Innholdsfortegnelse for December/January 2023 i Garden & Gun

You never quite know what’s going to arrive in the mail at the G&G offices. Recently I received a stunning handmade wooden memorial for Pritchard, my late Boykin spaniel, from a reader in Madisonville, Louisiana, that truly stole my breath. There are always letters from readers suggesting ideas and occasionally giving a stern but loving correction about something we may have gotten wrong in the pages, a Southern tsktsk. Once we received a very pregnant-looking USPS box stuffed with black walnuts, and there have been countless country hams and numerous garage-crafted duck calls. But one constant is a litany of new books from publishers. Most of those volumes pile deep on senior editor CJ Lotz’s desk. Among other duties, Lotz keeps everyone apprised of what’s coming, works on the popular…

PRETTY IN PINK Your cover with the roseate spoonbills has taken my breath away (October/ November 2022). They are extraordinary creatures: their legs so beautifully poised for their landing; their elegant beaks; their exquisitely colored feathers against the sky. I can’t stop looking at them! I have loved G&G and read each issue from cover to cover, but I admit this is one issue I’m still unable to open. Katrina Neylon Old Hickory, Tennessee I want to compliment you on the beautiful cover on your last issue. I always have Garden & Gun displayed until the next issue comes out, but this copy may stay awhile on my coffee table. It may be the most appealing I’ve seen since I subscribed in 2009. Pam Bond Blythewood, South Carolina We have…

Coulter Fussell never knows what she will find donated on the doorstep of her studio in Water Valley, Mississippi. A dowager’s mink, a cheating husband’s neckties, a rotting piece of Astroturf—anything could be in those Hefty bags. “Once I got a beaver’s tail,” she says. The weirder the scraps, the better. Her friends and neighbors know Fussell will use it all, crafting quilts from the refuse, occasionally wielding a power tool alongside a needle. “I know it looks like an episode of Hoarders in here,” she says. But every county dump should be so artfully inspired in its recycling. For most of its history, the quilt, regarded as more craft than art, has celebrated symmetry in recurring, kaleidoscopic patterns of gingham and calico. Fussell has instead brought punk-rock swagger to…

After a life spent watching my neighborhood birds,” writes the Elgin, Texas, artist and devoted birder Margie Crisp, “wandering through sometimes remote habitats seeking out beautiful, unique, or simply new birds; after joining and supporting local and national Audubon Societies along with other conservation organizations—how, at an age when most women are considering retirement, did I find myself crouched in a duck blind holding a loaded shotgun?” If you didn’t see that last line coming, well, neither did Crisp. But in 2016, while on a birding expedition in Texas, Crisp was struck by what felt like an incongruous realization. The hundreds of acres of soupy rice fields she was glassing with her binoculars, where thousands of birds were “wading, feeding, and roosting in the shallow water,” had been flooded and…

Larkin Poe BLOOD HARMONY Don’t let the delicate blues groove of the opener “Deep Stays Down” fool you. Two minutes into Larkin Poe’s Blood Harmony, the thundering guitars kick in, setting the tone for the thickest, heaviest effort to date from Georgia-born sisters Megan and Rebecca Lovell. “Bad Spell” is a sly response to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You,” the title track explodes into a joyous celebration, and “Kick the Blues” shows the sisters can rock just as hard as their Peach State brethren.…

It was like a fistfight to sell the stuff years ago,” says Joe Magliocco, the presidentof Michter’s Distillery in Louisville. He is talking about the early aughts, when rye was still considered a fusty, outmoded whiskey that interested few. On sales calls, he’d hear, “Who the hell wants a ten-year-old rye?” That’s all changed now. Michter’s pours up the long history of American whiskey in a short tumbler. The company dates all the way back to 1753, when two brothers, John and Michael Shenk, founded a namesake distillery in Pennsylvania. As with many such outfits, the following centuries brought ownership and name changes: Shenk’s became Bomberger’s in the mid-nineteenth century, then Pennco, then finally, in the 1950s, Michter’s—a portmanteau of Michael and Peter, the names of one of the new…

