You Lay With Dogs, You Get Up With Fleas.
Southern Sayings Don't Make Sense ... Until They Do.
Hello!
This is the first issue of Front Porch Wisdom & Southern Prose, the free newsletter from Southern Momentum Publishing House, LLC. In this newsletter, readers can expect to receive updates about the publishing house, our latest acquisitions, releases, and who we hope to secure next.
As we are just starting up, you will also have a chance to donate to our lean start-up fund. We’re trying to raise 1800 dollars to give the writers in our first anthology an honorarium that can be used to offset the cost of participating in the anthology, making it more accessible to more aspiring, underrepresented Southern Women Writers.
Be patient with us. I’m sure the format will change a million times until we find a formula that connects with a dedicated audience. Hopefully, we nail it in the first three issues, but I seriously doubt it because people who tend to love Southern fiction or nonfiction are a little strange. (I mean that in the best way possible 🤗) So, it may take a while to get the correct combination of intellectual, quirky, and what did that say, again?
Until we come up with that formula, I’ll keep writing and y’all can tell me what needs to change from month to month. Moment of transparency, I’ll probably pretend to 🙉 or 🙈 any of it, anyway.
It’ll all work out in the end.
By the way, welcome to Front Porch Wisdom & Southern Prose, it's everything you remember and all the things you wished it had been.
Question of Month
Lessons From My Grandma’s Porch
If you layin’ with dogs, you can betcha bottom dollar, you gone get up with fleas.
I grew up sitting on my Grandma’s porch on the third step from the bottom. Five wide steps led up to the covered porch. The steps—like the house—were made of red bricks. I didn’t want to sit too close and be accused of listenin’ to grown folks talkin’ but I didn’t want to be too far away to hear what the grown folks had to say.
Usually, it was my cousin and I who would sit on the steps after going into the garden to “help” pick vegetables. Help is in quotations because we mostly ate cucumbers and tomatoes and the wild blackberries we found growing between what had been planted.
We would have our bowls filled with field and snap peas. The plan was to take as long as the older women did so we could do what they told us not to do. Listen to grown folks talk. Hindsight being 20/20, I know my Grandma, great aunties, and the other grown folks who sat around on the porch doling out sage wisdom, marital advice, recipes for everything under the sun, and a good bit of what could only be carried out under the watchful eye of Sister Moon wanted us to sit there. Be quiet and soak it all up.
I don’t know about my cousin, but I sopped their words up like gravy. In all the ways that matter, their words were gravy. The kind that becomes more flavorful, richer, and filling as it warms on the stove. Or settles in the heart.
One of my aunties had been in an abusive relationship with her husband for as long as they’d been together. The family knew, but. like so many women in abusive relationships, my auntie had a difficult time leaving her abuser. That Saturday, after going into the garden and getting set up on the front porch, the sisters started talking.
My Grandma had become an ancestor by this time. Shout out to Molly W. the most put-together woman I’ve ever known,
Back to the story. My auntie had bruises everywhere. She didn’t try to hide them, there was no need anyway. We’d all heard the terrible and shouting and crying the night before. So, my cousin—my auntie’s youngest daughter—and I are shelling peas. We’re so quiet, we could’ve heard a rat piss on cotton. We’d witnessed the insanity the night before and had run screaming and crying from my auntie’s trailer to my Grandma’s house.
My mom, two brothers, and I lived in “the house”, and that’s where my auntie sent us. Not to get help, but to get to safety.
Anyway, my older auntie-I’ll call her, Nessy, was hot as fish grease. I mean ready to go to her house and get her pistol. I wanted her to do it. Would’ve gone with her to make sure she didn’t forget the bullets but they wouldn’t let her do it.
I don’t know which one of the women on the front porch said it, but when they did, I felt every word write itself on my soul, I can’t be sure, but it sounded a lot like my Grandma who whispered in my right ear, “Pay attention to this. It’s important, ya hea?”
“I done told ya once, keep layin’ down wit dogs and yo ass gone sho nuff get up wit fleas. Didn’t I tell ya that?”
I remember sneaking a peek at my auntie’s face and tears slipped down my cheeks into the bowl of field peas. I couldn’t even cry out because they’d know I was listening to grown folks. But, every bruise, cut, and handprint on my auntie’s beautiful face made me want to drown the dog that thought he had the right to give her his cowardly fleas.
I didn’t know if that was what my other auntie meant, but my childish mind saw that bastard as a mangy dog not fit to be around civilized people.
It was easy to see him as such.
Only a rabid dog would attack a woman as amazing as my auntie like she was a pile of discarded clothes he’d pissed on in the streets.
In the end, she continued to lay with him until she couldn’t take it anymore. Thankfully, she finally understood what her sisters and brothers had been trying to convey to her, and she handled her business like the boss woman she was in all other areas of her life.
