Some writers go looking for big stories. Lynn Henderson Oldshue built a following by going looking for small ones, the kind carried by the stranger at the bus stop, the man fishing off a pier or the woman behind a lunch counter. As the creator of Our Southern Souls, the Mississippi-born, Fairhope-connected storyteller has spent nearly a decade stopping everyday people and asking them to share their lives, and in October 2024 she brought out a second book collecting more than 160 of those stories, with every dollar from sales going to a Mobile-area youth music program.
Her approach is disarmingly simple. “There is a story in all of us. You just have to ask and listen,” she says. What follows is a look at how a catfish farmer’s daughter from Yazoo City became one of the Gulf Coast’s most recognizable chroniclers of ordinary lives.
A Catfish Farm Childhood in Yazoo City
Oldshue was born and raised in Yazoo City, Mississippi, a town on the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta that has produced an outsized share of storytellers. Author Willie Morris, whose memoir North Toward Home made Yazoo City famous in literary circles, grew up there, as did comedian Jerry Clower and motivational speaker Zig Ziglar. Known as the “Gateway to the Delta,” the town sits where the hills give way to the flat, fertile farmland that defines so much of Mississippi’s identity.
Her family’s corner of that farmland was devoted to catfish. Her father graduated from Mississippi State University with a degree in agriculture and expected to become a cattle rancher, until catfish farming took hold in the region. “He was one of the first farmers in the mid-1960s to embrace aquaculture,” she says. “The farm was about 1300 acres of property that had once been swamp land that my father cleared to develop catfish ponds. His harvest usually went to the Delta Pride processing plant.”
Those early aquaculture pioneers helped turn Mississippi into the nation’s leading producer of farm-raised catfish, an industry that still shapes the Delta’s economy. For young Lynn, it meant summers spent not at the pool but in the hatchery with the baby catfish, doing whatever her father asked. She also showed pigs at livestock shows and was named Livestock Queen by the Yazoo City Livestock Association.
Writing ran in the family, too. Oldshue comes from a fourth-generation journalism family; her mother’s relatives had owned Mississippi newspapers, including the Clarion-Ledger, the Jackson daily newspaper. She was a natural reader as a child, wrote stories about animals she wished she owned and grew up with a mother who always had a book in hand. Even so, she says, nothing in her early life pointed toward Our Southern Souls.
She still carries a sense of Mississippi’s complicated literary reputation. She recalls a “Mississippi, Believe It!” campaign that answered stereotypes about the state with the line, “Yes, we can read. A few of us even write.” In her office hangs a painting of a William Faulkner quote: “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.”
A Winding Road Through Mobile, Birmingham and Tuscaloosa
Like her father, Oldshue graduated from Mississippi State, earning a degree in communications and public relations, and she later completed a master’s degree in marketing at the University of Alabama, though she says she will always be a Bulldog. At Mississippi State in Starkville she met her husband, John Oldshue, a Tuscaloosa native who became a television meteorologist.
John’s career set the couple’s course for years. When he took a meteorologist position at a Mobile television station, they settled in Daphne. Lynn sold cable advertising for Comcast and later served as assistant director of the Saenger Theatre in Mobile, the historic downtown movie palace that opened in 1927 and remains one of the city’s signature performance venues. A later move to Birmingham let John work alongside Chief Meteorologist James Spann, one of the South’s best-known broadcast weather forecasters; the two remain close friends. In Birmingham, Lynn worked as events coordinator for the Birmingham Zoo.
The couple eventually moved to Tuscaloosa to be near John’s family, and there Lynn began teaching herself to write in earnest. She took Rick Bragg’s magazine writing class at the University of Alabama, a rare chance to learn from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All Over but the Shoutin’. She would go to the banks of the Black Warrior River to watch people and write about what she saw. “I went to the library and studied Rolling Stone magazines because the writing was so great. I was teaching myself to be a writer,” she says.
They were living in Tuscaloosa on April 27, 2011, when one of the deadliest tornado outbreaks in modern American history tore across Alabama, including a violent tornado that carved through the heart of Tuscaloosa. John was chasing and reporting on the storms and was the first to notify Spann of the strength and danger they presented. After Alberta Elementary School was destroyed, John and Lynn raised money to help its students get back on their feet.
Through it all, Lynn felt something missing. “I wanted to write, but no newspaper would hire me,” she says. She was not deterred. Her father had a saying for moments like that, “Root hog through,” and she usually does.
