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Author Q & A with Juliet Grames

On July 21, 2019

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

“Author” is a new title for Juliet Grames, associate publisher and curator of the Solo Crime imprint for HarperCollins. With the publishing of her debut novel The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna, Grames joins the ranks of the hundreds of writers whose works she has helped become real books.

Growing up in a tight-knit Italian family living in Connecticut, Grames loosely borrows from some of her own experiences as she shares the tale of the indomitable Stella Fortuna, who gave birth to 11 children even as she lived through at least seven–maybe eight–near-death experiences.

Grames is looking forward to her appearance at the Mississippi Book Festival in downtown Jackson Aug. 17.

“I had the great good fortune of visiting Jackson in January 2018 and was profoundly moved by everything I saw and experienced, but especially by the literary culture of the city,” she said. “I am so honored and grateful to have been invited to the festival and to have the opportunity to be a tiny part of that rich literary culture.”

Since this is your debut book, please share a bit about your background.

Juliet Grames

I was born in Hartford, Conn., and grew up in the Farmington Valley. I knew I wanted to write books since I was a little girl–actually, my first attempt at a novel, when I was 6, was a story inspired by my grandmother, just like Stella Fortuna was. I’ve spent my entire career working with literature. My first job was at the public library, then I spent four years working at my hometown’s Borders Books, then a year at a literary agency before getting my start in book publishing editorial at places like John Wiley & Sons and The Overlook Press. But secretly I’m actually a devout amateur historian. I was a history major at Columbia, and spent a year studying history at Oxford.

As a book editor who has worked for Soho the past decade, you now hold the position of associate publisher and curator of the Soho Crime imprint. How does it feel to be on this “other side” of publishing? Was writing a book always part of your career dreams?

I originally got into publishing because I thought it would help me toward a writing career. For years, it seemed this plan had catastrophically failed, and I advised aspiring publishing professionals not to get into editorial if they wanted to write, because they would never be able to find bandwidth to nurture their own creative voice. But in the end, it wasn’t such a bad plan. Soho Press is a wonderful institution that has allowed me, and others, to pursue creative endeavors, and I believe my editorial training really helped me make my own novel into the best thing it could be.

This story is partly based on experiences in your own Italian-American family. Can you tell us a little about that?

The novel follows a girl born in Calabria, Italy, in the years after World War I through her childhood in a poor mountain village, emigration to the U.S. on the eve of World War II, courtship, family drama, and eight near-death experiences. It was inspired by my grandmother, a larger-than-life character and storyteller.

My grandparents emigrated from southern Italy in the 1930s and settled in Hartford, Conn. I grew up steeped in their culture–the food, the dialects, the storytelling, the music, the horticulture–and very proud of my immigrant roots. As I got older, I tried to find histories and literature about the Italian South so I could learn more, but was frustrated by how little there is. One reason I wanted to write this book was to try to capture the fascinating world of southern Italy, where so many Italian-Americans’ ancestors originated.

The story begins with Stella’s parents’ history and extends to Stella’s life at age 100. Along the way, readers we learn about Stella’s multiple brushes with death, raising her large family and her lifelong longing for her own independence. Please tell us briefly about these struggles that define her life.

Stella Fortuna’s eight near-deaths are the one piece of the plot I took wholly from reality. My grandmother had very similar misadventures over the course of her long life–experiences, I realized, which laid the groundwork for an allegory about how dangerous independence and self-actualization could be for women like my grandmother, like Stella, born into reduced circumstances in pre-war southern Italy, where women were not even citizens.

Life was especially dangerous when these women took risks to better their situations–to educate themselves or their children, to be ambitious about accruing money or property, to stand up to their controlling or abusive fathers or husbands. Stella struggles her entire life against the identity her world wants her to embrace–obedient wife and mother. Her stubborn independence and fierce sense of self never allow her to compromise, even when her resistance nearly cost her her life.

Even though Stella and her family moved to America when she was 19 years old, she never got over missing the Italian village of her childhood. How does that drive her outlook and expectations of a better life?

Stella is typical of many Italian emigrants of the first half of the 20th century in that she is deeply ambivalent about having to leave Italy. The tragedy of poverty and colonial exploitation meant that there were few work opportunities in places like Calabria, and people traveled thousands of miles to work abroad so they could feed their families. Many of the millions of Italians who arrived in the United States between 1900 and 1925 continued to think of Italy as home and intended to return there.

