The Double Threats of Southern Storytelling
A select few Southern writers create fiction and poetry with equally exquisite skill. This week, the award-winning Kentucky poet Willie Carver publishes his first fiction with us, giving us our first peek at a forthcoming “novel in stories and poems.”
What is the most fiendishly challenging feat in creative writing? To write fiction and poetry with equal skill.
Who, among great Southern writers, has pulled it off? Of course, there is the late Robert Penn Warren, who wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the Kings’s Men at the same time he was serving as the Poet Laureate of the United States.
Among the living, there is Georgia native Honorée Fannone Jeffers, whose five collections of poetry have won multiple literary prizes and whose 2021 novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, recently won a place on The Atlantic’s list of “The Great American Novels.” North Carolina’s Ron Rash (a Salvation South contributor) has published eight novels, seven short-story collections, and four poetry collections—all of them winning critical praise of the highest order—over the last three decades. And we cannot forget the current Poet Laureate of Kentucky (another Salvation South contributor) Silas House, who is also a New York Times bestselling author of seven novels.
This week, Salvation South is plumb delighted to bring you the first published fiction by another great Kentucky poet, Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr., whose 2023 collection, Gay Poems for Red States, recently won a Stonewall Book Award. When you read Carver’s story, “Shortchanged,” you will be in on the ground floor of a project that could put him in the same league as the writers I just named.
“Shortchanged” is part of an as-yet-untitled “novel in stories and poems” coming from the University Press of Kentucky. In this forthcoming work, Carver writes short fiction and poems whose stories weave through each other. If, while reading “Shortchanged,” a certain dollar-store purchase reminds you of something you’ve read before, you’re remembering Carver’s poem “Requiem for a Dollar Store Christmas Bear,” which first saw the light of day in Salvation South during the holiday season of 2023. We’ve reprinted that poem below so you’ll have it handy.
We think Willie Carver is building something audacious here, and we’re proud to be part of his process. We hope you also enjoy this week’s essay from a new contributor, Becki Clifton of southeastern Georgia, and a collection of four poems that honor Harriet Tubman, who first escaped slavery 175 years ago this week.
—“Shortchanged”: new fiction from Kentucky poet Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.
—“Chicken. Dumplings. Legacy.”: a farming essay from Georgia’s Becki Clifton
—“I Do Believe in Miracles”: four poems honoring Harriet Tubman by Virginia’s Carol Parris Krauss
Until next week, do justice, love mercy, and be kind to your neighbors.
With gratitude for your readership,
Requiem for a Dollar Store Christmas Bear
By Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.
They cut off the lights to the Christmas tree
when they cut off the lights to the house.
The discouraged winds cried through the December wood
paneled walls of our single-wide trailer, held just back
enough by the melted butter morning sunlight
for us to open the one gift my mom
had scratched out of money
meant for flour and eggs.
Me and sissy each opened a plush white polar bear
who wore a thick red scarf that felt soft like
rabbit ears lying in green spring clover
and if you held real tight to his paw
like you were afraid he’d leave
he’d sing “Silent Night”
in twinkling tones.
He was alive.
At night, I took hold of his offered hand
pressed my face into his soft bear chest
and let his carols bury me below the river
of frozen walls weeping old dirges
I was still too little to understand.
We moved to my aunt’s house
when the water was scared stiff
and it wouldn’t leave its pipes.
My breathing and my body were both too soft
for her husband to share air or blood with,
so mom said, “Just try not to let him see you
and when we get money we can go home.”
I built blood ties, breathed air, kept warm
with the kinship of my white polar bear,
our scattered blankets rising snow,
our fire-swept igloo nestled in the tundra
of the soft light spacetime that let us in
between the box spring and the floor.
One night it rained in the winter,
and the crying ghosts found us
came flooding down the walls
begging for us to remember
how they used to be alive.
I closed my eyes
squeezed his paw
and held my breath.
Before the bear even got
to the part that says
all is calm, all is bright
the door cannoned open
and the winds of my uncle
lashed us across imagined borders.
Bear and boy thud against the bed.
“I told you not to play that shit at night cause I need to sleep and you just live to irk me.”
He mauled his shirtless path to the front door
lightning raging against itself in the sky
the bear dangling in terror and shock,
his last dull notes still spraying out.
The screen door screamed open
and rain punched the ground
even though the ground
was already dead.
He threw the bear into the thundering darkness of angry rain.
The walls were wailing.
My drumming breath kept time with them.
The world melted back into motion.
I crawled alone into our igloo.
My mom stood at the event horizon.
I spoke first.
“Do we have money yet?”
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/
