Guest Author – Page 5 – Lemuria Books

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By J.C. Patterson. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (September 22)

Over the years, Nevada Barr fans have grown to love the author’s sleuthing park ranger Anna Pigeon. However, in Barr’s new novel, What Rose Forgot, the protagonist is a sixty-eight year-old woman with memory loss who wakes up next to a tree in the middle of the night. Wearing only a hospital gown, cold, disoriented and very thirsty, Rose Dennis is not her usual self. But what was her usual self?

Rose is discovered by two teens who call Longwood Nursing Home’s Memory Care Unit. She’s greeted by very stern staff members, two big orderlies and her 13 year-old step-granddaughter Mel. Seems like Mel is the only one who really cares for her “Gigi.”

Back inside Longwood, before her medication is administered, Rose realizes one thing: she doesn’t belong here…and she must escape for good this time.

In a daring and slightly crazy plan, Rose breaks out of Longwood. But this time, she knows where to go. Her stepson Daniel lives nearby. Rose hides out in Mel’s old playhouse, only to be discovered by her very clever step-granddaughter. Let’s hide out from the adults, Rose begs. They may be part of the conspiracy.

With the aid of an Uber driver, Rose revisits and breaks into her home. Boxes from the move still lie about. Fragments of Rose’s memories start to resurface. She and husband Harley recently changed addresses from New Orleans to Charlotte, North Carolina to be near Harley’s granddaughter, Mel. Something bad happened to Harley, but Rose can’t quite remember what.

Mel Reminds “Gigi” that she was a lucrative painter and a published poet. Rose dressed in artsy, wild fashions, the kind that would seem normal in New Orleans. What contributed to the decline and fall of Rose Dennis’s sanity? Why was she in a memory care unit, her mind fogged with drugs?

More questions come grippingly fast as Rose battles for her life inside her home and on the rooftop. Someone wants Rose permanently erased from memory.

With the aid of Mel, Mel’s best friend Royal and Rose’s sister Marion, a reclusive computer hacker, Rose plots her revenge. Adding in questionable ex-con Eddie Martinez only makes matters weirder.

Is her family plotting against Rose? With two unscrupulous stepsons, a fiery ex-daughter-in-law and a sneaky ex-wife, the bets are wide open. And then there’s the staff at the memory care unit. Several seniors have died there after very short stays. Could Rose’s new friend Chuck be next on the hit list?

Get ready for a reading romp that only Nevada Barr could deliver. Told in her campy tone with wisecracks and barbs, What Rose Forgot reads like Nancy Drew meets The Keystone Cops with digital access. Barr shines a light on nursing home abuse, family greed and the bonds that bring young and old together.

The author, formerly a Clinton, Mississippi resident, divides her time between Oregon and New Orleans. Rose shares so many of Nevada Barr’s traits, it’s easy to channel character and creator. I missed a National Park visit with Anna Pigeon, but a romp with Rose Dennis is fresh and exciting, even for an old lady with memory loss.

J.C. Patterson is recently retired from WLBT and the author of the Big Easy Dreamin’ series.

Susan T. Falck’s ‘Remembering Dixie’ raises questions about historical memory

By Guest Author

On September 23, 2019

In Civil Rights, Civil War, Southern Culture, Southern History

By Jay Wiener. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (September 1)

Reverberations remain from decades during which Southerners acted as if the Civil War was not concluded with the Confederacy losing. The narrative evolved through variations on a theme, but constant was diversion from discussion of a multiracial society.

Remembering Dixie: The Battle to Control Historical Memory in Natchez, Mississippi 1865-1941 offers opportunity to rethink the narrative. Author Susan T. Falck writes, “In crafting their historical consciousness whites emphasized the gentility of southern civilization, the valor of Confederate soldiers, and the courage of female and elderly male civilians who heroically protected the home front. The memory… was selective, with little room for black experiences told from a black perspective.”

Experiences during enslavement of people of color of mixed blood and in the free black community, and hierarchies arising through differences, were overlooked by “… white Civil War memoirists who subscribed to the notion that the South was tragically victimized during the war and Reconstruction.” Fixation upon the Lost Cause crippled the South—and the country—because it begat orthodoxy as rigid as Stalinism, stopping expansive inquiries:

What other possibilities exist?
What options offer optimal outcome?
Why ignore them?

One-dimensional defense of the slavocracy—as a paradise lost—prohibited white Southerners from full appreciation of how emancipation felt for former slaves, the experience during Redemption, at which time freedoms were revoked, and the dehumanization which ensued. Remembering Dixie yields insights.

Chapter Four addresses lacunae through discussion of photography in Natchez. That examination alone justifies buying the book, in the manner that one purchases magazines without reading everything. Art History classes are likely to utilize it. Anyone interested in photography ought to consider it, given profound perspective into the “thousand words” that a picture is supposedly worth.

