Garden & Gun

Senior Vice President & Editor in Chief Executive Managing Editor Phillip Rhodes / Creative Director Marshall McKinney Photography and Visuals Director Maggie Brett Kennedy / Deputy Editors Amanda Heckert, David Mezz Style Director Haskell Harris /

—Maurice Carlos Ruffin on running with streetcars, p. 140 More than thirty years ago, a small-town Mississippi lawyer named John Grisham arose early before work to write. After he finished that first book, A Time to Kill, Grisham began writing The F

Growing up a river rat in coastal Georgia, I was a student of all of the state’s fifteen barrier islands, but the wildest ones enthralled me most. Even their names seemed to conjure adventure—Ossabaw, Blackbeard, Wassaw (where I left plenty of tracks

Several weeks ago, I received a subscription offer to your magazine. It was a surprise to me, a traditional woodchuck Yankee. I took a chance and mailed my check, and the April/May 2019 issue arrived. Russell Worth Parker’s Good Dog essay was worth t

In 1961, outside of Savannah, Georgia, a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker named Jerry Cooper got into the wrong Chevy convertible. The driver had stolen the car, and Cooper—fully unaware—was unlucky enough to be riding shotgun when the police tracked it d

Mary Lib Winstead sits in the living room of the Merritt-Winstead House, where she was born in 1918. The windows are cracked against the stifling heat of a Roxboro, North Carolina, summer—the house never had central air installed, but that doesn’t se

The way he tells it, Raymond Li Jr.’s path from a trouble-prone kid to the executive chef at Palmar, a modern Chinese restaurant with Latin influences, is a tale worthy of its own Netflix series. Li’s grandfather owned a Cuban Chinese restaurant in H

The duck confit biscuit is an expression of country-boy cooking. The duck confit biscuit is an expression of gentrified city cooking. Both of these statements are true. But after eating two great breakfasts in two months at Kenny’s Southside Sandwich

Anne and Will Massie were in high school when they went into business together for the first time. The siblings, born fifteen months apart, borrowed their dad’s orange International Harvester Scout and spent their summer days shuttling just-picked Si

My daddy was so cross-eyed, he could stand on Wednesday and see Monday and Sunday at the same time.” I overheard this from a man on the now-destroyed Scotch Bonnet pier on North Carolina’s Topsail Island while fishing with my mother one afternoon. My

The man and I drove all day through the Shenandoah Valley and entered the Blue Ridge by sunset, finding the turnoff only after dark. We serpentined into the mountains until our cell service slipped, until we were singing along to a station tuned to s

I am not a birder. I like one bird: the pelican. I might have died not knowing this, but nine years ago I moved with my family from New England to Austin, Texas, looked around, and realized we were far from the ocean. So we drove that summer to Galve

“The first book became a revered foundational text for any self-respecting hippie, me among them. It was also an affirmation of the wisdom of the region and the people I came from—something the culture at large did not acknowledge. My daughter now ha