I wasn’t surprised to learn that Lynn Oldshue was born and raised in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Many famous people are from Yazoo City, including Willie Morris, Jerry Clower, and Zig Ziglar, to name a few. As the author of the blog and book Our Southern Souls, Lynn has earned a reputation of her own, capturing the essence through her storytelling, of thousands of everyday people living among us.. 

Lynn’s new book Our Southern Souls, Vol. II, a collection of 160-plus stories, is due out this month, and her journey was the subject of our recent conversation. I’ve followed Lynn for a while, and she is a gifted writer who instantly connects with anyone she meets. “There is a story in all of us. You just have to ask and listen,” she says.

Growing up on a catfish farm, Lynn tells me while all her friends were doing fun stuff all summer, she was head-deep working in the hatchery with the baby catfish, and doing whatever her dad told her to do. 

“He graduated from Mississippi State with a degree in agriculture. He thought he was going to be a cattle rancher until catfish farming became a thing. He was one of the first farmers in the mid-1960s to embrace aquaculture. 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.” 

Lynn followed in her father’s footsteps and graduated from Mississippi State with a degree in Communications and Public Relations, but farming wasn’t in her future. Growing up on the farm, she showed pigs at the livestock shows and had the distinction of being named Livestock Queen by the Yazoo City Livestock Association.

A fourth-generation journalism family, Lynn’s mother’s family had owned newspapers in Mississippi, including the Clarion-Ledger. She says as a child, she was a natural-born reader and loved to write stories about animals that she wished she had. Her mom always kept a book in her hand. However, she tells me that even with this background, nothing in her life said that Our Southern Souls would be in her future.

Lynn recalls a Mississippi, Believe It! campaign that said, “Yes, we can read. A few of us even write,” a clever response to the state’s underserved reputation for literacy. She has a painting in her office of the William Faulkner quote, ”To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.”

She earned her Master’s degree in Marketing at the University of Alabama, but she will always be considered a Bulldog. Still searching for her career path, she moved around with her husband, John Oldshue, a meteorologist, whom she met in college in Starkville. 

A native of Tuscaloosa, John took a position as a meteorologist at WALA Channel 10 in Mobile, and they lived in Daphne. Lynn sold cable advertising for Comcast and later was the Assistant Director at the Saenger Theater in Mobile. They later moved to Birmingham, so John could work with Chief Meteorologist James Spann at ABC 33/40. The two are still close friends. While there, Lynn was the events coordinator for the Birmingham Zoo.

They moved to Tuscaloosa to be closer to John’s family, and Lynn took Rick Bragg’s magazine writing class at the University of Alabama. She recalls going down to the banks of the Black Warrior River in Tuscaloosa to watch people and write. “I wrote about things I 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.”

John and Lynn lived in Tuscaloosa when, on April 27, 2011, the tornados roared through the community. John was chasing and reporting on the tornados and was the first to notify James Spann of the strength and danger they presented. After the Alberta Elementary School was destroyed in the storm, John and Lynn raised money for the students to help them get back on their feet. 

Yet, through it all, Lynn felt a void, “I wanted to write, but no newspaper would hire me.” She was not deterred. Her father had a saying, “Root hog through,” and she usually does. 

In 2011, Lynn launched The Southern Rambler magazine with photographer Michelle Stancil,  which was about art and music. She recalls interviewing bands who were just starting,  like The Revivalists and St. Paul and the Broken Bones. She still enjoys discovering new, local musical talent. “This was my magic carpet for writing about things I love,” she says. But a conversation with Vincent Lawson, a photographer she met in Mobile, opened her eyes and changed her direction. Vincent was completing a series about homeless people he saw around town.

“I had conversations with him like I’d never had before. 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.”

Lynn published her story in The Southern Rambler, about the bus rides and the people who used them for everyday transportation, and the story received a lot of attention. After her experience, she raised money to place benches at the bus stops. John gave her a book called Humans of New York by Brandon Stanton, and it inspired her to stop people on the street and ask them about their stories. Over the past nine years, she has traveled near and far and let her curiosity about others take the lead. The results have been profound.

“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.” In the nine years, she has told these stories through social media and her followers have grown. Our Southern Souls has over 65,000 followers, and Lynn has conducted over 2000 interviews, each a unique story about everyday people. 

Lynn decided to compile a book of these life stories and published the first volume of Our Southern Souls in 2021 which included over 170 stories. The tagline for Lynn’s website is, “Sharing the Soul of the South, one person at a time.” All the profits from sales of her books are donated to worthy causes. 

When she is not stopping people on the street Lynn has been writing for Lagniappe for six years. In an attempt to bring light to the darkness, her features are usually a series of articles,   with themes of sex trafficking, drug addiction, poverty, and other overlapping interests. She can also be heard reporting on Alabama Public Radio. 

Lynn’s husband, John, founded Fairhope Now, a Facebook community group site that has 53,000 members, with Anne Dorman, Lynn contributes to that, too. “I love having multiple platforms and helping as many people as I can.  I especially like meeting them early on their journey and watching them succeed.”

As a music aficionado, Lynn still feels the loss of Catt Sirten who passed away last year. Catt was a fixture at 92 Zew and a close friend. “He helped focus attention on local music, and I learned a lot from him about working for the greater good. Catt is my reminder that one person can make a difference in the lives of others”

Our Southern Souls, Vol. II  will be out in mid-October. All the money from sales of the book will be donated in Catt’s honor to The Magnolia Breeze Youth Ensemble, an all-inclusive therapeutic band for youth in the Mobile area. Look for Lynn at book signings at Central Presbyterian Church in Mobile on Oct. 20, Page & Palette in Fairhope on November 12, and The Haunted Book Shop in Mobile on December 8th. 

What’s next for Lynn? “I have whiteboards with a bunch of ideas on them. I need both serendipity and organization. One story leads to the next.” Besides that, she enjoys travel, history, and capturing stories of everyday people wherever she goes. She is enjoying photography more and more. “I like telling stories through pictures. Photography allows you to see magic in the world without using words.”

And those stories she wrote as a child about the animals she wanted? “I finally got that horse.”

Congratulations, Lynn. What an inspirational story!