Biography/Memoir – Page 2

Category: Biography/Memoir (Page 2 of 9)

Print the Legend: ‘All the Way’ by Joe Namath

On June 12, 2019

by Andrew Hedglin

Once upon a time, I used to be a history teacher. I tried to impress upon my students that when we talked about giants of history–Martin Luther, Napoleon, Isaac Newton, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, etc.–that we were using them as shorthand for even bigger ideas. Genius is fine as far as it goes, but the most important human developments are products of collaboration. Few people will ever be giants, and to endlessly study biography for hints on whatever separates these titans from men–we have dozens of volumes on Winston Churchill alone here at Lemuria–might be missing the point.

What was going to talk about here? Oh, yes. Joe Namath. Joe Willie. Broadway Joe. And, specifically, his new memoir, All the Way: My Life in Four Quarters.

Joe Namath has some of the most baffling statistics of any quarterback elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. For his career, he threw more interceptions than touchdowns. Although he was, for the most part, a very good quarterback, especially by the standards of his era, what makes him a legend?

Joe Namath is shorthand for a bigger idea.

Namath smartly structures the book around a recounting of Super Bowl III, where his upstart AFL New York Jets defeated the powerhouse NFL Baltimore Colts, 16-7, beating no less than legends in Johnny Unitas and Don Shula in the process. The win legitimized the new league, proving that the teams of each league, which had been united in a recent merger, could be on equal footing on any given Sunday.

Joe Namath doesn’t talk about this game because it was his finest moment personally–he didn’t throw a touchdown in the game–but because he knows it is what people want to hear about from him. The actual game had its own heroes–runningback Matt Snell and cornerback Johnny Sample, but Joe Namath remains the enduring image–the guarantee, the index finger pointed skyward as he heads victoriously back into the tunnel.

Namath knows what the reader wants to hear about, but in return, he has his own things that he wants to talk about, including a plethora of adolescent tales set in his hometown of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. He throws in a fair amount of story from his playing days at Alabama under Bear Bryant. He reserves most of his privacy for his post-playing days, although his often dotes on his daughters and explains the drunken incident with Suzy Kolber at a 2003 Jets game.

Overall, Namath seems like a pretty good guy, and his co-writers Sean Mortimer and Don Yaeger help guide the story into a very readable format, even if does (charmingly, for my money) meander all over the place. Seeing a man become a legend is fun, sure, but stripping away the legend to see the humanity underneath is always the most fascinating part to me.

Signed first editions of Joe Namath’s All the Way: My Life in Four Quarters are currently available at Lemuria’s online store.

Margaret McMullan’s ‘Where the Angels Lived’ is a mesmerizing account of a family’s fractured history

By Guest Author

On May 6, 2019

In Biography/Memoir, History, War

By Ellen Ann Fentress. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 5)

Her grandfather, a Catholic University history professor, said he was the last of his accomplished Viennese family. He wasn’t, Mississippi author Margaret McMullan found out in an on-the-ground hunt that took her to Hungary, Austria, and Israel to learn the truth.

McMullan’s grandfather Friedrich Engel, who fled Vienna in 1939, was actually part of a renown—and at the time quite alive— Hungarian Jewish family. The Engel de Janosi clan had presided over their corner of Hungary as an economic and civic power, thanks to flourishing wood and coal enterprises that employed thousands. Emperor Franz-Joseph I of the Austro-Hungarian empire granted nobility to patriarch Adolf Engel and his descendants in 1886 in “recognition of economic virtues.” The family lived in palaces.

And yet. As Hungary and the citizens of the Engels’ town of Pecs, Hungary were overrun by Nazi forces in 1944, a century of prominence, good works and assumed assimilation weren’t enough for the Engels. The scion of the Pecs branch of the family—McMullan’s grandfather’s first cousin Richard Engel—died at the Mauthausen concentration camp after being rounded up along with other town Jews in March 1944. The story of Richard’s descent from respected, wealthy World War I war hero and city civic leader to being marched off as townspeople watched is the spellbinding story that McMullan tells in Where the Angels Lived: One Family’s Story of Exile, Loss and Return.

McMullan has crafted a mesmerizing account not solely of the downfall of her prominent cousin Richard Engel, but also of the shocking transformation of a Hungarian town. Interestingly, residents are now more eager to demonize the past Soviet occupation than to explore any town Nazi complicity in 1944.

McMullan’s has done more than tell this story masterfully. To relay an account of Richard Engel, it was up to her to uncover it. “What is not discovered, what is not saved is lost and forgotten,” she writes. “History is so often written and manipulated by winners. History can’t be written by the dead.”

