The vision of A Deeper South is rooted in the idea that the spiritual, political, and cultural health of a nation, region, city, town, or person depends upon an honest and unflinching memory; that the gravest danger to our cities and ourselves is a willful amnesia; that hope is to be found through the work of active remembrance, putting back together the fragments of personhood scattered by a culture of selective memory.
Read the story behind ADS in two essays for Los Angeles Review of Books: “A Deeper South” and “Almost Home.”
Watch the trailer:
r⭕️ad crew
PETE CANDLER
Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Pete Candler is a writer and photographer whose work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Commonweal, The Bitter Southerner, The Christian Century, The Chicago Tribune, Southern Cultures, The Washington Post, and others. He now lives in Asheville, where he writes about memory and forgetfulness in the American South. His recent publications address the legacy of white supremacy and white amnesia in the South. His photography collection, The Road to Unforgetting: Detours in the American South 1997 - 2022 (Horse & Buggy Press) was published in 2022, and his non-fiction narrative, A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road (University of South Carolina), will be published in May 2024.
JOHN HAYES
John Hayes is a historian of the 19th and 20th century United States, with a focus on the South. His first book, Hard, Hard Religion: Interracial Faith in the Poor South (UNC Press, 2017) analyzed the distinct folk Christianity crafted by impoverished people, Black and White, in the New South. His second book project, The People Rebelled, seeks to tell the complex story of the "riot" of May 11-12, 1970, in Augusta, Georgia—the largest Black rebellion in the Civil Rights-Black Power era South.
Meredith Candler
Anne Raustol
Anne is a writer who has lived up and down the eastern part of the country except for her brief stint in Missouri where she first began writing in a Hello Kitty lock and key journal. The rest of her childhood was spent in Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia, and she has spent much of her adulthood denying and despising her southern heritage. Her work with A Deeper South is a welcome chance to reclaim and re-member the south and how it has informed her identity. She received an MFA from Bennington College in 2001. Her stories and essays have appeared in Rock and Sling, Rapid River Magazine, Florida Review, Sky Island Journal, Literary Mama, Willow Springs, and Litro. Anne lives in Weaverville, North Carolina with her three children and two dogs. She also owns a small business called Water Leaf Writing in which she offers writing coaching, editing, and writing group facilitation.
about the ⭕️
A Deeper South’s logo hearkens back to the WPA Guides that have been so central to our road trips since 1997. The logo consists of three elements that tease out of the WPA aesthetic some of the central elements of A Deeper South. The first is typographical: the font is an echo of the city maps in the WPA Guides, like this one for Montgomery:
The second element is the ⭕️ that serves as an O in SOUTH. We took this from the larger state maps in the Guides, in which a red circle often marks a noteworthy city or intersection, like this one from the North Carolina Guide:
The ⭕️ represents, for me, intersections—of regional and personal history, of the lives of people our culture often marks as enemies, of expectation and reality—that have been so surprising to discover over the course of six Southern Tours. The red circle also hints at the often violent intersection of abstract racial ideologies with actual human beings, as in the bloody cost of Lost Cause mythology and the sacrifices it demands to its gods.
The red highway you see in the background of the header above and the image below is the third element: the scarlet thread of memory that runs through all of us, the sometimes dark and shocking stories that shape us more than we realize, the blood-red, forgotten backroads of personal, local, and national memory that we need to revisit if we want to understand who we are. This is what I am after in A Deeper South.
The four basic regions of the Deeper South site are:
1. STORIES. This is the heart of A Deeper South: stories that didn’t make it into the classroom or into family lore. These have been by turns amusing and unsettling, but always surprising—both in themselves and because I made it to my mid-forties without ever hearing them. Some of these include my own family history, which is full of both unsettling and ennobling surprises.
2. STILLS. The images on this page span all seven tours thus far. They were all shot on 35mm film (Tour 8 will be branching out into 120!) A more comprehensive gallery of images from each of the Tours can be seen here.
3. FILMS. During the 2018 tour, I made a 7-minute short film about Fargo, Georgia that began as a kind of accident. I did not set out to make a short film, but early on in Tour 6 I discovered that incredible stories are everywhere, and that if you simply stop long enough to look and listen, people are eager to tell them. And people are inherently fascinating. “Fargo" was the first of an ongoing series of Deeper South Shorts, short films (6-7 minutes) shot, edited, and posted in a single day. There is no voice-over or commentary; I try to let the story of a place arise out of the unrepeatable experience of being there at a particular time with particular people.
In 2020, we also hosted a series of live conversations with special guests, which you can view here.
4. SWAG. Deck yourself out in a Deeper South hat or shirt!
If you feel inclined to support ADS financially, we always warmly welcome donations, which make it possible for us to keep doing this, and pay for things like film, processing, internet domains, and Captain John Derst's Good Old Fashioned Bread for tomato sandwiches when John and I are on the road. There is a link at the bottom of each page to contribute to A Deeper South.