The author writes, “[Henry] Norman’s photographs empowered his black subjects to directly challenge the rampage of racist cartoons, jokes, articles, and pictures circulating in the pages of newspapers and consumer periodicals nationwide. As symbols of personal and collective empowerment, Norman’s portraits contested characterizations of blacks as innately inferior, simplistic, and unworthy of respect or civil rights.”

Chapter Five is no less essential. “The creators of the Pilgrimage repackaged the dramatization of a mix of decades-old southern racialized ideology and white historical memory initiated in the early postbellum period as a product for Depression-era consumption.” Slavocracy was sold as an idyll, superior to the dislocations of the Great Depression and industrialization. “Out of the more practical features of the North we may have obtained our economic status, but it is to the South that we turn for the music and romance of our yesteryears.”

Otherwise put, “… the Pilgrimage invited 1930s audiences to step inside the world of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler and experience vicariously a carefully reconstructed mythical past.”

The advertising slogan “Come to Natchez Where the Old South Still Lives” coined by “George Healy, Jr., formerly of Natchez and an Editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune…” encapsulates the anodyne delusion.

Interestingly the women spearheading the Pilgrimage exemplified anything other than Healy’s antediluvian approach: Although they inhabited traditional femininity, they were thoroughly modern, shrewd and calculating businesswomen.

Sound business judgment ultimately created “a profound civic commitment shared by many in the community—whites and blacks—to promote and tell a more inclusive and accurate historical narrative.”

As Natchez has done so, utilizing the Historic Natchez Foundation, the Natchez Courthouse Records Project, and the National Park Service, it has instructed communities, elsewhere, struggling through challenges: “… [T]hanks to the coupling of strong and wise external and homegrown influences the healing of Natchez’s past is well underway, resulting in a flurry of innovative heritage tourism developments that while not always embracing a critically accurate narrative are more racially inclusive and historically accurate than ever before.”

Jay Wiener is a Jackson attorney.

Susan T. Falck will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, September 25, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Remembering Dixie.

Author Q & A with Brittney Morris

By Guest Author

On September 22, 2019

In OZ: Young Adult Fiction

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

Brittney Morris’s hot debut novel presents a relevant and hard-hitting YA tale of a black teen game developer–17-year-old Kiera Johnson–who created the secret multiplayer role-playing game called Slay.

When things begin to spin out of control and the secret world of the game is threatened, Kiera and her online players face a dilemma that lands squarely in the lap of the young game developer, as she explores the ramifications of racism and the importance of exposing the truth.

Morris earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Boston University, where she was the founder and former president of the school’s Creative Writing Club.

A video game player herself, Morris now lives in Seattle with her husband.

Please share how the story in Slay was shaped by your own personal experiences.

Brittney Morris

Growing up, I was one of the only black kids in my small town. I felt like I was expected to be the black culture expert at my school. I was supposed to know a bunch of musical references, movie references, etc. that just weren’t part of my life. I felt too black to fit in with my white classmates and too “white” to fit in with my black friends, so I grew up in a racial limbo.

Writing Kiera’s story felt quite cathartic because it so closely mirrors mine. Moving between majority white and majority black spaces felt like stepping into alternate universes, one in which I could be myself–I just didn’t know it yet–and one in which I was expected to be “on” so as not to offend or ostracize white people. Kiera learns, like I did, exactly what Blackness means to her and just how diverse, beautiful, and complex it is.

Tell me about the idea of taking on many social topics that are currently relevant to young people today through the medium of video games, and how it resonates with their generation.

Video games–especially indie games–have been tackling tough topics for years: depression, suicide, immigration, chronic illness, self-harm, cyberbullying, and childhood trauma, just to name a few off the top of my head. I have game recommendations for each of those topics if anyone’s interested. Just tweet at me. Anyway, I didn’t see why racism, exploration of racial identity, and “reverse-racism” couldn’t fit in with that list.

And as for Gen-Z specifically, I love seeing them on Twitter. You think we Millennials are skeptical of everything and tired of the status quo? Just you wait. Gen-Z is not here to take no mess, and it gives me so much hope for our future as a species. Video games have been an underutilized immersive and fun educational medium for decades, and I don’t think there’s a better or more innovative group to take it on than today’s teens.

Slay is your debut novel. Tell me about the bidding war for the rights to your book–the immediate interest it garnered from major publishers, and the fact that it is already being considered for movie rights. Were you surprised by this instant response to your work?