A deep white bowl, mounded with elbow noodles wrapped in a blanket of Jarlsberg, Grana Padano, and sharp white cheddar, graces every third table. The blackboard menu on the wall above red vinyl booths lists macaroni au gratin as a side dish. That’s ungenerous. At Poole’s, Ashley Christensen’s bistro-meets-diner in downtown Raleigh, that macaroni is appetizer, entree, side, dessert—and talisman. Gone craggy and brown beneath the broiler, it’s a marker of the goodness this restaurant puts on tables and reflects back to its community. Before December 2007, when Poole’s opened, the outside world often saw Raleigh as the cultural and culinary also-ran in a triad of North Carolina cities dominated by Chapel Hill and Durham. Red mud coursed downtown streets, runoff from construction of the nearby convention center. Too few…

On a snowy day in 1980, Chip Chase literally skied his way into a new life. He and a friend, Winslow Ayer, at the time two back-to-the-lander free spirits in their late twenties, were on a backcountry ski trip in the Allegheny Mountains of Tucker County, West Virginia, in search of a cabin on Cabin Mountain. Not having much luck (spoiler alert: there is no cabin on Cabin Mountain) and a little bit lost, they skied down the slope of the county’s highest peak, Weiss Knob, and came to a dead stop in front of an abandoned ski lodge. “I said, I know exactly what this is—an old downhill ski area,” Chase, who’s now sixty-nine, tells me from his front porch near the base of that same mountain. “We saw…

END OF THE LINE The eminent freestyle rapper-dancer Megan Thee Stallion and I are different in many ways. She is from Texas, I am from Georgia. Her middle name is Thee, whereas my middle initial is A. (For Alton.) She has a song out called “Sweetest Pie,” which includes the line “Toes curling like they’re throwing gang signs.” I have a book out called Save Room for Pie, which I doubt includes any line as provocative as that. And she can do things with her hips, and so on, that I can’t even dream of—I’ve tried, to dream of them. Megan Thee Stallion was named by Time magazine as one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. I was not, and no wonder. Megan Thee Stallion is…

As I type this, I’m just back from the Garden & Gun Society’s annual gathering. This year, we headed to San Antonio, where a number of members joined some very special guests and contributors, including Latria Graham, Vivian Howard, Woody Platt, and Shannon Whitworth. The fabulous Hotel Emma provided the backdrop for our fun, which included panel discussions, bourbon, of course (courtesy of our friends at Blade and Bow), a day shooting sporting clays at Joshua Creek Ranch, and meals that will be hard to forget. Next year we head to Boca Grande, Florida, November 9–12, where good times and maybe a few tarpon will be on the docket. To learn more about the Society, visit gardenandgun.com/ggsociety.…

MEET THE WINNERS Meet Margeaux, a terrier mix, and Chauncey, a Brussels griffon mix, the overall winners of our 2022 Good Dog Photo Contest. Their owner, Rita Badalamenti, snapped this photo on a morning walk in Fairhope, Alabama, capturing two-year-old Margeaux’s ebullient personality and seventeen-year-old Chauncey’s charming snaggletooth. In the sporting-dog category, G&G editors found a winner in Cache, a four-year-old Boykin spaniel from Huntsville, Alabama, framed during an Arkansas duck-hunting trip with owner Logan Hardy. “You can tell he is strictly business,” Hardy says of the photo, taken by friend Jon Stahulak. The winners will receive prize packs from Eukanuba, our partner in the contest. Thanks to all who submitted their dogs; with nearly six thousand entries, selecting the champs proved to be a challenging (but delightful) task. To…

There’s a lot to catch your eye with a duck call hand turned by the custom call maker Josh Raggio. The Mississippi artisan crafts calls from gorgeous horse chestnut burl, cocobolo, African blackwood, and other grade A woods from around the world. He can checker the call in the manner of a fine double gun, add a decorative band, or even use a guitar string to score delicate burn lines that encircle the call. Even if you don’t know the first thing about calling a duck, there is something sinuous and sexy and viscerally appealing about a Raggio call. The irony: Very little of that matters to a duck. While the shape of a call and its material will affect its sound, most of what makes a duck call sound…

Although the living legend Wendell Berry guards his privacy, writing from his farm in Henry County, Kentucky, he has long revealed pieces of himself through his ruminations on the rural life, particularly in his Port William stories. Set in a fictional Kentucky town, his lovely new How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership (Counterpoint) continues the tale of the eighty-eight-year-old Berry’s autobiographical character Andy Catlett. “Better than he can see himself as he was,” Berry writes in one vignette, “he can see as he then saw the segment of his native country that lay before him as he began his walk: its winter-silenced hollows and ridges, its bare trees, the lichened and moss-grown rock fence then still standing…”…

