Joyland South was our first reader-requested region and this week marks the beginning of Jim Hanas’s tenure as guest editor. A Kentuckian by birth, Jim also spent time in Memphis as a music journalist before moving to New York City. Jim and I spoke recently about southern writing (and cooking), its past and its future.The picture above is of Walker Percy, not Jim.

To be sure, history can be subjectively read out of any writing region. There’s John Fante, Joan Didion or Dennis Cooper in some of Joyland's LA writers, for example, but also plenty of times, not at all. The literary south has more expectations than most other places and I always wonder if a contemporary southern writer’s first step in life is to either identify with tradition or pull away from it?

I grew up in Kentucky and have lived half my adult life in Memphis, so southern literature has probably exerted a disproportionate influence on my taste and work. I was just recently back in Kentucky -- at the 75th anniversary of Keeneland, a popular horse-racing track -- and was immediately reminded of Hunter S. Thompson's grotesques from "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved," a piece that doesn't get the credit it deserves for being disciplined and well-structured. But like Thompson in that piece, who wakes up and finds the decadent Kentuckian he's been looking for in the mirror, I'm not sure how one could effectively pull away from the southern tradition. From William Faulkner to Flannery O'Connor to Donald Barthelme, it's too varied. Where would you go? Even Richard Ford, who has made clear his disgust with the South, can be seen as an heir to Walker Percy.

What grabs you about a story? Maybe this is my own expectation but I noticed that most of our submissions from the south do have at least a seriousness of purpose in language. The first line will always be a keeper or, consistently, there’s an idea explored, beginning to end.

I think there is a sort of Beatles/Rolling Stones decision that one has to make about southern literature (or at least, there's one that I've made) between the modernist lyricism of William Faulkner and the relatively straightforward style of someone like Walker Percy, a favorite of mine. This division is well-explored in the letters between Percy and historian Shelby Foote, who were childhood friends in Greenville, Mississippi. Foote advocates for the Proustian novel, read from lived experience, while Percy starts with philosophy and works back to the particular (an approach Foote thought was intellectual treason, like Percy's Catholicism). But I stand with Percy, with a few dashes of O'Connor and Barthelme tossed in for extra compression.

I know you’re protective of southern cooking and are a little concerned over its current bowdlerization in New York restaurants. Similarly, what do people miss or simplify about southern literature?

I moved straight from Memphis to the West Village, where I lived above a restaurant that was ironically serving the very same food I'd been eating quite straightforwardly a week before. This trend has continued and spilled far into Brooklyn.

New Yorkers fetishize Southern food but are frequently horrified by the prospect of southern ideas, immediacy being considered a virtue in the former case, a vice in the latter. And, true, I'm a little protective of both.

I would just say that the South is full of smart people trying to do the right thing about poverty and race, while grappling with an unfortunate history that the rest of the country can plausibly, and conveniently, repress. But, to paraphrase Walker Percy, anyone interested in unraveling the complications of modern America would do far better to spend some time in Knoxville, rather than in Carroll Gardens or Bushwick.