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In Defense of Graphic Novels

On June 25, 2015

In Culture, Fiction, Graphic Novels, Staff Blog

Now, read this.

To most of us, college is a time to broaden horizons, mentally stretch, and to find out where to draw our lines. For Tara Shultz, the line was immovable from the beginning with no hope of being re-drawn. The problem of her protest is twofold: trying to force the books out of curriculum for all students instead of personally removing herself from the class is ultimately a selfish and bullying tactic; and by claiming that she was “expecting batman and robin, not pornography” is patronizing and belittles an entire genre of literature (and its authors) that can have the emotional depth and breadth of the written novel.
We at Lemuria have been striving to carve room in the store to build up our stock of graphic novels that we believe are fulfilling, fun, and thought-provoking. We encourage all of our readers, young and old, to explore this medium of literature and remain open-minded as they read. Ultimately, a graphic novel on any subject can be challenging because instead of being the commander of your imagination and creating your own version of the world being described to you, an illustrator takes that power away from the reader. It can be hard to un-clench our fists and relinquish that control. However, handing over the power of imagination to the artist does not make this mode of literature any less powerful or interactive. I believe that reading a graphic novel is in no way a passive act like watching television, but that it works different muscles in your brain, much like switching from jogging to swimming; both are cardio, both are effective exercises, but you can get sore in different places.

On several occasions when reading a graphic novel that was particularly weighty in its subject matter, having the wheel of imagination taken out of my hands was a relief. I can’t speak for all readers, but being able to take my mind off of the architecture of the world in the story and focus my attention on the characters themselves- it was transformative. So many brilliant artists use the illustrations in a graphic novel like a highlighter, underlining important ideas or phrases. In David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, as the protagonist ages and changes, so does the style of art on the pages; and, peeling back even more layers of the title character, the style evolves even more as his opinions of the people around him change. It’s like looking through a pair of binoculars into a microscope; ultimately tricky and hard to wrap your mind around at times, but as the images come sharply into focus, the headache goes away and the wonder begins.
In a turn of events that would probably surprise one miss Tara Schultz, the first time I experienced the moment when the rug of low expectations was pulled from beneath me was- you guessed it- when I picked up Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller. Poetic justice is a glittering and sharp sword. Miller weaves a story of regret and a scabby old identity crisis instead of simple vigilante justice and a good old fashioned political spanking for the corrupt. The Bruce Wayne of Miller’s Gotham City is older, tireder, and angrier than we are used to, and his self-conscious antics are equally compelling and embarrassing to see. The feeling of intense, growling reality that came from watching a man transform in such raw and painful way was shocking. I went in expecting witty one-liners and came out at the end shocked and emotional; feeling as if I had had a cold bucket of water sloshed over my head.

This new age of literature isn’t so new- Miller’s Dark Knight was released in 1986- but it feels as if it’s just had a fresh bath. More literary readers are turning to the medium for consumption, and authors are skillfully doing away with the “Batman and Robin” stereotype that people like Tara Shultz are trying to paste over the whole genre. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home waltzed into the spotlight when it was rewritten for the stage and recently won a Tony for Best Musical. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (one of the books that Shultz is protesting) became so widely known and influential that it has become required reading for many high school social studies classes. We are lucky enough to be living in a time where art, literature, and music are being appreciated and consumed in ways we never could have foreseen, but that won’t stop naysayers from trying to do away with anything they deem inappropriate or different. Educate yourselves. Read new things, stretch those unused muscles, and help us to encourage the growth of a generation of forward-thinking, open minded individuals.

The Great Migration

By Lisa

On June 24, 2015

In Art/Photography, First Editions, Lisa's First Editions

The Great Migration by Jacob Lawrence. New York: Harper Collins / The Museum of Modern Art & The Phillips Collection, 1993.
Jacob Lawrence was not your typical painter. He often spent months at a branch of the New York Public Library, taking notes from journals and books and other documents before he would began work on a formal painting project. Lawrence wanted his art to teach history to his people. In describing his research efforts for The Great Migration, Lawrence remarked:

“Having no Negro history makes the Negro people feel inferior to the rest of the world . . . I didn’t do it just as a historical thing, but because these things tie up with the Negro today.”