During my research, I found two very poignant forms of nostalgia at this great wave of migration: first, Italian-Americans like Stella and many other characters who never stopped loving and missing Italy; and second, in Italy, the descendants of the Italians who remained in towns that were emptied out by emigration, who feel kinship for the American cousins they never had a chance to meet.

In the end, the narrator tells readers that Stella was “not a woman of her time,” and that she was had “incredible will and strength, of charisma, of innate intelligence.” What can we learn from this tale today?

My main hope is that readers will walk away from the novel asking themselves about the lives and reputations of the “difficult” women who might have come before them–mothers or aunts or grandmothers of Stella’s generation who sometimes had to go to extreme or even ugly lengths to survive the hard years of the 20th century and to keep their families together. I believe our foremothers’ legacies are worth revisiting, and that when we question why these women were so “difficult,” we often find them to have been more heroic and multi-faceted than we could have guessed.

Juliet Grames will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “Best Debut Novels of 2019” panel at 10:45 a.m. in State Capitol Room 113 and the “All About Soho Press” panel at 2:45 p.m. in State Capitol Room 201 H.

Karl Marlantes adds new song to American literature with ‘Deep River’

By Guest Author

On July 19, 2019

In Fiction

By Matthew Guinn. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 14)

The American canon just got a new addition.

Karl Marlantes’ sprawling Deep River deserves no lesser estimation. It echoes the sweep of his contemporaries Toni Morrison and Jim Harrison at their best, but also harkens back to the epic naturalist novels of Jack London and Frank Norris. And in singing the beauties and perils of the American landscape, it has few equals in any era of our literature. Deep River is a new American classic.

Fitting that Deep River is a tale of immigrants, folk from old lands seeking a new one, and that it spans not only two continents, but two centuries. In this case, it is a Finnish family, the Koskis, tenant farmers suffering under the brutal Russian occupation of Finland. The oldest Koski brother has already immigrated to Washington State. His letters home tell of logging trees so gargantuan they must be seen to be believed by European eyes, of freedom from serfdom, and of bountiful, good-paying work.

By a turn of events the reader cannot anticipate, his sister Aino is the next Koski to follow him to America. The novel coheres around Aino even as Marlantes adds in scores of vivid characters—Finns and Swedes—who form a tight-knit immigrant community logging and fishing Washington State. Reaction is mixed to the brand of socialism Aino brings with her from the Old World and trouble finds her again. And again.

Aino is surely the most exasperating heroine in American literature. Time after time, she helps turn a good situation bad by her dogged agitation for the dream of socialism and the “Wobblies” labor party. People are hurt by her, and she leaves a wake of damage behind at every stage of her life. In matters of love, one never knows which way her heart will lead her. And yet we follow—exasperated, intrigued—because she is enigmatic, unpredictable, totally alive. She is as fully human—that is to say, complex and fallible—as we are. She is the lightning rod to whom all her fellow characters respond.

Yet Marlantes is careful and adept not to let Aino dominate his story. If there is a single dominating force in the novel, it is work. One is hard pressed to name a novel that has celebrated labor so eloquently. Deep River is a paean to the joy, dignity, cunning, and stamina of skilled physical labor and the men and women who perform it. Our digital century tends to forget the artistry required to bring down a 300-foot tree precisely by hand, or the intuition needed to read the currents on a river to determine where fish are running. Marlantes reminds us.

He also reminds us how thoroughly women and Native Americans contributed to forming America, and on this point it is clear how much Deep River adds to our national literature. So many of the classic novels of American experience are boys tales told for grown men that dismiss the contributions of women or neglect them entirely. Marlantes gives careful attention to the dignity of what used to be called “women’s work” and the skill and grace it requires, to say nothing of the harrowing experience of childbirth in the early years of the twentieth century. The senior Koski brother could never have built his empire without the guidance of Vasutati, the native healer who reminds him that “constant change” is in fact “life everlasting” and is such a vital force she is able to flirt with him even in death. All of the Pacific Northwest is here, fully represented. All work is honored.

