If you don’t yet know The Bitter Southerner, you should. They’ve been telling good stories since 2013, strong stories; stories that make you laugh, and stories that make you cry. There is so much that I love about what they are doing, but I especially love the description below from their “About” page by editor Chuck Reese:

“But there is another South, the one that we know: a South that is full of people who do things that honor genuinely honorable traditions. Drinking. Cooking. Reading. Writing. Singing. Playing. Making things. It’s also full of people who face our region’s contradictions and are determined to throw our dishonorable traditions out the window. The Bitter Southerner is here for Southern people who do cool things, smart things, things that change the whole world, or just a few minds at a time.”

Last Tuesday, they posted a piece about Alabama Chanin , and we are proud. It tells the story we live every day, it cracks open the work, and honestly explains how sometimes we know what we are doing, and how sometimes we do not exactly know what we are doing or the “complexion” of what we want to do, but that we are curious, and we want to do what we do well—with integrity.

But more than all of that, it connects us to our past, to our community, and to friends, and to heroes and heroines, like John Paul White and Rosanne Cash—and to the stories they are telling through the songs they are singing. It’s a piece that makes you want to get back to work. It might make you want to make a road trip.

We are (super) grateful to Kristi York Wooten, Chuck Reese, and all the team from The Bitter Southerner. Please go have a read here and join The Bitter Southerner to help them keep telling stories. (It’s worth the membership fee just for the “BS” bumper sticker.) They launch a new story every Tuesday; sign up for their newsletter to know the score.

Read more on William Faulkner from The New York Times Magazine
Photo from Rinne Allen via The Bitter Southerner