McMullan came to her project when, out of curiosity, she typed in her family’s Engel de Janosi name at the Yad Vashem Holocaust archive in Jerusalem, when visiting with a writers’ group. The name Richard Engel de Janosi of Pecs, Hungary appeared. The archivist handed McMullan a form called the Page of Testimony. “No one has ever asked about this man, your relative, Richard,” the archivist tells her. “You are responsible now. You must remember him in order to honor him.”

Where the Angels Lived tracks McMullan’s steps from learning of the extensive family history hidden by her grandfather up through her eventual excavation of Richard Engel’s life. Her search benefited from extraordinary persistence and also the serendipity of meeting key people with information to share.

Of course, the memoir’s inevitable look at the gradual nature of totalitarianism’s growth resonates today, as both the U.S. and Hungary experience right-wing resurgences.

To research Richard Engel, McMullan applied to teach at the University of Pecs, which was seeking a lecturer in American literature through the Fulbright academic exchange program. She moves there for a university term in 2010 with her husband Patrick and their eighth-grade son James.

McMullan persists and builds a sense of her cousin Richard through her research. Even the holes in his portrait make him more universal, she reflects. “Maybe I can see Richard more accurately than I can see any other human being,” she writes. Her quest deepened her sense of her own Engels legacy as well. “I feel them at my side as I walk. All this time, they were never very far away.”

Ellen Ann Fentress is a writer, filmmaker and teacher in Jackson.

Margaret McMullan will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “Memoir” panel at 1:30 p.m. at the Galloway Fellowship Center.

A life spared amid a reign of terror in Lovejoy Boteler’s ‘Crooked Snake’

By Guest Author

On March 13, 2019

In Biography/Memoir, Southern History

By Charlie Spillers. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 10)

“I don’t know how many people were kidnapped in Mississippi in 1968, but I was one of them,” writes author Lovejoy Boteler in the first sentence of the Crooked Snake: The Life and Crimes of Albert Lepard. Kidnapped at 18 by murderous escaped convicts, Boteler pens a fascinating account of the life and crimes of one of his kidnappers, Albert Lepard. In this remarkable book the author puts readers in the minds of convicts, lawmen, and dozens of victims. He takes us along on desperate escapes, intense manhunts, and lives scarred by crimes Lepard committed.

Sentenced to life in Parchman for the murder of an elderly woman, Albert Lepard escaped from prison six times in 14 years. During one of those escapes, Lepard kidnapped Lovejoy Boteler, stuck a gun in his ribs, and forced him to drive Lepard and another escaped convict from Grenada to Memphis. During the trip, young Botelor’s quick thinking averted an armed robbery and possibly another murder.

In Crooked Snake, Boteler pieces together the story of this cold-blooded murderer’s life using historical records and personal interviews with ex-convicts who ran with Lepard, family members who sheltered the fugitive during his escapes, the lawmen who hunted him, and the people he victimized.

When he conducted interviews for the book Boteler established rapport with fellow victims and elicited their chilling stories. They are bound by common horror and experiences with the same cold-blooded killer. John Nellum was ten years old when Lepard and two other escaped convicts broke into his home, tied up John, his 12-year old brother and their father, and held them for several hours. Lying face down with his hands bound, John was sure he was going to die. His heart felt like it would leap out of his chest as Lepard pressed the barrel of a rifle against the father’s head.

“I got ninety-nine years and one dark Sunday and it won’t make a damn bit of difference to me if I blow your head off right now,” Lepard declared as he placed his finger on the trigger.

Decades later, John still struggles with the memory of being tied up when he was ten. “What a crapshoot,” the author thought after interviewing John. “His psyche had been indelibly seared at the tender age of ten. At least I had been eighteen when I met Lepard.” Like 10-year old John Nellum, the then 18-year old Boteler faced pure evil and thought he was going to die during his intense encounter with Lepard.

Seventy-four year old Mary Young was not so fortunate. Lepard and Joe Edwards went to her home where they tied and blindfolded her. They pistol-whipped her and demanded she tell them where money was hidden in the house. When she refused to talk, Lepard went into a blind fury. He grabbed a claw hammer, swung it wildly and hit her in the head. They threw her on a bed, still tied and blindfolded. She was gagged but they could hear her moans. After finding money, they poured kerosene on Mary and the bed, and lit it. Lepard and Edwards walked out and coldly counted their loot while the house was consumed by flames and Mary Young burned to death.