Jacob Lawrence’s family was a family of migration. His mother and father had left the South for New Jersey where Jacob was born in 1917. Jacob ended up in Harlem at the age of 13. His mother and art teachers saw his talent at a young age, and eventually his talent earned him a position in the WPA program which provided the first artistic opportunities for many black artists like him. After Lawrence’s position at the WPA ended, he applied for a grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fund (of Sears & Roebuck) and cited his unusual research needs as a painter in the application. He asked for six months of research time before he began painting the Great Migration series.

The Great Migration consisted of 60 small tempera paintings depicting the mass migration of African Americans from the South to the North after World War I. The paintings were accompanied by captions which showed the influence of modern media: the rise of graphic illustration in mechanically produced magazines and photo books. The photo book with accompanying text was a popular genre following the Great Depression.
Many New Deal programs were designed to document rural America through oral-history projects and photography series.
Well-known photo books from this era include: Erskine Caldwell’s and Margaret Bourke-White’s “You Have Seen Their Faces” (1937); Dorothea Lange’s and Paul Taylor’s “American Exodus” (1939); “12 Million Black Voices” by Richard Wright (1941); and James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (1941).

Lawrence chose this same format—he only altered the format with his striking paintings. In 1941, the enlarged photographs from “12 Million Black Voices” with text by Richard Wright were chosen to accompany Lawrence’s Great Migration panels on a 15-city tour.
In 1993, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Phillips Art Collection released a signed limited edition book of 100 copies of The Great Migration with all 60 panels and captions.
In 2015, MoMA and Phillips released a new book, “Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series,” following a 2014 exhibition celebrating the artist’s life and work.

Written by Lisa Newman, A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.

Bleak but Relatable: Happenstance

By Former Lemurians

On June 24, 2015

In Poetry, Staff Blog

In my opinion, just because someone can compare a cup of sugar to the idea of love does not mean they are a clever writer. I prefer poetry that can make me think, and I only came across this poem for my British Literature class in college. But it really resonated with me, because it was one of those few times I read something and felt relief because someone addressed a really specific feeling I’ve had.

Hap is basically about how Thomas Hardy wishes that some god or higher being would tell him that the hardships he’s had to endure in his life have some meaning, even if it is only for the entertainment of the god. But Hardy knows that most likely there is no meaning to his life at all, everything that has happened to him is simply chance, thus the title of the poem, Hap, is short for the “happenstance” of his life’s events.

Yay existential crisis! So it’s pretty sad, but just the idea that a famous poet has felt something that I have makes me feel a bit better. It’s a pretty cool poem, and is worth reading and researching the words that Hardy uses to describe his feelings because they have specific definitions that help with understanding the poem. Also, if you feel depressed after reading the poem, just imagine reading it out loud in the middle of the rain while sad music plays like in a movie, while you, I don’t know, shake your fist at the heavens. Then it’s hilarious. So I hope you read this poem, and I hope you feel oddly comforted by it like I did.

Hap By Thomas Hardy

If but some vengeful god would call to me

From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,

Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,

That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,

Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;

Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I

Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,

And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?

—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,

And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .

These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown

Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

Environmental Creative Nonfiction: a fascinating niche of literature despite its horrendous umbrella term

By Former Lemurians

On June 23, 2015

In Adventure, Nature, Staff Blog

First off, introductions: Hello all, there’s a new Maggie of Lemuria in town!

Well, not really. You might recognize my face. I’ve been in and out of the Lemuria rotating staff since the summer of 2013 before my senior year of high school. After a summer internship in Oz, I worked part-time as a senior, learned enough to provide an extra hand to wrap or work Oz during the holidays, and here we are. I just keep coming back, even after my freshman year at Ole Miss. I’m working on an English degree my parents still disapprove of.

Okay, glad we got that out of the way.

Recently, I’ve become acquainted with the genre of “environmental creative nonfiction”. Bear with me- it’s a fascinating niche of literature despite its horrendous umbrella term.

When I say environmental creative nonfiction, I’m talking about adventure pieces by John Krakauer, Cheryl Strayed’s wilderness memoir Wild, and Rick Bass’s diary-style Winter: Notes from Montana. What these pieces have in common are their personal narratives of growth and experience as influenced by their environment. The environment becomes a character within the work because it plays such a crucial role in where the piece goes.

One of my favorite pieces within this highly specific genre is David George Haskell’s The Forest Unseen. I was first introduced to this work in Nature Writing, an English course I was lucky enough to weasel my way into during my second semester. I was mostly in it for the chance to get some real writing critique and a trip to Costa Rica (lemme tell you friends, it was awesome), but I was lucky enough to also be exposed to some really phenomenal works of nonfiction.

