Boyce Upholt

1 month ago | southlands.substack.com | Boyce Upholt

Programming note: Last week, quietly, I paused all billing for paid subscribers to this newsletter. (Thanks to all of you for the support, BTW!) Because this mailing list is now transitioning to its new form: This is now “The Southlander,” the bi-weekly free newsletter that accompanies our paid print issues.And the first of those print issues is now available for pre-order! I’m calling this a soft launch; I’ll make a more formal announcement soon.

2 months ago | southlands.substack.com | Boyce Upholt

I spent the past few weeks assigning writers for the inaugural issue of Southlands—and it’s a really phenomenal line-up. I’m excited to share it soon. The process put hunting and fishing on my mind. I knew I had to get both into the issue, in part because hunting and fishing are some of the more prominent ways that Southerners get out in nature.

Mar 4, 2025 | southlands.substack.com | Boyce Upholt

Our biweekly publication schedule is woefully slow compared to today's news cycle. I tried writing this before my vacation last week but knew anything I wrote would be outdated by Tuesday morning. So: I’ll keep this brief. As a Southlands reader, you probably know already about the devastating job cuts at the National Park Service. Here in the South, our relatively scarce bits of public land are all the more precious for that scarcity.

Feb 28, 2025 | okramagazine.com | Boyce Upholt

There is a kind of folktale in Louisiana: a set of lobsters followed French Canadians exiles, cast from their home in the mid-18th century during the French and Indian War, to arrive in Louisiana. As the lobsters journeyed south, enduring heat and humidity, they shrank from their grand dimensions, creating the diminutive creature we know as the crawfish. [dropcap letter=”T”]he crawfish is an ancient creature, of course, and was a foodstuff long before the first Cajun exiles arrived in the swamps.

Feb 18, 2025 | southlands.substack.com | Boyce Upholt

For a couple of years in my mid-20s—an era when I dreamed of being a writer but did not know how—I woke up every morning and read two longform magazine stories. It’s part of how I learned this work. Often enough, the stories came from the pages of Outside—and so, naturally, one of my ambitions became to publish my own adventure yarn in that august magazine. I came close, thanks to this online-only essay about the Bass Pro Shop inside the glass pyramid in downtown Memphis.