The author was seared by his own experiences while crammed together with Lepard and another convict in the cab of a pickup truck during that long trip to Memphis. He was sure he was going to die. Lepard not only spared his life, but performed a small act of kindness when they let him go. Boteler always wondered why Lepard let him live. Through his research, the author finally uncovered the likely reason and reveals it on the last page of the book.

Joe Edwards was convicted with Lepard of the murder of Mary Young. Writing of Edwards, who became a preacher, Boteler says, “In old age, he is a man who struggles with a past he cannot change–one that holds him fast and won’t let go.” The same is true for the author who has spent a lifetime living with a terrifying experience and wondering why a murderer spared him. Readers can be thankful it inspired him to write this compelling book.

Charlie Spillers is the bestselling author of Confessions of An Undercover Agent: Adventures, Close Calls and the Toll of a Double Life and Whirlwind: A Frank Marsh Novel, an international thriller. Flashpoint, the sequel to Whirlwind will be released later this year.

Author Q & A with Ken Wells

By Guest Author

On March 10, 2019

In Biography/Memoir, Southern Cooking, Southern Culture

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 10).

Louisiana native and journalist Ken Wells fondly recalls what he and his five brothers called “the gumbo life” in rural Bayou Black–a lifestyle lived close to the land and that meant he would not see the inside of a supermarket until he was nearly a teenager.

That phrase–Gumbo Life: Tales from the Roux Bayou–is the title of his culinary memoir which not only details the history of gumbo, but recounts recent stories of its role in today’s culture and kitchens.

Wells left Bayou Black decades ago to travel around the world as a writer for the Wall Street Journal, and he has penned five novels of the Cajun bayous. Today, he lives in Chicago.

In Gumbo Life, you describe gumbo as “more than a delicious dish: it’s an attitude, a way of seeing the world.” What exactly is gumbo, and can you tell us briefly about its diverse history?

In Louisiana, gumbo’s predominant interpretation is a café-au-lait colored soup cooked with a roux–flour browned in butter, oil, or lard–and served over white rice. Typically, ingredients include chicken, sausage, shellfish, okra, and a combination of vegetables known as the Trinity: celery, bell pepper, and onion.

Food historians think gumbo is at least 250 years old, probably older. The first written mention dates to New Orleans in 1764, and shows a dish called “gumbo fillet” or what we now know as file’ gumbo, being cooked by West African slaves. The Africans arrived with word-of-mouth recipes for spicy okra-and-rice stews that are the likely template for the first gumbos. In fact, the Bantu dialect word for okra is “gombeau”–probably how gumbo got its name.

An 1804 account by a French journalist has gumbo being served at a party in the Cajun bayous of southeast Louisiana. That reference fueled the myth of gumbo as a Cajun invention. But the Canjuns have played a critical role in gumbo’s evolution, specifically the roux. The most compelling theory is that the Cajuns, using animal fats that were ubiquitous in colonial cooking–bear lard, in particular–deployed the roux with such skill and gusto that today it is rare to find gumbos cooked without a roux.

You state that when you and your five brothers were “living the gumbo life” in Louisiana in the late 1950s, gumbo was pretty much “a Cajun and Creole secret, a peasant dish.” Tell us about gumbo’s rise in popularity around the world.

When I left the bayous for graduate school in Missouri in 1975, nobody there had a clue what gumbo was. Two things–the breakout of Cajun/Zydeco music to a national and world stage and the post-’70s boom in Louisiana tourism–began to change that. The music fueled an interest in the culture that produced it and, hence, the food that nourished it. Gumbo is…the only truly indigenous regional cuisine in all of America; not just a dish but a style and a way of cooking.

Ken Wells

Gumbo has traveled in part because of what I call the Cajun Obligation. My momma not only taught me to cook gumbo, but taught me that if you cook gumbo, you are required to share the love.

As a journalist, I’ve traveled over much of the world. I’ve cooked gumbo for friends in London; Sydney, Australia; and Cape Town, South Africa. The reviews are always the same: “How can anything be this good? Can you show me how to cook it?” I came to realize I was only the vessel stirring the roux. It’s what I call the Gumbo Effect: the dish itself. Gumbo, if you just stick to the plan with love and attention, transforms itself into food magic.

Gumbo Life is a deeply personal family story about growing up in a rural Louisiana setting where food and family were paramount. Living in points around the world since then (and Chicago now), and looking back, is it almost hard to believe how different life was for you then, compared to now?

