I had big plans for 2020. Plans for my school garden, plans for my students, plans for new projects of my own. But COVID-19 had other plans. After going to the Camp McDowell Farm School last November then the Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network’s Food & Farm Forum last December, I was ready to use that new knowledge to improve the school garden. After receiving another education grant from the Alabama Bicentennial Commission, I was ready to continue with my students in Newtown. After deciding to get off my keister and finally develop the Southern Generation-X project I had thought about for a long time, I was ready to get started. Then a couple-zillion microbes came along and changed everything. But COVID didn’t stop the work entirely – except in the school garden, which did have to stop – though the ideas had to undergo some amendments. Below is a selection of posts from the blog that tell a reasonably solid version of this year’s story. Click on any of the red links to read further.

Posts

Recycling, Money, Sustainability, and Me (February)

A new project . . . level:deepsouth— for Generation X (March)

Congratulations to the Winners of “Love + Marriage” (March)

A Look Back at “Patchwork: A Chronicle of Alabama in the New South” (April)

Literary Arts Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts! (June)

Biographical Sketches of Women Suffragists (June)

Alabamiana: Revisiting Mr. Rice (July)

The Education of a Personage: The Fitzgerald Museum Literary Contest (August)

Call for Submissions for Nobody’s Home (October)

Sketches of Newtown (December)

16,425 Days: The Whitehurst Case (December)

Let’s learn the lesson and move on. (December)

Reading

A Letter Concerning Toleration by John Locke (January)

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (January)

The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton (February)

Let the Dead Bury their Dead by Randall Kenan (April)

How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish (April)

Whose Votes Count? by Abigail Thernstrom (May)

The Death of Innocents by Sister Helen Prejean (May)

A Love Letter to the Earth by Thich Nhat Hanh (May)

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson (August)

St. Mark’s is Dead by Ada Calhoun (September)

Black Elks Speaks as told to Jim Neihardt (September)

Woodrow’s Trumpet by Tim McLaurin (September)

and published in “Groundwork,” the editor’s blog for Nobody’s Home :

Judgment & Grace in Dixie by Charles Reagan Wilson

The Countercultural South by Jack Temple Kirby

Southern Movies 

Macon County Line (1974)

The Klansman (1974)

The Beguiled (1971)

Good Intentions (2010)

The Rainmaker (1997)

The Liberation of LB Jones (1970)

Murder in Mississippi (1965)

Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

Bonus: A Women’s History Month Sampler

Bonus: A “Welcome to Eclectic” Southern Documentary Sampler

Bonus: Another Spooky, Scary Sampler, Old School Edition

Bonus: Yet Another Spooky, Scary Sampler, 21st Century Edition