David George Haskell is a professor of biology at Sewanee, and The Forest Unseen follows what he refers to as “A Year’s Watch in Nature”. Haskell observes a one-square-meter patch of old-growth forest, referred to as the mandala, for an entire year. The work is divided into chapters concerning specific anecdotes and aspects of life in the mandala, from fungi to insects to plant and animal interaction, touching on how all are linked together in a complex web. Everything is intensely researched and backed up with scientific fact. There are detailed descriptions of life cycles, bizarre adaptations, histories of scientific discovery. But what makes The Forest Unseen such a phenomenal book is Haskell’s skilled weaving of the scientific and the spiritual.

It begins with Haskell’s use of the term “mandala”. Mandalas are small circular sand drawings that are representative of the entirety of the universe and are in the tradition of Tibetan monks. From this one concept, Haskell brings into his book a complex layer of spirituality. He alludes to many different branches of faith and their relationship to the environment, discusses the nature of souls within the concept of the natural world, and draws parallels between his observations and religious concepts. By discussing spirituality in relation to science within the concept of the mandala, Haskell connects humanity to the environment, something we so often tend to view as some inconceivable other.

I want to put this book into everyone’s hands. I look for any excuse to recommend it to someone, but it is such a hard book to quickly summarize. It is about so much. It is about humanity and the environment and religion and science and the relationship between it all. It is about the past and the future. It has the power to speak to you if you let it.

In short, Haskell transforms a potentially dry, textbook subject into an ethereal reading experience (okay, maybe it’s a bit dry at the beginning but you can’t have everything). He creates intoxicating yet informative prose that reads like a poetry collection and a textbook. He brings the environment he observes to life, lets it breathe on the page and gives it a voice. Haskell has me head-over-heels in love with environmental creative nonfiction, and I have a feeling this is going to be a rather drawn-out love affair.

Key’s Southern ‘secrets’ too funny, painful, true to share in ‘World’s Largest Man’

By Guest Author

On June 19, 2015

In Culture, Guest Post

By Jim Ewing

Special to The Clarion-Ledger
Before saying anything about The World’s Largest Man by Mississippian Harrison Scott Key, let’s get down to brass tacks. First, we probably need to keep this book a secret just between us Southerners.

Key, the scurvy lout, reveals all of our secrets. Such as: Most Southerners, despite literary assumptions elsewhere, don’t know how to tell a story. Their dinner conversation is not a Faulkneresque regaling of the gothic intrigues of their kin, but in fact is mostly grunts, or code. Such as:

“You ever speak to old Lamar Bibbs?”

“Not since him and Gola Mae went down yonder after the thing up at the place.”

Silence.

The story ends then, as grandpa studies his dentures that he has placed in his hand to remove particles of corn.

Storytelling itself evolved, reveals Key, because in Mississippi when he was young “there was very little to do but shoot things or get them pregnant.”

So, as you can see, with such truths as this leaking out of Key’s pen, we don’t need to be spreading it around.

Key does reveal that he’s still a Mississippian, sort of, though maybe a bit around the bend living in Savannah, Ga.

“I do believe in the power of Jesus and rifles,” the Belhaven University graduate confides. “But to keep things interesting, I also believe in the power of NPR and the scientific method” — which means he’s probably out of sync with most of the people who write letters to the editor of The Clarion-Ledger — and vote.

Key came about his odd mix of weltanschauung by spending his early years in Memphis, then moving to his parents’ native Mississippi in fourth grade — where, he tells, his classmates had sideburns, body odor, and large male parts.

He had moved, you see, to Puckett in Rankin County.

He chronicles such things as:

– Rites of Passage, such as the dove hunt, where the drunken leader of the gun-toting mayhem says: “Only rules is don’t be shooting nobody in the face.”

– Vital Knowledge, such as the Rankin County News, he relates: “a publication I would later value chiefly for its photographs of local virgins.”

– Football: “It had everything required to make a boy into a man: brutality, blood, a concession stand.”

Living as he did walking between the worlds of Mississippiana and what some people mistakenly call civilization, he learned to observe the ways of people in the Magnolia State the way anthropologists study ancient civilizations.

Largest Man is a laugh riot that will shake the skeletons of any Mississippians with the slightest sliver of a funny bone. But that’s only half the story. It’s leavened by insights about his father, moments of fear and sadness, inadequacy, and anger. For, at heart, Largest Man is a coming of age story about the difficult life his tough-as-nails asphalt salesman father laid out for Key, with its attendant disappointments. Throughout, his mother, a schoolteacher at McLaurin Attendence Center in Star, shines like a gentle beacon of hope and love, albeit with her own quirks.