As for me… I learned that lesson sitting on the third step from the bottom one that led to my Grandma’s covered porch. If it’s good for you, it won’t leave you with itchy bruises all over your body, heart, and soul.
What’s a piece of wisdom you’ve carried with you from your family? Share your thoughts in our Substack Chat for deeper conversations.
Southern Momentum:
We Never Rush Because It Takes Time to Perfect a Thing
This is where the unapologetic journey of starting a hybrid publishing company from the ground up is shared. The joys, the lows, the tears, and the woes. I will never lie about how daunting it is to start this company.
If you’re a business owner, you already know how much goes into starting a business but what if you’re alone and figuring it out by yourself?
That was my dilemma in the beginning. I don’t know anybody who’s started a publishing company dedicated to working with a niche group of writers across state lines to liberate underrepresented voices and stories. I think if I were just starting a hybrid publishing company for the hell of it, I wouldn’t care so much but this isn’t just anything. Southern Momentum Publishing House, LLC is my legacy maker. The thing I will leave behind when my body dies,
It’s important to my soul, not only my will and heart. My hybrid publishing company is how I will fulfill my Soul’s Vow. Maybe one day, I’ll share what it is, but this is the way I’m bringing it to fruition.
So Far at SOMO Publishing House …
After two or three months of trial and error, I got the WEBSITE up and running. It looks exactly how I want it to look. I decided to do a soft launch, in hopes people would tell me what works, what doesn’t, and if they saw any mistakes that needed fixing,
I had two middle-aged white men tell me I had typos on my website but didn’t see fit to tell me where. (Thank you for your feedback)
One white man told me that I was a literary predator and vanity press and should be ashamed of myself for charging a reading fee for anthology entries because I was going to be the only one to make money off their stories.
Do you notice a pattern here? First off, Thank you but my hybrid publishing house is not for the cisgender, white men who felt the need to check out a site designed to appeal to underrepresented Southern women and femme-identifying writers. [I did have a few typos, so shout out to the middle-aged dude for pointing it out]
As a solo entrepreneur, I knew I needed to create a team of knowledgeable partners and advisors. I’m starting as a lean startup, which means very little capital, and will be reinvesting my revenue back in the business until Southern Momentum Publishing is well established and turning a serious profit. So how could I get the kind of people to join me in this endeavor without the promise of a big budget and guaranteed salary?
Referral-based Preferred Partner Network (PPN). The PPN is my genius way of ensuring my future clients get the best services while ensuring SOMO has access to their expertise, network, and relationships. I am still accepting professional author service providers, especially BIPOC & LGBTQIA+. If you’re interested in joining the Preferred Partner Network use the link below to complete an interest form and I’ll get in touch with you.
I’ve been fortunate enough to build some amazing relationships within the writing community at large. I say this to say that I put the call out to my writing community to become part of an advisory board and… Surprise of surprises, they answered the call. My advisory board has over 100+ years of combined industry experience. We are still finalizing some things, but having the foundation in place took a lot of pressure off me.
It’s important to establish a social media platform and build brand awareness. To that end, I invest upwards of three to four hours a week on social media, interacting, posting, and organically creating connections. If you’d like to help our numbers and plan to be an active member of our growing community give us a follow on our socials:
Instagram | Threads | Facebook | LinkedIn |
Exciting News!
We are on track to officially launch in January of 2025, although we are enjoying this soft launch and have several promotions going on during this time. (Check the website to see if any of them scratch an itch.)
We have completed one grant and have started working on another one to infuse some much-needed startup capital into our coffers.
I have started working with several business mentors from various agencies in my city and state geared toward helping minority and women entrepreneurs find and maintain success.
I had my first potential author publishing consult and it went so well; she’s verbally committed to publishing with us. (She’s pretty impressive and provided me with an in to leverage with a potential publishing partner.
Interest is growing in the company and my numbers are increasing on socials—not by leaps and bounds—but I prefer to do things at a Southern Momentum, we never rush because it takes time to perfect a thing.
Open Call for Short Story Submission for the Inaugural Short Story Anthology, When Everyone Kept Secrets: Reconciling the Forgotten Legacy of Southern Womanhood.
If you identify as a Southern marginalized woman writer and think you have a short story (2500-10,000 words) that fits this theme, please check out our submission requirements on our website. Until the 14th of December, the $15 reading fee is waived for all submitted manuscripts.
We are looking for 12-15, professionally edited short stories that have not been previously published anywhere else. That includes Vella.
Thank you for reading. I hope you’ve enjoyed getting to know… Oh, I almost forgot to tell y’all what’s in our paid-only section, Marginal Moments.