Lynn Oldshue will tell you there is a story in all of us — you just have to ask and listen. For nine years she has asked. The author of the blog and book series Our Southern Souls has stopped more than 2,000 people on streets across the South, recorded what they told her, and shared it with an audience of more than 65,000 followers. Her second book, Our Southern Souls, Vol. II — a collection of more than 160 of those stories — arrived in mid-October, with every dollar of sales pledged to charity.
The approach sounds simple, and that is the point. “I discovered that no matter what I thought a person’s story was going to be, I was wrong ninety-nine percent of the time,” Oldshue said. Her website’s tagline — “Sharing the Soul of the South, one person at a time” — describes the method precisely.
A catfish farm in Yazoo City
Oldshue was born and raised in Yazoo City, Mississippi, a small Delta town that has produced storytellers out of proportion to its size — Willie Morris, Jerry Clower and Zig Ziglar all came from there. She grew up on a 1,300-acre catfish farm her father had carved out of swampland; one of the first farmers in the mid-1960s to embrace aquaculture, he sold his harvests to the Delta Pride processing plant. Summers meant working the hatchery with the baby catfish, doing whatever her father told her to do. She showed pigs at livestock shows and was named Livestock Queen by the Yazoo City Livestock Association.
Journalism ran in the family. Her mother’s family owned newspapers in Mississippi, including the Clarion-Ledger. Oldshue followed her father to Mississippi State, earning a communications and public relations degree, then a master’s in marketing from the University of Alabama. A painting of William Faulkner’s line hangs in her office: “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.”
Her career path wandered — cable advertising with Comcast in Daphne while her husband, meteorologist John Oldshue, worked in Mobile television; a stint as assistant director of the Saenger Theater; events coordinator for the Birmingham Zoo after John joined James Spann’s station; then back to Tuscaloosa, where she took Rick Bragg’s magazine writing class and taught herself the craft on the banks of the Black Warrior River, studying old Rolling Stone issues in the library. “I was teaching myself to be a writer,” she said.
April 27, 2011, and the buses
On April 27, 2011, the tornado outbreak tore through Tuscaloosa while John chased and reported the storms — he was the first to alert Spann to their strength. After Alberta Elementary School was destroyed, the Oldshues raised money to help its students recover. The experience fed something in Lynn that was still unsatisfied. “I wanted to write, but no newspaper would hire me,” she said. Her father’s phrase — “root hog through” — became the operating instruction.
In 2011 she launched The Southern Rambler magazine with photographer Michelle Stancil, covering art and music and catching rising bands like The Revivalists and St. Paul & The Broken Bones early in their careers. Then a conversation with Mobile photographer Vincent Lawson redirected everything. Lawson was photographing homeless people around town, and together they rode the city’s public buses for months, learning who rode them and how they lived. “These buses were rolling billboards for personal injury lawyers, but we saw the humanity inside,” she said. “I started capturing their stories… Everybody wants to know that their life matters.”
The bus story ran in The Southern Rambler and drew wide attention; Oldshue raised money to place benches at the stops. Her husband handed her a copy of Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York, and the light came on: stop people on the street, ask about their lives, and publish what they say.
2,000 interviews and a second book
Since 2015, Our Southern Souls has grown into one of the region’s most trusted storytelling platforms. The first book, published in 2021, collected more than 170 stories; the second volume adds more than 160 more. All profits from book sales go to worthy causes — the second volume’s proceeds are donated in honor of Catt Sirten, the longtime 92 Zew radio personality and local-music champion who died the year before, to The Magnolia Breeze Youth Ensemble, an all-inclusive therapeutic band for young people in Mobile.
Oldshue’s portfolio extends past the street interviews. She has written features for a local news organization for six years — series on sex trafficking, drug addiction and poverty, aimed, as she puts it, at bringing light to darkness — reports on the radio, and contributes to Fairhope Now, the Facebook community group with 53,000 members founded by her husband with Anne Dorman. She credits Sirten with a lesson that guides the work: “One person can make a difference in the lives of others.”
What’s next? “I have whiteboards with a bunch of ideas on them. I need both serendipity and organization. One story leads to the next.” She travels, studies history, and has fallen for photography — “it allows you to see magic in the world without using words.”
And the childhood stories she wrote about the animals she wished she had? “I finally got that horse,” she said. In a life measured in the stories of strangers, that counts as a happy ending she wrote for herself.