Article by Jana Hoops originally published in the Clarion-Ledger on Saturday, October 4 2014.

New York Times best-selling author S.C. Gwynne will mark the release of his highly acclaimed “Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson” with a stop at Lemuria Books at 5 p.m. Tuesday.

S.C. Gwynne (Photo: Special to The Clarion-Ledger )

This is Gwynn’s second venture with Scribner and his first release since the extraordinary reception of his “Empire of the Summer Moon” in 2010. It was the success of “Empire,” which earned him a spot as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, that enabled Gwynne to make that fortunate transition to full-time book writer.

He has spent most of his career as a journalist, working as a magazine writer and editor for both Time and Texas Monthly; and as a reporter for two daily newspapers. He is also the author of “Selling Money” and “Outlaw Bank.”

Gwynne holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Princeton University and a master’s degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and daughter.

“Rebel Yell” is a sweeping 672-page biographical narrative of the personal and military life of an enigmatic, brilliant Civil War general, and a detailed account of the conflicts Stonewall Jackson commanded for the Confederacy. You have included your extensive research efforts for this book in 60 pages of notes, bibliography and photo credits. How long did it take you to write this book?

About four years.

What inspired you to take on a project of this magnitude?

I have been fascinated by the Civil War for a long time and finally just decided to take a shot at it. What interested me most about Jackson was the idea of personal transformation — how an obscure, eccentric physics professor could, in 14 months, become the most famous military man in the world.

Tell me about the title of the book.

Thomas J. Jackson got his nickname “Stonewall” for his remarkable performance at the Battle of First Manassas, or First Bull Run, in 1861. After making a spectacular defensive stand against Union assaults, he ordered his men to charge, and “Yell like the Furies.” What the men of his five Virginia regiments then did was what later became known as the “Rebel Yell.” Since Jackson and his men invented it, I thought it would be a good idea for a title.

Who should read this book?

I have spent my career writing for general audiences, and I have written “Rebel Yell” the same way. I wanted it to be accessible to as many people as possible. I would assume my readers would have at least some interest in and familiarity with the Civil War, but they don’t have to be buffs or fanatics. I would hope that buffs would like it, too.

As a long-time journalist writing a biographical work about a historical figure, was it hard to keep your objectivity about your main character when you had “spent” so much time with him?

You bring up a good point, and as a reporter you understand the phenomenon. Over the years Jackson books tend to fall into two categories: either the writer loves him unconditionally and believes he can do no wrong or, more recently, the writer’s goal is to tear the Jackson myth down, expose his flaws.

My own feeling is that Jackson was a great and tragic American hero. He was a great man. I fully embrace his flaws. They are part of him and part of his greatness. I think that in many ways his idiosyncrasies are the most interesting things about him. You may have seen the movie “Patton.” What makes General George Patton interesting are his flaws — his vanity and ambition. And, what makes General Douglas MacArthur interesting — to me, anyway — are his flaws as much as his amazing talents. They are all American heroes.

Your accounts of Jackson’s personality show a dichotomous figure who was at once a devout Christian and a violent crusader for the cause of the South. Your book also describes him as a serious and eccentric leader, yet devoted to his family and his soldiers. In two years’ time, he rose from an obscure school teacher to a military leader of legendary proportions. Describe the figure you discovered through your vast research.

Jackson is a phenomenally complex character. I found him to be something of a dual personality. In public he was a stiff, odd, silent man with all sorts of eccentricities. In private with his two wives (he remarried after the death of his first wife) and sister-in-law he was joyous, sometimes boisterous, and loving. He loved Shakespeare and Gothic architecture, gloried in sunsets, was a first-rate gardener, and taught himself to be completely fluent in Spanish. This side of him was unknown to the public.

Why is Stonewall Jackson important in American history?

He was one of the most important factors in the first two years of the Civil War. His amazing partnership with Robert E. Lee changed the course of that war and very likely extended it. Without their victory at Second Manassas, Richmond might have fallen.

Jackson represented what the South considered to be the best of itself. He came along just when hopes were at their lowest. What the Confederacy had desperately needed, in a war that it was obviously losing at that point, was a myth of invincibility, proof that their notions of the brave, chivalrous, embattled Southern character were not just romantic dreams, proof that with inferior resources they might still win the war. Jackson gave them all that.

“Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson”By S.C. Gwynne

Scribner, Hardback, 672 pages, $35.

S.C. Gwynne will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, October 7 at 5:00. 

