Best Stories of 2022

December 20, 2022

Published February 1, 2022

Story by David Hanson | Photos & Video by Michael Hanson 

In telling what’s part environmental story, part homage to a disappearing way of life, David and Michael Hanson spent time in the community of Apalachicola, Florida, with oyster tonger Kendall Schoelles. This feature went beyond oysters and opened our eyes to the world of oyster tonging and how climate change, dwindling oyster populations, and an ongoing feud over fresh water have impacted a once lucrative local industry. 

Bonus: You’ll want to watch the beautiful three-minute film by Michael Hanson, found at the top of the story page. 

Excerpt: The oyster tonger cuts an independent, rugged shape atop the bay’s flat horizon. There’s no shelter from a frigid north wind, or from the summer thunderstorms that have killed people on the water. Oyster tongers work on their own schedule, with no boss, getting paid in cash based on their daily harvest. Big business never muscled its way into the scene. In Apalachicola, there’s no automated alternative to raking wild beds. The tongs are homemade from pine or fir by locals. Profits are based on market price and how hard you work. There’s a cowboy romance to the independent industry.

Published February 10, 2022 

Story by Laurelyn Dossett | Photos by Molly McGinn & J. Scott Hinkle

There are no laws in Laurelyn Dossett’s home state of North Carolina against burials on private property. So when her mother passed away last summer, Dossett, her brothers, and other close family members gathered to bring her home. This heartfelt and beautiful story of a family coming together made us want to hug our loved ones a little tighter. 

Excerpt: My mother died on a bright Tuesday afternoon in August 2021. My three brothers and I brought her body home in the Prius and buried her behind the vegetable garden. My car, the gravesite clay, the tomatoes, the rims of our eyes — all red.

Our queen Lola Weldine, our lady of gumbo and chocolate pie, lived 80 full years. We were saddened by her leaving, but also glad that her suffering was over. Her 18 months in assisted living coincided with both the global pandemic and her personal struggle with Parkinson’s. We had not been able to care for her in person — so when she died, all we wanted was to bring her home.

Published March 10, 2022

Story by Michael A. Gonzales | Illustrations by Sam Watson

Last fall, Michael A. Gonzales chose a book from the unread section on his bookshelf and opened it up to a random page. The story was written by a young woman named Diane Oliver, who in the 1960s wrote six short stories about the horrors of racism in Black communities in suburban America. Gonzales fell in love with her prose, style, and complex ideas, and set out to discover who she was and why she wasn’t more popular. 

Excerpt: I sat down to read Oliver’s story, originally published in 1966, and was blown away by the narrative power she demonstrated; later, I learned that she was still in her early 20s when the story was published, but her voice was already mature. In a short career that consisted of six published stories, Oliver wrote about race and the horrors of racism perpetrated on families in 1950s and 1960s America. Of course, Black folks have known the terror of racism since the days of being dragged to this country in chains, and long before Jordan Peele's freaky films “Get Out” and “Us.”

April 5, 2022

Story by Kimberly Coburn | Photos by Fernando Decillis

In a time of exaggerated death and dying, Atlanta native Kimberly Coburn penned a moving essay about seeking out the maligned turkey vulture in order to understand the deepest mystery of all. She writes about the lore surrounding the buzzard and chronicles her meeting with a leucistic vulture named Wilson whose strange beauty gave her hope that she could be “a little vulture.” 

Excerpt: In the slantwise, sackcloth logic of grieving, I decided to learn all I could about the turkey vulture, the disparaged buzzard. Maybe these bald-faced undertakers knew something I didn’t. They are neither riddled with the urgency of the predator nor the anxiety of prey because carrion is never in short supply and the vulture’s own meat is no animal’s delicacy. While the rest of us run, gallop, and slither from death, buzzards sniff it out, hurtle toward it. I thought if I apprenticed myself to these wake workers, maybe I could glean the arcane wisdom they keep suspended far above us. That’s why I had scheduled this visit to Callaway to meet a particularly unique specimen.

April 26, 2022

Story by Silas House | Photos by Ryan Hartley

One of many talented musicians who’ve graced the pages of our magazine, S.G. Goodman is a breakout star from Kentucky who has charmed audiences onstage alongside Jason Isbell and John Moreland, among others. Fellow Kentuckian and author Silas House interviewed her, and the two talked about her latest album, Teeth Marks; the workings of her creative process; and finding home in a place that doesn’t always accept her.

