THOM 7 | Fall / Winter 2016

VISIONARIES
“We are always looking
behind things and under
things,” Chuck says.
“The most difficult question we have gotten,
consistently, since we started is: How do you define
the South?” Chuck says. “And, well, that’s not easy.”
What defines a culture? Well, basically, it’s what
always defines a group of people: their stories.
Southern stories, like Southern culture, go beyond
a simple definition of geography and the boundary
of the Mason-Dixon line. The heartbeat of the story
must pulse as one with the collective heartbeat
of the South. As the editor of The Bitter Southerner,
Chuck is always seeking
to capture this elusive
thing, this pulse.
“People want to be
proud of where they
live and in a place like
the South, that requires
Photo by Whitney Ott
some acknowledgement
of some less-thansavory
parts of our past,” he explains. “We don’t
shy away from that, but we don’t wade into the
politics of things, either. We are just storytellers.
What makes a good story for us is if it’s told well
and is defined in a certain way by the negative space
between the stereotypes you see in the national
media about the South.”
It is not all just stories about grits and biscuits,
bluegrass, banjo and bourbon, low country and
backwater, hunting dogs and ghosts that linger,
oysters and hot summer nights, Sunday school and
segregation, front porches and lush gardens, fishing
stories and drinking stories. Not all race relations
and reconciliation, civility and hospitality, progress
and tradition. Although — sometimes it is, except,
turned inside out and from a new angle, a fresh
perspective. “We are always looking behind things
and under things,” Chuck says.
“There is no way that someone can read one story
published in The Bitter Southerner and get anywhere
close to a complete sense of what the South is
actually like, today, in 2016,” Chuck says. “But my
hope is that over time, a reader can read a collection
and get a more complete sense of what this place
is like… and really get a sense for how it doesn’t
always fit those stereotypes that most people have
about the American South.”
'This past July marked the anniversary of
three years’ worth of weekly features for The
Bitter Southerner. Which puts Chuck’s collection
somewhere in the neighborhood of 155 stories: an
impressive archive of memories, mythologies, voices,
textures, tones and traditions of what we invoke
when we talk about the South. Each story shines
the light on a different aspect of Southern life. It is a
living, breathing, growing archive.
“Our point of view from the very beginning was
that we are not going to feed you the stuff that you
are always fed about the South. We are going to
tell the stories about people who are doing cool or
interesting or innovative things in the South that
maybe the world doesn’t know about,” Chuck says.
The Bitter Southerner was originally created by four
founding partners and began as an idea for a
cocktail blog, for recounting stories about bars and
bartenders and Southern cocktail culture. Yet, it
quickly grew to embrace a much more expansive
portrayal of life in the South.
In the beginning, writers simply gave them stories
for free. Journalists kept approaching them with
stories about the South and a feeling like there was
no place to put them. “I used to joke that during our
first year, we had become the home of lost stories,”
says Chuck, with laughter.
“Every writer who has been at it for a while, has
tucked away in a notebook somewhere, a story that
7