A Deep Southern, Diversified & Re-Imagined Recap of 2024
2024 was a very different year for this middle-aged writer, editor, and teacher. After the release of Faith. Virtue. Wisdom. in October 2023, I had no full-length project that I was working on— for the first time in twenty years. But I restarted the Dirty Boots column, wrote several long-form posts for Welcome to Eclectic, and Nobody’s Home has been moving steadily along. My job at the college as the Academic Writing Advisor has also settled in, and I taught some 200-level lit survey classes in the fall. After we announced the winners of the Fitzgerald Museum’s sixth annual Literary Contest in March, I turned the contest back over the museum director. It has been the quietest year for my writing in a long time. Now, as 2024 comes to a close, here is a recap of what has been published on the blog (and a few things on Nobody’s Home) this year:
Posts
Sharing the Good Stuff: Bipartisanship and Problem-Solving, on Meet the Press (December)
Dirty Boots: Drivin’ N Cryin’ @ Saturn Birmingham (December)
Dirty Boots: 1994 (November)
The First One in a Long Time: A Poem in Boudin (November)
The Work, As 2024 Winds Down (October)
Dirty Boots: Confederates in the Attic, Re-Visited (October)
A Deep Southern Throwback Thursday: The WAPX Shootout, 1974 (October)
Sharing the Good Stuff: A Hopeful Take on Climate Action, from PBS News Hour (September)
Dirty Boots: Backstories (August)
A Legitimate Educational Interest (August)
Another Batch of New Works in Nobody’s Home (August)
Dirty Boots: “Democracy in America” (July)
The Open Submissions Period for Nobody’s Home ends today. (June)
Conrack, 50 Years Later (June)
Dirty Boots: Just Like Jim Stark’s Blues (June)
Dirty Boots: Disturbing the Peace (May)
Throwback Thursday: The Community Legacy Project, 2015 (May)
Dirty Boots: A Joyous and Inexplicably Necessary Thing (May)
The 2024 Open Submissions Period for Nobody’s Home (April)
Tuskegee, Before and After (April)
Throwback Thursday: The Haiku Year, 2004 (April)
Dirty Boots: Who Knows . . . (March)
Dirty Boots: Shorty Price (February)
Dirty Boots: The Third Third (January)
50 GenX Movies You’ve Probably Forgotten or Never Seen (January)
Eerily Prescient but Also Mistaken (January)
and published in “Groundwork,” the editor’s blog for Nobody’s Home:
Stone, A Rock, and Free Posters: A Rumination on Religion and Politics (December)
Hold Steady and Stick Together: A Rumination on School-Choice Vouchers (January)
Reading
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
The Shadow of a Great Rock by Harold Bloom
Loving Our Enemies by Jim Forest
The Gospel of Life by Pope John Paul II
My review of From Every Stormy Wind that Blows by S. Jonathon Bass (July)
My review of Glass Cabin by Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel (July)
and published in “Groundwork,” the editor’s blog for Nobody’s Home:
Getting Right with God by Mark Newman (2001)
Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State by Andrew Gelman, et. al. (2008)
Southern Politics in the 1990s by Alexander P. Lamis (1999)
Watching
The Watchlist Lives! (The Great Watchlist Purges, Part . . . whatever) (July)
and published in “Groundwork,” the editor’s blog for Nobody’s Home:
Review: Lost Child (2017) (October)
Watching How the Monuments Came Down on PBS (June)
Review: My Cousin Vinny (1992) (May)
Watching The Harvest from American Experience on PBS (March)
Southern Movies
Stroker Ace (1983)
The Legend of Billie Jean (1985)
Incoming Freshman (1979)
The Beast Within (1982)
A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004)
Shanty Tramp (1967)
Murder in Coweta County (1983)
Beasts of the Southern Wild (2011)
Read more from past years:
A Deep Southern, Diversified & Re-Imagined Recap of 2023
or A Deep Southern, Diversified & Re-Imagined Recap of 2022
or A Deep Southern, Diversified & Re-Imagined Recap of 2021
or A Deep Southern, Diversified & Re-Imagined Recap of 2020
