Guest Author – Page 2 – Lemuria Books

Author: Guest Author (Page 2 of 28)

By Susan Cushman. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 12)

Inspired by the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C., New Orleans native and documentary photographer Cheryl Gerber has, in her new book Cherchez la Femme: New Orleans Women, curated an incredible collection of over 200 color photographs and 12 essays, showcasing both famous and lesser-known New Orleans women. Gerber set out to show their “grit and grace” and their “beauty and desire,” and I believe she succeeded in a big way with this gorgeous large format hardcover masterpiece.

Cherchez la femme literally translates as “look for the woman.” In his 1854 novel The Mohicans of Paris, Alexandre Dumas repeats the phrase several times. Since then the French have often used it in a sexist manner, implying that women–or “the woman”–must be the cause of whatever problem is being described. It brings to mind Adam’s reply to God’s question concerning his transgression with the forbidden fruit; he blamed it on “the woman you gave me.”

In her homage to those women, Gerber has turned that phrase on its head, inviting the reader to look for the women who have made and are still making significant contributions to their colorful city.

My use of the word “colorful” is intentional. In the foreword, New Orleans native Anne Gisleson prepares us for the tour de force that Cherchez la Femme is–a tribute to the monumental achievements of colorful women and women of color.

Beginning with the Ursuline nuns and their beloved Lady of Prompt Succor who ran the hosptials and schools for people of all races as early as the War of 1812, and later as French baroness Macaela Pontalba fought to protect and rebuild the historic architecture of her beloved city. Gisleson introduces us to Henriette Delille–a free woman of color who started her won order to feed and educate the poor, since she wasn’t allowed to join the Ursulines.

Gerber’s loving tribute to chef Leah Chase (1923-2019) and Helen Freund’s essay about Chase in the culinary chapter set a celebratory tone for the stories that follow. Gerber organized these into topical chapters: Musicians, Business, Philanthropists and Socialites, Spiritual, Activists, Mardi Gras Indian Queens, Mardi Gras Krewes, Baby Dolls, Social and Pleasure Clubs, and Burlesque. The contributors include publishers, authors, historians, journalists, and educators.

Fifty years ago, the New Orleans-born gospel great Mahalia Jackson debuted at Jazz Fest. In her essay, Alison Fensterstock hails Jackson as “an artist whose powerful creative spark and spiritual passion shaped the sound not only of the city, but also of her nation.”

In her essay, Kathy Finn says that female entrepreneurs–including Voodoo practitioners, strippers, clothing and jewelry designers, and professional sports team owners–are “helping to ensure that the city” retains its unique character far into the future.”

Sue Strachan tells us about a bevy of female philanthropists, lobbyists, social columnists, and fundraisers who have “a passion for making the community a better place.”

The city of New Orleans–named for a young French girl who saw angels and saints and led France in a victory over England, “The Maid of Orleans,”–today “serves as the cauldron where these archetypal forms simmer together: the saints, the nuns, the witches, the mambo…a distinctively feminine spirituality…that runs through the streets…” Constance Adler found her true home there through a Voodoo priestess’ “gestures, words, and smoke at the altar.”

Katy Reckdahl shines a light on many women activists, showing us that “the tradition of resistance in New Orleans is particularly strong.”

Mardi Gras Indian Queens like essay contributor Charice Harrison-Nelson, also known as Maroon Queen Reesie, is one of 16 Indian Queens Gerber photographed for the book. Did I mention this city (and the book) is colorful?

While Krewes were male-dominted in the past, women have become “the architects of a new carnival experience,” as Karen Trahan Leathem explains in her essay.

Kim Vaz-Deville goes into more depth about the Baby Dolls, offering an opportunity for black women who were previously shout out of Mardi Gras. Gerber captures 14 of these dance groups in her amazing photographs.

Social and pleasure clubs keep the tradition of second-line parades alive. Karen Celestan explains in her essay: “The kinetic procession viewed on weekend streets in the Crescent City is nothing less than liquid muscle memory….It is fresh joyfulness, majestic, paying tribute to their ancestors.”

Gerber’s final chapter features an essay by Melanie Warner Spencer, who writes about the resurgence of burlesque. Today’s stars–like Bella Blue, Louisiana native and mother of two–are often trained in classic ballet. Blue is also headmistress of the New Orleans School of Burlesque. Spencer says burlesque “promotes a message of fun, fabulousness, confidence, and body positivity…keeping alive an art farm that is as much a part of the history of New Orleans as streetcars and beignets albeit a dash naughtier.”

“Fun and fabulousness” are also words I would use to describe Cherchez la Femme, a beautiful love letter to the women of New Orleans.

Jackson native Susan Cushman is editor of Southern Writers on Writing and two other anthologies. She is author of short story collection Friends of the Library, the novel Cherry Bomb, and the memoir Tangles and Plaques: A Mother and Daughter Face Alzheimer’s.

Barry Gifford offers writers advice in ‘The Cavalry Charges’

By Guest Author

On January 13, 2020

In Essays, Writing

By Steve Yates. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 12)

Mississippians are especially fortunate in that we likely have more independent bookstores per capita than any other state in the union.

And one thing those bookstores do is bring in authors readers might otherwise miss. John Evans at Lemuria Books in Jackson has brought author, poet, and screenwriter Barry Gifford to Jackson many times since meeting Gifford at an American Booksellers Association meeting in Las Vegas in 1989. This was just before the movie Wild at Heart appeared, a film which Gifford co-wrote with famed director David Lynch.

Born in Chicago, Gifford is often now described as a Bay Area writer. But his writing and work have taken him all over the globe, including many times to the American South.