As a memoir, Largest Man weaves poignant growing up tales that are profound. He reveals very real and somber truths about growing into adulthood, fearing — and knowing — that he never measured up to his father’s expectations, and lays bare his own failings, as a husband, as a father.

Some parts of the book are so filled with sorrow only laughter can heal the pain. We laugh with him, knowing we share his pain, as individuals, as a region.

That agony, too, is our secret we sometimes try too hard to conceal.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at The Clarion-Ledger, is the author of seven books including Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them, in stores now.

“Fateful Lightning” illuminates Civil War Gen. Sherman’s march

By Guest Author

On June 18, 2015

In Fiction, Guest Post, History, Southern History

By Jim Ewing

Special to The Clarion-Ledger
Sometimes, fiction can be more revealing of the truth than nonfiction, and in Jeff Shaara’s The Fateful Lightning: A Novel of the Civil War, the bones of nonfiction shine through his artful narrative.

This 614-page saga focuses on a less studied segment of the war, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea and thence into the Carolinas, which is usually overshadowed by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

Lightning is the fourth and final volume of Shaara’s Civil War series that previously included the battles of Shiloh, Vicksburg and Chattanooga (though it’s not necessary to have read any of the previous books to enjoy this one). It covers the campaigns from November 1864 through the end of the war in North Carolina in April 1865. For the South, Lee’s surrender was the symbolic end of the war, while Sherman’s march continued the war’s misery for generations. It set a heinous standard of “total war,” waged intentionally against civilians.

Shaara adds the insights, motivations and behavior often overlooked: breakdown of civil authority in the South; the assistance of Confederate forces in the destruction, in advance of Sherman in order to starve his army; the hatred of the civilian population of both sides of the conflict for that destruction; as well as the need for constant foraging for food by both armies, including for the freed slaves numbering 50,000 following Sherman’s 60,000-man army.

We may think of Sherman’s march as a lightning strike, as the name suggests, but it might more accurately be seen as a big, hungry hurricane consisting of four broad columns of men about 75 miles wide moving about 15 miles per day through 2,000 miles of the South.

Shaara takes pains to say that Sherman only ordered facilities of use to the enemy to be destroyed, that the actual burning of entire cities — including his worst conflagration, Atlanta — was the result of being unable to control his men.

Shaara lays bare the outlines of this segment of the war, keeping up the suspense, even as the outcome is known, by detailing Union Gen. Ulysses Grant’s concerns in the East; Sherman’s burning the heart out of the Deep South; both men fighting constant rearguard actions against politicians, the press, the duplicitous greed of those whose allegiance is to profit, no matter whose flag flies over it; and the jealous, second-guessing of subordinate generals.

Shaara’s brilliance is credibly crafting the thoughts, motivations, strategies and personalities of the leaders on both sides of the conflict. He also weaves the narrative of a slave named only Franklin, who gives the unique perspective as one of the emancipated, giving voice to those who latched on to the hope of freedom and Sherman as savior, a faith at least somewhat betrayed at Ebenezer Creek in Georgia.

There will be some grousing, for sure, from those who see Lightning as a whitewash of Sherman. It’s a point Shaara notes, saying that perhaps no more polarizing figure exists from the conflict, regarded alternately as its finest battlefield commander and ranking among the nation’s finest with George Patton and Douglas MacArthur versus a “savage,” his very name “a profanity.”

While Lightning may not be a history book, but historical fiction, students of the Civil War will find much to debate, and readers just looking for an absorbing novel will be well rewarded.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at The Clarion-Ledger, is the author of seven books including Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them, in stores now.

The Story of Lord John Press

By Lisa

On June 17, 2015

In Fiction, First Editions, Lisa's First Editions

“House Snake” by Reynolds Price. Northridge, CA: Lord John Press, 1987.

A young Herb Yellin caught the bug for autographs at Fenway Park in Boston. As he grew older Yellin became a serious reader and married the two passions when he began collecting signed first editions. Eventually, his insatiable quest for books led him to establish Lord John Press in 1976 as a way to offer something special beyond the hardback book. The books were often issued in printings of 150 and 300 copies and were signed by the author. The press showed a passion for paper, printing and book binding. The contents were never lengthy, containing an author’s short story, an essay, a speech, a poem, or an excerpt. Lord John Press did not publish the obvious, and this provided something special to the book collector and for the reader who was so devoted to that author.