In Deep River, Marlantes is after the whole tapestry of American experience, and he comes closer to getting it than any writer before him. And running counter to the blasé petite-nihilism of our postmodern moment, he reminds us that though life is hard, it is also good. His characters never say aloud that there can be dignity in struggle, meaning in pain. They live it, on every page. Could any worldview be more American?

“What a country this is,” one of the Koskis exclaims at a moment of opportunity seized. What a country, indeed. And what a novel to sing its epic song.

Novelist Matthew Guinn earned his Ph.D. in American Literature at the University of South Carolina. He is associate professor of creative writing at Belhaven University.

Karl Marlantes will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, August 14, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Deep River. Lemuria has chosen Deep River as its August 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

* * *

Marlantes will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 in conversation with Kevin Powers and Tom Franklin at 12:00 p.m. in State Capitol Room 113.

Grant bio ‘Hold On with a Bulldog Grip’ makes ideal entry into storied life

By Guest Author

On July 18, 2019

In Civil War

By Timothy T. Isbell. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 30)

The book Hold on with a Bulldog Grip: A Short Study of Ulysses S. Grant informs the reader about one of the more intriguing and larger-than-life characters of the American Civil War.

Co-authored by John F. Marszalek, David S. Nolen, Louie P. Gallo, and Frank Williams, the book is a short biography of Grant and his legacy. In a well written and concise narrative, the authors take turns telling about Grant’s early life, his college days at West Point, and his eventual military and political career.

In his memoirs, Grant expressed his desire not to be a soldier: “A military life had no charms for me, and I had not the faintest idea of staying in the army even if I should be graduated, which I did not expect.” Grant’s fellow cadets such as William Tecumseh Sherman, James Longstreet, George H. Thomas, Don Carlos Buell, and Richard Ewell played a significant role in Grant’s experience in the Mexican War and Civil War.

In the book, the Civil War years reflect on Grant’s victories at Fort Donelson, Fort Henry, Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chattanooga and his ultimate victory at Appomattox. Readers learn of Grant’s philosophy of always moving forward. Grant said, “One of my superstitions had always been when I started to go anywhere, or to do anything, not to turn back, or stop until the thing intended was accomplished.”

Such a philosophy helped Grant win Civil War battles like Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga. Each engagement offered serious obstacles that may have forced other generals to withdraw, but Grant stayed the course.

After the first day at Shiloh, Grant’s Union army was pinned against the Tennessee River. Sherman said, “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Grant demonstrated his always go-forward mentality, stating “Yes, lick ’em tomorrow though.” This was exactly what Grant did as his army drove the Confederates from the field.

The Civil War period touches on relationships with Abraham Lincoln and the likes of Sherman, David Dixon Porter, and Henry Halleck.

Grant was ahead of his time where the issue of slavery and civil rights were concerned. Grant was staunch in his belief that the Civil War was because of slavery. In his memoirs, Grant said, “The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery.”

Grant supported the use of black soldiers in the Union Army. One of the earliest examples of former slaves fighting can be found during the Vicksburg Campaign. Grant used the 11th Louisiana Cavalry to defeat Confederates at Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana.

Grant’s magnanimous gesture to Robert E. Lee at Appomattox helped a war-torn nation to try peace after four bloody years of fighting. Such an effort along with his military record helped put Grant in the White House.

As president, Grant supported passage of the 15th Amendment which granted African American men the right to vote. Although ratified during Grant’s presidency, it took almost a century to totally enact. Southern states used poll taxes, literacy tests, and means of intimidation to keep black people from voting.

Of special note is the afterword by Mark Keenum. The relationship between Grant and Stephen D. Lee is explored. The relationship of these soldiers who fought for blue and gray, who became friends after the Civil War and their eventual relationship with Mississippi State is a nice closing for the book.

For anyone interested in Ulysses S. Grant, the man who struggled to succeed at anything prior to the Civil War, the hero who helped save the Union, president over a war-torn land and determined fighter who beat death long enough to write his memoirs, this is a book to read and enjoy.

A freelance journalist and author of four books from University Press of Mississippi, Timothy T. Isbell was a member of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning Sun Herald newspaper in Biloxi. He received a National Endowment of the Arts/Knight Foundation grant for his study of Mississippi’s Vietnamese community on the Gulf Coast and he’s an inductee in the University of Southern Mississippi Mass Communications Hall of Fame.

