Sherry Chandler

A nominee

Felicia Mitchell, nominated by the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature for inclusion in Sundress’s 2008 Best of the Net anthology, calls her online chapbook There Is No Map

Here is his Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Will it help if I say that I was so homesick for South Carolina two weeks ago that I got into Google Earth and called up a tiny corner of Williamsburg County, my mother’s birthplace, and then moved to the small town of Sumter, where I was born, to find the exact neighborhood where I once played with my brothers in the dirt with our coal bucket in the backyard? It’s possible that living where I have lived for twenty years, southern Appalachia, could make me a southerner, but that’s not the case. My roots are in South Carolina, and when spring comes I’m like a dog catching a scent in the air. I want to get in the car and drive down the mountain to the low country where I was born and bred, where generations of my family were born and bred. Two years ago I brought my mother, Mama, up near me to live, and you’d think that having her with her equally southern accent and charm ten miles down the road in a cozy nursing home that I visit almost too much would make me feel as if I’d brought the most important part of South Carolina, my father already buried down there, up to me. I’ll tell you the truth. When the two of us get together and sit on the porch (since I picked her nursing home because it has a porch and flowers she can tend and horses across the street that we can watch and all the loving care you’d get in a big extended family living in a big house the way her family did a few generations ago), it’s almost like being back on her porch. But it’s not quite the same.
Would I lose points if I said I qualify for Colonial Dames but am not at all likely ever to join? Having moved away from the South Carolina where my family had lived for generations without straying far, having married a man from New Jersey, having borne a son who doesn’t talk like he comes from South Carolina—these things should not be held against me.

I currently live in Meadowview, a rural town in Virginia near the border of Tennessee, and work in Emory, an even more rural town in the interior of Meadowview (Emory is a village within a town, a very small village within a very small town).

Her nominated poem is also called “There Is No Map.” You can read it here.

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There is the list of all six poets nominated by the Mule for The Best of the Net. Like Helen, I hope one of us makes the cut.

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