Brutal South

Every December, my friend the sportswriter Michael Baumann joins me for a festive exchange of Wikipedia articles we gathered through the year. We’ve been exchanging them informally for well over a decade now, but in recent years we decided to make a podcast out of it.Mike covers baseball for FanGraphs.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @MichaelBaumann. If you’d like to follo

My guest is Aaron Carey of the West Virginia black metal band Nechochwen. Aaron is a true Appalachian hesher who's also trained as a classical guitarist, and he's been using his musical project to retell and reinterpret indigenous history in his part of the world. He learned growing up that he was descended from some prominent members of the Shawnee and Lenape tribes, and he freque

My guests today are Amber Campbell-Moore and Dr. Matt Cressler with the Charleston Area Justice Ministry, a good, radically inclusive organization working for social and economic justice in Charleston, S.C., and the greater Charleston area. As we speak today, the ministry is gearing up for its biggest public-facing event of the year, the Nehemiah Action.Every year at the Nehemiah A

I have a new piece of short fiction out today in the Charleston City Paper Lit Issue. It’s called “Possum Island,” and you can read it online or pick up a paper if you’re in the area.I thought it would be fun to make an audio version, so that’s what I did. Enjoy!If you’re looking for more stuff to listen to, check out the Brutal South podcast on Apple or Spotify or wher

We're gathered here today to speak of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a tremendous beautiful bird that is gone forever ... or so some people think.Hey. Welcome to Episode 29 of the Brutal South Podcast. The ivory-billed woodpecker has been on my mind again since late September when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed moving it and 22 other species from the endangered species l

My guest on the pod is Michael Smallwood (@mikeluvsgushers), an actor, director, podcaster, and screenwriter from Charleston. He recently appeared in the biggest movie role of his career as the character Marcus in Halloween Kills, the latest installment of the Michael Myers saga. If you've seen it, you'll recognize him as the guy in the doctor costume from the first 20 or so minute

Welcome back to the Brutal South podcast, Episode 27.I guess this was inevitable: We're going to talk about critical race theory, both as an actual framework for understanding the world and as a mostly unrelated buzzword that conservatives have been screeching about nonstop since this summer.It's been more than 3 months since I put out an episode, and customarily this is where I as

My guest is Shane Claiborne, a Christian activist fighting against war, gun violence, and the death penalty. I got to meet him recently at a death penalty abolitionists' meeting in Columbia, S.C., and he graciously set aside a little time to talk about the struggle to end state-enforced killing in my state and across the country.On a personal note, Shane's writing has meant the wor

Quick note in case you missed it: I’m trying to decide on a T-shirt design for Brutal South, and my friend CJ Bones came up with three metal-inspired logos to choose from. Click here to check them out and let me know which one you like the best.***Brood X is upon us. I'm talking about a brood of cicadas that emerges mature from the earth just once every 17 years. They scream, the

My guest is Amethyst Ganaway, a chef and writer from North Charleston, South Carolina.Amethyst has been working in the restaurant industry for about 12 years, and during the past year she got deep into researching the history of food from our part of the country. She has published a few great pieces on what she's learned.The articles we'll be discussing are "Black Communities Have