The Cavalry Charges: Writings on Books, Film, and Music (Revised Edition) (University Press of Mississippi) is a collection of reviews and reflections that shaped him as a writer to a wide range of books, films, television programs, and music. Within these essays, Gifford talks about his own work, his own film-making (not just with Lynch, but with Francis Ford Coppola, and Matt Dillon), and the film-making of others, including a nine-part dossier on Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks.

“The cavalry charges” is, according to Coppola, the most expensive three-word stage direction in all of screenwriting. You’ll have to read that essay. But don’t get the wrong idea. These essays are not about multi-million-dollar movie scenes in super expensive settings. They’re about art–making it, discovering it, relishing it, and ensuring that it continues.

Gifford rubs shoulders with the likes of Artie Shaw, Coppola, and Dillon, and even spots E.M. Forster shuffling to a Lenny Bruce performance near Cambridge (“wearing a cape,” Gifford observes, “[Forster] resembled a large anteater”). But his real delight is the reaction of a raw joy art can evince in the individual beholder.

In a fascinating essay about the movie Gifford and Dillon created, City of Ghosts, a Cambodian woman at a screening in Toronto admits to the filmmakers that she and a contingent of South Asians had just watched the film anticipating it would exploit her people and culture. But she found it thoughtful, even tender. Most important to Gifford’s collaborator Stellan Skarsgard was “Did you like it?” Gifford declares victory when the woman smiles and exclaims “Yes! It was very exciting!”

Gifford talks about where he was, what he was doing, who were his sidekicks or whom he was sidekick to when he encountered each book, or film, or musical figure he treats. Sidekicks, companions, and collaborators have played a huge part in every phase of Gifford’s life. And that comes through here repeatedly as he generously points them out and celebrates what friends and co-conspirators gave him.

University Press of Mississippi–which published Gifford’s Hotel Room Trilogy and Out of the Past: Adventures in Film Noir–published a revised edition of The Calvary Charges this winter in paperback.

New to the collection are four previously published essays: a brief look at the novels of Álvaro Mutis; a reflection on Gifford’s schooling at University of Missouri in Columbia under Nebraska poet John Neihardt; an essay on Hattiesburg’s Elliot Chaze and his superbly written novel Black Wings Has My Angel; and short glimpse of Gifford’s thieving, road-tripping characters for so many novels, Sailor and Lula hanging out together in Metarie and contemplating Andy Warhol, wigs, black and white photography, and Abita beer.

Time after time, Gifford says, essentially, do yourself a favor and read this, watch this, or listen to this. Follow his advice and enjoy it all in The Cavalry Charges.

Steve Yates of Flowood is the author of the novel The Legend of the Albino Farm from Unbridled Books, the Juniper Prize-winning Some Kinds of Love: Stories, and a recipient of The Quill Award from the Missouri Writers Hall of Fame.

Author Q & A with Susannah Cahalan

By Guest Author

On January 12, 2020

In Nonfiction, Psychology

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 12)

New York Times bestselling author Susannah Cahalan shines a light on a turning point in the field of psychology with her second book, The Great Pretender.

The award-winning author of Brain on Fire, Cahalan presents in her new book a thoroughly researched and thoughtful assessment of Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan, whose 1973 undercover investigation into the country’s mental illness facilities would bring about major–and more compassionate–approaches to treatment.

The twist that Cahalan reveals is that Rosenhan was not forthcoming in many of the “facts” of that study–leaving readers with plenty of clues to make their own conclusions about his intentions.

As a writer who shared her shocking struggles with a rare autoimmune disease of the brain in her first book, Cahalan has become an influential voice on the approach to mental health in America.

She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

After your experience of having a rare autoimmune disease of the brain that was misdiagnosed as a mental illness (and led to your first book, Brain on Fire,) what caught your interest to write a book about Stanford psychiatrist David Rosenhan’s well-known study and subsequent article “On Being Sane in Insane Places’?

Susannah Cahalan

My interest was piqued during a conversation with two Harvard researchers who study the brain. I told them a bit about a woman who I call my “mirror image,” a young woman around my age who went misdiagnosed for two years and would never fully recover. It prompted one of the researchers to say that we both essentially were modern-day pseudo-patients–testing the nature of psychiatric diagnoses and finding it lacking, much like a famous pseudo-patient experiment in the 1970s.

I read the study that night in my hotel room and immediately was transfixed, not only by the focus on misdiagnosis but the beautiful, spot-on descriptions about how you are treated when there is a psychiatric label attached to you. I immediately knew that I wanted to learn more about the study and the man behind it.

In what ways has Rosenhan’s 1973 study been groundbreaking in changing the field of psychiatry?

You can’t really underplay the role that this one study had on psychiatry and public perception of the field. The study occurred right at the center of a lot of controversy hitting psychiatry–rampant public distrust, a movement away from Freud, issues with diagnosis, lack of clarity about its role within the rest of medicine. This study hit into the heart of all of its insecurities. It was an embarrassment to the field, and as I found out, even played a role in reshaping the field towards a more biological approach, encapsulated by the creation of the DSM-III. It also gave fodder to the antipsychiatry movement and to the growing push to close institutions, something called deinstitutionalization.

The Great Pretender is a journalistic investigation of Rosenhan’s study, as you searched diligently for the truth of what happened during his “experiment” that led to healthy people spending time in psychiatric facilities. As a result of your research, you discovered false statements and misinformation he included as “facts” in his report. What did you come to suspect was his motive was for this behavior?

I can only speculate about motives. I think that he truly believed that he was doing positive work–at the time institutions were often terrible, shameful places and I believe that he felt he was accurately pinpointing a real problem. I also think that he wanted to make a splash with this piece, and I think that he allowed himself to take many liberties with the truth to get that splash.