I feel blessed. When we moved to our little farm on the banks of Bayou Black in 1957, I felt the place was happily stranded in the previous century. My dad worked for a large sugarcane-farming operation that still kept a mule lot–not entirely trusting all the plowing to tractors. My brothers and I learned to swim in the bayou. We got our water from a cypress cistern. The sugar company owned thousands of acres of marshland, fields, and woodlands that we were free to roam, hunt, trap, and fish. My brothers and I were in the 4-H Club and raised chickens and pigs that we entered in the annual 4-H Club fair–and harvested for the pot.

Food was central. My mom cooked Cajun–not just gumbo but dishes such as sauce piquant and court-bouillon with ingredients like snapping turtle and redfish that we harvested ourselves. We ate well! We grew a huge garden. I don’t think I set foot in a supermarket until I was 12 or 13 years old. That’s because there weren’t any near-by.

You book is also a history of one of Louisiana’s greatest cultural and culinary offerings to the world, along with glimpses of current gumbo tales that emphasize its adaptability–not to mention that you’ve included a glossary of regional and culinary terms, a map of the Gumbo Belt and 10 recipes! What did it mean to you personally to write this “culinary memoir”?

I obviously love my gumbo and I felt a deep exploration of its roots and iterations was a good way to tell the wider story of our singular, food-centric culture. I say “our” even though I have not lived in the Gumbo Belt since 1975, my journalism career having compelled me to living in big cities far away. I think that living away has helped me see my roots in a way that I might not have seen them had I stayed.

I have two grown daughters who, now in their 30s, love Dad’s gumbo as much as I loved my mother’s. But their childhoods could not have been more different than mine. We moved among cosmopolitan cities, lived abroad, traveled widely. They will never lead the gumbo life as I lived it and so in a way my book was written for them–to remind them of their connections to a place where our roots run so deep.

Ken Wells will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, March 13, at 5:00 to sign copies of and discuss Gumbo Life. Lemuria has chosen Gumbo Life as its March 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

For the Adventurer: ‘To Shake the Sleeping Self’ by Jedidiah Jenkins

By Former Lemurians

On December 3, 2018

In Adventure, Biography/Memoir

by Abbie Walker

Looking for the perfect book to give the thrill-seeking traveler in your life? Look no further than To Shake the Sleeping Self by Jedidiah Jenkins.

Like most millennials making connections in 2018, I found Jedidiah Jenkins through social media. As the editor of Wilderness magazine, Jedidiah filled his Instagram with lots of traveling and goofing around with his lovable squad. In fact, it was this account through which he first shared one of the biggest adventures of his life, gaining him coverage by National Geographic and eventually a book deal.

After a series of successful jobs but feeling like his life was heading in an unwanted direction, Jedidiah decided to change course and do something radical for his thirtieth birthday. In the 1970s, his parents spent five years walking across America. Jedidiah, feeling called to his own expedition, settled on biking from Oregon to Patagonia–an epic 14,000-mile journey that would take him around a year and a half to complete.

Divided into the geographical sections of his trip, To Shake the Sleeping Self follows Jedidiah and his friend Weston as they ride right out of their comfort zones and into the unknown.

From tasting exotic cuisine and bathing in waterfalls, to the spiritual experience of wild mushrooms and hiking Machu Picchu, Jedidiah learns more about himself and the world around him. However, life on the road is anything but easy.

Besides the physical trials of biking across two continents (the exhaustion, the uncertainty of where to sleep each night, the dangerous highways), Jedidiah also faces a decent amount of inner conflict on his journey. The pages are filled with thoughts about his faith, his sexuality, and what it means to really embrace life.

The story of the trip itself was fascinating and made me want to go on my own adventure, but I also appreciated Jedidiah’s honesty and his ability to effectively communicate his struggles. The raw conversations he has with Weston, the strangers he meets on his trip, and himself open up bigger conversations about stereotypes, friendship, and what connects humans all over the world.

To Shake the Sleeping Self is a great read for anyone who enjoys a good adventure memoir. Fans of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild will appreciate Jedidiah’s journey and the heart behind his writing.

Author Q & A with Kiese Laymon

By Guest Author

On December 2, 2018

In Biography/Memoir

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (December 2)

Growing up in Jackson, Kiese Laymon learned early on that he would have to learn how to fight many battles, as he experienced the weight of emotional pain, violence, racism, addictions, confusion–and a lifetime struggle with the bathroom scales.

