Mississippi Native: Catherine Simone Gray

"The work that I do now as a writer would not be the same if I did it from anywhere else. This place provokes bold action in me."

What does it mean to call Mississippi home? Why do people choose to leave or live in this weird, wonderful, and sometimes infuriating place? Catherine Simone Gray didn’t move to Mississippi by choice (“Mississippi and puberty arrived for me at the same time,” she writes), but she’s stayed by choice. Catherine is a writer and a teacher, a self-described “motherhood disruptor” and “vag-angelist” (more on that below!). Her stunning debut memoir Proud Flesh: A Memoir of Motherhood, Intimate Violence, and Reclaiming Pleasure is deeply rooted in Mississippi. Catherine will be joining our book club tomorrow March 27 at 7pm CT to discuss Proud Flesh. Today she unpacks how living and raising children in Jackson has shaped her connection to home and to her community.

Catherine at the Eudora Welty House & Garden. Photo by Jess Bollaert Eddleman.

Where are you from?

I’m from Jackson. I can say that now without doubting it. If we talk for a little longer, though, I’ll tell you there’s more to the story. In early life, I moved around every three or four years, living in the disparate lands of South Florida, New Hampshire, and Iowa.

Since I was a little girl, the question of “where I’m from” has also held an ancestral awareness. My mother is French, born in Paris, and my heritage in the past three generations spans four continents, including origins in Cambodia, Algeria, Corsica, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. Because many places and cultures intersect in me, it took me many years to feel like I could really claim Mississippi as my own. Growing up as a multi-ethnic girl from a non-church-going, Catholic family, I felt wildly different from most of the people around me.

How long have you lived in Mississippi?

Mississippi and puberty arrived for me at the same time. It was quite a shock.

For the first seven years, I didn’t choose Mississippi. My parents moved me here, and I just had to live with it until I could get away. I never thought I would make a home here for myself. But in my senior year of high school, I began writing as an intern for The Jackson Free Press, a local alternative newsweekly. I was surprised by how interesting the city was once I started getting curious and asking big questions. I remember realizing, “I don’t feel like my conversation with Jackson is finished.” I decided to stay in Jackson for college, wanting just one or two more years to wrap my mind and heart around his place before transferring. Twenty years later, that conversation still isn’t finished, and I don’t think it ever will be.

Catherine visits family in Montmorency, France, with her friend from Mississippi in 2003.

What does “home” mean to you? How does Mississippi fit into that definition?

Home means intimacy, knowing and being known. Where you care for yourself and care for each other. It can be hard for a place to feel like home when you don’t actively choose it. Since choosing this place in adulthood, home feels like a dance of separateness and togetherness, making the choice to be drawn close over and over again, through times of boredom, frustration, change, pain, and rediscovery.

I am home in my body, in my relationships, in the land. I’ve lived in the same home in Jackson for eleven years now with my partner. I watch a magnolia tree down the block go through its cycle every year: the cone-shaped fruit with the red seeds; the furry husks that crack open after they’ve protected the buds through winter; the majestic, leathery blooms. To me, that is home. It’s caring enough to pay attention and really see. It’s the inner orientation of noticing something new in order to sustain the thread of your interest and connection. Home is where we care enough to put the work in and to allow the place to work on us in the process.

How have you cultivated community in Mississippi? Who are the people who have made you feel rooted here?

The roots are undeniable. I couldn’t untangle them at this point if I tried. I’ve lived here for so long now that I can’t go anywhere without seeing someone I’m connected to in some way: my former teachers and classmates, my former students and their parents, musicians and artists I’ve interviewed as a college journalist, a friend of a friend whom I met at a wedding who then happened to teach at my kids’ summer arts program…I never forget a face.

But the people who are really nourishing the soil for me these days tend to be my close-knit community of misfits, artists, and fellow parents who are choosing to raise kids here in Jackson, fiercely believing in our power to cultivate vibrant pockets of love for our children and ourselves. We’re discovering and embracing our queer identities in straight-presenting marriages, passing around our kids’ outgrown shoes, and also hitting the road for piercing pilgrimages.

