{"id":105620,"date":"2016-12-08T10:45:59","date_gmt":"2016-12-08T15:45:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=105620"},"modified":"2016-12-09T16:50:18","modified_gmt":"2016-12-09T21:50:18","slug":"my-step-is-south","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/","title":{"rendered":"My Step Is South"},"content":{"rendered":"

Discovering William Christenberry.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

William Christenberry, Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama, 1994<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

One of my first days in Washington, having just arrived from Tennessee,\u00a0I wandered into the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I found myself surrounded by\u00a0Kodak Brownie photographs of barns, country stores, Baptist churches, metal signs, family graveyards\u2014striking reminders of the Southern landscape I\u2019d left behind.<\/p>\n

Starting in the 1970s, the artist William Christenberry had photographed the same places in rural Alabama year after year. In one picture, a shack with false brick siding commanded the landscape; two decades later, kudzu had swallowed it whole. Their continuity gave these images a neurotic but documentary quality. There was loss in them. There was deep and complicated love.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The photographs were accompanied by Christenberry\u2019s sculptures of the same structures\u2014withdrawn from nature now, miniaturized, and presented on pedestals in a haunting, idealized form. If the photographs reveled in the mortality of things, the sculptures beatified them, turning those tumbledown haunts into totems: what Christenberry, who died last week<\/a>, at eighty, called \u201cDream Buildings,\u201d \u201cSouthern Sculptures,\u201d \u201cMemory Forms.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was hooked. On lunch breaks from work, I returned to the show day after day, unsure as to whether I\u2019d chanced upon a kind of homecoming or a home burial or something else, but homing in on the work all the same.\u00a0What the pictures said was that the rural South was decaying. Yes, yes, the sculptures countered, but on the imaginations of its exiles the place retained an irrevocable hold.<\/p>\n

To be sure, the South, or at least my Middle Tennessee sliver of it, had never had more of a hold on me. On the metro, between white spells of motion sickness, I was reading Randall Jarrell, who had, like me, grown up in Nashville, and who, for one reason or another, had hit the northern road.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cTurn as I please, my step is south,\u201d Jarrell wrote in a poem called \u201c90 North.\u201d Before, I had taken the line as a metaphor for the inevitable letdown that attends great accomplishment\u2014in Jarrell\u2019s narrator\u2019s case, reaching the North Pole\u2014but now I wondered if he wasn\u2019t making a more fundamental statement about home. It tugged at you, turned you around. Only once you self-consciously extracted yourself did it assert its claim. In a sense you weren\u2019t really \u201cfrom\u201d there until you moved away.<\/p>\n

As I blew about D.C., not yet knowing if I wanted to settle in, I found myself reaching for Christenberry\u2019s work like an aide-m\u00e9moire. I knew those barns. They dotted the hillsides north of Nashville. I had cashed checks in those country stores, had sat in the back pews of those old churches. To be honest, I\u2019d never thought much about them and, to be more honest, I had spent a lot of time trying to move on, and now suddenly they struck me as beautiful\u2014as subjects deserving, even possessed, of art.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Until then, I\u2019d regarded art as a portal to another place, a generic elsewhere. In my high school, let alone in my house, we didn\u2019t have pictures or paintings of the South on the walls. We didn\u2019t have many pictures or paintings at all. What we had were posters and\u00a0reproductions\u00a0of Paris scenes by the French impressionists\u2014those\u00a0and a few abstract expressionist\u00a0prints\u00a0that could have been about\u00a0nowhere or everywhere\u00a0and yet somehow were definitely not about anywhere I knew.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Christenberry, on the other hand, was giving me something of my own backdrop\u00a0and experience. He was calling attention, to quote the poet Patrick Kavanagh, to the \u201cbackward\u201d places, the places where \u201cno one important ever looked.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Coleman’s Caf\u00e9, Greensboro, Alabama<\/i>, 1971, Brownie pigment print image, 3 3\/8″ x 4 7\/8″.<\/p><\/div>\n

Even though he had lived and worked in D.C. since the early seventies, and had spent time in New York with Walker Evans before that, Christenberry had remained intimately connected to his native Hale County. With the encouragement of Evans, who had traveled to Hale County\u00a0with James Agee in the 1930s to take pictures of sharecroppers for what would become the book\u00a0Let Us Now Praise Famous Men<\/em>, Christenberry began making yearly pilgrimages to chronicle the ravages and renewals wrought upon his homeland by nature, migration, and time.<\/p>\n