His new book, Heavy: An American Memoir (Scribner) is, literally, a long letter written directly to his mother, as he works through the complexity of his disordered childhood and its continued effects on his life today. The result is a deeply personal, and open, cry for answers as to why theirs was such a difficult relationship even as she unfailingly reassured him of her love.

A single mother who has little money but big expectations for her son, she was determined for her son, she was determined Laymon would get a good education and, in the process, develop a toughness she believed would prepare him for dealing with the curves she was certain white society would throw at him.

The book is a 2018 Kirkus Award Finalist and is shortlisted for the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction.

Kiese Laymon

Other books Laymon has authored include the novel Long Division and a collection of essays titled How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. His essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Esquire, McSweeney’s, PEN Journal, Oxford American, Ebony, Travel and Leisure, the Best American series, Paris Review, and many other publications. Another novel, And So On, is due out in 2019.

Laymon is now the Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. He previously served as an associate professor of English and Africana studies at Vassar College in New York.

Heavy: An American Memoir is a commanding title for a record of one’s life at your age. Describe how the title explains and describes your life, and why you wanted to share your personal story with the world.

The book is really about words and “heavy” is one of the most elastic words we have. It means so much. Sometimes it means intellectual depth. Sometimes it means a lot of weight.

You had a difficult childhood, growing up with a driven, abusive mother who tangled up love with frequent mistreatment–and yet, she was the one who introduced you to books and who demanded a very strict writing discipline from you. Tell me about how writing this book has been a way to sort through the confusion of those years and beyond.

The book was exactly a means of working through things I never worked through. To really remember, I needed to write to my mother since she was my first teacher and the first person to read the sentences I wrote as a child.

You write that, for generations, your family has kept secrets about abusiveness, addictions, issues with weight, and other struggles. Has your relationship with your mother improved over the years?

My mother and I are talking about things we avoided for decades. Every day is work, but we are up for it.

The entire book is written in a technique that directly addresses your mother personally, from start to finish. Why did you decide to frame the book using this unique writing style?

Again, I wanted to write a memoir that I’d never seen. I’d seen people address their children, but I’d never read an entire memoir written to one’s mother. I had to write this book to my mother if I was going to do the memoir justice.

Explain why you skipped your own high school graduation.

I wasn’t a fan of Gov. Kirk Fordice, and he was scheduled to be our graduation speaker. So, I told my friends I was skipping.

That was part of it. The other part was that I was really embarrassed for graduating close to the bottom of my class.

What is your message in this book to the white community, and is it only directed at Mississippians?

I think black Mississippians have spent lifetimes sending messages to the white community. I’m not sure I have anything more impactful to say to white folks than Faulkner, Welty, Wright, Hamer, Morrison, or Baldwin already said.

I wish they’d listen to the lessons writers and freedom fighters have been trying to send them for generations. I really wish they would listen.

You state in your book that if you ever had a child, you would want to raise him or her in Mississippi. After everything you’ve lived through here, why would you say that?

I came back to Mississippi, the culturally richest place in the world, and I needed to be closer to a lot of the people and spirits that ironically gave me a chance to leave.

Is there a new writing project in the works for you at this time, and, if so, can you share any information about it here?

I’m working on a new novel called And So On. I’m so happy to be back in Mississippi working with young writers who will become the future of American literature.

Kiese Laymon will be at Lemuria on Saturday, December 8, at 12:00 p.m. to sign copies of Heavy. Signed copies are available at our online store.

He Dreamed a Dream: ‘Congratulations, Who Are You Again?’ by Harrison Scott Key

By Former Lemurians

On November 8, 2018

In Biography/Memoir, Humor

by Andrew Hedglin

The first book that I fell in love with after I started working at Lemuria was Harrison Scott Key’s The World’s Largest Man, a memoir Key had written about his father. In addition to it simply being hilarious, it helped me contextualize the travails I’ve encountered when trying to write about my own family.

Key has returned with a metatextual sequel called Congratulations, Who Are You Again?, large parts of which detail the process of writing the first book. When Kelly, our store’s manager, first explained this concept to me, I was a little worried. Not because I thought the book wouldn’t be good (which it is, very good). But because I was worried that having to read another book first, in order to enjoy this one, seemed like a high barrier for entry. As in, the audience would naturally be a smaller piece of the initial audience.

But that’s not really true. What Key points out, early and often, is that this is not a book about his previous book. It’s about dreams.

The reason people could relate to his father-memoir is not that they knew Key’s own father personally, but that most people have had a father or father figure in their life. A story can hold up a mirror to our own experience.