John F. Marszalek will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the Civil War panel at 12:00 p.m. in the C-SPAN/Old Supreme Court Room.

Author Q & A with S. J. Rozan

By Guest Author

On July 14, 2019

In Mystery, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 14)

Author SJ Rozan’s familiar detective duo of New Yorkers Lydia Chin and Bill Smith find themselves in a place “more foreign . . . than any (they’d) ever seen”–the Mississippi Delta–when they tackle yet another mystery in her newest tale, Paper Son.

Multi-award-winning crime writer Rozan, herself a native and current resident of New York City, was intrigued when she first heard about the Delta’s long-established Chinese community, and proved that this “Most Southern Place on Earth” was also the best setting yet for another whodunit. And this time, it‘s personal: Lydia’s cousin–whom she never knew existed–has been accused of murdering his father.

To her writing credit of 16 novels and more than 70 short stories, Rozan adds Paper Son, the 12th in her popular Lydia and Bill series. Her work has been the recipient of the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, Macavity, and Japanese Maltese Falcon awards, and she recently captured the Life Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America.

Rozan will appear as an official panelist at the Mississippi Book Festival on the lawn of the Mississippi Capital on August 17.

How did you decide to set your latest novel in the Mississippi Delta – the “most Southern place on earth”? Do you have friends/family/ties to Mississippi? Did you visit the Delta in person to research the land, people and culture of the area?

S.J. Rozan

I first went to the Delta to visit my friend Eric Stone, who had moved to Clarksdale. Eric introduced me to the story of the Delta’s Chinese grocers. I’d never heard this fascinating bit of American history. I’d been writing about Chinese-American private eye Lydia Chin for years, and this seemed like a situation made for her. I researched the history of the grocers and the Delta itself when I was back in NYC, then made two more trips to the Delta to interview, see people and places, and get a feel for the sights, sounds, and smells.

Paper Son places private investigator Lydia Chin and her partner Bill Smith in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, with a plan to defend a cousin in what appears to be an open-and-shut murder case. As an American-born native of Chinatown in New York City, Chin, and fellow New Yorker Smith, face the Delta with the uncertainties of “strangers in a strange land.” They are soon sorting through the tangled “facts,” amid nuances of the Delta’s past. What role does the setting of this story play, and what would you say this case tells us about the secrets of the Delta–past and present?

The setting in some ways IS the story. This is true in all my books, with Paper Son as my 12th Lydia and Bill book, and my 16th overall. Things happen in some places–in this instance, the complicated family history of Lydia’s Delta cousins–that wouldn’t happen in others. What the case tells us about the secrets of the Delta, I think, are universal truths: everything is complex and nuanced; we rarely get any whole story unless we dig for it; and the motivations for people’s actions are often different from what we think they are.

After working in a number of career roles, how did you know that writing was what you were meant to do, and what was it that made you gravitate specifically toward writing crime novels (or is the term “mysteries” more accurate)?

I like the term “crime novels;” it’s broader and gives me more leeway as a writer. I always wanted to write, but in college I got sidetracked by the thought that a person had a responsibility to do something useful in the world. I became an architect. The firm I was with did sustainable buildings and historic preservation. They were great people and I enjoyed the work, but I wasn’t happy. As soon as I admitted that to myself, I realized I wanted to go back to my original love, which was writing. Crime novels attract me because they’re about two main issues: a moment when someone feels intense pressure to respond to a situation, and the aftereffects of that response.

Have you already begun to write the next adventure for Lydia and Bill–or perhaps other characters–and why do you think Lydia and Bill have become endeared to so many readers?

The way my series works, Lydia and Bill alternate as narrators from book to book, with the other character as sidekick. Paper Son is Lydia’s book, and I’ve started the next one, which will be Bill’s. It’s set in the New York art world, an endless source of intrigue. What readers tell me they like about Lydia and Bill is the way they’re obviously fond of each other, or maybe even more than that, and they can depend on one another absolutely, but neither of them will take any baloney–from the other, or from anyone else. Also, Lydia, a strong independent Asian woman with, nevertheless, a huge family she takes seriously, is an unusual character in crime fiction.

Please tell me about your participation in the upcoming Mississippi Book Festival on Aug. 17 in Jackson. On which panel will you be a participant, and what will be the topic of discussion? Is this your first appearance at this event?

