“Groundwork,” the editor’s blog of Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore, features project updates, brief ruminations, long-form reviews of books, guidance for submitting writers, quotations from books, and other peripheral bits of interest related to beliefs, myths, and narratives in Southern culture. Because Nobody’s Home is an online anthology, not a print anthology, the format allows for an ongoing editor’s commentary, which in a book would be provided by a single introduction. This dynamic aspect of the project creates opportunities for me, as an editor, to keep the ideas flowing, growing, and evolving, without the limitations of a page count or publication date. And now, as COVID-19 and its associated travel restrictions ease up, I’ll hopefully be more able to include one of the original ideas behind the editor’s blog that I haven’t been able to add yet: to travel and interview ordinary people about beliefs, myths, and narrative. It is titled “Groundwork,” after all.

Below is a sampling of the posts. Click on the links to visit the site and read the post.

April 2021: More Substance than Stereotype

March 2021: Reading Myth and Southern History, Volume 2: The New South

February 2021: Reading Alexander Lamis’ The Two-Party South

January 2021: Reading Stephen A Smith’s Myth, Media, and the Southern Mind

December 2020: Reading Jack Temple Kirby’s The Countercultural South

December 2020: The Looming Specter of the Dormant Voter

November 2020: Reading Charles Reagan Wilson’s Judgment & Grace in Dixie

November 2020: Work

November 2020: Reagan at Neshoba, August 1980

October 2020: Crazy, Wrong Madness

September 2020: A Personal Religion that Goes Public

September 2020: Narratives, Old and New

Forthcoming in May and June are posts on the South to a New Place anthology (literary criticism) and Matthew Lassiter’s The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South.