Growing Up in Mississippi is a collection of essays written by a wide range of notable Mississippians–from news anchor Maggie Wade, writers Ellen Douglas and Richard Ford, our former Governor William Winter, and many more distinguished educators, entrepreneurs, and artists. Accompanied with a photograph from their Mississippi childhood, these essays attempt to capture the parents, teachers, communities, history and landscape that shaped their young minds as they rose into adulthood.
In the foreword, Richard Ford writes of the difficulty in constructing a clear picture of what actually influenced an individual as we all “invent” influences to serve our own needs and desires: “How does influence work, when you get down to it? I’m not sure. But it rarely works as mechanistically as, say, a hammer ‘influencing’ a nail to penetrate a prime piece of pine planking. I sometimes think that Mississippi influenced me by so insisting that Mississippi was an influence that I ran away across many state lines just to prove that the accident of birth was not as powerful as my own private acts of choosing” (xii).
With this challenge of defining influence, the twenty-nine contributors earnestly set down their stories. While it has already been two years since the first publication of Growing Up in Mississippi, editors Judy H. Tucker and Charline R. McCord have given Mississippians a timeless collection of stories illustrating the wide range of talent and ability nurtured by our Mississippi landscapes.
Tucker and McCord’s latest collection is Christmas Memories from Mississippi. Christmas Stories from Mississippi is another collection which also makes a great gift.
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