Now, I’m a bookseller, and I love all the inside-baseball stuff here about how a book is made: the talk about the early morning coffee house writing, the publisher bids, the advance, the author tour, the Terry Gross king-making. I will personally treasure and adore for years to come a particularly exquisite and profane paragraph about the bookstore’s view of author events. Book people and wannabe writers will find lots here to enjoy.

But dreams come in all shapes and sizes. They have different rewards and consequences. What’s interesting here is how Key’s original dream was just to make people laugh, and it took him a while to figure out that writing a book was the method he would use to achieve that. When he fist made decisions to make this goal come true, he was thrust into roles such as acting, academia, and even fund-raising.

On the other side of having written his book, he has to deal with success. Which suddenly seems important, but was not part of the original plan to begin with. Where Key ends up, as with his last book, is surrounded by his wife and daughters (hilariously given the nicknames Stargoat, Beetle, and Effbomb here for their protection). I don’t think this is designed, but it’s not a coincidence, either. I imagine that for most of us, our loved ones have a way of ending up at into the center of our dreams.

So, if you have any kind of dream, I think this book is worth reading. Even if you’re not familiar with Key’s own dream, he’s got an amusing way of explaining it and casting that reflection back onto us, the readers.

Harrison Scott Key will be at Lemuria on Friday, November 9, at 5:00 to sign and read from Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

Author Q & A with Erin and Ben Napier

By Guest Author

On October 21, 2018

In Biography/Memoir, Celebrity, Decorating, Southern Culture

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (October 21)

Erin and Ben Napier’s passion for home renovation is obvious on every episode of their HGTV show Home Town, where they take on dilapidated, vintage houses in every stage of disrepair and create cozy homes in their own home town of Laurel.

How the couple has gotten to this point is the result of two lifetimes of struggles and triumphs as documented in their memoir, Make Something Good Today. Through 18 inspiring chapters, husband and wife take turns sharing their stories–complete with hopes and fears–but always filled with encouragement. The book also includes dozens of family photos and hand-painted sketches by Erin.

College sweethearts since their years as students at Jones Junior College and then at Ole Miss, Erin is a designer and entrepreneur who established her own international stationary company; and Ben is a mater woodworker and businessman who founded Scotsman Co., and is a co-owner of Laurel Mercantile Co. in Laurel. Together, they’re known nationally for their home restorations in Laurel. The couple welcomed their first child, affectionately known as “Baby Helen,” in January.

Erin, you grew up in Laurel; and Ben, as a Methodist minister’s son, you moved around to several different communities during childhood. After your years together in college and earning your degrees at Ole Miss, what brought you back to Laurel after you got married?

Erin and Ben Napier

Erin: I had roots there, my family, and Ben had been part of that family pretty much since the week we met so it felt like for him, too, even though his family is scattered across the state. It felt right to build a life we wanted in the place where we had so much to come back to.

Ben: Yeah, I’ve always said I fell in love with Erin and fell in love with Laurel at the same time. They seemed one in the same to me. And we both were offered jobs there, so it felt like a stable, adult decision.

How did you come to see the potential for a much brighter future for this small town?

Erin: I saw that our group of friends who all had come back home to Laurel after college–the Framily, we call it–had very specific gifts and talents that worked so nicely together. Ben and I were like the mascot and the art department, and I now see the way we shared our town on social media and my blog a form of producing. We were being creative directors of the image of our town, and I think that’s the job of any creative–to tell the world at large what is cool. To give people permission to believe in something that may have been considered lame or boring before.

Ben: And when we all stay in our own lanes, magic happens. If we let the finance people find the grants and financial support, and we let the folks with connections build the volunteer base, and we let the churches create family-centered events, and let the musicians plan the music festivals, it all comes together, and a town comes back to life. It takes all of us doing what we do best in one concerted effort.

Erin, tell me about the blog you started, and how it came to bring about such a turning point in your lives.

Erin: When I left my day job and started my own company, I was paralyzed with fear and worried I would fail. writing each day was a way to focus on the blessings, on the good in the aftermath of the difficult. It became so important to me, I began to cling to the good and it shifted the way I thought about everything. I would make something good happen if it looked like I would have little to say at the end of the day. It was an exercise in editing out the messiness of life and focusing instead on gratitude. For eight years, 2010-2017, I did not miss a single day.

Tell me about obstacles you’ve had to navigate as you worked so hard to realize your dreams.