Why did you believe it was important to write this book and expose not only the good that became of Rosenhan’s work, but also the untruths he intended to pass off for true statements?

This study had such a tremendous effect and is still taught in many classrooms around the country. It’s still trotted out as evidence that psychiatry lacks validity and its institutions are harmful places.

Though I do think there are serious limitations within psychiatry and its institutions, it’s important to accurately pinpoint those problems so we can make progress. What this study does is allow us to look back, take a more nuanced and careful look at the mistakes and the misconceptions of the past, allowing us to clear the way for a real, open and honest discussion about the issues in mental health care for the future. At least I hope so.

Do you have suggestions for how your readers may be able to help those who experience mental health issues, in ways that could help make a difference?

On an individual level I think it’s important to understand that someone who struggles with serious mental illness is not always “ill.” We all at various points cross in and out of what we know as sanity and insanity. It’s so easy to discount people based solely on their diagnosis and I hope that this provides some more insight into the complexity of that experience. I hope it shines some light into the complexity of all of our experiences with mental/physical/emotional health.

I also hope that it calls into question why so many of us sympathize with people when they have a “physical” illness, but we are far more likely to ascribe blame or be frightened or suspicious of someone with a mental illness. Why do we do this? I think part of it is the fear of the unknown–the brain is one of the final frontiers and the idea that someone could lose themselves without a known reason is deeply unsettling.

That said, I hope you look at people actively struggling with serious mental illness with more compassion–much like you would someone with any kind of chronic physical illness–after reading my book. That’s my dream.

Lemuria has selected The Great Pretender its January 2020 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Chef Sean Brock expands powerful influence of regional palate in ‘South’

By Guest Author

On January 11, 2020

In Cooking, Southern Cooking

By Lelia W. Salisbury. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 5)

Sean Brock, award-winning chef at the iconic Charleston, South Carolina, restaurant Husk, seems to find himself at a turning point. Like many Southerners, he is deeply aware of the concept and complexities of place.

As a chef, he has immersed himself in these Southern roots and let seasonal produce and local suppliers guide what ended up on the plate. He sees these food traditions as extending beyond the South, however. He argues that they are also part of a larger national story, and that what we cook and how we source are evolving right alongside our cultural landscape.

If Brock’s previous bestselling cookbook Heritage is a map to his cooking past, his new book, South, finds Brock laying the foundation for new directions in his own life and cooking. Recently relocated to Nashville and in the process of opening two new restaurants–his first solo ventures–Brock lays out his experience with the iconic food of the South and looks ahead.

For Brock, food not only reflects a way of life, but also serves as a balm for life in an ever-changing world. “Food is medicine, after all–it can heal the soul, help mend a broken heart, or calm a busy mind,” Brock writes in the introduction.

The recipes and the chef’s notes on ingredients and techniques reveal a man who takes a meditative approach to cooking, who sinks himself fully into the process and tools and sensory experiences of making delicious and nourishing food.

South is not a book to hurry through, either in the reading or in the cooking. Many of the recipes require lengthy resting or soaking times, so these are not dishes that will be ready quickly after a frenzied day at work. Instead, they are recipes that celebrate fresh, flavorful ingredients and honors the ways, both old and new, that they can be prepared.

The South is not a single, homogeneous region, and accordingly, Brock approaches the recipes in his book as reflections of the many micro-regions within the U.S. His own personal history reflects deep attachments to two very different parts of the South. He was born in the Appalachian region of Virginia, and he spent the formative part of his culinary career in the South Carolina low country.

Accordingly, he includes five recipes for cornbread, arguing that how one cooks cornbread is the result of both location and personal preference (not to mention that the grain itself will vary according to its origin and growing conditions). After explaining the importance of starting with a hot cast-iron skillet, beginning the cooking on the stove-top to create the all-important crust, Brock then lays out recipes for basic cornbread (no sugar for him) and variations of cracklin’ (a staple at Husk), sour, rice, and hot water cornbreads (the latter he calls the “skillet baked cousin” of traditional cornbread.

While fresh produce is at the heart of the book (Brock has a special fondness for ramps, a North American wild onion), he also writes extensively about grains. Heritage grains have played a starring role in Southern and local food movements of the past 20 years, and many of the recipes explore the Southern landscape through the grains of a particular region.

He reveals that a pressure cooker is his preferred away to cook grits at home (“Think of it like using a rice cooker to cook rice,” he writes). Hominy sits alongside preparations for Carolina Gold rice, Appalachian Fry Bread, and Southern food hero John Edgerton’s Beaten Biscuits (a non-leavened biscuit that has long been a staple of the regional holiday or funeral table).

Much has been written about the global South and ways that the cuisines of other countries inform Southern cooking. Brock understands these influences, but lets them manifest in marvelously subtle ways. Rather than bringing in non-regional ingredients, he honors these outside flavors by incorporating local ingredients of the same taste profile. Benne seeds, brought to the U.S. by West Indian slaves in the early 1700s, flavor Brock’s baby back ribs, add a Southern twist to Caesar dressing, and stand in for tahini in his Sea Island Red Pea Spread.

The “Pantry” section of the cookbook features both boiled peanut and hominy miso recipes. Brock explains that German immigrant to Appalachia made sour corn to satisfy their cravings for fermented foods, making them with what was locally plentiful. He incorporate this sour corn into several recipes, including a traditional chowchow, and he suggests it as an accompaniment for Hominy and Pokeweed Griddle Cakes or Fried Green Tomatoes.