I’ve found that the relationships that form here are a special kind of close, a sanctuary. We’ve gotta build a strong, opposing muscle to the bleakness of legislation, stars and bars flags, and boil water alerts. We’ve gotta believe we belong here just as much; what we share is as real as the law and statistics.

Catherine gathers with friends at a mother blessing circle in her home before giving birth in 2018.

What’s the weirdest question or assumption you’ve encountered about Mississippi (or about you as a Mississippian) by someone who’s never been here?

Hmm. Probably the sense that the South is one big blur in people’s consciousness. As I’ve built my writing career in recent years and talked to literary agents and publishers from cities on the East and West Coast, there seems to be limited awareness of the geography and cultural differences in southern states. Someone thought I lived in the same state as New Orleans, which is not a mistake a person from the South would make. It’s the feeling of being terra unknown, so far away that there’s an interstellar quality when we’re talking.

How has living in Mississippi affected your identity and your life’s path?

I was the shy kid who only spoke up in class after everyone else had spoken or who took the lead in a group project if no one else would. Living here has inspired courage for me to be a leader, to look around and ask myself, “What’s not being said? What’s needed?”

The work that I do now as a writer would not be the same if I did it from anywhere else. This place provokes bold action in me. Even though I write my personal stories, I am spurred and shaped by the raw and violent truth of what I see around me. I write intimate details about my vagina healing postpartum in my memoir, and I do so with the knowledge that birth is mandated in Mississippi. Girls and women are legally decreed to undertake a process that rearranges their organs, stretches their muscles and fascia, and reshapes their sense of self, with lifelong, incalculable impact. That lived reality is much more shocking and disruptive than anything I could write from my experiences in a post-birth body. I am not willing to be silent about any messy part of the process if the state is making these demands on our bodies.

Catherine visits Red Bluff with her family for the first time in 2025.

What is something that you’ve learned about Mississippi only by living here? In what ways has Mississippi lived up to your expectations?

There are no simple stories about people, places, and bodies. The bulk of what I’ve learned about love and being a human has happened in this place. That means that I’ve learned to look beyond an initial impression and get curious about the origins, the paradoxes, the motivations, the needs, the heart.

I’ve been abused here, and I’ve healed here. I’ve been raised by this place, and my body has been cut open and torn to birth my two babies here. It’s the only home my kids have ever known.

I’ve taught in rural classrooms full of twenty-eight middle schoolers for six periods each day. I’ve taught with a twin bedsheet used as my projector screen in the old football locker room when the air conditioning’s broken in September. “This is more Mississippi than I’ve ever known,” I declared.

Today, this is also my Mississippi: a non-binary mom friend invited me to a pole-dancing class on Mother’s Day. She made a bracelet for me recently that says, “VAGANGELIST” which is a term we coined for “vagina evangelist,” our cheeky nod to postpartum health and pleasure. We have witchy nights with backyard fires and oracle cards. I let her borrow my selenite necklace, and we got the idea to pass it around our friend circle, our “sisterhood of the traveling selenite.”

I didn’t know all this could exist in Mississippi—or in myself—so in this way, this place has exceeded my expectations and made me hesitant to declare that I ever know what to expect anywhere.

Do you ever consider moving away someday? Does a sense of duty keep you rooted here? Do you have a “tipping point”?

Early in our marriage my husband and I moved away for fourteen months to Santa Fe. The high desert was sublime and enchanting, and the culture stirred me deeply. But we missed our people. We realized that we had taken for granted the community we’d built in Mississippi, how much joy and security it brought us. No landscape or culture could replace how much our community meant to us, along with our deep ties of personal history, so we packed up the U-Haul, our two dogs and cat, and came home.

I have no plans to leave Mississippi, but I guess the tipping point would be if I see that my children are suffering and limited from being their full, whole selves here. I’m thinking of a friend whose teen is trans and lost access to gender-affirming care and moved out of state. I make decisions as they come, but wow, that would be a really tough one to grapple with.

Catherine’s debut memoir, Proud Flesh, is available wherever books our sold, including the Rooted Bookshop.org affiliate shop. Join our book club discussion with Catherine on March 27. Registration is free.

What do you wish the rest of the country understood about Mississippi?

