Don't believe me? Check out these excerpts from their work.
Candice Dyer
From her article, “Greetings from Helen,” about the biggest and booziest Oktoberfest celebration in the world, held in the north Georgia mountains:
Other spectacles just as memorable, but not likely to be remembered clearly, will unfold in the tavern parking lots, including fist-fights, heaving expurgations, and acts of urgent carnal release—sometimes all involving the same two people. In a strange hybrid of highland folkways, Helen is where gemütlichkeit—the arm-linking, swaying-together fellowship of the Alps—abets the hell-raising volatility of Appalachia. The enduring joke about Helen, along with the “Helen a hand-basket” puns, goes: “I wonder if somewhere in Bavaria there is a North Georgia tourist town of trailer parks, gun dealers, and live-bait shops?” If only Lynyrd Skynyrd could yodel.
Jason Hartley
…Like most of the extraordinary discoveries in human history, the Advanced Genius Theory had its eureka moment in an ordinary place.
….Though it is difficult to pin down an exact date, the theory came to life sometime around 1992, when Britt Bergman and I got together for that fateful meeting at the Pizza Hut, near the University of South Carolina. Somehow we got on the subject of the decline of Lou Reed, whose music Britt introduced me to in high school. The Velvet Underground was unquestionably one of the greatest bands ever, but we wondered why Reed had made those Honda scooter commercials and why he had such a terrible haircut and why he always played "Walk on the Wild Side" on Late Night, and, finally, why his music had gotten so embarrassingly bad. And then it hit us: the Velvet Underground were ahead of their time in the 60s, so maybe Reed was ahead of our time in the 80s and 90s. Maybe he was just as much of a genius in the days of "The Original Wrapper" as he was when he wrote "Venus in Furs." Maybe he was expressing his genius in a way we didn't yet understand. And if this were true, could it also be true of other geniuses throughout history? We knew that we were on to something bigger than just explaining Lou Reed's haircut, and consequently for the last fifteen years, I have devoted my life to understanding Advancement.
Liane Lemaster
My grandmother kept the human braid in the bottom drawer of her dresser, wrapped in newspaper, dated June 14th 1926. I found it when I was seven. It was raining. Usually, when I came to visit my family in West Virginia, my mother sat at the Formica table in my grandmother’s kitchen and smoked and complained about the railroad tracks being so close to the house while my father sat in the other room and watched TV until it was time to eat again. Usually, when it didn’t rain, my cousins and I swam, fished, climbed, foraged, got lost in the woods, made tracks for people to find us, climbed, teased dogs, built huts, climbed again, and made up games that were specific and mean—if you can’t make it to the top of the hill then I will slice your head off, if you can’t make it to the next laurel branch then I will slice your head off and eat it, if you can’t make it back to Mamaw’s, then I will slice the heads off of all your family and rub them in gum and stick a spit through them and roast them like a pig, starting now. We loved it because it we were young enough and we felt safe enough to know it would never happen.
But this summer visit, the summer that I found the human hair in the drawer, my cousins weren’t around.
...Come see all three, plus their Artifacts from the Past, at "True Story!", next Wednesday, July 28th at 8:00 pm at Kavarna in Decatur.
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