Ben: There’s always uncertainty when changing careers, which we’ve been through several times, and there is always going to be the challenge of changing hearts and minds of those who have always lived here and decided to obstinately refuse to believe that Laurel can improve and be a special place again.

And, there’s a handful of soreheads who feel Erin and I get too much credit for all this, and they are probably right. We’re just having fun and hoping to inspire folks around us as we go. It’s like a game, to see how far we can take this thing. This movement, of sorts.

How has your faith played a role in bringing you to where you are now, and sustaining you through hard times?

Ben: Faith has been part of my life for as long as I have been alive, and it’s the guiding hand in every decision we make together as a family.

Erin: When I wonder why in the world this is happening to us of all people in the world, I know that it’s God authoring the story, and that gives me comfort in it. To know that we’re being used for something he has ordained, for however brief or long-term this whole thing may be, makes me feel like we can do this. Otherwise, i would feel too small and too unimportant to have this kind of spotlight.

In your wildest dreams, I doubt either of you planned to be national TV stars, but you both seem to embrace it naturally! How has that changed you? What has it taught you?

Erin: Ben was made to be the center of attention. He’s very comfortable with it. Not in a showy way, just in a way that he can shoulder attention and make it look effortless. I’m introverted, so having this very public career is a little uncomfortable for me. But as long as I only think about our crew that we work with every day, whom we’re so close to, it feels like we’re just messing around, making a little short film for local viewing only. I can’t think about what it really is too much. It’s like looking at the sun, and it’s too much!

It’s taught me to guard things in our life, to keep them sacred and close, like the friends we had before all this happened, and Helen. I want to keep her protected and unaware of the public-ness of our job as much as we can.

You both have entrepreneurial spirits. Tell me about the businesses you’ve built individually and together.

Ben: Erin began her letterpress wedding stationary company in 2008, and a few years later we started an online shop called ErinAndBen.co of antiques, my furniture, and American-made goods to give us a boost during the holiday season when wedding traffic would die down.

When the show started, we realized we couldn’t do them by ourselves anymore, and our four best friends–Jim, Mallorie, Josh, and Emily–came on as partners, and ErinAndBen.co became Laurel Mercantile Co., and my hobby woodworking outfit, Scotsman Co., became the flagship brand of LMCo.

Josh bought a building downtown and renovated it to become our first brick and mortar shop for the Mercantile; and this year, another building, which became the Scotsman General Store and Woodshop.

We only sell American-made goods because if we’re going to be serious about revitalizing small-town America, then we have to be serious about making things in America to keep our hometowns strong. There are challenges to sourcing and manufacturing everything in the USA, but we believe it’s worth it.

There’s pride in the things we make. The true cost of a bargain is in the loss of jobs and thriving communities in small town America. In January, our collaboration with Vaughan-Bassett will be in stores everywhere, a line of furniture made by 600 American craftspeople in Virginia, made from Appalachian hardwoods.

You both seem to possess a wisdom beyond your years, and you’ve even written your story as a memoir. What is your biggest message of this book, and what do you think the future holds for you and for the city of Laurel?

Erin: It’s a love story, and it’s a bout blooming where you’re planted. It’s about how we s tarted looking at what was right were we were standing instead of what was wrong. Southerners, I think, are especially good at taking what we have, however modest it might be, and making something delicious or beautiful from it. There is no secret to how it’s done. It’s just about changing our way of seeing.

I don’t know what the future holds for Laurel, but I hope it doesn’t rely too much on a TV show. I hope the seeds we’ve been planting in this town for the last 10 years will bear fruit for generations to come. I hope the pride we see in this town takes root and holds steady, for good.

Erin and Ben Napier will be at Lemuria on Saturday, October 27, at 2:00 p.m. to sign Make Something Good Today, and will read from it starting at 4:00 p.m.

Open a Book to the Open Road: ‘The Long Haul’ by Finn Murphy

By Former Lemurians

On July 12, 2018

In Biography/Memoir, Nonfiction

by Andrew Hedglin

I can already tell one of my deep regrets during my time here at Lemuria will be that I was not here when Finn Murphy came last October to promote his trucker memoir, The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tale of Life of the Road. He brought a rig with a custom decorative wrap on the trailer. It looked awesome. Alas, I was visiting my brother in Nashville at the time.

While I was preparing to take a road trip this summer and visit my other brother in Indianapolis, I unboxed Norton’s new releases only to find The Long Haul had just come out in paperback this June. I bought a copy to read on the road.