ARM CANDY The Virginia jewelry designer Elizabeth Locke’s new collection of bangles includes the delicate diamond and gold stunner at top and, below it, two rainbow-hued venetian glass designs that look equal parts Etruscan and 2023 ($7,300– $14,550; elizabethlocke.com). DESERT STAR This Syna eighteen-karat-gold and champagne diamond cocktail ring from Charlotte, North Carolina’s Elizabeth Bruns transforms the cactus into a succulent statement piece ($5,650; elizabethbruns.com). Clockwise from far left: ALL-TERRAIN VEHICLES Consider the Trafalgar boots by Fairfax & Favor a forever gift—one that only gets better as the years go on. The subtle navy blue side panels make them a cinch to slip on and off, and their stylish look means they work as well in the office as they do in the field ($330; fairfaxandfavor.com). GIVING SNAPS This hardworking…

James Lee Burke WRITER With forty-two novels (and counting) to his credit, the eighty-five-year-old literary titan James Lee Burke has no plans to slow down. “I write every day and take no days off,” he says. “It’s the greatest life in the world.” One of his series follows an epic family saga in Texas; another tracks the adventures of detective Dave Robicheaux around Burke’s family home of New Iberia, Louisiana—a locale he revisits in “A Chapel of One’s Own” (p. 162). These days, Burke has traded boyhood time along Bayou Teche for ranch life near Montana’s Bitterroot River, but his novels, such as his forthcoming Flags on the Bayou, out in summer 2023, often lead his mind home. “I write every day and take no days off. It’s the greatest…

Josh Lucas describes his career as a tide—fitting, given the fifty-one-year-old spent his childhood on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, just outside Charleston. At age nine, he got bitten by the acting bug there, after hiding in the dunes to watch a small production company film a climactic scene between two teenage lovers. Since then, he’s stepped in front of the camera in such movies as Sweet Home Alabama, Glory Road, Poseidon, and The Lincoln Lawyer. He’s acted onstage, too, and his extensive voice-over work means you might also recognize his smooth intonations from Home Depot commercials and Ken Burns documentary narrations. ¶ In the first two seasons of the über-popular TV show Yellowstone, he appeared as a young John Dutton, the rancher-patriarch played in the present day by Kevin Costner.…

Joey Ward comes from a generation of well-trained young Atlanta chefs who a decade ago pushed the city into a new and more adventurous chapter. No place embodied that era more than Kevin Gillespie’s brash, delicious Gunshow, where Ward spent six years as executive chef. Now he creates bold dishes that honor the region’s ingredients and the city’s many flavors at Southern Belle (named for his wife, Emily) and his small tasting room, Georgia Boy (named for him). “Yes, we might have some grits on a dish, but we are also using kimchi,” he says. Ward wanted to be a chef from the moment his grandfather put him on a stool as a kindergartner and showed him how to cook pancakes with blueberries they had picked themselves. He was a…

Rebecca Gardner says she still believes in Santa Claus because he came to her mother’s Christmas parties in Corpus Christi, Texas, for decades. Turns out the guy with the real white beard was a man her mother had found slumped outside a local liquor store and paid to do the job. When Gardner’s family moved, he found them each December. She says, “He showed up every year at the same time for the rest of time.” To Gardner, it was a Christmas miracle. She says, “The best guests are unexpected.” She says, “Every party should have a little bit of naughtiness.” Gardner should know. As a child, she worked her mother’s soirees, taking coats. Knee-high to a grasshopper cocktail, she learned that “you can make anything happen with a party.”…

BRONZE AGE From left: Forget-me-not necklace by Julie Cohn Design ($595); hydrangea blossom earrings by Julie Cohn Design($395); St. Louis sunglasses in petal by Krewe ($325); roll-top backpack by Iron Rivet ($650); pink pelican scarf by Carson & Co. ($332). VERDANT FINDS From left: Green carafe and glass set by Kiss That Frog ($50); Vincas scarf in cream by Carson & Co. ($332); Garden & Gun needlepoint flask by Smathers & Branson ($75); Gone Fishin’ 500-piece puzzle by Piecework Puzzles ($32); Adele sunglasses in lagoon by Krewe ($285); succulent chalk by Twee ($42); hand grinder in dark teal by Good Citizen Coffee Co. ($40); Kleck with jade cabochon earrings by Hazel Smyth ($475); lichen cuff by Emilie Shapiro Jewelry ($323); Cheers bow tie by Brackish ($225); green oyster plate by…