Q. What is your favorite place, activity, or person related to Mississippi or the best part about growing up and//or living in Mississippi?

A. Mississippi has a way of making you forget where you are. For decades it has moved at sloth’s pace, and while this is not necessarily a good thing, it is not necessarily a bad thing, either. It’s the kind of place where time goes on vacation - everything here is slow: the music, the weather, the enunciation of vowels. It is quite a feat to capture in words all that I love about this state - from its inner forests and flatlands to the hustle and bustle of its coastal life - as this love applies to a part of Mississippi that is in no way tangible. The dulcet tones of Southern life have accompanied me all the days of my youth; crickets playing and leaves rustling were my lullabies long before I knew how to form a sentence, and there is something here, something in the electricity of the air and the buzz of life that cannot be tempered by industrialization or large scale change. Peel back the social issues, and see Mississippi for its strengths, and you’ll find there is so very much to love. How can I put on paper the way the glower of a Southern sun warms my bones to the heart of me? How do I trap a summer breeze or the satisfaction of working in a backyard garden alongside grandparents who have been doing it for seventy years already? There is a connection here, between the generations, between the earth and its people, that is not easily broken; an ineffable bond that ties all those long gone to their children still breathing. I can’t say what I love most about Mississippi because it is not a thing to be put into words.

Q. When did you become aware of the negative stereotypes associated with Mississippi? 

A. In a way, I have always known them. We are raised from infancy with the idea that because we come from where we do, people will never expect us to be of any worth. We are racists; we are bigots; we are ill-bred, backwood, bible-thumping, cousin-marrying hill folk with a penchant for drawing out our words and burning crosses on every doorstep that seems a shade off.

Q. Why do you think these stereotypes are incorrect?

A. In a way, they are not unfounded; as with most of their kind, stereotypes are born from a grain of truth - stretched, yes, beyond reason, but not without an initial cause. The South in general and Mississippi in particular are home to a variety of people, each with their own social standing and set of grounded morals, but it was not always so. Looking back only a few decades, our state was one of shame, and even now, some of those old prejudices thrive. But one must always strive to not miss a forest for its leaves - we are not the actions of a few, nor are we the beliefs of a few. Admittedly, many misguided souls live in Mississippi, but the overwhelming majority are not as such. A man stands on a street corner and throws racial slurs out like candy, but forty more men stand to knock his feet from beneath him. I will not call our state void of faults - never - but I feel we cannot call it entirely faulty, either for there are dangerous and deluded men everywhere; we are remembered more for ours than most.