Salvation South

Inevitably, it comes time for the one who loves us best to leave. But maybe she’s always around, like that bird outside the window.

This week, join our Patti Meredith as she interviews George Singleton, a master of the short story—and of making us laugh at ourselves.

As spring arrives, one of the South’s most prolific poets takes us from the celestial to the earthly and back again.

Her father was a Pentecostal minister who never told a lie in his life. Until he did. And it was so big, it stayed with the family forever.

A Tennessee poet guides us into a spring ritual, an old house, dreams of where we’ve been, and dreams of where we’ll be.

“The coyote…has as much right to be here as we do,” environmental activist Edward Abbey once wrote. These days, he wouldn’t get much agreement.

The daughter of a legendary Arkansas pair of revivalists unravels a gripping story about an unspoken truth that haunted her family for decades.

A minister on why he takes his cues from the late Mississippi Rev. Will D. Campbell, who believed all of us were bastards, but that God loved us anyway.

After a lifetime of fishing in—and studying—the rivers of our Blue Ridge Mountains, an ecologist now understands, and grieves, how climate change has altered them forever.

A poem on faith and doubt along the Carolina shore

This weekend’s edition brings writing about a wondrous Southerner and natural Southern wonders.

Robert Lee Coleman, at 18, led a crew of teenage musicians in Macon, Georgia, who played so hot even James Brown came to town recruiting. At 78, he plays even hotter, and he vows to “play until I die.”