I can never erase the Southern part of me, and I don't want to.

I don't want to hide my Southern accent from pretentious academics, and I don't want to feel ashamed when I get excited about country music, about banjos, about George Strait.

I never want to leave the south and say "it's not worth talking about those people there," as if the place didn't introduce me to some of the best goddamn people I've ever met, as if some people matter less than others.

I never want to deny that part of the reason I love slam poetry so much is because it reminds me of the anger and conviction I always heard in my Southern Baptist preacher's voice when he talked about God being an angry, wrathful, and male God. I also can't deny that I originally learned what it means to be passionate in Sunday school classrooms with cold metal chairs and wooden walls - at alters and with youth groups.

I'm convinced that so much of my writing style, so much of the way I tell stories, so much of the way I talk comes from the stories I heard riding the church bus every single Sunday starting at age three. I can hear myself stopping in the same places the men who told the stories would stop. I break my sentences in the way they spoke. The stories they told were always funny stories, ones you could tell were made up at least a little, with a moral at the end - something the men learned about God that made the narratives they constructed meaningful. And the stories were always way too insightful, way too sentimental.

Every single Sunday I heard stories told almost universally by Southern men, and despite their sentimentality, they helped shape me; they're a part of the way I speak. They taught me how to make an every day experience useful, how to infuse it with so much meaning it becomes sickening.