Deonna Kelli Sayed

Alternatively titled: Selected Readings of a Southern Life.

Let us start with a discussion about landscapes and memory.

If you are from the rural American South,  know what the dirt smells like. There are fields to the left, sometimes to the right, and maybe on all sides.  I grew up in such a place, at an intersection of a river and familial history where fields and dirt roads determine the boundaries of tradition and ceremony.  Big Momma’s house stood at one corner of the field. On the other side dotted single-wide trailers that belonged to an aunt and various cousins (I was conceived in one of those single-wides).

Our house sat on the backside of the field, almost at the road’s end. Inconveniently, the hard clay path plummeted into the woods and at the nape of oldest graveyard in the county, one haunted with the Irish-Native American remains of my…