South is a marvelous walk through the many souths and the dishes that define them. Brock shares new techniques for old favorites and includes a wide selection of recipes for staple sauces and sides, canned and pickled goods. He connects deeply with the techniques of cooking with and over fire, and he offers detailed explanations for how these types of cooking add flavor and can be done at home (he even includes a recipe for Hickory-Smoked Ice Cream).

At the heart of his cooking is a reverence for what he calls “natural flavors.” Brock’s recipes are designed to let the core ingredients shine, whether it is the potlikker that becomes the star of a sea bass recipe, or the pawpaw and banana pudding recipe that adds a local spin to a beloved southern classic.

Leila Salisbury is the former director of the University Press of Mississippi. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

Signed first editions of Sean Brock’s South are available in store at Lemuria and on our website.

Author Q & A with Mildred D. Taylor

By Guest Author

On January 5, 2020

In African-American, Historical Fiction, Oz: Middle Grade

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 5)

Mildred Taylor wraps up her 10-book series that has followed the lives of the Logan family from slavery to the Civil rights movement with her final addition, All the Days Past, All the Days to Come. With familiar character Cassie Logan at the forefront as her own story evolves along the timeframe of civil rights events, she is supported by familiar family members who provide a constant link to generations past.

Born in Mississippi in 1943 and raised in Toledo, Ohio, Taylor developed a strong attachment to Mississippi as a child, thanks to frequent trips “home” to visit extended family members who were always eager to offer stories of their own childhoods.

She earned a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Toledo in 1965; and went on to write Song of the Trees, the first of the Logan family series, a decade later.

It would be Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, published in 1976, that would become her most recognizable work when it was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1977.

The collection has earned many other awards for Taylor throughout her lengthy career, including an NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, Buxtehuder Bulle Award, Coretta Scott King Award, Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for fiction, Christopher Award, Jane Addams Book Award, American Library Association’s Best Book for Young Adults, the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and others.

What inspired you to become a writer, and to use this tool as a way to bring to life the real-life struggles of racism, for young people?

Mildred Taylor

From the time I was a child, I was fascinated by the stories my father told about the history of my family and the history of others in his Mississippi community. He was a master storyteller, using dialect of the many characters in a story and sometimes becoming an actor using great motions to tell the story. There were many of us in the family who heard the stories; I was simply the one tapped on the shoulder to write them down. My father passed before Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry was published, but his words and those of others who told the history live on through all my books.

Your new book “All the Days Past, All the Days to Come” is to be the final chapter of the Logan family saga, begun with “Songs of the Trees” in 1975. Looking back to the beginning, did you ever expect that this collection of stories would become so enduring to readers for so many years?

Because I was so very much enthralled by the stories, by the history, it never surprised me that others would be as well. What surprised me was that I could tell the stories well enough so that people around the world would care about the history of my family, and about the lives of people in my family’s Mississippi community.

This final book (as its predecessors) recounts many true historical events along the time frame of each volume. Having lived through many of these events yourself, is it still difficult to look back on those times, and do you believe enough progress has been made today?

I could not get free of the stories and the obligations I had to myself and to the history of my family and the history of so many African Americans whose stories I wanted to tell. As one friend told me: “It is something you have to do. We’re of the last generations who knows–who remembers how it truly was–racism and degradation and what we had to go through to rid ourselves of all that. Younger generations think they know, but they have no idea of what it was truly like.”

Because of the historical timeline I am trying to follow, this final book is my greatest challenge yet. At a time when racism is again at the forefront, I believe it is important to look back at history, to look at how we have evolved since slavery began in our country, what has been sacrificed through a civil war, lynchings, racism, and segregation. Through a personal story told from the point of view of the Logan family of Mississippi, perhaps readers of all ages can grasp what life was like before the Civil Rights Movement and how that Movement helped change the nation, and to understand why we cannot allow racism to overshadow us again.

From slavery to the presidency, this is what the epilogue in All the Days Past, All the Days to Come symbolizes, and the bus is a symbol of that journey. That Cassie is on that bus–the bus, a negative symbol through much of her life–to President Barack Hussein Obama’s inauguration is one of the greatest triumphs for Cassie, her generation, and all African Americans.

Much has changed and much has not. I believe everyone needs to know the history.

The series has granted you many awards since its beginning more than 40 years ago. Has this taken you surprise?

As I said previously, since I was enthralled by the stories, it did not surprise me that
others would be as well. What surprised me was that I could tell the stories well enough that people around the world would respond as I did.

Of course, it was wonderful to win the Coretta Scott King award for four of my books. When The Road to Memphis won the award, I was actually on the dais (platform) with Mrs. Rosa Parks and was able to talk with her. My greatest regret is when I was unable to attend the ceremony to accept the award for The Land and I missed the chance to receive the award from Mrs. King herself.

What would you like to say to young people of all races today about the hope for cooperation (despite the frequent division) in this country? Are you hopeful for the progress that has been made; or do you believe racial equality will ever become the norm in America?

There have always been racial divisions in the United States; however, through the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, hard-fought-for legislation, integrated education, and one-on-one communication among all people, Americans have a much better understanding of each other today than 50 years ago, 100 years ago, all the years past in the United States.

Through continued education, economic opportunities for all, the important one-on-one relationships, there is hope that in time we as Americans can be accepting of each other. At that point, perhaps racial equality will be the norm.

Signed first editions are available for pre-order at Lemuria’s online store. The book’s publication date is Tuesday, January 7.

Author Q & A with Mark Barr

By Guest Author

On December 29, 2019

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (December 29)

Mark Barr’s debut novel Watershed literally sheds light on the true story of how electric light first came to rural Tennessee in the 1930s–and how its arrival changed those communities in ways they never expected.