From The Southern Rambler to the City Bus
In 2011, Oldshue launched The Southern Rambler, a magazine about art and music, with photographer Michelle Stancil. She interviewed bands at the start of their careers, including The Revivalists and St. Paul and the Broken Bones, both of which went on to national audiences. “This was my magic carpet for writing about things I love,” she says, and she still enjoys discovering new local musical talent.
The turning point came through a conversation with Vincent Lawson, a Mobile photographer who was finishing a series on homeless people he saw around town. “I had conversations with him like I’d never had before,” she says. “We decided to ride the public buses throughout the city for months to see who rode the bus and learn about the lives they led. These buses were rolling billboards for personal injury lawyers, but we saw the humanity inside. I started capturing their stories. I was reluctant at first on how they would respond, but everybody wants to know that their life matters.”
Her story about the bus riders ran in The Southern Rambler and drew wide attention. Afterward, she raised money to place benches at bus stops. Then John gave her a copy of Humans of New York, the photographer Brandon Stanton’s collection of street portraits and short interviews that grew out of his popular blog. It inspired her to start stopping people on the street and asking about their lives.
Our Southern Souls: More Than 2,000 Conversations
Over the next nine years, Oldshue traveled near and far, letting curiosity lead. The lesson she keeps relearning is humility. “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,” she says.
She shared the stories through social media, and the audience grew steadily. By 2024, Our Southern Souls had more than 65,000 followers, and she had conducted more than 2,000 interviews, each a portrait of someone who might otherwise go unnoticed. The project’s tagline captures its mission: “Sharing the Soul of the South, one person at a time.”
In 2021 she published the first volume of Our Southern Souls, a book of more than 170 of those life stories. From the beginning, all profits from her books have been donated to worthy causes.
Street portraits are only part of her work. For six years she had been writing for a local news organization, producing feature series aimed at bringing light to dark subjects, including sex trafficking, drug addiction and poverty. She has also reported on the radio. John, meanwhile, co-founded Fairhope Now, a community Facebook group, with Anne Dorman; it had grown to about 53,000 members, and Lynn contributes there as well. “I love having multiple platforms and helping as many people as I can,” she says. “I especially like meeting them early on their journey and watching them succeed.”
A Second Volume in Honor of Catt Sirten
Our Southern Souls, Vol. II, a collection of more than 160 stories, was set for release in mid-October 2024. Proceeds were dedicated to the memory of Catt Sirten, a longtime fixture at Mobile radio station 92 ZEW and a close friend of Oldshue’s, who died in 2023. All the money from book sales was pledged in his honor to the Magnolia Breeze Youth Ensemble, an all-inclusive therapeutic band for young people in the Mobile area.
“He helped focus attention on local music, and I learned a lot from him about working for the greater good,” she says of Sirten. “Catt is my reminder that one person can make a difference in the lives of others.”
The book’s fall 2024 launch included signings at three of the region’s best-known literary gathering spots:
- Central Presbyterian Church in Mobile on Oct. 20, 2024
- Page & Palette in Fairhope on Nov. 12, 2024
- The Haunted Book Shop in Mobile on Dec. 8, 2024
Page & Palette, a family-owned independent bookstore in downtown Fairhope, and The Haunted Book Shop in downtown Mobile are both regular stops for Southern authors, and readers looking for either volume of Our Southern Souls can check with local independent booksellers or the project’s own channels for availability.
What Comes Next
Oldshue does not lack for ideas. “I have whiteboards with a bunch of ideas on them. I need both serendipity and organization. One story leads to the next,” she says. She enjoys travel and history and keeps collecting the stories of everyday people wherever she goes.
Photography has become a bigger part of her work, too. “I like telling stories through pictures,” she says. “Photography allows you to see magic in the world without using words.”
And as for the stories she wrote as a girl about the animals she wished she had? The Yazoo City farm kid finally got her wish. “I finally got that horse,” she says.
Why Everyday Stories Matter
In an era when so much of what people read is national, partisan or produced far away, Oldshue’s work is a reminder of what local storytelling can do. Her interviews tend to reveal the same thing her bus rides revealed years ago: that the cashier, the veteran, the street musician and the retiree on the next bench are carrying histories as rich as anyone’s, and that simply being asked can matter to them.
For readers who want to follow her lead, the method is as open as the subject matter. Slow down, ask a question, and listen to the answer. As Oldshue puts it, everybody wants to know that their life matters, and along the Gulf Coast she has spent years proving that nearly everyone has a story worth telling.