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.

A teacher in Austria, I had finally given myself permission to indulge in English language reading when I ran across a paperback of The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart by Alice Walker in a Swiss bookstore.  It was the title that convinced me to the purchase the book as I had never read Alice Walker before.

The opening stories are a fictionalized reflection of Alice’s marriage to civil rights lawyer Mel Leventhal. Even though the reflections are weighted with the heaviness of a broken heart, I admired this couple in Jackson, Mississippi, Alice teaching and writing, birthing and raising their only baby girl, Mel working late nights all across Mississippi to prosecute civil rights violations. Alice also worked for the Legal Defense Fund, documenting cases of blacks who had been evicted from their homes because they had tried to register to vote.

When I first read Alice Walker’s work in Austria, I never ever would have imagined that I would find myself living in Jackson, Mississippi–since at that time I had no connections in Jackson. It was some time after I moved here that I picked The Way Forward off the bookshelf and was amazed that this book and I were here.

Since then I have read Alice Walker’s biography and was saddened to read the details of how Alice was unhappy and often felt her creativity to be stifled in Jackson. Obviously, she moved on as need be and has long felt Mississippi’s imprint.