I don’t find myself thinking about what the rest of the country thinks of us. But if I meet someone with an open heart and a curious spirit who lives here and wants to move away, I find myself inwardly aching to express: Sure, other places may have better weather, more aligned and supportive politics, less blatant racism, more gorgeous hiking spots, more eclectic techno-art scenes—or whatever your vibe is. If this place is not for you, then it’s not for you. At least not right now. I wholly respect that it’s your life, your freedom, your choose-your-own adventure. I trust and honor that.

But if you really want to give this place a chance, if you love it and let it love you back, if you attend the rallies and the art nights and sit on someone’s back porch and invite this place to really groove into you, you just may find that there’s nowhere more meaningful to make a life. You may find that the land gets more and more beautiful the more love you make here. Mississippi has a place for everyone, and we’re hungry for free thinkers, new ideas, bold visions, and far-out artistry. If you can figure out a way to be unapologetically yourself here and to flourish in your own way, then this is the thickest love you could find.

Do you have a favorite Mississippi writer, artist, or musician who you think everyone needs to know about?

I’d love everyone to know about the artists at work all around them. If you’re out at a coffee shop, at Old Trace Park by the Reservoir at sunset, or even at the community pool, you might see someone who looks like an artist. It’s happened to me many times: that look of mutual recognition and creative spark in the eyes. We start talking and soon it comes up. “You look like an artist. What do you do?”

It means more than we know to see each other and to be seen. These conversations in passing are the connective tissues of our days and generate a strong sense of connection, support, and well-being. We can start to feel that the imaginative web is alive all around us — because it is. I’m held together in this way, and there’s nowhere I go where talking about the creative process isn’t an option. It makes for a very rich life. I want you to know the artist within you.

Catherine walks among the cypresses at Mayes Lake in 2018. Photo by Josh Hailey.

If you had one billion dollars to invest in Mississippi, how would you spend your money?

My mind goes straight to reproductive health and reproductive justice. Pelvic floor physical therapy for postpartum women. Paid maternity and parental leave for twelve weeks. Free birth control, including emergency contraception. Full-spectrum doula care for women giving birth and experiencing pregnancy losses, as well as recovering physically and emotionally from abortions. Funds for pregnant people to access legal and safe abortions out of state. When we invest in the care and self-determination of women and their bodies, we invest in the well-being and power of our communities for generations to come.

What or who do you want to shamelessly promote? (It can absolutely be a project you’re working on, or something you are involved in.)

My first book came out recently. It’s called Proud Flesh: A Memoir of Motherhood, Intimate Violence and Reclaiming Pleasure. I explore how new motherhood triggered memories of past intimate partner violence and challenged me to reclaim pleasure and joy in my body in the unlikely time of postpartum. The natural world of Mississippi is also an integral part of the narrative. I’d love for you to call up Lemuria Books, Friendly City Books, or your local library to get a copy.

Additionally, on Saturday, April 26, I’m leading an event at the Mississippi Museum of Art called Mothers Writing & Kids Creating. It’s a morning for mothers and caregivers to explore their own stories through writing while their children make art with museum educators. It’s totally free and is a space for creative community connection. I’ll have copies of my book to give away too. Funded by the Mississippi Arts Commission, I’m thrilled to partner with the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jxn Motherhood, and the Jackson Safer Childbirth Initiative of the Mississippi Public Health Institute.

I love to collaborate. Please get in touch if you have an idea, and we’ll see what we can imagine together.

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Catherine Simone Gray is the author of Proud Flesh: A Memoir of Motherhood, Intimate Violence, and Reclaiming Pleasure. Featured by Roxane Gay as an Emerging Writer in The Audacity, Catherine’s work has also appeared in The Bitter Southerner and the Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape. Her writings on her blog Unsilenced Woman have reached audiences globally of up to 2.5 million and have been shared by respected organizations for new mothers, such as La Leche League, International Cesarean Awareness Network, and ImprovingBirth. She is the recipient of a literary arts fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission and has delivered three addresses at the Mississippi Womanist Rally. With an M.A. in Curriculum and Instruction, she leads writing circles for women, mothers, and caregivers. She lives in Jackson with her husband and two sons. You can find her online at @unsilencedwoman and www.unsilencedwoman.com.

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