Though Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore went online in the summer of 2020, the anthology’s first essays were published on this day five years ago— January 15, 2021. Guinotte Wise’s “Come Together. Right Now.” came first, and it was followed that day by twelve more. Since then, there have been Open Submissions Periods – several back to back, then annually since 2022 – that have expanded the anthology to fifty-eight essays by forty-seven writers. There are also lesson plans, book and movie reviews, and my editor’s blog Groundwork. All of it examines, in some way, what the South has been or has become since 1970.

The idea behind Nobody’s Home is: what if an anthology could be a living, growing entity rather than a one-time publication? I got the idea from poet Walt Whitman, whose collection Leaves of Grass was reissued every few years in successively larger editions over the course of two decades. He did this rather than publish new poems in a new collection each time. The germ of that seed came to life after I edited a print anthology titled Children of the Changing South, which was published in 2011 by McFarland. During the process of getting it ready for publication, I realized that the internet and digital technologies allow for so many more possibilities . . . like what Whitman had done with Leaves of Grass. This project came about in 2020 after nearly a decade of trying to figure out how to do it.

The title and subtitle of Nobody’s Home are both references to things that I see in Southern culture. First, and somewhat sarcastically, the title alludes to Southerners’ penchant for refusing to face what we don’t want to acknowledge— “The lights are on, but nobody’s home.” This leads straight into the subtitle “Modern Southern Folklore,” which refers to the equally Southern penchant for storytelling and mythmaking. My mother used to tell me when I was young, “It doesn’t matter what you are. It matters what people think you are. Because that’s how they are going to treat you.” (This was her response to my GenXer’s penchant for proclaiming that I didn’t care what people thought about me.) For all our talk of common sense, we Southerners like to set aside what is reasonable or credible and show preference to what is interesting or acceptable. Myths are the truths we live by, and narratives are the stories that we tell ourselves to justify those truths. Nobody’s Home wraps its arms around those aspects of our culture and says to both writers and readers, Let’s open up a bit and talk about it.

In that spirit, my editor’s blog Groundwork takes on the idea that, where an anthology usually has a one-time editor’s introduction, this online anthology can have an ongoing editorial commentary that grows alongside its contents. Though this aspect of the project is more like a magazine’s set-up than a book’s, to be clear, Nobody’s Home is not a literary magazine. There is no spring issue or fall issue, so there are no back issues. Every work in the anthology is presented and prioritized equally, whether it was published this year or last year or several years ago. As for needing an ongoing introduction, let’s all agree that a lot has changed since 2020.

And it ain’t over yet. In three months, Nobody’s Home will have another Open Submissions Period, starting in mid-April. Writers who are interested in sending a work of creative nonfiction should read the guidelines, query first, and wait for a response about whether to send the whole work.