I had a great feeling the whole time I was drafting Slay. I knew the concept was commercial, easy to pitch, and full of heavy themes and high stakes. But you never know for sure if something will resonate in publishing. So, I guess when my agent and I began pitching to editors, I was hoping it would resonate, but prepared for the worst. Luckily, we had 13 editors from eight different houses–I think–it’s been awhile – interested!

The bidding war for Slay was wild. It lasted two days and involved lots of conversations with my amazing agent who coordinated the whole process like a wizard. I wasn’t surprised by the response, because I went into this expecting anything to happen. But I am grateful, and eternally honored that I get to share this book with so many people. It’s a lifelong dream come true.

Ultimately, what is your hope for what you would like to accomplish through this book, and the message you want to send?

I was inspired to write Slay after seeing Black Panther. It was the first time I walked into a room full of Black people and felt like I belonged, 100 percent, without having to know any specific pop culture knowledge. You can blame my lone-Black-kid-in-a-hugely-white-town childhood for my complicated relationship with Blackness. It was enough to cross my arms and say “Wakanda forever.”

I want that total unconditional love and acceptance for every single Black person on the planet, especially the ones on the outskirts who feel like they’ve always been “different,” for whom major stereotypes don’t necessarily resonate, like me. I want everyone who reads Slay to walk away believing their identity is what they make it, and that no one has the right to tell them what their identity means or what stereotypes that means they have to fit.

Your publishing agreement includes a second book. Can you tell us yet what ideas you are considering for your sophomore offering?

It does, and I can! It’s about two teen black boys. One can see into the past, and one can see the future. The book is about living with the pressure of knowing what your ancestors went through to get you where you are today, the threat of violence, brutality, and incarceration in your future, and navigating the present under the weight of toxic masculinity.

Slay was a love letter to black people worldwide. My next book sits at the corner of Blackness and masculinity, and it is meant to be a love letter to black men specifically.

Brittney Morris will at Lemuria on Tuesday, September 24, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Slay. At 5:30, she will be in conversation with Ebony Lumumba.

Author Q & A with Shaun Hamill

By Guest Author

On September 15, 2019

In Fiction, Horror

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

A self-acknowledged “steady diet of horror fiction and monster movies” as he was growing up has, for Arlinton, Texas, native Shaun Hamill, resulted in a debut novel that makes Halloween look like a day in the park.

A Cosmology of Monsters turns the lives of one decent family into a nightmarish sequence of circumstances that blurs the lines between reality and the unknown–which is a good thing for those who love the spooky genre.

Hamill, who earned his writing stripes working on his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has seen previous fiction work appear in Carve magazine and Split Infinitive.

Today he resides in Alabama.

Tell me about how you developed such a strong interest in horror stories.

Shaun Hamill

I’ve always been drawn to stories about what might be hiding in the dark. Maybe it’s genetic: my mom kept stacks of horror and thriller novels around the house when I was a kid, and we rented a lot of thrillers from the video store. But I was also lucky enough to encounter three bits of kid-friendly horror at just the right time. The first were Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books. The second was Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? show. The third was AMC’s 10 p.m. classic monster movie feature every Friday night, where I first saw Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein. From there it was a natural progression to slasher movies, Stephen King, Anne Rice, H.P. Lovecraft, and a lifelong love affair with the genre.

In your acknowledgements at the end of A Cosmology of Monsters, you refer to your debut novel as “this weird literary genre hybrid.” With the current rise in the interest of horror literature, film, and TV, explain where you believe this book fits (or does not fit) within the seemingly expanding genre of “horror.”

When I started Cosmology, I was only following Toni Morrison’s advice and writing the exact book I wanted to read–something that could balance emotional realism with the sense of dark wonder I seek in horror fiction. Through luck or kismet or what-have-you, my book is being released amid a true horror renaissance. In the past few years, artists like Carmen Maria Machado, Victor Lavalle, Ari Aster, and Jordan Peele have provided an embarrassment of elevated or literary horror, and we’ve also gotten a spate of great mainstream horror as well, including the new IT movies, Stranger Things, and the 2018 Halloween, for example. My hope is that Cosmology will sit somewhere between those two poles, attracting mainstream and literary readers alike.

A Cosmology of Monsters is a story about a really nice guy (Harry Turner) and his family, whose journey into darkness begins with the creation of a “haunted” Halloween house in their backyard. One thing leads to another, and eventually the entire family descends into a state of constant tragedies as each is touched by feelings of the presence of “monsters.” Please briefly explain the premise of this sprawling tale of fear and heartbreak.

A Cosmology of Monsters is a literary horror novel about a family running a haunted house attraction in the suburbs of Fort Worth, Texas. Narrated by the youngest child, Noah, the novel tracks the family’s fortunes across 50 years, and explores the monsters–both metaphorical and literal–that haunt them. It’s a generational saga, an homage to Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft, and most importantly, a story about the ways love can either save or damn us.