Originally published in the Clarion-Ledger in September 2014

Greg Miller turns his discerning eye outward in his newest collection of poems, The Sea Sleeps, translating experience into finely wrought verse. A scholar of the Welsh metaphysical poet and Anglican priest, George Herbert, Miller draws from Herbert’s use of form to contain expansive ideas.

Selected from several previously published collections, as well as a large selection of new poems, The Sea Sleeps reveals Miller’s range over nearly a decade of published work. Undeterred by experimentation, Miller’s poems are of a refreshed formalism. “Forgiveness” sprawls across the page in shattered lines, while other poems fall into a regimental meter.

To Miller, poetics is a system of calculating and finding value, of showing the relationships between things, both internal in the poem itself, but also in the external world. Where structure is stable, the subject matter is fluid.

The strength of Miller’s work is in the humanness of the narrator. Like the Psalmist, he struggles with his faith, with the brokenness of the world. Throughout the collection, the speaker moves from a France steeped in its past, to war-torn South Sudan, to his window overlooking “one tree in white bloom.” No matter the locale, Miller’s careful selection of detail is transporting.

Greg Miller’s cultural contributions extend beyond his poetry. The Janice B. Trimble Professor of English at Millsaps College, he was featured in a 2011 article in Oxford American, highlighting his work with Sudanese refuges. Poems addressing Miller’s work with these refugees are included in his collection. Also included are several translations.

Miller makes the familiar unfamiliar. In “Capital Towers,” he turns his attention to Jackson:

the Governor’s mansion, Statehouse,

the decaying, grand

King Edward, and the Electric Building—

the last gutted like a fish,

its art deco scales intact and buffed

lustrous against brown marble.

My eye, intent ever

on artifice, wanders. I am a crow

with an eye for shiny things

The Sea Sleeps is a wonderful poetic grab bag, showcasing the breadth of Miller’s experience and insight.

Adie Smith is a poet and bookseller at Lemuria Bookstore. The 2014 winner of the Tennessee Williams Festival’s Poetry Contest, she is a regular contributor to Relief Journal’s blog. Her poetry has appeared in Ruminate Magazine and Rock and Sling, among others.

It was hot. Lord it was hot. It felt like it was never wintertime when we traveled to see our relatives in the Delta. I would press my forehead against the glass of the car windows and watch the fields rush past like pages turning in a book and then get carsick. Every time, I would pull my head away from the window with a churning belly and a headache from the setting sun and I would wish, oh I would wish hard, that the Delta wasn’t so terribly and inexcusably boring.

My mother, born and raised in Greenville, obviously disagreed with me. She would point out flocks of nesting blackbirds that would rise as one out of a field of cotton into a swirling mass hovering just above the snowy tops of the plants. Once, she stopped the car and let us sneak up on a flock of geese in a field so that we could startle them and listen to them rustle up into the sky. Looking back, those were some of the most beautiful drives I’ve ever been on.

Because of our (often) vocal reluctance to enjoy the sights of the Delta and our inability to quit messing with each other in the car, we would pass a lot of the time listening to audio books. I will never forget the first time my mother popped in the cassette tape of Eudora Welty reading “Why I live at the P.O.”, all of us sticky from gas station Sprites and Skittles, pausing our fighting to listen to the old voice draaaaaawing out the vowels.

“Papa-Daddy,” she says. He was trying to cut up his meat. “Papa-Daddy!” I was taken completely by surprise. Papa-Daddy is about a million years old and’s got this long-long beard. “Papa-Daddy, Sister says she fails to understand why you don’t cut off your beard.”

So Papa-Daddy l-a-y-s down his knife and fork! He’s real rich. Mama says he is, he says he isn’t. So he says, “Have I heard correctly? You don’t understand why I don’t cut off my beard?”

“Why,” I says, “Papa-Daddy, of course I understand, I did not say any such of a thing, the idea!”

He says, “Hussy!”

I says, “Papa-Daddy, you know I wouldn’t any more want you to cut off your beard than the man in the moon. It was the farthest thing from my mind! Stella-Rondo sat there and made that up while she was eating breast of chicken.”

But he says, “So the postmistress fails to understand why I don’t cut off my beard. Which job I got you through my influence with the government. ‘Birds nest’- is that what you call it?”

Not that it isn’t the next to smallest P.O. in the entire state of Mississippi.

I says, “Oh, Papa-Daddy,” I says, “I didn’t say any such of a thing, I never dreamed it was a bird’s nest, I have always been grateful though this is the next to smallest P.O. in the state of Mississippi, and I do not enjoy being referred to as a hussy by my own grandfather.”

But Stella-Rondo says, “Yes, you did say it too. Anybody in the world could of heard you, that had ears.”

