Projects
Foster Dickson is a writer, editor, and teacher in Montgomery, Alabama. His work has centered on the American South, Generation X, the arts and humanities, education, sustainability, and social justice, with special attention to telling neglected or forgotten stories.
Current Projects
Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore
Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore is an online anthology of creative nonfiction works about beliefs, myths, and narratives in Southern culture over the last fifty years, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Created in 2020, the anthology collects personal essays, memoirs, short articles, opinion pieces, and contemplative works about the ideas, experiences, and assumptions that have shaped life below the old Mason-Dixon Line since 1970. Access to Nobody’s Home is and will continue to be free, and while the project is intended for a general readership, it also has accompanying resources for teachers to use the works in their classrooms.
Fitzgerald Museum’s Literary Contest and Zelda Award
In 2018, Foster re-designed and began coordinating the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum‘s student literary contest. That year that marked the centennial of Scott and Zelda meeting in Montgomery. Using the original theme “What’s Old Is New,” the newly revamped Literary Contest was opened to high school students and college undergraduates anywhere in the world. Two years later, Foster worked with a new museum director to add the Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald Young Writers Award for Alabama high school students. The creation of this statewide award coincided with Zelda’s induction in the Alabama Hall of Fame in 2020. The 2023 – 2024 school year held the sixth annual Literary Contest and fourth annual Zelda Award.
Dirty Boots
Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century. Written since 2014, its subjects run the gamut.
Southern Movies
The series, which began in 2013, explores images of the South in modern films as well as how those images affect American perspectives on the region. Over more than a century, mainstream movies about the South have offered varied portrayals, and many Americans who have never visited the South (and know little to nothing about it) take their understanding of our complicated culture from the images, characters, and story lines in movies about the South. Whether they are set in the South, feature Southern characters, or both, movies feed and fuel how Americans view and treat the South, and also perpetuate and protect misinterpretations.
Welcome to Eclectic
Continuously published since 2010, the blog Welcome to Eclectic has published everything from opinion pieces and short essays to news about events and publications. Originally called Pack Mule for the New School, the title was changed in 2018 to more accurately reflect writing that is, as the subtitle puts it, “Deep Southern, Diversified & Re-Imagined.” Its focus has remained basically the same: to provide a Generation-X perspective on the modern multicultural South, education, and social justice, as well as books, literature, reading, and movies.
Past Projects
level:deepsouth— for Generation X
level:deepsouth was a crowdsourced online anthology about growing up Generation X in the Deep South during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. From 2020 through 2023, the anthology published long-form and shorter works of nonfiction, as well as book reviews and a variety of images. It was created with the goal of documenting and sharing the experiences of Generation X in the South during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s by collecting personal essays and memoirs about our lives back then and since then. Though any submission that fit the subject matter was considered, Foster was primarily interested in essays or memoirs by writers who were born between 1965 and 1980, and who grew up in the region.
A Moveable Feast
From early 2015 until mid-2022, Foster had an extracurricular schoolyard garden at the arts high school where he taught. The project was designed to provide students with opportunities to learn about raising flowers, vegetables, and herbs on a small scale without the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The project began with six raised beds at the school’s Union Street campus, then was rebuilt with two in-ground tracts at the Hayneville Road campus after an August 2018 fire that forced a move. To learn more about this project, visit the School & Community Gardens page.
curriculum guide for Alabama in Fourteen Foods (2019)
The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods by Emily Blejwas is available from University of Alabama Press. The book was published in July 2019 and is accompanied by Foster’s curriculum guide, which contains lesson plans and other resources to help teachers use the book in the classroom. From the publisher’s description: “The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods explores well-known Alabama food traditions to reveal salient histories of the state in a new way. In this book that is part history, part travelogue, and part cookbook, Emily Blejwas pays homage to fourteen emblematic foods, dishes, and beverages, one per chapter, as a lens for exploring the diverse cultures and traditions of the state.”
Chasing Ghosts
Foster Dickson’s family came into the Deep South in the late 1700s, settling first in the Carolinas, then Georgia, and finally in Alabama in the mid-1800s. This series explores that history. The series came about when Foster’s father passed away not long after giving him a large box of family history materials that he had been compiling since the 1980s. Foster began working with his family history in 2013, using newer digital tools and archives to expand on his father’s findings, and these posts are some of the results. To begin, you should read the first post: “It’s like he knew it was coming.”
Patchwork: A Chronicle of Alabama in the New South
Working in 2009 and 2010 within an Arts Teacher Fellowship from the Surdna Foundation, Foster Dickson spent a year traveling around Alabama, visiting places and sites, interviewing people, taking pictures, reading state history books, and following state news, then he used what he found to produce a blog, videos, a podcast, and a staged reading. (Though these are common today, they were not in 2010.) Because Patchwork was ultimately still a writing project, the final product was the staged reading “You Can’t Know Where You’re Going (When There’s Something in Your I),” which was performed at Auburn University at Montgomery’s Southern studies-themed Liberal Arts Conference in 2011.
honeydü: the sweetest thing
Published in 2002 and 2003, this literary magazine focused on publishing eclectic and unconventional writers in the modern South. Three issues were produced and distributed. After the initial print run for each issue was gone, subsequent copies were made available via print-on-demand. Contributors to those three issues included Tom House, Ron Whitehead, Sebastian Matthews, Kyes Stevens, and Bellee Jones-Pierce. In addition to the literary magazine, the project also published a small number of broadsides.
Student Literary Magazines
The Prelude (2023 – present)
The literary and art magazine of Huntingdon College, The Prelude, was founded in 1928. Notable contributors have included novelist Nell Harper Lee, poet Andrew Hudgins, and poet Jacqueline Allen Trimble. Foster became the magazine’s advisor in 2023, shortly after joining the college’s faculty a year earlier.
Graphophobia (2004 – 2020, 2022)
The literary magazine of Booker T. Washington Magnet High School, Graphophobia was given its name by students in the 2003 – 2004 school year. (Previous titles for the publication had been Pneuma and Moxie.) Foster took over as the magazine’s advisor that year when he became the Creative Writing magnet instructor. Graphophobia was continuously published until 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic affected in-person learning, and it won state and national awards in the 2000s and 2010s.
Foster Dickson 