Ultimately, the story is a mixture of thrill, suspense, mystery, and dark forces, all preying on a decent family that seems to attract more than its share of misfortune. Sometimes it feels as though the metaphorical and the “real” situations and settings blur, as scenes, and sometimes characters themselves, quickly transform. How should readers interpret these changes–and are there glimpses of hidden messages in these scenes?

Although much of the book is meant to be read literally, there are a few places where the literal and metaphorical blend–particularly in the “Turner Sequence” interludes between the main story sections. While I wrote the book to be enjoyed and understood in a single reading, I also designed in some secrets that will, I hope, reward multiple readings and close attention. The book has mysteries to be parsed, if the reader is willing.

Are you surprised by the acclaim and attention your debut book has drawn, and do you have plans for another book in this same vein in your future?

It’s funny. Right before my agent and I started submitting this book to editors, I told my wife that I didn’t expect it to sell. I thought it was too odd, that even if publishers enjoyed reading it, they wouldn’t know how to sell it to a general audience. I have never been happier to be wrong. The novel sold quickly, to the incredible and enthusiastic team at Pantheon Books. The entire publication journey has followed this pattern–with me as the gloomy naysayer, and the universe or fate surpassing all my expectations. This is a long way of saying that yes, I’m both surprised and incredibly grateful for the positive attention the book has drawn, and I hope it means I’ll get to write and publish more novels in this same vein in the future.

Bonus question for you! Define “Cosmology” and tell me about the title of the book.

“Cosmology” is an interesting term. In science and religion, it’s the study of the origin, life, and eventual death of the universe, and the rules or forces that govern those processes. In philosophy, it’s the study of existential questions that are beyond the reach of science. I’ve always loved the word–both its sound and its meaning. I think it’s an appropriate moniker for a story in which a narrator is examining his own life from end to end and uncovering the secret forces that have shaped his existence.

Shaun Hamill will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, September 18, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss A Cosmology of Monsters.

Minrose Gwin delivers soon-to-be classic novel ‘The Accidentals’

By Guest Author

On September 13, 2019

In Southern Fiction

By Scott Naugle. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (September 8)

The Accidentals by Minrose Gwin is the best type of novel, striking so many intellectual and emotional chords. The deep and rich story is masterfully built through the subtlest of detail, nuance, shading, and intuition. Beautifully styled, every word gently and intentionally placed, The Accidentals is destined to become a classic of 21st century American literature.

Minrose Gwin is a native of Tupelo. Her previous novels include Promise and The Queen of Palmyra. Gwin’s nonfiction work includes Wishing for Snow, a memoir, and Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement.

The Accidentals begins in 1957. Olivia McAlister is an anxious mother of two daughters, June and Grace, married to the dependable Holly, a bookkeeper for the local paper mill company. Holly drives a Nash Rambler and is meticulous in trimming the hedges of their neat, comfortable house. Impacted by and wistful for the energy and vibe of her youth in New Orleans, Olivia cannot find her footing among the routines and housewives of a rural Mississippi community. She’s standoffish, a loner, pining for the intellectual and artistic stimulation of a larger city and the invigorating broader cause she served while working at the Higgins boat factory during World War II.

Through bird-watching and opera, Olivia attempts to find purpose and connection. She is an accidental, “a bird found outside its normal geographic range, migration route, or season: vagrant” explains the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

With a richly developed interior life, artistic, self-aware, walking through days under a deep and exhausting disquietude, Olivia McAlister joins Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. Intelligent, internally reflective, and articulate female characters in literature are a rarity, particularly through which an author sets the tone of a novel or barometer through which other characters or society are judged.

In the opening paragraphs of “Mrs. Dalloway”, “… feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful as about to happen; looking at the flowers…” And from the opening of “Mrs. Bridge”, “…Now and then while growing up the idea came to her that she could get along very nicely without a husband.” Both are strong independent women challenging the status quo and searching for intellectual fulfillment outside a society dominated by men and commerce.

We are introduced to Olivia McAlister in the opening paragraphs of The Accidentals as she projects her concerns and desires, “Listen hard now and you can tell what they are saying. This morning the cardinal. Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart, sweet. Then, two houses down, a mockingbird. Redemption, redemption, redemption…Cheer, cheer, cheer. I’m all ears little wren.” Birds represent flight, an escape, while chirping coded messages to the restless Olivia McAlister, plotting her next action that will, through a series of mishaps, lead to her death. Her escape flight will be aborted.

