Celebrate 30 years of the OA.
With original work from Imani Perry, Kristen Arnett, Diane Roberts, and so many others, our Spring Issue honors our past and looks into our expansive future.
Magazine
Issue 47, July / August 2003
“The poetic, as I am so elastically and ethereally defining and redefining it, needs an almost surreal sense of liberty, a comfort with its own illogic.” — William Bowers
Essays by William Bowers, Padgett Powell, and Sam Anderson. Mark Schone digs in to New York Times–bestseller J.H. “Jim” Hatfield’s fabricated life. Photography by Adam Shemper. Poetry by C.I.M. Jones and R.T. Smith.
Other contributors include Hal Crowther, David Ramsey, Katy Vine, Paul Reyes, Lauren Wilcox, and more.
Columns & Departments
Editor’s Box
by Marc Smirnoff
NEWS FROM THE FRONT
South Carolina’s forbidden art; hijinks in the Texas Legislature; an artist’s glowing homage to Eudora Welty
Sense of Place
SARDIS, MISSISSIPPI
photographs by Adam Shemper
Local Fare
BUCKING THE TREND
by John T. Edge
Meditations
DIXIE ZEN
by Sam Anderson
The Moviegoer
MALADY OF THE QUOTIDIAN
by William Bowers
MUSIC NOTES
Drive-By Truckers, Prefuse 73, Dwight Yoakam, and more.
FINE PRINT
Rick Bragg’s idea of a good book; a reissue of a 1909 novel and the Orange Prize winner reviewed; Newt Gingrich rewrites history.
Gone Off Up North
PEANUTS, MAMA, AND ROBERT E. LEE
by Roy Blount, Jr.
Dealer’s Choice
THE THREE GRACES
by Hal Crowther
Southern Scenes
SARDIS, MISSISSIPPI
photograph by Adam Shemper
Features
ANDALUSIA IS OPEN
Descending on Flannery O’Connor’s farm, where visitors are sometimes welcome.
by Padgett Powell
UNFORTUNATE CON
How deed did Jim Hatfield’s self-deception run? The lonely criminal behind the presidential scandal-that-wasn’t.
by Mark Schone
THE GOLDEN ERA OF HEARTBREAK
When love fails, you might have to depend upon the cruelty of strangers.
a story by Michael Parker
Poetry
THE LATIN FOR CICADA
by C.I.M. Jones
DIRECTLY
by R.T. Smith
Cover photograph by Debbie Fleming Caffrey