“Stop right there,” says Mama, looking at me.

So I pulled my napkin straight back through the napkin ring and left the table.

So sassy. Oh man, she was the sassiest! We learned quickly that our parents thought it was extra funny when Papa-Daddy said, “Hussy!” so we took to that word pretty quickly, for better or worse. Eudora was a hit.

That was the first time I ever remember hearing the name Eudora Welty, and I immediately felt at home with her. She talked the same way my Grand-daddy talked, slow and looping, like did they care if you were in a hurry to get somewhere? Well, too bad. She was one of our people, not particularly unique for having so many stories to tell; but utterly like no one else in her ability to put those stories to paper.

I never got to meet her, which is a pity as it seems that Grand-daddy knew practically everyone in the state of Mississippi and I feel that he should have introduced us. She would have gotten quite a kick out of him and me, us prank calling each other and poking fun at everyone around us. For years and years he would call me on the phone every single day and would make me pick up my violin and play him “Ashokan Farewell” from Ken Burns’s Civil War documentary. I really learned to hate that song, and years later, I would do almost anything for a chance to play it again for him, at least once more.

See, the thing about Eudora Welty is that you can’t help but think about your people when you listen to her speak or read her stories. This blog was supposed to be about her, and in the end it was about my mother and her father. I cannot separate my connection to her writing from my connection to my Mississippi roots.

I think she would have liked that, and I think she would be proud that I grew up and went to work in her favorite bookstore.

Eudora Welty’s bedroom and writing area

Jackson: photographs by Ken Murphy is available now for purchase. To order a copy, call Lemuria Books at 601.366.7619 or visit us online at lemuriabooks.com. 

“Painted Horses is a wonderful novel full of horses, archaeology, the new West, and two fascinating women. Malcolm Brooks should be lauded for this amazing debut. Very fine.”             -Jim Harrison

“Reminiscent of the fiery, lyrical, and animated spirit of Cormac McCarthy’s Border trilogy and the wisdom and elegance of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, Painted Horses is its own work, a big, old-fashioned, and important novel.” -Rick Bass

Join us tonight at 5:00 for the signing and reading for Malcolm Brooks’s debut novel Painted Horses.

At 7:00 am on the opening morning of this year’s New Orleans Jazz Fest, I was awakened by phone calls from Jeff Good of Broad Street, and Austen of Lemuria informing me that the Lemuria Book Hand had crashed down and was destroyed. They sent pictures as proof, and I worked my mind clear, defrosting my late night take of beverage and great music from Bombino at the House of Blues. My musical high crashed down to earth with this news.

I called Bob Reed, our sign guru, and he told me not to worry, he would take care of it and deal with our insurance company. Replacement was immediately underway, and now Bob has reinstated our sculpture and Lemuria’s brand symbol is back.

In 1980, to celebrate 5 years in business, Lemuria engaged local artist Keith Parker to do a wood engraving. The edition would be 100 copies, signed and numbered. Our Art Deco inspired image was of a Lemuria mermaid rising out of Lemuria’s ruins holding a book high.

In 1981, Lemuria finally got out of debt and made a little money. To celebrate, we issued graphic tshirts, also designed by Keith,  of a hand holding a book exploding out of the water to surface. We had gotten our bookstore above water! All of this was visioned within the eyeball of the Wisdom Eye. This image was influenced by the tail of a whale on the surface as it is diving, and we considered the image as a homage to the great 1930 edition of Moby Dick, illustrated by Rockwell Kent.

In 1998 when Lemuria designed our present storefront, we created our entrance with the Book Hand. Banner Hall was near financial ruin when new ownership took over. Once again, our book hand signaled a re-birthing of Lemuria’s stability.

In the last few years, real books have been challenged by alternative reading devices. Lemuria thus launched a “Read Real Books” campaign, grounded by our Book Hand logo. Coupled with the recession and severe competition, the real book was challenged. Now, real book reading has stabilized in a posture of strength and rebirth once again. Justin Schultz of Flying Chair, also designed a more contemporary book hand with a modern Wisdom Eye to celebrate real book stabilization.

Our Book Hand sculpture has now been replaced and situated. Stability once again for Lemuria, has been symbolized.

Lemuria has endured the recession’s hard times. We have published our book proudly about our local community, and good ole Bob has brought our Book Hand back to us, and he has promised our new sculpture will last the lifetime of Lemuria.

By the way, our previous Book Hand collapsed because of inferior glue which eroded over the years causing our beloved sculpture to weaken. Fortunately, at 5:00 am this past April when it fell, no one was in Banner Hall or was hurt.