“House Snake,” a single poem by Reynolds Price, seventeen pages in length, was published in book form in colorful marbled boards with gilt decoration by Lord John Press in 1987. Only 150 numbered copies were printed and signed by the author.

Other examples from the press include:

“The State of the Novel” by Walker Percy (in conjunction with Faust Press)

“Ill Seen Ill Said” by Samuel Beckett

“The Literature of Exhaustion and the Literature of Replenishment” by John Barth

“Acrobats in the Park” by Eudora Welty

and “A Collection of Reviews” by Ross Macdonald.

Lord John Press got its funny name from the founder’s love of these authors: John Barth, John Cheever, John Fowles, John Gardner, John Hawkes, and John Updike. “Lord” is said to have come from his desire “to marry” Great Britain and America. Over the years Yellin published around 100 titles. Lord John Press has since closed and Yellin passed away in 2014.

Written by Lisa Newman, A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.

Spend Father’s Day With the World’s Largest Man

By Former Lemurians

On June 17, 2015

In Culture, Southern Culture

by Andrew Hedglin

“Well.”

This is how all of Harrison Scott Key’s stories begin, according to the end of the first chapter of his tragicomic memoir about his father, The World’s Largest Man.

He doesn’t literally begin all his stories this way, at least not in writing, but I’d like to think he really does when he’s telling them aloud, whether to his children at bedtime or to a small group at a party in somebody’s kitchen.

It’s a little pause that gives opportunity to the storyteller to think about if he really does want to tell what he’s about to, and for us if we really want to hear it. In the moment of the pregnant pause between collecting his thoughts and dispersing them, lies the warning I first heard from the late, great Lewis Grizzard: “I don’t believe I’d-a told that”.

But that’s the difference between him and me, I guess, and I’m glad he committed to the story. And once he commits to telling, we also commit to the listening, because it’s impossible to resist the honest, hilarious, stylized absurdity that is about to follow.

Key begins by telling us stories about a man—shaped by a culture—that has no use for the art of storytelling. Our protagonist gravitates towards his mother, growing to prefer the quiet gentleness of her cooking and reading to the violence-soaked nature of his father’s obsessions: hunting, football, fighting, and farm work. Yes, even the miracle of (bovine) childbirth aims its roughest edges at Key, working on a neighboring farm, for free, at his father’s behest.

Did I say “gentleness” in that last paragraph? That’s not exactly what I mean.

Although sometimes uncomfortable with the more physical aspects of attempting (and often failing) to fulfill the expectations of Southern masculinity, he brilliantly unleashes his own aggression through his God-given talents for sarcasm and smart-ass-ery at every target available: his father in particular, the South in general, his rivals on the baseball field, potential bullies, his ne’er-do-well Savannah neighbors, later his wife (who is just as good at dishing it back), and even (and especially) himself.

His twin talents of insult and empathy lead him to say things which he then instantly regrets throughout all of his stories. That’s easy enough to let happen in conversation, or the dialogue of these stories, but leaving such joking truth on the page, after having enough time to consider what you’re saying? That’s a practiced and glorious art.

Curiously, he wounds his father mostly with disappointment rather direct verbal attacks, until about halfway through the book one day when his father beats our teen-aged narrator, half-naked and cornered on top of a washing machine, angrily with a belt. Key asks his father the question that has been building in his mind, and many of the readers’, throughout the narrative: “What the hell is wrong with you, old man? Are you crazy?”

Crazy can be a relative term, defined by both culture and circumstances. The second half of the books shifts the focus to his adulthood, leaving him a husband and a father himself in Savannah, Georgia. While he escapes the condemnation of the rural Rankin County mores he rejects, he examines the more unreasonable side of his nature in the face of challenges such as his wife’s pregnancy, his daughter’s potty training, tweaked-out neighbors relocation next door, and the very same home-invasion paranoia he began the book mocking his dad for.

The power dynamics do shift from a boy trying to connect with his different-natured father to a man trying to connect to his wife, the mother of his children, and sometimes partner-in-insanity.

Key has to learn which lessons to remember from his raising, and which ones to forget before it’s too late. It’d be easy to sell this book on Father’s Day as a exploration of a certain type of fatherhood, but there’s a lot to relate to whether you’re somebody’s child, parent, or spouse.

