Editor’s Note: Dirt and Desire

Our second issue of south is dedicated to Patsy Yaeger’s path-breaking Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing 1930–1990. Published in 2000, the book set a new paradigm for inquiry and perhaps even a longing for study of and in the south. In many ways this journal’s new direction represents the child of that endeavor. When James Crank came to me with the proposal for a special issue on Yaeger’s work, I couldn’t have framed it better myself. This issue’s focus on Dirt and Desire showcases writing from a variety of scholarly locations and in it, you will find critical and creative non-fiction, speculative and archival home spaces.

I will leave it to Professor Crank to articulate the intellectual terrain for this issue. In the meantime, I would like to give readers a taste of what’s to come. We will be back to special issues in Fall of 2017 with “Crisis/Opportunity.” I am pleased to announce that board member, Robin D. G. Kelley will be the guest editor of this exciting collection of scholarly manifestos and reports from the troubling terrain of our contemporary southern cosmos. Please see the CFP both here and on-line (http://southjournal.org).

In leaving you this time, I want to make a few parting remarks. When I read this collection of fine essays and reflections on the work and life of Patsy Yaeger in its entirety, I wept. Joy and grief. Despair and longing. These are the halogen moments of our present in the “south.” We hold our breath waiting for some good news for a change. I recall the words echoed across the essays collected here: all we have or know is mostly given to many of us through her words, as some of us were not lucky enough to come into her orbit. If that’s all we have or know, it sustains us. It sustains me. I, for one am glad for Patsy Yaeger. RIP.