Murphy is not interesting in further mythologizing the trucker as seen in popular culture–your Smokey and the Bandit, your “Convoy.” He acknowledges that many other truckers are influenced by it, but he paints himself as both in and outside what brotherhood does exist.

It turns out that within trucking, Murphy explains, as with any other profession, there exists a myriad of castes and specialties to which a trucker can ascribe. While freight haulers dominate the popular imagination, Murphy establishes himself as a long-distance mover–and these days, one usually contracted to help VIP clients for big bucks.

This gives Murphy an unexpected vantage point: he certainly illuminates his world on the highway; I could see into the cabs of trucks from the Greyhound bus I was riding. Cummins, a diesel engine manufacturer whose existence I had spent decades being oblivious of, had a headquarters in Indianapolis that I noticed immediately upon arrival.

But here’s the funny thing: Murphy not only shows us his world, but shows us our world in a mirror. He drives through countless American towns decimated by sprawl and globalization, enters our homes for moving assignments, weary from materialism and impermanence. He ruminates on the economy and race. What makes this trucking tale so fascinating ultimately is its access to so many entrances and intersections into our larger culture.

This is not to say Murphy has written a philosophy book. It is first and foremost a story. Occasionally (literally) unbelievable, often uproarious (the piano story had me cackling), and filled with distinct and intriguing personas and characters, The Long Haul is the perfect book to read this summer when you’ve decided you need to get away for a while.

Viv Albertine’s ‘To Throw Away Unopened’ should not be put away, unread

By Jack

On June 21, 2018

In Biography/Memoir, Music

Many musicians who decide to become authors after their long and boisterous music careers usually sell books based on their reputations as musicians alone. As a reader and an avid music listener, I am drawn to the memoirs of musicians that I listen to the most or that I have a preconceived notion of. This is usually because I am interested in learning about these musician’s lives outside of how they portray themselves through the music they make. However, my introduction to former musician Viv Albertine was not through her music with her legendary punk band The Slits, but rather was the result of reading her fantastic new memoir To Throw Away Unopened.

I had read about Albertine as a feminist influence to many of my favorite female-led, Pacific Northwest bands like Bikini Kill, Sleater Kinney, and Dear Nora, but I really didn’t know who she was. But when I happened upon her new memoir, I decided to give it a try. After that, there was no turning back.

The former punk-rocker holds nothing back in this memoir built around her life after divorce, surviving cancer, and living the day to day life as a musician. I was immediately drawn to her painfully dry and honest writing style as she delineated the realities of failed relationships, dating as an older woman, surviving cancer, and having trouble raising a daughter properly after having been brought up in an objectively dysfunctional family herself. Albertine progresses through these shortcomings and lessons learned with a strikingly raw and realistic voice that is hard to deny. Eventually, the story centers around the death of her beloved mother Kath, who raised both Albertine and her sister Pascale after the departure of their foul-playing father Lucien.

Albertine’s attempt to overcome the death of her mother revolves around her trying to understand the childhood she experienced and the rocky split between her parents in the 1960s. Her search for those answers gets interesting when she finds the diaries of both of her parents, one found in a bag marked “To Throw Away Unopened.” Instead of doing so, Albertine wields these journals as weapons in her struggle to understand the truth of her past. With these descriptive and sometimes clashing new accounts of her parents’ failing marriage and family life, Albertine begins to piece together a more accurate version of the truth she experienced as a child, and many of her questions begin to be answered.

What unfolds after the story of her youth begins to unravel is a compelling and quick read about the realities of life that people often choose to ignore. Albertine puts those emotional parts of her life on display, and the result is an extremely relatable and honest memoir written for those who wouldn’t throw the bag away unopened. If you fit yourself into that category, I highly suggest picking up a copy of this beautifully compelling memoir.

Category: Biography/Memoir (Page 2 of 9)

Print the Legend: ‘All the Way’ by Joe Namath

Margaret McMullan’s ‘Where the Angels Lived’ is a mesmerizing account of a family’s fractured history

A life spared amid a reign of terror in Lovejoy Boteler’s ‘Crooked Snake’

Author Q & A with Ken Wells

For the Adventurer: ‘To Shake the Sleeping Self’ by Jedidiah Jenkins

Author Q & A with Kiese Laymon

He Dreamed a Dream: ‘Congratulations, Who Are You Again?’ by Harrison Scott Key

Author Q & A with Erin and Ben Napier

Open a Book to the Open Road: ‘The Long Haul’ by Finn Murphy

Viv Albertine’s ‘To Throw Away Unopened’ should not be put away, unread

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