christian cattleman with a certain amount of success, you might donate a few acres to provide a site for the cross, which is precisely what Joe Hazard, the protagonist of “Crossed Signals,” does. It’s a decision he comes to regret. I won’t spoil the story by telling why—or by whom—the cross ends up burning, except to say it isn’t for the same reason crosses have historically been set alight in Mississippi. “It took a few minutes for the cross to catch fire, but when it did, it burned higher and brighter than any cross in Mississippi history,” Easterling writes. “And that’s saying something.” Thomas G. Easterling III is a longtime teacher in the public school systems of Mississippi, and “Crossed Signals” is the first story he’s ever published. But Salvation South was happy to present it, because Easterling’s sense of the comic is delicious.
“Irish Exits” by George Singleton
Margaret Renkl, the esteemed Nashville writer whose columns for The New York Times represent the South beautifully, once wrote, “George Singleton is nothing less than the Shakespeare of South Carolina.” Thus we were happy to publish work by this bard, who writes in a shed out back of his house as he chain-smokes. An “Irish exit,” if you have never heard the term, describes the action of someone who leaves a party but says goodbye to no one, not even the hosts. Protagonist Janie Doyle, whose husband has been known for his own Irish exits, makes one of her own after she returns a lost dog to the rich folks two blocks over who own the dog, but clearly do not love it. Singleton’s sharp comic sense is evident here, particularly when dog owner Coleman Gregory offers Janie one of his original paintings as a reward: “‘You did this yourself?’ she said. It looked as if Coleman went to a Paint By Numbers museum and copied the original, like any art student enthralled by the masters.” But underneath the funny in “Irish Exits” lies a rich vein of pain and hope and redemption.
“Meet Me There” by M.O. Walsh
M.O. Walsh has hit the New York Times bestseller list and taken home the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize. His second novel, The Big Door Prize, was turned into an HBO series by Schitt’s Creek creator David West Read. Critics have used phrases such as “feel-good read” and “sense of wonder” to describe Walsh’s work. Thus, when “Meet Me There” came over the Salvation South transom, we wondered what those critics would think when they read this. The story begins with the narrator and his brother-in-law, Benny, traveling dangerously fast in the middle of the night through the southeast Louisiana countryside. They are searching for a man named Simon. Their intention is to “bring him the pain.” The narrator does not feel qualified for this mission. “In better days they called me a pacifist, as if I were Christlike and strong,” Walsh writes. “Now they call me a snowflake, like I fell fragile and weak from the clouds.” But along the way, he learns why the mission is personal not only to Benny, but to his own family. Walsh vividly portrays what happens when hatred unites people who are otherwise not one bit alike.
“Where There Are No Trees” by Grace Buckner
Grace Buckner is the youngest writer whose work is on this list, but her talents are prodigious. The process of publishing “Where There Are No Trees” was delayed when Buckner’s home in Hot Springs, North Carolina, fell under the deluge of Hurricane Helene. In that delay she instead delivered her essay “A Love Letter to a Drowned Land,” which she wrote on September 28, four days after Helene first attacked Appalachia, from whatever parking lot could offer her cell service. A few weeks later, though, she put the finishing touches on “Where There Are No Trees,” an all-too-real piece of fiction narrated by a fifth-grader named Samuel, whose dearest wish is to move to some frozen, treeless tundra. Slowly, over the course of the story, we learn the source of Simon’s wish. Buckner’s story would be remarkable enough if only for how she so adeptly inhabits her ten-year-old narrator: “Tonight the lady who gives us Smarties at church came to see us. Mama made dinner and told us that we needed to be nice to Miss Darlene and speak to her when she spoke to us. She said that she didn’t want a lady she didn’t know coming to the house either, but that we had to be friendly to folks who were friendly to us, especially now.” When you discover what’s behind that “especially now” part, your heart will...well...just read the story. You’ll discover a truly talented young writer.
About the author
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.
- Chuck Reecehttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/chuck_reece/
- Chuck Reecehttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/chuck_reece/
- Chuck Reecehttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/chuck_reece/
- Chuck Reecehttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/chuck_reece/
