Carmen K. Sisson | Page 8 of 21 | Making sense of the South, one story at a time.

If you want to find the South, ask directions from a Southerner.

If you want to find the people, meet them where they live.

Because the South is more than hurricanes, heat, and humidity ...

The South is more than sweet tea, antebellum homes, and the Civil War ...

Every story a writer could ever want to tell is here, buried beneath the soil.

If you want to find the South, ask directions from a Southerner.

There is something extravagant and wild about what they have to say — snakes on the roof of a car, swamps, a delta, sweat, the smell of sea, buzz of an air conditioner, Coca-Cola ... ~ Natalie Goldberg

If you want to find the people, meet them where they live.

Being Southern isn't talking with an accent ... or rocking on a porch while drinking sweet tea, or knowing how to tell a good story. It's how you were brought up ... family (blood kin or not) is sacred ... And food, along with college football, is darn near a religion. ~ Jan Norris

Because the South is more than hurricanes, heat, and humidity ...

Summer in the Deep South is not only a season, a climate — it's a dimension. Floating in it, one must be either proud or submerged. ~ Eugene Walter

The South is more than sweet tea, antebellum homes, and the Civil War ...

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home. ~ William Faulkner

Every story a writer could ever want to tell is here, buried beneath the soil.

And after 30 years of covering the South, I'm just scratching the surface. Faulkner said: "To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi." Consider this an introduction.

Engagement is not a buzzword — it's a survival skill.

If you're looking for a writer to aggregate content, regurgitate press releases, or deify pundits, I'm not the one. If you're looking for a writer to spew statistics, quote jargon, and bill by the hour, well, that's not me either.

If you want to connect with people, we should talk.

If you want to know how people feel, what they think, and who they are, I might be your writer. If you want a seasoned journalist who prefers to be in the field instead of behind a desk, someone equally skilled with both pen and camera, someone who keeps a suitcase packed and notebook ready, I might be your writer. If you want a journalist who is a native Southerner — who understands its people, knows its terrain, remembers its past and cares about its future — I might be your writer.

Because if it's people you want to reach, I'm all in. And if you've got a story, you've got my interest. Email me today.

Knox Elementary goes to Washington for the inauguration, Part 1 of 3

Reading Time: 5 minutesReddick wants the children to see beyond graffiti-strewn walls, beyond limitations, beyond a town where violence is a daily reality. She wants them to witness something people in this racially torn bastion of the civil rights movement never believed was possible. She wants them to see a black man become president of the United States, to hear his voice ring out across the National Mall and know that anything is possible.

Tennessee fly ash spill survivors worry about toxins

Reading Time: 7 minutesFor Tennessee firefighter Chris Copeland, responding to disasters is a way of life, but three days before Christmas, his world was shaken to its foundation when the rescuer found himself in a new role — survivor. Just after midnight Dec. 22, while Copeland lay sleeping, an earthen dike gave way on the north side of Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant in Kingston, Tenn. Within seconds, 5.4 million cubic yards of fly ash — a by-product of coal combustion — oozed into the Emory River, gaining speed until the glossy, debris-laden sludge roared through the Swan Pond area, leaving three homes destroyed and 42 damaged. Copeland says the sound was deafening; he thought it was a tornado.

Detroit’s fall gives power to rival Dixie

Reading Time: 6 minutesAlabama has been particularly aggressive. Since the early 1990s, the state has offered German-based Mercedes, Japan’s Honda and South Korea’s Hyundai a staggering $1 billion in tax incentives, abatements and infrastructure improvements to build plants there. The return on investment has been $7 billion, creating almost 50,000 direct jobs and another 70,000 in sectors like parts suppliers. The population of the town of Vance, where the 4,000-employee Mercedes factory is located, has leapt from 500 to 2,000. Unlike the local sawmill, fertilizer plant or rock quarry, residents feel Mercedes “is going to survive, no matter what,” says one woman who has five family members working there. “That’s what made Vance what it is.”

Loan fund builds hope in New Orleans

Reading Time: 7 minutesThere are jobs, but there aren’t enough. There is housing, but there is not enough. Yet there is growing optimism as well. There is progress, albeit slow, and there is a brighter future on the horizon, albeit distant. And there are volunteers here — people of all faiths, people from all walks of life — bonded by a common determination to bring this battered city, along with the entire Gulf Coast, back to life.

A deaf football team vanquishes opponents and stereotypes

Reading Time: 6 minutesUnderestimate the Alabama School for the Deaf (ASD) if you want. They like it that way. You won’t know what hit you until you’re facedown in the turf, inhaling the scent of fresh-mown grass and Alabama soil, staring at the final scoreboard, which illuminates your flawed logic. ASD, billed as “home of the champions” and winner of four national football titles against hearing and non-hearing teams, is one of only 30 deaf high schools in the US playing 11-man football. The team shows up ready to compete.

Strong storms batter South; tornadoes confirmed in Denison and Collinsville

Reading Time: 3 minutesKelly Taylor-Forgar, emergency services director of the Central Louisiana chapter of the Red Cross hopes she never again experiences what she went through Monday night. Red Cross volunteers reported 42 families affected and four homes destroyed in La Salle and Rapides parishes. Meanwhile, their colleagues found themselves in need of assistance as well when high winds slammed trees into their office and tore away part of the roof. Taylor-Forgar, who was in the building at the time, said even though she grew up in Texas and spends her days assisting families touched by natural disasters, it was frightening to witness a storm in progress.

Florida’s Tropical Storm Fay survivors still waiting for recovery

Reading Time: 4 minutesLorraine Finch stares nervously at the blue tarpaulin covering her 85-year-old mother’s roof. It’s not raining today in southeastern Florida, but as winter sets in, nighttime temperatures are dropping into the low 20s, and the worn plastic does little to shield the home from the elements. It took less than a week in August for Tropical Storm Fay to take 36 lives and leave $180 million damage throughout the state, but recovery is moving far more slowly, frustrating both residents and the organizations trying to help.

California wildfire survivors focus on recovery

Reading Time: 4 minutesOne by one, the names were called, amid a backdrop of noise and confusion Monday afternoon in the Sylmar High School gymnasium, where survivors sought shelter following four weekend wildfires, which blackened more than 42,000 acres in southwestern California. It was a seemingly endless roster, tinged with both hope and despair as families waited to learn which van would take them on a 10-minute tour of Oakridge Mobile Home Park in Los Angeles County — the white vans, for residents whose homes were left standing; or the black vans, for those who had lost everything. The black vans stayed busy.

Ken Mink plays college basketball at age 73

Reading Time: 6 minutesMink wrote to eight schools, knowing it was the longest shot he’d ever taken. Weeks passed. No one replied, not even to say, “You’ve got to be kidding.” Then coach Randy Nesbit called from a small college in Harriman, Tenn., 35 miles away. Mr. Nesbit was willing to give Mink a chance. Most of all, Nesbit was intrigued: He wanted to know if Mink was serious.

Faith-based teams take a holistic view on disaster response

Reading Time: 6 minutesThe rental trailer wasn’t in great condition before the muddy rivers spilled their banks in Columbus, Ind., but it provided a home for the family of five. The parents worked in the fields and their baby played happily on the kitchen floor in the evenings, surrounded by the chatter of the two elder siblings doing homework and the smells of supper being prepared. Then summer came, and with it came flooding rains — 11 inches within seven hours. Levees broke. Dams failed. Much of the Midwest was left underwater, with places in Indiana seeing the worst flooding the state had experienced in more than a century.

Children come first in wildfire response

Reading Time: 4 minutesContreras hadn’t gotten the phone call from her supervisor yet, but she didn’t care. She looked out the window again. Television reports indicated her area was out of danger, and though many roads were closed, she could make it to San Fernando High School, one of four shelters opened by the American Red Cross. Frantically, she ticked items from her list one by one. Play-Doh. Check. Coloring books. Check. Watercolors. Check. Puzzles. Check. For the hundredth time, she was grateful she always kept the blue suitcase packed with her Kit of Comfort. It made it easier to get to disaster scenes quickly.

How one Mississippi town rebuilds, hurricane after hurricane

Reading Time: 5 minutesThe live oaks that sprawl across the Southern landscape are like no other tree. Their trunks are massive, the limbs long and twisting, drooping to the ground, stretching to the sky, spreading to touch other trees. Most are hundreds of years old. Some thousands. They’ve seen floods, droughts, fires, hurricanes. And still they survive, the wood growing harder, stronger, more resilient, through every trial they endure. In Pearlington, Miss., they’re everywhere, a fitting symbol for a town that refuses to die and 800 residents who bend, but will not break.