About us

Where to begin the story?...

You could say this magazine was born on the banks of the Mississippi, a decade ago, when a newly minted journalist embarked on a dream assignment: a profile of one of the South's most well-known river guides.

Our founding editor, Boyce Upholt, grew up in suburban Connecticut. As a 25-year-old, he moved to Mississippi for a job. He was assigned that profile six years later, when he was first embarking on his career as a freelance journalist. And until then, despite living two dozen miles from the mighty Mississippi, he'd figured the nation's biggest river was just a toxic canal. He was surprised to learn it was as wild and beautiful as any national park. And he wondered why no one had ever told him that.

That curiosity grew into Boyce's first book, The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi—which won this year's Willie Morris Award for Southern writing. Which he thinks is fitting, because he's spent much of the past decade unpacking just what makes this thing we call "the South" tick. Through assignments for The Atlantic and the Oxford American and Smithsonian, he stumbled into other terrain that was, if not quite undiscovered, then criminally underknown. He met biologists and backpackers, hunters and anglers and gardeners—people who love this land and its inhabitants, but who didn't always know they belonged to one great sprawling community of Southern nature lovers.

So when he—true story!—lucked into a little inheritance from a long-lost relative, he decided to bring together that community by launching a new magazine, one that would celebrate all this region's got and call attention to what we need to do to keep it intact.

Our team

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Take the low road? What the heck does that mean?

We're not totally sure yet, to be honest, but it feels like it encapsulates our ethos.

We're big fans of High Country News and have joked about the need for a lowcountry cousin. That's not quite what we're doing, but the idea lodged in our minds. Then we saw that the folks at the beautiful magazine Mountain Gazette have a stirring motto: "When in doubt, go higher." Which is pretty cool, except it overlooks the one of the core powers of the South—all the rivers and swamplands where we love to get lost. (All respect to our mountains, too, of course, which are, we have to say, millions of years older and wiser than the Rockies.)