Through its pages, Barr chronicles the stories of fictional characters Claire and Nathan, whose complicated fates are drawn together only through the enormity of the construction of the hydroelectric dam that would supply the power to turn the lights on. Barr’s meticulous research adds an attention to detail that draws the reader into the time and place of the story.

A software developer who likes to spend his spare time baking bread, Barr has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including those from Blue Mountain Center, I-Park Artists Enclave, Jentel Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Millay Colony, and Yaddo. He earned an MFA from Texas State University.

Barr resides in Arkansas with his wife and sons.

What was it about the Tennessee Valley Authority hydroelectric dam project in 1930s rural Tennessee that caught your interest and inspired this story?

I had been working as an advertising copywriter, and I was assigned to write a brochure for an electric cooperative client. During my preparation for that, I was shocked to learn that, while electricity was available in our large cities in the early years of the 1900s, it wasn’t until 1937 and the Rural Electrification Act that much of the rural countryside finally got electrical service. I was kind of shocked, not that we’d experienced this divide, but that we don’t much collectively remember it.

The prospect of life with electricity was an unknown in 1930s rural Tennessee. Explain how the dam’s construction in Watershed would bring more changes to the community than just electric power–and how the book’s title reveals that.

We don’t stop to think about it much, but we today enjoy a standard of comfort and living that is far beyond 99 percent better than what our preceding ancestors had. Consider the fact of air conditioning when it is hot, lights when it is dark, our global communications network and internet–all of these things are available by and large because of electricity. It’s a foundation for so many other conveniences. It is hard to overstate the reach of its benefit.

Please tell us about the fears and ambitions of central characters Claire and Nathan.

I think a lot of the novel has to do with our past and our inability to ever escape it. Nathan is bound to his. Claire is shaped by hers, even as she grows into a new life. When I set out to write the book, Nathan was, to my mind, the main character. It surprised me when Claire came along and then grew into what I now think of as the primary character. It’s Claire’s struggle and growth that defines the arc of the novel’s story. I feel that it is because of Claire that the book is an optimistic one.

With the scarcity of jobs during the post-Depression years of the ‘30s, explain the tension between the locals and the outsiders who competed for employment on this project in Hardin County, Tennessee.

Here’s a story that reflects the scarcity of jobs during this time period: I visited a couple different dams that had been built in 1937 during my research. At one of them I learned that, during the construction effort, a camp had sprung up just adjacent to the dam site. It was comprised of men seeking work. Each morning, men from the camp would venture over to the dam site to inquire if anyone had died during the previous day, and if so, if a position had opened up as a result! A version of that story made it into the novel.

What can you tell us about future works you may have in progress now? Do you plan to stick with historical fiction as your main interest?

I’ve got a couple different projects that I’m working on next. The one that currently has the upper hand is set in an Illinois coal mining town in the 1990s. I’m drawn to stories about communities as they change, and this one deals with the strains placed on a particular town, generationally, after the mines shut down.

Lemuria has selected Watershed its November 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction. Signed first editions of Watershed are available in our online store.

Author Q & A with Ann Patchett

By Guest Author

On December 22, 2019

In Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (December 22)

New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett’s seventh novel The Dutch House is a tale that lingers long after the final page.

A story of home, love, disappointment and forgiveness, the novel centers around the family home of siblings and parents through decades of their changes, longings and, eventually, a comfortable sense of healing that bridges to the next generation.

A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Patchett has won numerous awards and fellowships, including England’s Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She has authored six previous novels, three books of nonfiction, and a children’s book.

In November, 2011, she became co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, where she lives with her husband, Karl VanDevender, and their dog, Sparky.

Reviews for The Dutch House often refer to it as “a dark fairy tale,” and, indeed, its main characters–two siblings whose childhoods were darkened by the abandonment of their mother, followed by the presence of a cruel stepmother, and their attachment to a large and looming home–spend their lives lamenting their misfortunes in later years, but are still drawn back to the house. Tell us briefly about their childhood regrets.

Danny and Maeve regret that they didn’t get the house. They regret that their stepmother won, and they lost. Funny, but when I think about regrets, I tend to think about my own actions and not the actions of others. I think they see themselves as fairly blameless in how the events of their childhood unfolded, and I think they’re right. I don’t want to give too much away but when Danny is a teenager, he feels he dealt with a terrible situation terribly, but I believe that as an adult he doesn’t blame himself or harbor any regret.

The house that siblings Maeve and her younger brother Danny grew up in–and would be banished from–is practically a character itself. The design and features of this unique structure, not to mention its furnishings–loom as large as its physical presence. In what ways does this house stand as a metaphor of this story?

Ann Patchett

I think of houses as our public face. Our house is how other people see us. Houses represent our success and our failure, our good times and bad. It’s where we store our memories. If you’ve ever had the experience of driving past a house you used to live in, you remember very quickly how you felt when you were there. So, for Danny and Maeve, the house represents a happier time when their mother was still with them, and it also represents the security of wealth. They had never imagined another kind of life for themselves, and while Maeve was already out of the house, and in a very small apartment, Danny had no idea about the turns that life might take. Children rarely do.

The story goes far beyond the siblings’ childhood years, continuing through their middle age and beyond–as it unfolds their divergent careers and personal lives, and, near the end, the unexpected appearance of a character. When you’re developing a story, do you map out the way their lives evolve for such a long time?

I do. Different writers approach this question differently. I really have to know where I’m going, or I just meander around and get nowhere. I like structure and plot, so I work out the larger details of the novel before I start writing. It’s my favorite part of the process, thinking a story up. I don’t write things down. I keep everything in my head. That way I don’t get too attached to a certain idea. I can change my mind. I can just forget about something. My outlines aren’t specific, but I have a clear idea about all the characters, who they are, what they want, as well as their arrivals and departures.