After Olivia’s death, her daughters and Holly are boomeranged through a series of emotions and actions that further reverberate into the lives of others with tragic consequences–abortions, wrongful incarceration, cancer, mental illness, physical deformity. I must admit that the plot twists in The Accidentals were so unexpected, and shocking, that I stopped short in my reading and gasped more than once.

Gwin can plot a story like few other writers. She exposes the randomness and elegiac incongruity of Southern life at the twilight of the twentieth century. Like an unrestrained and irrepressible Faulkner spinning through generations of malevolence and wickedness in Absalom, Absalom!, Gwin’s characters cannot escape their past, the poor judgments of their relations, and pure bad luck.

Unlike her fellow Mississippian William Faulkner, Gwin writes with a balance and steadiness, spinning a completely believable story, more grounded in day to day life than we may care to acknowledge.

“What I know is that there are always stories behind the stories people tell,” muses June, “They are stacked like crackers in a box behind the ones they do tell.”

Gwin does not attempt to unearth plausible causes, scrapping through circumstances or family attics for reasons to present the reader as to why something happened. Rather, she understands that art, particularly literature, is where one word or one inferring principle is enough. Gwin gives us a story to contemplate, softly imprisoning the reader in her beautiful and subtle language, as we read late into the early morning hours.

Scott Naugle is the co-owner of Pass Christian Books/Cat Island Coffeehouse in Pass Christian, Mississippi.

Signed first editions of the paperback original The Accidentals by Minrose Gwin are available at Lemuria and in its online store.

Author Q & A with Téa Obreht

By Guest Author

On September 8, 2019

In Fiction

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

Téa Obreht’s sophomore novel Inland paints a stark picture of the brutal 19th century American West in a frontier tale that culminates with the meeting of two unlikely characters who give their all to the parched desert, the unforgiving land, and the never-ending drought of the Arizona Territory. A strong touch of mysticism and more than a few conversations with the dead add suspense and intense interest to the story.

Obreht’s internationally bestselling debut novel The Tiger’s Wife earned her the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and her works have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and others.

A native of Slovenia (formerly Yugoslavia), Obreht now lives in New York with her husband, where she teaches at Hunter College.

Tell me about the “frontier story” your research uncovered that became the basis of the narrative of Inland.

Téa Obreht

Stuff You Missed in History Class, a podcast I absolutely adore, dedicated an episode to something called the Red Ghost. It centered a yarn about two Arizona women who have a disastrous encounter with a monster on their ranch, and went on to frame the incident in the context of the weird, side-lined true history of the Camel Corps, the military experiment which brought camels from the Ottoman empire to the American southwest in 1856.

I’d never heard of either the yarn or the history before, despite having researched regional history and folklore for quite some time, and was absolutely blown away by it–not only because even the weirdest part of this very weird story was apparently true, or because the idea of a camel among saguaros (cactus) presented such a compelling narrative challenge, but also because at the heart of the story were these real people, Hadji Ali and Greek George, who had traveled here from an empire which, at that time, also held the Balkans.

The brutal setting of Inland obviously shaped its characters. How does this setting really become a sort of “character” of its own story?

I think the setting’s most prominent “personality” trait, if you will, is its complete lack of investment in what stories do and don’t survive it. The prevailing and most dangerous myth of the West tells us that an individual’s triumph or a story’s survival are directly proportional to goodness and worth; that good people “make it” because they deserve to.

Nora and Lurie spend their respective storylines learning the falsehood of this mythology by watching–and frankly helping perpetrate–the breakdown of communities and individuals all around them. They are fearful of a similar fate and are working against the inevitable reality that they don’t matter to this landscape and that it is determined to forget them.

Main characters Nora, a homesteading wife and mother awaiting her husband’s return from a desperate trek to find water for the family; and Lurie, a fugitive running from the law, share the common trait of talking with the dead-and, for both, the “conversations” are with family members. You also used mysticism in your first novel, The Tiger’s Wife. Tell me about your interest in this phenomenon–and how it colors Inland.

I’m deeply fascinated by the trappings of belief–the way we reel between resisting mysticism and needing it. What I found additionally alluring about this period of American history was the clash of technology and spiritualism taking place from coast to coast, and how that would have shaped these characters’ perception of, and relationship to, the supernatural plane.

There’s Nora, who “talks” to her dead daughter, but insists she knows these conversations to be illusory, that the ghost is obviously just a figment of her imagination. And then there’s Lurie, for whom seeing the dead is a fact of life–albeit one from he derives no comfort because the spirits he encounters are the products of the violent, turbulent history in which he himself participates. His ghosts are people who suffered violence in death or burial, and he fears a similar fate might await him, and thus takes no solace in the confirmation of an afterlife.

Caught between them is Josie. She is Nora’s niece, a medium from New York, whom Nora derides terribly for the charlatanism of “pretending” to commune with the dead–through, of course, Nora is guilty of this kind of pretending, too.