The intense ritualism of Christenberry\u2019s process, the perpetual return to and revivification of the same material, extended into his most controversial work, a collection of more than four hundred\u00a0Ku Klux Klan\u2013related paintings, sculptures, textiles, and pictures he brought together under the title \u201cThe Klan Room.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 1960, Christenberry was walking through the Tuscaloosa\u00a0County Court House when he came upon a Klansman dressed in full regalia. The man, standing guard over a Klan meeting, turned to face Christenberry, who was twenty-four at the time. \u201cI\u2019ll never forget that as long as I live,\u201d Christenberry later recalled. \u201cI immediately turned and rushed out of the building.\u201d<\/p>\n

I recognized that reaction. In the back office of a small business where I\u2019d worked one summer in Nashville, I\u2019d opened a drawer to find a knife with a KKK insignia on the handle. I recoiled at the sight of it, jerking my fingers away and backing out of the room. The knife might have been a brown recluse, a scorpion, a rattlesnake.\u00a0I was scared that whatever idiocy and evil had carried such a hateful object into that office might also reside in me by virtue of my presence there, by virtue of growing up where I grew up\u2014by virtue, more worryingly, of my humanity, which, if the knife was any signal, included a capacity for great inhumanity, too.<\/p>\n

In 1979, the entire contents of Christenberry\u2019s \u201cKlan Room\u201d were stolen from his D.C. studio, forcing him to restart the project from scratch. The culprit was never apprehended, the pieces never returned. Could it have been the work of a white-supremacist group? Had Christenberry indirectly induced the crime by creating, as some critics claimed, a troublingly ambivalent take on racial violence in the South, one that Klan sympathizers could have mistaken for approval?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nothing, by my lights, could have been more specious. Set against the rest of Christenberry\u2019s oeuvre, the tableau has all the force, even ferocity, of a personal, if not a cultural, exorcism. Case in point, Christenberry\u2019s handmade Klansmen dolls. Constructed and costumed first with the help of William Eggleston\u2019s wife, Rosa, and later with the help of the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia, the finger-sized statuettes\u2014dozens of which populate \u201cThe Klan Room\u201d\u2014are often posed like action figures, sometimes impaled on pins like voodoo dolls, sometimes peering out of wooden windows, sometimes standing in coffin-shaped boxes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The pageantry employed by the Klan to dignify its devilry is here exposed as juvenile perversion. Seldom has an artist gone to such elaborate and individuated lengths (think Picasso, think de Goya) to deracinate the delusions at the dark heart of fanaticism. Christenberry was as affected by rural experience as Agee and Evans. His work could offer a solemn memorial or a prodigal embrace, yes\u2014but when he wanted it to be, it was a wholesale repudiation of that culture, a caricature burned in effigy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even so, Christenberry\u2019s \u201cstep,\u201d as Jarrell put it, \u201cwas south.\u201d In Washington, my own \u201c90 North,\u201d many miles removed from home, it was Christenberry who helped me see, appraise, reject, and reclaim that place as if for the first time.\u00a0His barns and Dream Buildings, dirt roads and Memory Forms carried me straight back, made me feel known again and safe enough even as they issued an urgent call: not to do the South proud, no, nothing so provincial as that, but rather to think better and more brazenly\u00a0about its radix, the very first place, no matter how backward, how beautiful, how depraved.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Drew Bratcher is a writer from Nashville.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christenberry\u2019s photographs called attention, to quote Patrick Kavanaugh, to the \u201cbackward\u201d places, the places where \u201cno one important ever looked.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":439,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[3551,26133,26135,26134,9894,21057,26136,1666,26132,100,7221,165,1681,964,459,1637,7258,8141,26131],"class_list":["post-105620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam","tag-alabama","tag-brownie","tag-dirt-roads","tag-dream-buildings","tag-james-agee","tag-ku-klux-klan","tag-memory-forms","tag-nashville","tag-patrick-kavanaugh","tag-photography","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-randall-jarrell","tag-sculpture","tag-smithsonian","tag-tennessee","tag-the-south","tag-washington-d-c","tag-william-christenberry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIn Memoriam: William Christenberry\u2019s South<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Christenberry\u2019s photographs called attention, to quote Patrick Kavanaugh, to the \u201cbackward\u201d places, the places where \u201cno one important ever looked.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"My Step Is South by Drew Bratcher\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 8, 2016 \u2013 Christenberry\u2019s photographs called attention, to quote Patrick Kavanaugh, to the \u201cbackward\u201d places, the places where \u201cno one important ever looked.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-12-08T15:45:59+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-12-09T21:50:18+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/christenberry.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1280\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1020\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Drew Bratcher\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Drew Bratcher\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Drew Bratcher\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/170d988fbd5e897875eb3bf9fa1e23fe\"},\"headline\":\"My Step Is South\",\"datePublished\":\"2016-12-08T15:45:59+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-12-09T21:50:18+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/\"},\"wordCount\":1336,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/christenberry.