Untitled South

By: Mattie Jones

For a number of years now, I’ve used the collage form as a means of processing my place in the world around me. Fitting with this motivation, my style has changed and shifted over time just as my world view has— although certain tendencies and focuses remain throughout this timeline. One slant to my work that I do not see changing any time soon (if ever) is my devotion to Southern Gothic. While this term is most often used for literary purposes, I have found the collage form itself to be especially fitting for creating works that fall under this umbrella. I view our collective image of a modern south as somewhat of a collage itself— a thing made of both past and present, hope and hopelessness, beauty and severe evil.

In more recent years, I began experimenting seriously with short stories and flash fiction, and in this, I found a sibling to the collage form I hold so dearly. Both collaging and short story writing are (to me) endeavors of collaboration. Both involve a collection process of sorts that never fails to send a thrill up my spine. For sourcing collage materials, I favor the basement of Atlanta Vintage Books for its long-spanning shelves of vintage LIFE magazines (although advertisements and magazine pages of any decade have a special place in my heart for these pursuits). I have found that short stories can come to be through similar means of collection. Try an overheard comment from a stranger’s conversation, a question you will never know the response to, or even bits and pieces of stories from your more talkative relatives. Quotes from friends, enemies, or potential love interests will also do the trick. Collecting these fragments of thought, circumstance, and character is not only an enjoyable endeavor but a fruitful one.

In my opinion, these processes, and these forms, are nearly ideal for pursuing an image of Southern Gothic. This can be especially true if (like many) your south is not the one depicted so readily by much of our media even today. I grew up in Athens, Georgia, and often spent holidays traveling to see family in Rome, Georgia. Despite their similar names, these were (and are) two shockingly disparate images of the south, easily as separate from one another as the figures in the collage paired with this post. Said collage was at the time of its creation untitled (and in fact still is). But its lack of name has come to seem more and more fitting over time. Just as some works (whether they be of art, writing, etc.) are best left untitled, so too, I think, is our image of the south today. We can describe it, of course, research its history, work as communities to better it— and I think it’s incredibly important that we do so. It is necessary work. We should find the flaws. Find the soured interactions, the landscapes and landmarks whose history has been seasoned with prejudice. Find them and learn about them. Explore them, criticize them, write them, draw them. But above all, we cannot excuse them. Nor can we pin down the exact south that exists today. We cannot give it a new name in hopes that its past will dissolve. We can only gather the fragments— old and new— and observe them as they interact together with the hope that these interactions can be improved. There is less hope in renaming this south of ours than there is in working to improve its content— even if the final result remains untitled. In conclusion, I offer a thank you of sorts— to all the souths I have yet to meet, the many I will not, and those that I have always known— I’ll be seeing you.