Brutal South Paul Bowers

Every December, my friend the sportswriter Michael Baumann joins me for a festive exchange of Wikipedia articles we gathered through the year. We’ve been exchanging them informally for well over a decade now, but in recent years we decided to make a podcast out of it.
Mike covers baseball for FanGraphs.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @MichaelBaumann.
If you’d like to follow along, here are Baumann’s picks:
* Southern Victory
* Corinne Diacre
* Quebec Biker War
* Goncharov
* List of -gate scandals and controversies
Here are mine:
* Dave Matthews Band Chicago River incident
* The Truman Show delusion
* Loukanikos
* Devil Eyes
* Ghost Army


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My guest is Aaron Carey of the West Virginia black metal band Nechochwen. Aaron is a true Appalachian hesher who's also trained as a classical guitarist, and he's been using his musical project to retell and reinterpret indigenous history in his part of the world. He learned growing up that he was descended from some prominent members of the Shawnee and Lenape tribes, and he frequently talks about the history of those tribes, both in his lyrics and also in what he describes as non-lyrical tone poems.
The latest Nechochwen album is called Kanawha Black, which you can stream or download or buy on a vinyl record via Bandcamp. If you're interested in learning more about the band, the music journalist Brad Sanders had an excellent profile earlier this year in Bandcamp Daily.
The Brutal South podcast is an extension of the weekly newsletter of the same name, which you can read and sign up for at brutalsouth.substack.com. The theme music is by The Camellias.


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My guests today are Amber Campbell-Moore and Dr. Matt Cressler with the Charleston Area Justice Ministry, a good, radically inclusive organization working for social and economic justice in Charleston, S.C., and the greater Charleston area. As we speak today, the ministry is gearing up for its biggest public-facing event of the year, the Nehemiah Action.
Every year at the Nehemiah Action, members of religious communities bring their protests and demands to local politicians. It’s exciting, it’s strange, it’s genuinely a lot of fun to be part of — and it gets the goods. Year after year I’ve seen the group behind it, the Charleston Area Justice Ministry, push for successful changes in our city, county, and school district governments. They make some enemies along the way — including the mayor of North Charleston, who threw a hissy fit one year — but when they get in trouble, it’s always good trouble, as the saying goes.
The 2022 Nehemiah Action will take place on Monday, April 4th from 7-9 p.m. at the Charleston County School District 4 Regional Stadium (3659 West Montague Ave., North Charleston, SC). Here is the link to register and add it to your calendar: https://charlestonareajusticeministry.org/event/2022-nehemiah-action/


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I have a new piece of short fiction out today in the Charleston City Paper Lit Issue. It’s called “Possum Island,” and you can read it online or pick up a paper if you’re in the area.
I thought it would be fun to make an audio version, so that’s what I did. Enjoy!
If you’re looking for more stuff to listen to, check out the Brutal South podcast on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.
If you’re a possum aficionado, you might enjoy this thinkpiece I wrote about possum memes last year with the help of the novelist George Singleton:
That’s all for this week. The possum drawing is by my daughter. The music in the episode is by The Camellias.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

We're gathered here today to speak of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a tremendous beautiful bird that is gone forever ... or so some people think.
Hey. Welcome to Episode 29 of the Brutal South Podcast. The ivory-billed woodpecker has been on my mind again since late September when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed moving it and 22 other species from the endangered species list forever, effectively declaring the bird extinct.
It's been called the Lord God Bird, supposedly because of the things people would exclaim when they encountered this big, elusive bird in the American wild. The last universally accepted sighting was in 1944 in northeast Louisiana. Hobbyists and professionals alike kept searching, though, keeping the faith that it was out there, but hiding, like a cryptid. This bird has been the subject of songs, novels, endless speculation, and long expeditions in the swamps and forests of the Southeastern United States.
My guest this week is Matt Drury, who's currently working as a resource management coordinator for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. In the course of his career he's done all kinds of fascinating and vital work in the woods in this part of the country, including a stint leading the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker in old-growth swamplands across South Carolina. I don't want to give too much away, but I learned so much from him. There's a lot to mourn, but a lot we can still save, too.
To learn more and support Matt’s work, visit appalachiantrail.org and southernspruce.org.
If you liked the podcast, please leave a nice review wherever you do that or just share it with your friends. Also, if haven't yet, check out the Brutal South newsletter at brutalsouth.substack.com. I've been publishing at least one interesting thing a week for more than 2 years on labor, ecology, parenting, art, and just about everything else from my little perch here in South Carolina. I think you might find something you like. One piece you might appreciate is this one from June 23 on camping in fragile places with young children during the Anthropocene:
The episode art is an engraving of ivory-billed woodpeckers, Campephilus principalis, by John J. Audubon.


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My guest on the pod is Michael Smallwood (@mikeluvsgushers), an actor, director, podcaster, and screenwriter from Charleston. He recently appeared in the biggest movie role of his career as the character Marcus in Halloween Kills, the latest installment of the Michael Myers saga. If you've seen it, you'll recognize him as the guy in the doctor costume from the first 20 or so minutes of the movie. He was great. I screamed when I saw him.
Michael and I have crossed paths a few times over the years here in South Carolina, but we'd never gotten to sit down and talk at length. As cool as it was to see him in a big Hollywood production, I was even more excited to talk to him about his original short film What a Beautiful Wedding, which deals with the underlying current of horror in weddings that take place on former slave plantations. We'll get into that in the second half of the show.
If you want to see Halloween Kills, I don't need to tell you how to find it; it's the No. 1 movie in America. If you want to see What a Beautiful Wedding, it's currently only available to stream via the Octopunk Media Patreon page at patreon.com/octopunkmedia. Worth it.
Over on the newsletter at brutalsouth.substack.com, my latest piece is about the state of the death penalty in Missouri, Alabama, and Oklahoma. Coming soon, I've got some juicy details on former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley's weird, bespoke, neo-McCarthyite think tank and how it's blowing millions of dollars on Facebook ads.
If you’d like to support my work and get access to some exclusive content, subscriptions are $5/month at brutalsouth.substack.com/subscribe.
Exciting stuff on the way, y'all. Have a lovely spooky season.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com