Coming from different circumstances but sharing the urgent reality of a deadly drought, why would you say Lurie and Nora were “destined” to meet?

Because, by the time they meet in the book, despite all their recklessness and weaknesses, they are the only people in the entire world who can give each other what they need.

Do you already have plans for your next book–and can you give us some hints of what it will be about?

I still feel drawn to the West, and will no doubt write about it again down the line. But I think the next one might be a desert island book.

Téa Obreht will be at the Eudora Welty House on Thursday, September 12, at 5:00 to sign and read from Inland. Lemuria has selected Inland as one of its two September 2019 selections for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Sarah M. Broom

By Guest Author

On September 1, 2019

In African-American, New Orleans, Southern Culture, Southern History

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (September 1)

In her debut book The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom presents a powerful memoir of the New Orleans she experienced as a child (growing up in a family of 12 children), and the house that swallowed up the dreams and finances of her resilient mother.

Broom earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004 and won a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016. She was a finalist for the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction in 2011, and has been awarded fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Oxford American, and O, The Oprah Magazine, and others.

Today, Broom lives in Harlem.

Sarah M. Broom

The Yellow House is a richly detailed memoir of your life, sharing not just stories of your immediate family but those of at least two preceding generations. Why was it important to you to devote so much detail to previous generations to fully tell this story?

I wanted to provide context, a kind of grounding, to situate the story in a lineage. To begin at the moment of my birth would have been dishonest, and also would have ignored the people who compose me and make me who I am. I was setting up a matriarchal world, establishing the women who preceded me within the City of New Orleans. The story of my mother’s house felt, to me, indistinguishable from the story of my Grandmother Lolo and her many houses.

The neighborhood in which the Yellow House was built was part of New Orleans East, touted in the early 1960s as a “new frontier” and a “Model City” like nothing that had come before it. Describe the idea behind its expected growth, and why it would eventually fail.

New Orleans East was an enormous area of the city, east of the Industrial Canal, a navigation channel opened in 1923. Long before New Orleans East, Inc. arrived, there was a collection of communities within the east including Orangedale Subdivision, where my mother eventually bought the Yellow House. New Orleans East, Inc. began to build out the more easternmost parts of the area, which created a flurry of excitement and news stories. Eventually, the entire area of the city took on the corporate name. The East failed for many reasons–the oil bust, white flight which led to divestment, public policy and city planning choices, and inattention.

Your mother, Ivory Mae Soule Webb, was a 19-year-old widow when she bought the Yellow House in 1961, paying the $3,200 price with life insurance money after her first husband’s death. By 1964, when they moved in, she was remarried to Simon Broom, and they began married life with six children between them. Tell me about your mom’s pride in her home, and how important it was to her to keep everything looking nice, inside and out.

My mother loved to make a beautiful home. She was raised by women who took pride in all the places where she lived. For my mother, owning a house of her own was buying into the American dream. Through home ownership, I suspect she learned quite a bit about the frailty of the American dream, about the critical importance of the solidity of the “ground,” so to speak. (It was) understood through time that her investment might not build wealth for her as it might for someone else.

After several career moves and the devastation of Katrina, you eventually were drawn back to New Orleans. At the end, you state: “The house was the only thing that belonged to all of us.” Ultimately, what did (and does) the Yellow House mean to you and your family?

It is to this day a repository. Witness to our lives. The place our mother paid for, in which she built a world full of joy and surprise and sometimes sadness, but it belonged to her and it still is ours even as a memory.

Lemuria has selected The Yellow House its September 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Small towns, big issues get help from touring author in Susan Cushman’s ‘Friends of the Library’

By Guest Author

On August 26, 2019

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

By Tracy Carr. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (August 25)

When Adele Covington hits the road for a book tour in some small Mississippi communities, it turns out she’s part author, part fairy godmother. The ten short stories in Susan Cushman’s Friends of the Library deal with big issues in small towns with heart and compassion.

Hosted by each site’s Friends of the Library, a non-profit advocacy group aimed at supporting public libraries through fundraising and promotion, Adele adapts her program to the group and, depending on their interests, discusses either her novel, which deals with a sexually abused graffiti artist, or her memoir, which details her experiences with her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s.

If the descriptions of Adele’s books sound a bit familiar, there’s a reason for that: Cushman herself embarked on a book tour of Mississippi libraries, hosted by the Friends, where she discussed her novel, Cherry Bomb, which features a sexually abused graffiti artist, and her memoir, Tangles and Plaques: A Mother and Daughter Face Alzheimer’s. Friends of the Library is loosely based on Cushman’s real-life series of library programs, but with—presumably—a little more magic.

