Verbs, nouns, gerunds, prepositional phrases and stuff from the submission guidelines of yore:
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES * WE LOVE SUBMITTABLE
You can submit a valid Southern Legitimacy Statement if any of the following applies to you or someone you know or someone you made up out of the whole cloth:
you live in The South. Or the North. Or the midwest, northwest, southwest, east, west — any damn where, even Canada or Bulgaria. It’s just a simple thing to write.
you used to live in The South.
your submission is about The South or if you ever thought about the South at some point in your life.
you know where the Mason-Dixon Line is. If, on a map, you can point to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia or any part of The South without first using Google Maps
you have a large extended family and they all eat at MaMaw’s house at Thanksgiving. No matter what! And no one gets to bring PIE because Aunt Fanny always makes the pies. And you can’t bring biscuits, or sweet potato casserole with brown sugar and pecans on top because some Aunt or Grandmother or whatever always makes said items.
And Mamaw’s sister, your Great Aunt Betts alway ALWAYS brings a congealed salad and some of her special home-made sweet pickle relish. And you damn sure better take some of it on your plate and then tell her how good it tastes. Always say “Better than last years!”
your submission is about a Mule (any geographic area acceptable, alive or dead mules)
OR
your personal food pyramid contains at least three of the following: grits, collards, chittlins, fried pies, sweet potato or cheese biscuits, possum, sweet tea. pig pickin’ pork.
you write a good memoir, some fabulous fiction, poetic frenzy fantasticalness, about anything that grabs the reader’s interest — you can submit to be a Mule writer:
Submittable LINK
The South is not about ignorant people any more than it is about kudzu or grits. Oh, wait! yes …. it is about Grits.
Or write about Dr. Jerry Leath Mills and his mind-bending journal article about Mules: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/30885
Get your creativity engines tuned up, change your keyboard spark plugs and get your fiction oil changed. Let the homeless guy with a Windex bottle and a roll of Bounty on Old 2nd St. clean the laptop windshield and don’t forget to give the guy a $2 tip. Rotate your poetic tires. Okay, now I’m rambling… Turn up some Allman Brothers and let’s rock …
There’s no New South, there is only The South.
No good Southern fiction is complete without a dead mule.
No graphic violence or sex and no soft-porn. Please don’t waste our bandwidth.
Essays and stories about inventors, entrepreneurs, scholars, and selfless contributors to the public good. Or rascals, southern-type. Carpetbagging opportunists? Sure, why not.
Geniuses with outhouses and high speed DSL.
–We wrote most of that in 1996 — obviously not the Submittable link. Time flies when you’re having fun.
The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature 