Welcome to The Southerly Way
Welcome to The Southerly Way
A digital publication about the South as it was, as it is, and as it continues to become.
There is a South we know by heart, or at least think we do.
It is Spanish moss and mountain roads, oyster shells and old brick, church suppers, and corner stores. It is music that belongs to a particular patch of ground, recipes passed down with instructions that were never written, and places whose stories have been told so many times they have become part history, part mythology.
But the South has never been one thing, and it certainly isn’t standing still.
That is where The Southerly Way begins.
This is a digital publication about the South as it was, as it is, and as it continues to become. We are interested in the deeply rooted traditions that give this region its character, but equally interested in the people who are reimagining them. The old pottery town and the artist doing something new with its clay. The recipe everyone knows and the story of how it got here. The roadside place you have passed a dozen times without knowing what happened there. The landscape that looks familiar until you learn what is hiding in it.
Sometimes we will go looking for the big story. Just as often, we will pull off the road because something caught our attention.
We will travel through small towns and growing cities, along coastlines and mountain ridges, down roads where the destination is only part of the reason for going. We will meet artists, makers, musicians, chefs, preservationists, characters, and people who simply have a very good story to tell. There will be history here, but not just history sealed behind glass. We want to understand how what came before continues to shape the places we live in and visit now.
There will also be food, because trying to understand the South without eating your way through it seems like a particularly joyless exercise.
What you won’t find is another checklist of the South’s “best” things. There are plenty of places to tell you where to eat, what to see, and which ten attractions you absolutely cannot miss. We may point you toward all of those things, but we are more interested in why they are there in the first place and what they tell us about the place around them.
And we are going to leave room to be surprised. In fact, that may be the point.
Over our first few weeks, we will take you from an extraordinary garden built by a preacher-turned-folk artist in northwest Georgia to the Chattanooga bakery that gave the South one of its most recognizable treats. Then we’re heading for the Lowcountry, where some of the stories are already waiting and others, we hope, haven’t introduced themselves yet.
From there, we’ll keep going.
The Southerly Way is new, and that means you get to be here at the beginning. Tell us about the place we should pull over for, the person we need to meet, the tradition worth understanding, or the story everyone in your town knows but the rest of us don’t.
Because the South is deeply rooted. But it is still growing, changing, creating, and surprising us. And we intend to follow wherever the story leads.
Welcome to The Southerly Way.
Bonnie Buckner Reavis
Publishing Editor
Southern by birth. Explorer by nature.
Join In
Show us what you see, who you know, and what matters.
