For Michael Witte, drawing Julia Reed was easy; no matter how eccentric he made the scene, it couldn’t be too far off from the writer’s larger-than-life personality. “She was truly her own character,” says Witte, who had illustrated Reed’s column, th

There are few things Lisa Donovan loves more than a pudding cup. The love affair began in childhood with old-fashioned lunch box pudding cups—the kind that used to come in pop-top cans before migrating to plastic in the 1980s. They even make a cameo

SOME CHILDREN SLEEP WITH TEDDY BEARS; OTHERS DRIFT into dreamland with well-worn baby blankets tucked under their chins. Most don’t snuggle up with a pair of Air Jordan 3s—unless you’re Justin James. “When I was a kid, Christmas would come around and

If you passed this quiz with flying colors, want to bolster your Southern bona fides, or are ready to win the night at a holiday party, you just might enjoy Garden & Gun’s Bless Your Heart: 200 Trivia Questions to Prove Your Southern Know-How (Clarks

Until the summer before last, it had never occurred to me—I declare it hadn’t—that carrying a pocketknife made me unusual. Saying “I declare” in that way does make me unusual, and old, but I accept that and don’t do it regularly. Carrying a pocketkni

I used to take solitary walks before sunrise—three-mile, one-hour marches that emboldened or pacified me, depending on which way my mental pendulum was swinging. But last year I joined forces with an eleven-year-old Labrador mix who is utterly imperv

“HERE YOU GO,” LORI BEAN’S FATHER SAID TO HER ABOUT A decade ago. “Have at it.” He had handed his daughter her great-grandmother’s canning equipment and a copy of the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving. The items had been languishing for years. “The

Standing four feet eleven, with a drawl as thick as summer honey and a wit as sharp as cucumber vine, the Tennessee-born writer, actor, and comedian Leslie Jordan is the people’s Truman Capote. A seasoned stage performer and raconteur famous for his

ART-DIRECTING OVER-THE-TOP PARTIES FOR clients ranging from rapper Sean Combs to Chanel is all in a day’s work for the event designer Bronson van Wyck and his team. He’s just as focused on the details, though, when it comes to celebrating at home wit

That used to be a bog, and that used to be a bog, and that,” JJ Apodaca says, pointing to neatly mowed ditches as we wind through the rural valleys of the Southern Blue Ridge Mountains in his field truck. To the casual observer, the landscape looks…

OUT EAST OF TOWN, MY FATHER AND GRANDFATHER HAD land that had been cleared for pasture at some colonial moment, but was now tattooed with trees so inexplicably random that their seed could only have been incubated in some grazing deer’s gut or shat o

AS ARTISTS ARE WONT TO DO, JULIE NEILL TENDS TO WAX POETIC about her craft. “Once I realized art could be a source of light, I knew I’d found my calling,” says the New Orleans designer, who fashions elegant, imaginative light fixtures for both privat

Thank God, we don’t have to worry about earthquakes, too. Or do we? You’d think the Appalachians being 480 million years old would mean the Southland would be spared the tectonic slippage, mudslides, and the like that our California brethren so grit

WHEAT FLOUR, A BIT OF SHORTENING, MEXICAN brown sugar, and milk. “It’s simple and tasty and good year-round,” says Mariana Barran de Goodall of her recipe for gorditas de azúcar, or sugar tortillas. Goodall founded the embroidery company Hibiscus Lin

WITHIN SIX MONTHS, NICK CARRERA AND HIS WIFE, CHRISTIE, lost both of Christie’s parents, and Nick’s mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “That was the turning point,” Carrera says. “Christie and I had a passion for a lifestyle that revolves around

Daybreak, no wind, me and Travers on the end of the dock, eyeing the flood tide, rising now to brimming full, only the very tips of spartina canes showing above the water, like the faintest green and golden fuzz upon a mirror of the sky. Little jewel

EVER SINCE MY YOUNGER SON COULD TODDLE, MY FAMILY HAS TAKEN holiday walks along a small lake edged in shore grass and slash pines—an ideal spot for bird-watching—near my parents’ house in Central Florida. On those days when we’re visiting them betwee

FOR ME, CHRISTMAS HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT SETTING A MOOD THAT TASTES, smells, and looks completely different from the rest of the year. But running a restaurant (mine is Chef & the Farmer in Kinston, North Carolina) that caters to special occasions lik

TIP TOP PROPER COCKTAILS OCCUPY THE PLACE WHERE PAST meets present. With the midcentury swagger of the 1960s cocktail boom, partners Neal Cohen and Yoni Reisman have tapped into the present canned-cocktail trend—mixed drinks in cans you can easily to

Cassie Jacobs, the narrator of the titular novella at the heart of Danielle Evans’s astonishing second collection, The Office of Historical Corrections, works as a field agent for the Institute of Public History, a fictional federal agency “devoted t