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Alabama\",\"Brownie\",\"dirt roads\",\"Dream Buildings\",\"James Agee\",\"Ku Klux Klan\",\"Memory Forms\",\"Nashville\",\"Patrick Kavanaugh\",\"photography\",\"poems\",\"poetry\",\"Randall Jarrell\",\"sculpture\",\"Smithsonian\",\"Tennessee\",\"The south\",\"Washington D.C.\",\"William Christenberry\"],\"articleSection\":[\"In Memoriam\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/\",\"name\":\"In Memoriam: William Christenberry\u2019s South\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/christenberry.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2016-12-08T15:45:59+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-12-09T21:50:18+00:00\",\"description\":\"Christenberry\u2019s photographs called attention, to quote Patrick Kavanaugh, to the \u201cbackward\u201d places, the places where \u201cno one important ever looked.\u201d\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/christenberry.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/christenberry.jpg\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"My Step Is South\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"description\":\"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.\",\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Organization\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"logo\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"width\":696,\"height\":696,\"caption\":\"The Paris Review\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\"},\"sameAs\":[\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\",\"https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview\",\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview\"]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/170d988fbd5e897875eb3bf9fa1e23fe\",\"name\":\"Drew Bratcher\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/4bf2b0551c17f47e0ddf97d8d1aab818fde9bd6109cbadc57ca7377834dc26ec?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/4bf2b0551c17f47e0ddf97d8d1aab818fde9bd6109cbadc57ca7377834dc26ec?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Drew Bratcher\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/dbratcher\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO Premium plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"In Memoriam: William Christenberry\u2019s South","description":"Christenberry\u2019s photographs called attention, to quote Patrick Kavanaugh, to the \u201cbackward\u201d places, the places where \u201cno one important ever looked.\u201d","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"My Step Is South by Drew Bratcher","og_description":"December 8, 2016 \u2013 Christenberry\u2019s photographs called attention, to quote Patrick Kavanaugh, to the \u201cbackward\u201d places, the places where \u201cno one important ever looked.\u201d","og_url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/","og_site_name":"The Paris Review","article_publisher":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","article_published_time":"2016-12-08T15:45:59+00:00","article_modified_time":"2016-12-09T21:50:18+00:00","og_image":[{"width":1280,"height":1020,"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/christenberry.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Drew Bratcher","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@parisreview","twitter_site":"@parisreview","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Drew Bratcher","Est. reading time":"7 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/"},"author":{"name":"Drew Bratcher","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/170d988fbd5e897875eb3bf9fa1e23fe"},"headline":"My Step Is South","datePublished":"2016-12-08T15:45:59+00:00","dateModified":"2016-12-09T21:50:18+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/"},"wordCount":1336,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/christenberry.jpg","keywords":["Alabama","Brownie","dirt roads","Dream Buildings","James Agee","Ku Klux Klan","Memory Forms","Nashville","Patrick Kavanaugh","photography","poems","poetry","Randall Jarrell","sculpture","Smithsonian","Tennessee","The south","Washington D.C.","William Christenberry"],"articleSection":["In Memoriam"],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/","name":"In Memoriam: William Christenberry\u2019s South","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/christenberry.jpg","datePublished":"2016-12-08T15:45:59+00:00","dateModified":"2016-12-09T21:50:18+00:00","description":"Christenberry\u2019s photographs called attention, to quote Patrick Kavanaugh, to the \u201cbackward\u201d places, the places where \u201cno one important ever looked.\u201d","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/christenberry.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/christenberry.jpg"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/08\/my-step-is-south\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"My Step Is South"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","name":"The Paris Review","description":"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization","name":"The Paris Review","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","width":696,"height":696,"caption":"The Paris Review"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview","https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/170d988fbd5e897875eb3bf9fa1e23fe","name":"Drew Bratcher","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/4bf2b0551c17f47e0ddf97d8d1aab818fde9bd6109cbadc57ca7377834dc26ec?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/4bf2b0551c17f47e0ddf97d8d1aab818fde9bd6109cbadc57ca7377834dc26ec?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Drew Bratcher"},"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/dbratcher\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/439"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105620"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105706,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105620\/revisions\/105706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}