Mostly, I can guarantee if you make it to the book, you’re going to laugh a lot. You may even be tempted to tell a few stories about the things you remember from the harrowing experience of growing up.

Would you or I have the courage to celebrate and excoriate ourselves and even those we love as faithfully as Key has here?

Well…

Harrison Scott Key will be signing copies of this book at Lemuria on Thursday, June 18, at 5:00 p.m. and will be reading at 5:30.

The Book of Friendship

By Lisa

On June 16, 2015

In First Editions, Lisa's First Editions, Southern Fiction

“The Norton Book of Friendship” edited by Eudora Welty and Ronald A. Sharp. New York: Norton, 1991.

Eudora Welty and Ronald Sharp edited the “The Norton Book of Friendship” which contains more than 270 selections on the subject of friendship dating from antiquity to the end of the nineteenth century.

“The Book of Friendship” was put together in a conference room in the old Sheraton hotel in Jackson. Sharp recalls their editing process in his Introduction:

“Who has the fiercer rage for order, the artist or the scholar, is hard to say. But it was Eudora who had the brilliant idea of renting the Windsor Room. When she writes fiction she puts bits and pieces of stories and novels into a file, and when she is ready to start shaping the material, she spreads out the scraps of paper on a bed or a table or the floor, so she can see it all in one place, and then she actually ‘pins’ together the various pieces into a whole. ‘Shaping a book is a physical process,’ she says, and that is precisely what we discovered that afternoon in the Windsor Room.”

Welty and Sharp’s brilliant anthology includes letters and invitations from Colette, Raymond Carver and Samuel Johnson; poetry from Homer, Langston Hughes, Richard Wilbur, and Anne Sexton; Chapters from the Bible; Sonnets from Shakespeare; short stories from Chekhov, Tolstoy and William Maxwell; and too many other unexpected pieces to mention.

As Welty finished her Introduction to “The Book of Friendship,” she included a note to Sharp referenced in Marrs’ biography of Welty: “’The [Persian Gulf] war is so ghastly that nobody can feel very balanced about much, but it’s a good thing, ain’t it, that we’ve got Friendship.’”

“The Norton Book of Friendship” continues to be a treasure and a refuge for readers. Once you have one yourself—you find that it makes a wonderful gift. By the time “The Book of Friendship” was published, Welty was 82 years old and not doing very many public signings, so signed copies of this book are very rare and valuable to collectors.

Written by Lisa Newman, A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.

Filling Up With Stories

By Former Lemurians

On June 16, 2015

In Southern Culture, Southern Fiction, Southern History, Staff Blog

In the heart of Belhaven stands a little house among all the other mismatched houses. It is framed by flowers and pine trees, and children run through the carpet of green lawn, blowing bubbles and fingers sticky with the melted popsicles they claim as priceless treasures in the heat.

On this porch is a blue wicker rocking chair, and as the summer storm rolls in, it rocks, empty, a glass of sweet tea by its side.

Earlier, before the children were let loose to run like wild banshees, they sat on that same porch and listened to a story or two. This June, every Thursday from 3 to 4 p.m. I have been fortunate enough to read stories in conjunction with the Eudora Welty House for Summer Storytime. Last week, the group of children was so big that we split it up into three separate groups to hear multiple stories before they clamored for popsicles and ran through the sprinkler.

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This upcoming Thursday, June 18, we will be reading stories about writing your own story, and what a better place to do this activity than at the Eudora Welty House, the home of an author who made her own stories. We hope you and your children will join us from 3:00 to 4:00 to make a book.

Who can say whether there is or isn’t a certain magic imbued in a place? When the last of the children left, led by the hand by their parents, it was just as if Ms. Welty herself had been there the whole time, smiling as words and stories filled these children, just as they in turn filled her garden.

As I turned to leave, the rocking chair creaked in the wind, and the little house was quiet, the grass worn by the patter of little feet, standing just as it was before with all the other mismatched houses, right in the heart of Jackson.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

—Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings

Page 64 of 257

In Defense of Graphic Novels

The Great Migration

Bleak but Relatable: Happenstance

Environmental Creative Nonfiction: a fascinating niche of literature despite its horrendous umbrella term

Key’s Southern ‘secrets’ too funny, painful, true to share in ‘World’s Largest Man’

“Fateful Lightning” illuminates Civil War Gen. Sherman’s march

The Story of Lord John Press

Spend Father’s Day With the World’s Largest Man

The Book of Friendship

Filling Up With Stories

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