It seems that the Dutch House redeems itself at the end. What does that state for the entire story?

I’ve been told this is a very sad book and I’ve been told it has a happy ending. I like the fact that different people can read it in different ways. The house never changes. It is, after all, just a house. It’s incapable of feelings, a fact that irritates Danny and Maeve who believe on some level that the house should have collapsed in solidarity when they were thrown out. Again, I don’t want to give anything away. Let’s just say the house is loved and obsessed over for many generations.

Ultimately, this story doesn’t seem to be the expected “good guy, bad guy” tale; rather, it’s pretty much everyone doing the best he or she can. Could you comment on that?

I’m awful at writing villains. I definitely lean towards sympathetic characters, mainly because most all of the people I know personally are sympathetic. We seem to be living in a world of good and evil now, and who is good and who is evil depends on who you’re listening to. But I think most people do the best they can. That said, Andrea is the closest thing I’ve ever come to a villain, and I can even see how she was young and in over her head. I keep meaning to try harder with my villains, but I spend so much time with my characters and look at them so closely I can’t help but feel some empathy for most of them.

Lemuria has chosen The Dutch House as its September 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Karen Abbott

By Guest Author

On December 15, 2019

In History, True Crime

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (December 15)

Award-winning New York Times bestselling author Karen Abbott adds to her popular lineup of historical nonfiction with The Ghosts of Eden Park– a surprising memoir of the life and times of George Remus, the 1920s teetotaling opportunist whose skyrocketing rise to “King of the Bootleggers” during Prohibition would end in tragedy.

An instant New York Times bestseller, Indie Next pick, Amazon best book of August, and a top fall title for both Newsweek and Publishers Weekly, the book is as important for its historical worth (many of the characters in this real-life saga have been practically wiped off the historical map of America’s past) as for its entertainment value.

Abbott’s work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and other publications. Her previous books include Sin in the Second City, American Rose, and Liar Temptress Soldier Spy.

A native of Philadelphia, she now lives in New York.

Tell me how you first learned about George Remus’s true story, and why it caught your attention and inspired you to write Ghosts of Eden Park.

Karen Abbott

I usually get my ideas by perusing old archives and out-of-print books, but this one came through television–specifically the show “Boardwalk Empire,” which aired on HBO for five seasons. There was a minor character named George Remus. He spoke of himself in the third person and stole every scene he was in. I wondered if Remus was a real person, and indeed he was! His real story was much more dramatic than the show’s portrayal, with a sordid love triangle, a devastating betrayal, a murder, and a sensational trial.

The real Remus also spoke of himself in the third person: “This is going to be a hell of a Christmas for Remus”; “Remus has been betrayed by everyone he had trusted”; and my favorite: “Remus’s brain exploded.”

In all my years of researching history, I have never come across a more interesting, bizarre, and brazenly outlandish character. He was an impoverished, abused German immigrant kid who, through determination and savvy, became the most successful bootlegger in American history. Within a year of launching his operation, he owned 35 percent of all the liquor in the United States–an astonishing figure. Newspapers at the time compared him to Vanderbilt and Rockefeller.

At the height of Prohibition, Remus lived an “outrageous” lifestyle on many levels, using his background as both pharmacist and lawyer to game the system. Can you give us an example about Remus’s story that you would say proves the old saying that “truth is stranger than fiction?”

Remus is said to be a real-life inspiration for Jay Gatsby, mainly because of his lavish parties. The most famous was his 1921 New Year’s Eve party, when he unveiled his brand-new Greco-Roman bath, built for $175,000. At one end stood a variety of Turkish and Swedish needle baths, a style and pressure for every taste, and even electric baths–an early version of a tanning bed, heated by incandescent lights and said to make the user “frisky.” Remus’s glamorous wife, Imogene, put on a daring one-piece and executed a perfect dive. Remus handed out party favors: diamond stickpins and watches for the men, 1922 cars for the women, and a $1,000 bill tucked under everyone’s plate. In a gesture emblematic of the times, one what would be remembered in awe decades later, Remus lit guests’ cigars with $100 bills. All this in an era when the average annual salary was about $1,200.

Mabel Walker Willebrandt has been called “the most powerful woman in the country” at the time when she became the assistant attorney general of the United States in 1921 and took on the challenging task of enforcing the National Prohibition Act, which prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. Tell us about her role in this story.

When President Warren Harding appointed Willebrandt to be the assistant attorney general of the United States, she, along with all other adult female citizens, had only had the right to vote for nine months. She was 32 years old, only five years out of law school, and had never prosecuted a single criminal case–and yet suddenly she was in charge of the thousands of Prohibition cases that began piling up in the courts, including cases against Remus.

To add to the pressure of her job, she had a serious hearing problem, and spent an hour every morning styling her hair to conceal her hearing aids. She was almost inhumanly tough and thick-skinned, qualities that were reinforced by the ice-cold bath she took every morning. Her favorite saying was: “Life has few petted darlings”–and she didn’t consider herself one of them. Her formative childhood event: She once bit a pet cat’s ear. To teach her a lesson, her father bit her ear back. During her time, she was the most powerful and the most famous woman in the country, and I couldn’t believe she’d be so lost to history.

Your astounding research for this book made it possible for you to complete it with “no invented dialogue,” thanks to government files, archives, diaries, letters, newspaper articles, books and hearing and trial transcripts, as you listed in your Author’s Note. Tell me about this extraordinary investigation and why this level of accuracy of detail was so important to you.

