Porch People

[Editor's note: This article was published in 2018. The 2019 Conference on the Front Porch will be held on September 26 & 27.]

When pressed to consider the power of the porch, I think of literature and light before I even reach leisure. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch uses his front porch as a barrier between the roiling town and his tender children. At home, my mother always reminds me to catch the eerie green light that follows a rainstorm, and there’s no better lookout point than the porch. And as a shameless food photographer, I find it painful to sit down with a beautiful plate of food before I’ve rushed it out onto my porch for a glamour shot—the sun’s gentler in the in-between. Everything is.

I’m a porch person, and I’m hardly alone. On October 25 & 26, two hundred of my fellow devotees will gather in Taylor, Mississippi, to celebrate not just their own personal relationships to porches (though sentiment is a large factor) but the consequences of shut-off suburbia as well.

Conference on the Front Porch founder Campbell McCool doesn’t believe he’s ever suffered life in a home without a front porch. Born in a shotgun house in New Orleans, not far from the Audubon Zoo, McCool founded the Plein Air Neighborhood in Taylor—eight minutes from Oxford—and it soon became known as the “front porch neighborhood.” Eighty years ago, the nickname would’ve made no sense, but following World War II, front porches figuratively fell off the American home. “You no longer needed the cool air, and the ‘idiot box’ brought everyone inside,” said McCool. “I started researching the sociology of the porch and realized that this was worthy of a larger effort.”

McCool refers to the conference’s inaugural year, 2016, as a “deep dive on porch nerdism” with speakers like Crow Hollister, founder of the Porch Sitters Union (living life by the dictum, “Don’t just do something, sit there”) and R. Scott Cook, author of The Cultural Significance of the Front Porch. The conference has expanded in years since: 2018 will include a front-porch concert by Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors as well as a one-man play, in which actor Johnny McPhail mounts the porch as a blustering Big Daddy from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; field dinners; and opportunities to drive into Oxford for historic home tours (you can bet they have porches) and tours of the Ole Miss history archives.

But plenty of porch nerdism remains. Speakers include Erin and Ben Napier of HGTV’s Hometown; Wyatt Waters and Robert St. John of Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s Palate to Palette; Mississippi Poet Laureate Beth Ann Fennelly; CJ Lotz of Garden & Gun; Mike Stewart, CEO of Wildrose Kennels; and Suzanne Stern, president of Our Town Plans. Author John Barry (Rising Tide) will deliver the keynote. $395, including six meals. Registration is limited. Visit theconferenceonthefrontporch.com for details.