Excerpt: The joyful sound woven through the album is sometimes driven by love, sometimes by defiance, but always by a delight in singing out. The album feels like the declaration of an artist who knows exactly who she is, backed by a band that blows the roof off the studio, effectively giving the listener the experience of hearing the music live. It’s music for a South that is not only a place of farmers and workers, but also of queer people, progressives, and folks fed up with the abuse of those close to them and of the ways pharmaceutical companies and corporations exploit the place and its people. “Teeth Marks is about coming to grips with someone not returning the feelings you have for them,” Goodman says, and she could easily be talking about the many people who love a South they feel doesn’t always return the affection.

May 17, 2022 

Story by Christina Lee | Photos by Brinson + Banks

Atlantan Michael Render is known by many titles and one stage name: Killer Mike is a rapper and television host, businessman and activist, grandson and father. In our cover story from Issue No. 3, host of the “Bottom of the Map” podcast and writer Christina Lee sat down with Mike to talk about how he’s been trying to interweave all those roles so we can “do more together.”

Excerpt: Mike has come to realize that, in order to build districts and movements and make progress, there needs to be a constant exchange of ideas, just like the ones between his grandparents. Between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and SCLC. Between Civil Rights leaders and the Kennedys. Between King and President Lyndon B. Johnson, who ultimately passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Between Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who posited in the 1960s that America might see its first Black president in 30 to 40 years, and writer James Baldwin, who scoffed as if that was supposed to be considered imaginative and progressive. When Mike invites guests … to “Love & Respect,” he’s inspired by these examples of dialogue. “No one believes in creating a more perfect union than [Black Americans], because we’ve been here every step of the imperfect way,” Mike says.

Published May 31, 2022 

Story by Moni Basu | Photos and Video by Darnell Wilburn 

Alabama’s youngest and first Black poet laureate, Ashley Jones wants to leave her mark. Although the state is “a place that was or is most cruel to its Black citizenry and still struggling to reckon with racism,” Jones writes about the beauty of Black resilience through poems honoring the lives of Breonna Taylor, Mary Turner, and her father, Donald Lewis Jones, among others. Another facet of her work is a dedication to making poetry more accessible for ordinary Americans. 

Excerpt: She had returned to Alabama, where she was born and raised, where she makes her life now as the state’s first Black poet laureate and, at 31, also its youngest. It’s a place, she knows, that is often seen as rigid or backward or shameful. Or all three. … And yet, for Jones, the warmth of that Alabama sky is as palpable as the fear that once consumed the streets of her native Birmingham. She chose to come back after escaping all those things people say Alabama is. Now, she sees no contradiction in loving a place that has murdered and pillaged her people. And it is because of that love that her poetry pierces its very soul.

Published July 12, 2022 

Story by Mickie Meinhardt | Photos by Gunner Hughes

While Maryland’s Assateague State Park is known for its wild horses, it’s also home to 37 miles of pristine beach, over 300 campsites, and plenty of wildlife. Wrangling it all — including the millions of tourists who visit every year — are six full-time park rangers. Writer Mickie Meinhardt, an avid surfer along the park’s beaches, spent some time getting to know the rangers who ensure the safety of animals and humans alike. 

Excerpt: There’s a thrum of unseen energy, and ranger-made signs everywhere alert you to what you might see: whales, dolphins, turtles, and, of course, horses. Whether you come in the hot height of summer, the golden-hour fall, the still and steely winter, or the tender and bright spring, it’s always a different kind of breathtaking, a place that exudes a palpable and silencing magic — the very definition of awe-inspiring. Which is why those rangers are so dedicated and so important. They ensure that anyone who visits the island, one-timers or forever devotees, can always have that possibility: of encountering, however briefly, something divine. We don’t like to think of the outdoors as a kept thing. But behind every publicly accessible park in the world is a group of state or federal employees maintaining that natural beauty. And at Assateague’s state park, that group is a small but mighty force handling a whole lot of actual nature and human nature.

Published August 23, 2022

Story by Dalton LaFerney | Photo by Hannah Hayes

Summers are getting longer and hotter across the globe. And the people who are most impacted are folks like Dalton LaFerney, who grew up in a trailer in Texas and learned to fall asleep with the hum of his window unit. In this essay, LaFerney writes about the power of the window unit to reshape the way we think about air conditioning in a world that’s looking for sustainable cooling solutions. 