(By the way, there are 135 Friends of the Library groups in Mississippi. If you’re a library supporter and want to make a difference, join your local chapter!)

At each library, Adele meets someone who catches her eye. She strikes up a conversation, suggests a cup of coffee or lunch, and listens as the person unburdens their problems to her. Adele, who would be a busybody if she didn’t get great results, offers advice, connects people, and fixes their lives. Imagine if Touched by an Angel were set in Mississippi libraries.

Adele’s not fixing minor problems, either. The problems these folks have are serious: homelessness, alcoholism, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, eating disorders, and kidnapping, to name a few. Adele’s quick thinking, easygoing manner, and trustworthiness mean she’s able to offer big solutions to the big issues.

In Oxford, she meets Avery, a part-time library employee and full-time aspiring writer. He’s written a fantasy novel about a dystopian society where newborn babies are taken away from their parents and prominent families get to take their pick. The rest of the children grow up in warehouse orphanages, and later stage an uprising to find their birth parents.

Over coffee at Square Books, Adele listens to how closely Avery’s background and novel intersect and encourages him to enroll in a creative writing workshop, where he forms an immediate connection with a creative writing professor 20 years his senior. I won’t spoil things, but this book is all about happy endings.

The same goes for the homeless man in Eupora, the kidnapped girl in West Point, and the abused wife in Aberdeen: they all, with Adele’s help, find solid solutions to their life-threatening problems.

And that’s a good thing. Cushman doesn’t shy away from real-life issues, and while the way those issues are dealt with might be swift, it also gives us a little hope.

Do some of the problems wrap themselves up a little too neatly? Perhaps, but just as we don’t complain that a TV show’s conflict is resolved tidily at the end of each episode, we shouldn’t be bothered that Adele is always in the right place at the right time with the right words.

We could all use a little more sweetness and magic in our lives, and that’s what Friends of the Library delivers.

Tracy Carr is the Library Services Director at the Mississippi Library Commission in Jackson. She also serves as director of the Mississippi Center for the Book, and is a Mississippi Book Festival advisory board member.

Susan Cushman will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, August 27, at 5:00 to sign and discuss her novel, Friends of the Library.

Author Q & A with Margerita Jurkovic

By Guest Author

On August 25, 2019

In Southern Culture, Sports

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (August 25)

Slovenian attorney Margerita Jurkovic said she had “no idea what to expect” when she arrived in Jackson in 2017 as a law exchange student–but it wasn’t long before she found herself captivated by a passion for a brand new experience: American (and specifically Southern) football.

She soon realized that the stories she lived out as she discovered the thrill of the game, literally on the sidelines, were the stuff that would make a good read, and Margerita’s Gridiron Adventure: A Slovenian Lawyer’s Crash Course in American Football Culture was the inevitable outcome.

Mike Frascogna, a Jackson attorney and former law professor of Jurkovic’s, took the football novice under his sports-driven wing and introduced her to the game at youth, high school and college matches throughout the Southeast during the 2018 season. Her perspective, as an outsider who was new to the game–and the culture–of Southern football is honest, humorous, and often thought-provoking.

Jurkovic received her second Master of Law at Mississippi College in 2018, graduating magna cum laude. She also holds a doctoral degree in criminal law and human rights. In Slovenia, she serves as CEO of a non-profit organization that works with victims of domestic abuse and human trafficking.

While in Mississippi, Jurkovic specialized in negotiations and entertainment law at Frascogna Entertainment Law, a Division of Frascogna Courtney, PLLC, in Jackson.

What brought you to Mississippi from your home country of Slovenia?

Margerita Jurkovic

First, it started as an educational experience in law for me. Finishing my PhD, I thought it would be useful to get some experience in a country with a common law system, so I found Mississippi through one of my law school contacts at home. I was planning on staying only a couple of months, but before I realized I had been in Jackson for almost two years.

How did your passion for Mississippi football develop so quickly, and what role did Jackson attorney Mike Frascogna play in that process?

It happened so spontaneously, my passion for football. While in Jackson I was constantly surrounded by people who are interested in this sport. Seeing the enthusiasm of players and coaches, and then experiencing what the win of their chosen teams means to the fans (played a big part) . . . and Mike Frascogna–he knows a lot of people around here. I learned a lot from him, not only football, but about the law, and also life.

It seems you had a unique vantage point at the high school and college football games you attended during your time in Mississippi: you were actually on the sidelines during the games! How was Mike able to make that possible, and do you think that made the games even more exciting, especially since you usually got to meet the coaches or high-level school officials?