A confession: I have never had so much fun researching a book. When I discovered that the Yale University Law Library possessed a 5,500-page trial transcript, I immediately set out for New Haven. Nearly every page was a treasure trove–all of the details I would need to recreate conversations and craft scenes. I found incredibly intimate details about Remus. For example, he didn’t like to wear underwear, which in the 1920s was considered evidence of an unsound mind. It took me four months to go through the trial transcript and compose an outline, which amounted to 85,000 words–nearly as long as the finished book itself.

George Remus’s wife, Imogene, fell in love with Franklin Dodge, the very Prohibition agent who put her husband in jail. Who was Imogene, and was she truly in love with Agent Dodge?

Imogene Remus was a classic villain: greedy, conniving, duplicitous–qualities for which she was roundly denigrated and punished. As awful as she was, a man who’d engaged in similar misdeeds likely would have gotten away with them. I think she was aware of this double standard and that it fueled her rebellion. She was the epitome of what the New York Times called the “middle-aged flapper,” defined as one who yearns to escape from a monotonous routine and seeks independent adventures.

When Imogene met Remus, she was going through a nasty divorce, supporting herself and her young daughter by working as a “dust girl” in Remus’s law office. She’d had a difficult life, and here was this brilliant, doting man who was poised to make millions as a bootlegger.

She was full partners with Remus before she turned on him, and she used all that knowledge to fortify her relationship with Dodge. Trial witnesses testified about Imogene and Dodge’s flirtatious phone calls, about their afternoon rendezvous in speakeasys, and about their plans to hire a hitman to kill Remus.

I don’t know if Imogene and Dodge were truly in love, but they definitely shared a common goal: to steal Remus’s fortune and ruin his life.

Lemuria has selected The Ghosts of Eden Park its August 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Quintessential book reveals making of Johnny Cash’s most iconic album

By Guest Author

On December 12, 2019

In Music

By DeMatt Harkins. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (November 17)

The morning of January 13th, 1968, Johnny Cash rode half an hour from Sacramento to the granite walls of Folsom State Prison. With Carl Perkins and The Statler Brothers as openers, he played two shows at 9:40am and 12:40pm. The composite recording of the proceedings would surpass 3 million units sold.

This was not Cash’s first performance at a prison, nor was it his initial appearance at that particular location. But in Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece, Michael Streissguth details what proved to be the most important day of Cash’s career, providing the trajectory to cement his place in musical history.

If you came up during a time when Cash was already a living legend, it is natural to assume he always was one. However, Streissguth explains this was not the case. At Folsom Prison‘s namesake track was recorded at Sun Studios 13 years prior. With the exception of one outlier, Cash’s string of hits tapered off around 1963. His output became increasingly uneven and uninspired. This came as no surprise with recording sessions regularly pilfered, when not missed entirely.

Streissguth lays this rut at the feet of Cash’s drug addiction. Throughout the decade, the singer would struggle with the misuse of amphetamines. Meeting concert obligations became a 50/50 prospect. When he did make it to the microphone, it was not unusual for Cash to be deep in the throes of his habit or just returning to consciousness.

However, as the 60s drew to a close, Streissguth demonstrates two people came into Cash’s life, to great benefit. They would help set the stage for the success of At Folsom Prison. Country royalty June Carter served as a calming, supportive, and loving influence on the troubled soul. Her budding relationship with Cash spawned not only a marriage, but also a return to form in the Grammy-winning duet “Jackson.”

Simultaneously, when Columbia Records transferred Bob Johnston to run their Nashville operations, it would open doors for Cash. Although the Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel producer had been stationed in New York, the native Texan proved a Cash ally, with an equal penchant for mischief. Cash had been asking to record at a prison for years. Johnston was just the guy to ignore the home office’s warnings and green light such a project. The gamble would pay off for all parties involved.

Just as At Folsom Prison would provide Cash’s career a shot in the arm, it also rehydrated country music from its own drought of sorts. In 1968, the musical order of the day was psychedelic and soul. Streissguth argues that Cash was miscategorized as country front the get-go, since he truly played rockabilly. He contends the popularity of Folsom greased the wheels for an updated country/rock hybrid introduced by The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. Going further, Streissguth credits Cash’s revival and subsequent exponential growth for paving the way to arena success for Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, among others.

Nonetheless, Streissguth asks the question, why is At Folsom Prison rarely if ever included in the best albums of the rebellious 60s? While LPs still considered masterpieces today explored new artistic landscapes, he asserts none of them truly challenged authority like At Folsom Prison. Mocking guards and swearing in front of a thousand inmates as tape rolled was a bold move for the era.

Recognizing this, Columbia built their marketing strategy on Cash’s impudence. At the time, the company allocated their promotional budget to pop and classical. With limited resources and a seemingly countercultural message, Columbia sent the record straight to underground newspapers and free-form radio DJs. Although now considered a landmark country album, At Folsom Prison initially gained momentum with the hip set.

But as Streissguth points out, Cash went beyond merely thumbing his nose. Over the next decade he would become an outspoken advocate for prison reform. Essentially unheard of at the time, he understood that caring for prisoners would achieve more for society than brutality. For years he spoke out during interviews, and even appeared at a Senate hearing in 1972.

Without question, At Folsom Prison put Johnny Cash back on the map for three more decades. In addition to putting you there that chilly morning in 1968, Streissguth places the album in context of Cash’s career, personal life, and music as a whole.

DeMatt Harkins of Jackson enjoys flipping pancakes and records with his wife and daughter.

Author Q & A with Jonathan Miles about Larry Brown

By Guest Author

On December 8, 2019

In Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (December 8)

Fans of the late Oxford author Larry Brown need wait no longer to own a collection of his career short works in one volume, with the release of Algonquin’s Tiny Love: The Complete Stories of Larry Brown.