Excerpt: A window unit returns me to the hands of my mother. When I hear the murmurs from one now, I think of her labor that made our window units run, because to experience a window unit is to be confronted by bills and money and working and heat all at once. Unlike central air conditioning, its presence mostly felt, window units call out; they are in the room with us. They have faces and voices. I can feel when they are exhausted.

Published October 4, 2022

Story by Shane Mitchell | Photos by Audra Melton 

Few folks can weave together food writing, investigation, history, and personal narrative like Shane Mitchell. In the eighth installment of her “Crop Cycle” series, she writes about the Vidalia onion — an accidental discovery turned beloved state vegetable. It has morphed into a legally protected household name and industrialized agribusiness and is shipped across the country. But a recent federal investigation brought the southeast Georgia fields on which they’re grown into a new, more insidious light.  

Excerpt: The memory of emerging from that basement with onions dangling in Mom’s laddered stockings jolted me recently as news broke about a federal investigation in Georgia. Operation Blooming Onion peeled back layers of intractable abuse, including the variety that some would have us ignore or pretend doesn’t exist anymore: the sale of 30 “guest workers” for $21,481. Dark secrets live on in the onion fields of southeast Georgia, where an unlikely crop with an outsize reputation has coalesced power and wealth not unlike King Cotton and Big Tobacco.

Published October 11, 2022

Story by Hannah Hayes | Photos by Brinson + Banks

For our Issue No. 4 cover story, deputy editor and producer Hannah Hayes met musicians Kevin Morby and Katie Crutchfield, aka Waxahatchee, at their house in Kansas City. Although they’ve spent a decade sojourning through real and mythical geography and on endless tours, it’s here, instead of on the East or West Coast, that they’ve found a place to call home and pursue a slew of new music projects while leaning into the quiet of the heartland.

Excerpt: Somehow in 2022, with the average rent in New York City climbing northwards of $5,000 a month, the idea that an artist of his or Crutchfield’s notoriety could thrive outside it or Los Angeles — let alone in a modest midsize city in the middle of the country — remains baffling for many in their industry orbit and the writers who cover them. But after the living room talk, Morby thought more about musicians he admired: Will Oldham (Bonnie “Prince” Billy) in Louisville, David Berman in Nashville, Justin Vernon in Eau Claire, Angel Olsen in Asheville, Conor Oberst in Omaha, John Darnielle in Durham. He realized buying a house in Overland Park, the suburb where he grew up on the Kansas side of Kansas City seemingly straight out of a ’90s family sitcom, might not be that novel an idea after all. It might just be the secret sauce.

Published November 22, 2022

Story by Caroline Hatchett | Photos by Rinne Allen

Caroline Hatchett grew up attending her hometown’s annual rosin potato festival but hadn’t given much thought to the curious cooking method until she read Thurnell Alston’s account of working in turpentine camps in Praying for Sheetrock in 2019. This story is as much a mystery — filled with twists, turns, and false leads — as it is a meditation on food folklore and memory, and we loved every second of it. 

Excerpt: In the summer of 2020, Dad drove to Patterson, Georgia, to pick up 25 pounds of rosin from Diamond G Forest Products, a boutique producer of gum rosin and turpentine. I drove from New York to Baxley. In his garage, with the door rolled open, we fired up a propane cooker, melted rosin, and dropped in potatoes. The fumes coming off the pot were piney and potent, enough to make you dizzy in the heat, so I stood back, bare feet on smooth concrete, watching as a fury of bubbles rose from the swampy liquid. A half-hour into the boil, the potatoes began to emerge one by one. But it would take another year for their origins to surface. Turpentiners did not record the grand discovery that is rosin potatoes, or from where, exactly, they hail. They left that up to me.

Published December 13, 2022

Story by David Peisner | Photos by Fernando Decillis

Though it was published late in the year, we would be remiss to leave this important and ongoing story of a contested Atlanta forest off our list. David Peisner spent months in the woods to bring the voices of the forest defenders, outside activists, city officials, and local residents to life in this long-form, nuanced piece.

Excerpt: For progressive activists, Atlanta’s Public Safety Training Center represents something of a perfect storm: a single project that catalyzes fears of ecological degradation, state-sponsored violence, police militarization, environmental racism, opaque governance, and the long legacy of white supremacy. In the same way environmental issues are never simply local, the concern is that this training center — which would dwarf those of much larger departments in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago — will become a nationwide model. As one activist living in the woods told me in August, “The intersection between the climate crisis, growing inequality, and the militarization of cops is emblematic here, but it’s a problem everywhere.”