How often have you heard that we lived in simpler times? When people my age say it, they’re often forgetting the Cold War, the culture war,...

Reprinted from Clarion Ledger Jackson MS April 19, 1962 Ancient Bones Give View Of Past To Digging Crew  Workers digging at the Pearl River ...

South's enduring past intrigues teacher By NELL LITTER FOCUS Staff Writer  Clarion Ledger June 15, 1983 Steve Anspach is a Northerner ch...

I've been thinking of writing a Christmas story.  When I was little, this really remarkable woman gathered artistically leaning people a...

 Tomorrow's story for the Eudora Welty reading group is "A Visit of Charity" from "A Curtain of Green."  The story i...

Reading "A Memory" from Eudora Welty's "A Curtain of Green," it occurs to me that, although she never mentions it, t...

Like many cities in the South, by 1963, Jackson, Mississippi, closed all of its public swimming pools rather than integrate them as required...

 Stage and dance floor, Lamar Theater/Disco, Downtown Jackson, 1979

 We bring them home.  We raise them up.  We fill them up with as much spirit and love and learning as we can possibly find.  One day, you re...

I’ve been delaying working on this for a few days.  Sometimes, what I have to say makes me uncomfortable. My father had eight children. Four...

Tom Cotton was at work.  At sixty-four, he had enough life savings to last him about eleven months, so he figured he’d be working till the d...

 When Lance Goss held auditions for a new play, it was his custom to tell the story of the play briefly for the students wishing to audition...

For quite a while now, I’ve been collecting the urban legends that emanate from students and employees at the University of Mississippi Medi...

 In 1978 I was fifteen years old.  It was the first year I ever fully experienced the darkness inside me.  My family fought through an extra...

 Ken Stribling messaged me last night with corrections about a piece I wrote at 3:00 a.m.  What would I do without friends who can’t sleep e...

This project that I’m calling “Lies My Mother Never Told Me” has been openly banging around in my head for about a year and a half now.   Qu...

If I'm going to write about what happened in the sixties and early seventies, I feel like I need to be able to at least understand and a...