The Day Before Turkey
By Ricky Fitzpatrick for The Creative South

There are a handful of days in the Southern year that come pre-loaded with a sort of quiet electricity. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving is one of them. 

It’s not an official holiday, but it behaves like one. Folks show up to work with the same energy they bring to a dentist appointment. School traffic evaporates into thin air. And if you drive through any small town between Cordele and Cornelia, you’ll see gas pumps working overtime like…

Kudzu: The Green Blanket of Our Regrets

By Ricky Fitzpatrick for The Creative South

If you’ve driven through the South for more than two minutes, you’ve met kudzu. It is our unofficial state plant, our unsolicited back-yard roommate, and the region’s most persistent overachiever.

Kudzu didn’t start out as the villain in our story.

It arrived in the late 1800s as a polite, well-intentioned houseguest…much like the cousin who came to stay for “just the summer” and is still living in your spare room twenty-seven…

The Daylight Savings Conspiracy

By Ricky Fitzpatrick for The Creative South

Twice a year, without fail, the South experiences an emotional event so disruptive, so controversial, that it makes national elections look like mild disagreements at a church picnic. 

I’m talking, of course, about Daylight Savings Time…which, according to most Southerners, is either:

1. Unconstitutional
2. A plot by “the government”
3. The actual cause of why everyone’s tomatoes didn’t come in last year

There is no middle ground.

The whole…

Jesus Was a Southerner

by Ricky Fitzpatrick for The Creative South

Every Southerner has heard the old saying:

“You can take the boy out of the South, but you can’t take the South out of the boy.”

And the more I read my Bible, the more convinced I become that Jesus Himself must’ve been a Southerner.

Now calm down…I’m not petitioning the Southern Baptist Convention to redraw the Holy Land. I’m just saying the evidence is…compelling.

Let’s start with geography. Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Which, if you look at the…

The Joy of Knowing Everybody’s Business

by Ricky Fitzpatrick for The Creative South

There’s a particular charm to living in a small Southern town, and it’s not the sweet tea…though that certainly doesn’t hurt. It’s not even the pine trees or the Friday night football or the fact that half the town waves at you from their front porches like they’re greeting a long-lost cousin. 

No, the heart of Southern small-town living is this simple truth: everybody knows your business.

And sometimes they know it before you…

Where Stories Come From

by Ricky Fitzpatrick for The Creative South

Folks often ask where my stories come from, like there's some secret creek behind the shed where writers go to dip a bucket. The truth is, if you live in the South long enough, the stories mostly come to you. Usually uninvited, usually on a Tuesday, and usually when all you wanted was a quiet afternoon with a glass of tea.

Take a friend of mine, for example. I won't name him here (in the interest of journalistic integrity and because he still…

The Lost Art of the Front Porch

by Ricky Fitzpatrick for The Creative South

There was a time, not even that long ago, when the front porch was the command center of Southern life. It was where news traveled, stories grew legs, and the day’s heat got talked out of your bones before supper. Some folks had living rooms, but the porch was where the real living happened.

These days, though, the front porch is becoming something of an endangered species. We still build them, bless our hearts, but half of them are…

Between the Hedges (and the Hibachi)

Between the Hedges (and the Hibachi)

by Ricky Fitzpatrick for The Creative South

There are Fall Saturdays in the South, and then there are Georgia Football Fall Saturdays…the kind that settle into your memory the way red clay settles into a pair of white socks. You never quite forget them.

When I was eleven…blonde, thin, sunburned from living outdoors…I believed there were three forces running the universe: God, gravity, and Vince Dooley. And on Saturday afternoons in 1980,…

As the South Turns

As The South Turns

by Ricky Fitzpatrick for The Creative South

There are certain sounds that defined growing up in the South: the slam of a screen door, the hum of cicadas, and the unmistakable theme music of a daytime soap opera drifting through the house sometime between 1:00 and 3:00 p.m. 

If you listen real close, you can still hear it in your bones…those jangly opening notes that signaled somebody was about to get slapped, seduced, or resurrected.

Our grandmothers and mothers didn’t just…

AI in the Bojangles Line

AI in the Bojangles Line

by Ricky Fitzpatrick for The Creative South

Progress always seems to arrive in the South the same way a thunderstorm does…suddenly, loudly, and right when you were hoping for a quiet afternoon. 

And nowhere has that been truer than at the Bojangles drive-thru at Banks Crossing, where the newest employee isn’t a teenager wearing a headset, but a cheerful-sounding robot with a corporate-approved accent and a questionable grasp of human emotion.

Yes, friends.…