It was fitting that writer Jonathan Miles, (author of the novels Anatomy of a Miracle, Want Not, and Dear American Airlines, and who considered Brown to be both close friend and mentor since they met in Oxford in the early ‘90s) would be the one to contribute the foreword to the book.

“Larry published six novels, a memoir, a book of essays, and all the stories (in this new book), carving his name, indelibly, onto the thick tree trunk of American literature,” Miles states in the foreword. “He strained and he faltered, yes, but he never lost his faith.”

Larry Brown

Without any training in writing or previous publication of a single piece, Brown literally taught himself to write–and he persevered through seven years of rejections until the publication of his first collection of short stories, Facing the Music, in 1988. After his first novel, Dirty Work, was published, he would quit his job as a firefighter in Oxford to devote his efforts full-time to writing.

Among other recognitions, Brown would go on to win the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the Mississippi Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and the Southern Book Award for Fiction–twice.

He died of an apparent heart attack at his home near Oxford in 2004.

Miles, a former columnist for the New York Times, served as a contributing editor to several national magazines, and his journalistic work appeared in the annual Best American Sports Writing and Best American Crime writing anthologies. A former longtime resident of Oxford, he now lives in rural New Jersey.

Miles shares his thoughts and memories about his friendship with Brown below.

How did the idea come about to publish all of Larry Brown’s work in one volume, and how were you chosen to write the foreword to this book?

The idea had been bouncing around, among Larry’s family and friends, for the last decade or more. The links between his two story collections – Facing the Music in 1988 and Big Bad Love in 1990–are so strong that combining them felt like a natural and graceful merger. The greater desire, however, was to finally corral all the stray stories that Larry published in magazines and anthologies, so as to gather the entirety of his short fiction into one definitive volume. Those includes his wild masterpiece, “A Roadside Resurrection,” which appeared in the Paris Review, as well as “Tiny Love,” the prickly, lovelorn title story, which Larry published in a charity anthology, as well as the early stories he published in biker and horror magazines. I’d been shepherding the idea along, over the years, and was honored when Algonquin, Larry’s longtime publisher, asked me to write the foreword.

Tell me about your friendship with Brown. How did you meet him, and what did you learn from him as a writer?

Jonathan Miles

I met Larry in 1992, a very memorable meeting that I wrote about in the foreword. It involves dancing on a table! Despite a 21-year age difference, we were instant pals. The Brown family adopted me, in just about every way, and neither Larry’s passing nor my move up north ever changed that–when I’m with them, I’m home.

As for writing, I’ve often said that my writing classroom was Larry’s pickup, and my classes were the hours Larry and I spent riding Lafayette County backroads. He often traced the origins of stories and scenes on those drives, pointing out the location of some real-life event and then explaining how he’d worked it into fiction, how he’d transformed it into art. Sharing the recipe with me, in a sense.

But the greatest lesson Larry gave me, and gave every artist, was the example of his persistence. Despite years of rejection, he never stopped writing. The only failure in art, he taught me, is not making art. You must always keep working.

Please describe Brown’s work in your own words. What do you admire about his work, and what drew you to it?

Larry Brown wrote about human frailties, about people in dire straits–emotional, romantic, financial, existential. The setting was almost always the rougher corners of north Mississippi, but the frailties were universal. Good people doing bad things, bad people doing good things. With limitless compassion, Larry sought to reconcile such human mysteries. From the first page he liked to load his characters with trouble–he called this “sandbagging”–and then chronicle their struggles to cast off this load, like the Old Testament’s God lobbing ordeals at Job. Yet by gauging what they could endure Larry showed what all of us can endure. There was a lot of darkness in Larry’s work but tremendous light, too.

Why was it important to finally publish all of Brown’s short work into one volume?

The hope is that this big new volume will draw a new generation to Larry Brown’s work and will reboot appreciation for one of the most singular voices in American literature. The people Larry wrote about don’t often appear in literary fiction, or, when they do, are rarely afforded the breadth of humanity that Larry gave them, the full bandwidth of their existence.

A young novelist from Alabama recently wrote me to say that he’d never met folks like himself and his family in books until reading his first Larry Brown book. Tim McGraw, a huge Larry fan, once told me that, unlike with most books he reads, he “recognized” the people in Larry’s work.

I hope this volume kindles more moments like that. I hope it leads more readers into Larry Brown’s north Mississippi, down those windy backroads. And I hope it helps to further cement his legacy as one of this state’s–and for that matter this nation’s–greatest writers.

What are some of your favorites among Larry’s work, and why?

In putting this collection together, I was struck, anew, by his story “Samaritans,” which appeared in Facing the Music. The setup for the story sounds like a joke setup: a little kid walks into a bar. But the story veers into dark, unsettling directions, and ultimately just claws at your heart. I’ve probably read it dozens of times but each time I do it feels slightly different–tonally, morally, the works. Certain paintings are like that; there’s always something new to see. Likewise, certain songs. That’s a hallmark of great art: it feels inexhaustibly alive.

Copies of Tiny Love: The Complete Stories of Larry Brown and Lemuria’s specially designed Larry Brown t-shirts (designed by Barry Gifford) are available in our online store and at our location in Banner Hall.

Author: Guest Author (Page 2 of 28)

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Author Q & A with Mildred D. Taylor

Author Q & A with Mark Barr

Author Q & A with Ann Patchett

Author Q & A with Karen Abbott

Quintessential book reveals making of Johnny Cash’s most iconic album

Author Q & A with Jonathan Miles about Larry Brown

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