Absolutely–I got to experience things most fans cannot, and this is why the book has so many unique stories–like hearing the pre-game talks in the locker rooms. I became spoiled in a way–now, I only want to watch football from the sidelines! The involvement of the Frascogna law firm in Mississippi athletics made things easier for us. One of my characters in the book said, “Mike can make anything possible!” I guess she was not far from the truth.

What were some important lessons you learned from this experience?

There are many lessons one can learn while living abroad, especially how to keep yourself happy and involved in local activities, even while being so different, and often missing home. There are many differences between European and American life, but we all share the same human needs. Seeing the 7- and 8-year-olds playing the rough sport of football helped me understand some basic American values: protecting teammates, loving competition, and not being afraid of physical contact.

What convinced you to write a book about this adventure?

I did not need any convincing after coming in contact with the passion of the coaches and players for the game, and observing the enjoyment of the fans, cheerleaders, bands and the dance groups. It is truly a unique cultural event, involving the entire community. The emotions of this sport got me from the first day.

I never expected that I would be writing a book about football, surrounded by sweet tea and strong men, seriously fighting out there, for the love of the game.

Lawyer masterminds bootlegger empire in Karen Abbott’s ‘Ghosts of Eden Park’

By Guest Author

On August 23, 2019

In History, True Crime

By Patrick O’Daniel. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (August 11)

Karen Abbott expertly weaves a story of ambition, treachery, and revenge in her new book The Ghosts of Eden Park: The Bootleg King, the Women Who Pursued Him, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz-Age America. Drawing from court testimonies, newspapers, and other first-hand accounts, Abbott details the rise and fall George Remus, the so-called “King of the Bootleggers.”

The Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution banned the sale and transportation of most alcoholic beverages in the United States. George Remus, a successful defense attorney in the Midwest, represented many bootleggers arrested for violating the law. He was amazed at how easily his clients paid exorbitant court costs and fines. Intrigued by the profit potential in bootlegging, he studied the prohibition law, discovered its loopholes, and found a way to cash in on the liquor business.

Remus found that millions of gallons of liquor remained in bonded warehouses after prohibition went into effect. The only way the owners could legally get rid of it was to sell their stock to drug companies who in turn sold the liquor as prescription medicine. Remus saw an opportunity and decided to buy both distilleries and drug companies to become both buyer and seller.

Remus falsified or destroyed records of shipments, and had crews from his trucking company divert liquor to a fortified safe-house in rural Ohio where they sold it illegally. Remus bribed law enforcement to avoid arrest as he bought more distilleries, warehouses, and pharmacies. He lived a lavish lifestyle reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby and made millions at a time when the average salary was less than $2000 per year.

Abbott goes into detail about Remus’s business operations and the men that worked for him. She recounts the hijacking that led Remus to use armed convoys and a fortified safe-house. She describes how easily a rich bootlegger could corrupt poorly paid law enforcement and how hard it was for honest prohibition agents to do their jobs. On one occasion, Remus’s lieutenant George Conners expertly cajoled a couple of prohibition agents with whiskey and money after the two nearly discovered the operation. Every decision described sheds more light on Remus’s character.

Abbott also brings to light Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the crusading Assistant Attorney General who wanted Remus behind bars. The story takes a bizarre turn when Agent Frank Dodge, the man Willebrandt sent to investigate Remus, and Remus’s wife Imogene became lovers and conspired to steal his fortune. Their treachery would not only bring about Remus’s ruin but their own as well.
Abbott’s colorful settings and intricate relationships make the book read like a novel, but always with an eye on historical accuracy. She inserts excerpts of court testimony as epigraphs to set the stage as events unfold. Eyewitnesses recount personal observations, motivations, and secret plots. The details help the reader see the conspiracies take shape against Remus, his downfall, and what brought him to seek revenge.

Abbott captures the feel of the Jazz Age and its gangsters, scofflaws, and crusaders in this story. The Ghosts of Eden Park is a well-researched and highly engaging work filled with intrigue, infidelity, murder, and headline-catching courtroom drama. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the Prohibition Era, including fans of Prohibition by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick and HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.

Patrick O’Daniel is the Executive Director of Libraries for Southwest Tennessee Community College in Memphis and author of Crusaders, Gangsters, and Whiskey: Prohibition in Memphis, When the Levee Breaks: Memphis and the Mississippi Valley Flood of 1927, Memphis and the Super Flood of 1937: High Water Blues, and co-author of Historic Photos of Memphis.

Lemuria has chosen The Ghosts of Eden Park as its August 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction. Signed first editions are available in store and on our website.

Author: Guest Author (Page 5 of 28)

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Author Q & A with Téa Obreht

Author Q & A with Sarah M. Broom

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Author Q & A with Margerita Jurkovic

Lawyer masterminds bootlegger empire in Karen Abbott’s ‘Ghosts of Eden Park’

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