“You have to accept yourself, without any concern for success, without any hope for any special kind of achievement. Just do the work…I think that is the beginning.” — Ha Jin on being a writer

Features by Diane Roberts and Mark Richard. Fiction by Ha Jin. Photo Essay by Bayard Wootten. Padgett Powell on “What Southern Literature Is.” Poetry by Andrew Hudgins, Wyatt Prunty, and Eric Ormsby. A Elegy for Carl Perkins by Tom Piazza.

Other contributors include Randall Curb, Hal Crowther, Julia Reed, Roy Blount Jr., and more.