Why I Started Southern Harlequin

How a decade of jokes about "crazy southern women" turned into a brand — and a bigger purpose.

Gina·February 2026

Southern women are crazy. I didn’t make that up — I just stopped arguing with it.

For about the last ten years, people have called me the Southern Harley Quinn. It started as a joke, the way most good nicknames do, and it stuck the way most good nicknames do too. At some point I quit correcting folks and started answering to it. A comparison I wear with pride, as I’ve said more than once.

I grew up in a small rural community in North Carolina, the kind of place where fishing isn’t a hobby, it’s just what you do on a Saturday. My uncles took me offshore every chance they got. In 2001 I won a Lady Angler King Mackerel tournament, which I will be bringing up at dinner parties until the day I die.

Then life did what life does. I graduated from Campbell University School of Pharmacy in 2005, went to work, and the rods went in the garage. Not on purpose. You just look up one day and it’s been fifteen years since you smelled a boat motor.

Getting back on the water

In 2021 I got back into fishing — bass, this time, on NC lakes instead of out past the inlet. In 2023 I bought my first boat, a 21’ Avid FS MAGNUM in Mossy Oak Bottomland camo. She’s not fancy. She runs, she floats, and she’s taken me to more sunrises than I can count.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect. The fishing was never really the point. The point was four hours where nobody needed anything from me, where the phone didn’t work half the time anyway, and where the worst thing that could happen was not catching anything. I came off the water different than I got on it. Every single time.

No agenda. No pressure. Just water, peace, and maybe a fish or two.

And once I noticed that, I couldn’t un-notice who wasn’t getting it. The single mom working two jobs. The woman eighteen months into a divorce she didn’t ask for. The one who lost her husband and hasn’t had a quiet afternoon since the funeral. Nobody’s handing those women four hours of nothing.

So that’s what this is turning into

Southern Harlequin started as a name and a few hats. What it’s becoming is a nonprofit that takes single moms and their kids, and women walking through hard seasons, out on the lake for an afternoon. No cost to them. No agenda, no sermon, no catch. If they want to fish, we’ll fish. If they want to sit in the shade with a cold drink and not talk, that works too.

We’re not formally a nonprofit yet — that paperwork is in progress, and I’d rather tell you the truth about where we are than make it sound further along than it is. But the boat exists, the lake exists, and I’ve got Saturdays.

If any of that sounds like something you want to be part of, there’s a page for that. And if you’re the woman I just described — the one reading this thinking that’d be nice, but not for me — it is absolutely for you. Come on.

Take your meds, drink some water, you matter. — Gina

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