Featured // Vol. 32, No. 2
Something That I Want to Last
essay by Virginia Evans, Charlie Lovett
Our Past
Browse past issues and articles from the last 30 years
Poetry
As Ever
by Kevin YoungThese poems are taken from The Saltwater Letters, my forthcoming volume chiefly made up of poem-letters to friends, family, and fellow writers. This book-to-be began a number of years ago with a letter to the late Lucille Clifton, then several others coming in quick succession. Then, as I indicate in “Lost Letter to Yusef Komunyakaa,” »
Art
Among Subjects Discussed Last Night
by Daniel Wallace“Fractals came up, as they will, and I pretended to understand them (I don’t). Where does our cat go at night? Still a mystery.” Writing about myself, what I do on a certain day, who I meet, ideas I might have, my views on current events or the cultural moment in which we find ourselves; »
Essay
Vagabond, Dude, Crusader
Reading Pauli Murray Through the Lens of Transgender Studies
by Simon Fisher“Murray’s journey of racial and gender self-definition through mobility, travel, and transmasculine jouissance was intrinsic to their creativity and self-expression.” Pauli Murray (1910–1985) was an African American gender-nonconforming feminist, civil rights activist, legal scholar, and teacher, and, later in life, an Episcopalian priest. Raised largely in Durham, North Carolina, by their maternal aunts, Murray was »
Interview
Woven into the Letters
Translation in Conversation
by Yuri Herrera, Lisa Dillman“Art is an artifact, you know? Once you assume that every single language in literature is a created language, is an artificial language, you feel free to just include whatever is there around you.” Translation is a double form of correspondence between me and Lisa. First, there is the near-daily—or, sometimes, multiple-times-a-day—correspondence we’ve maintained during »
Art
One Mark and the Thing Comes into Play
Drawings, 1976–77
by Allan Gurganus, Tom Rankin“I never feel so smart as I do when I’m drawing, because I have complete control and I can subvert all else that I’ve just made possible.” A “sketch diary” drawing pad Allan Gurganus bought at the Stanford University Art Center, while on a Stegner Fellowship, displays the name “The Globetrotter” and is personally marked »
Essay
Coming In
Carson McCullers's Queer Correspondences
by Anna Creadick“‘Darling, when I share my loneliness with you I cut it in half.’” If she is known for nothing else, Carson McCullers is known for being southern. The Georgia-born New York transplant set her fiction almost exclusively in small, stagnant towns in the Deep South. Despite her personal ambivalence toward the region, she needed to »
Interview
Something That I Want to Last
by Virginia Evans, Charlie Lovett“Moving through the world as a writer is, I think, an experience of moving through the world with your eyes open to observe. Charlie Lovett: The Correspondent is one of my favorite forms of novel or storytelling. It is epistolary. My father taught eighteenth century literature, and the eighteenth-century people wrote epistolary novels. People wrote »
Photo Essay
The Eudora Welty House
by Kate Medley, Michael Pickard“The Welty House speaks to the author’s love of travel, art, music, and the centrality of family to her life. But it is, above all, a home designed for work, which, in Welty’s case, meant reading and writing.” Twenty-five years after the author’s death, Eudora Welty’s home phone number remains the same as it ever »
Essay
An Excursion to the Swamp
Joseph Mitchell's Fairmont
by Scott Schomburg“Often what is hidden in Mitchell’s portraits of New York is a reflection of his life in North Carolina.” One November day some years ago, at the midpoint of my obsession with legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, I drove two hours south from Durham, North Carolina, where I was living at the time, to »
Fiction
For the Pleasure of the Writing
by Tayari Jones, Leoneda Inge“That’s always been part of the mission of my work—to write about the sheer breadth and wonder and scope of our southern lives.” Leoneda Inge: I understand that this book came at a critical time for you, health-wise. Was writing this novel a healing experience for you? Tayari Jones: I feel like this novel really »
Dear Reader
by Marcie Cohen Ferris“We see how the literary tradition of southern letter writing is fundamentally relational, notsolitary; that writers work and are inspired by somewhere specific.” As this is the Arts & Letters issue, it seemed only appropriate to write a letter to you from the historic Love House, where I work and where the Center for the »
Music
“Can’t Keep a Good Hoedown”
Reimagining Country Dancing and Queer Community in Atlanta, Georgia
by Joshua HowardTaking advantage of low property values caused by white flight during the 1960s, many LGBTQ+ individuals made their way into the heart of Atlanta. They established bars, clubs, businesses, and bathhouses in Midtown and Cheshire Bridge, transforming these neighborhoods into hubs of queer nightlife and culture. At the same time, the city was becoming a »