This will be the first time I’ve been part of the Mississippi Book Festival and I’m very much looking forward to it. I haven’t gotten my panel assignment yet, but whatever it is I’m sure it’ll be interesting and fun. ‘See you there!

S.J. Rozan will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “The Thrill of Mystery” panel at 1:30 p.m. in State Capitol Room 113.

‘Conversations with Gary Snyder’ reveals prophetic Zen mind rooted in North American earth

By Guest Author

On July 9, 2019

In Poetry, Zen

By Frank LaRue Owen. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 7)

Some writers move, inspire, or entertain their readers. Other writers create movements of conscience and spark poetic consciousness in whole generations of people that follow them. Gary Snyder is of the latter feather.

In Conversations with Gary Snyder, we are offered a rare glimpse into the inner life of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet through twenty-one interviews from different phases of his esteemed career. Like an archaeological dig that gently brushes away the dust of years to reveal the storied bones of life and culture, the masterful curation of these insightful conversations from different chapters of Snyder’s life reveals a gleaming thread of topics that aren’t just relevant to American literature, but—even five decades later in some cases—are themes that remain deeply pertinent to the times we’re living through.

Readers will find that many of the collected interviews grapple with subjects that require us to look in the mirror at who we are as a society. In this way, the book is not merely about a poet or his poems, but is, all-at-once, a cultural history, an ecological indictment, and a disturbingly visionary statement in the psychological, sociological, and futuristic sense.

Those already familiar with Gary Snyder are in for a real treat. Devotees of his poetry are no strangers to the subtle “fragrances” that hover like incense in the background of his writings. Gathered at the periphery of a Snyder poem or essay, or scampering right through the middle of one, we encounter Pacific Northwest Coast native lore, a flash of Buddhism, stirrings of deep ecological empathy, or an outright protest about the Western world’s assault on the natural world. All of these subjects, and more, rush forward on full display as major features in the interviews editor David Stephen Calonne has compiled.

From his enshrined place within early American Beat poetry (the character Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums was modeled after Snyder) to his eloquent articulation of his writing process as stemming from an obviously Zen-trained body-mind integration, what may have once been an understated personality silhouette for some readers of Snyder emerges full-force as a three-dimensional profile of an American national treasure.

In each of the interviews—ranging from sources as diverse as Newsweek, Shambhala Sun magazine, an interview at Naropa University’s Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and a truly fascinating dialogue from the late ’60s between philosopher Alan Watts, poet Allen Ginsberg, psychedelic proponent Timothy Leary, and Snyder—we come face to face with the mind-essence of an authentic American Zen man, who is also known to some by his dharma name Chofu (“Listen to the Wind”).

The end result can only be a singular conclusion. Snyder is of a rare breed; a veteran “psychonaut” (explorer of consciousness and the spirit of place). In this way, a refreshing portrait is offered of a searingly awake person, born in the U.S. but truly liberated from the constraints, blind spots, spiritual impediments, and cultural biases of mindless consumerism and the modern Judeo-Christian worldview.

Even more important, by the time readers of this work reach the final pages, they will receive the distilled benefits of Snyder’s lifelong journey in the form of an invitation; to be more at home in one’s own skin, to hold an allegiance to the deeper story flowing beneath our troubled national psyche, to be conscious that we all belong to a sacred reality we need desperately to remember—a planetary citizenship that thinks of humanity and nature as one extended family.

Frank LaRue Owen is a Mississippi native, an alumnus of Naropa University, and the author of three books of poetry, The School of Soft-Attention,The Temple of Warm Harmony, and the forthcoming 2020 release Stirrup of the Sun & Moon. He will be a panelist in the upcoming Mississippi Book Festival, August 17, 2019, at the Mississippi State Capitol.

Selfish Reading: ‘The Most Fun We Ever Had’ by Claire Lombardo

By Former Lemurians

On July 8, 2019

In Fiction

by Trianne Harabedian

We received advanced copies of Claire Lombardo’s The Most Fun We Ever Had a few months ago, and it immediately went on my to-be-read list. Sometimes you just have a good feeling about a book. But I was consumed with middle grade novels and picture books, and, since I spend all my time in the children’s section, I didn’t feel like I could justify the commitment of such a thick adult novel. Finally deciding to be selfish was one of the best book choices I have made in a long time. This novel had everything I wanted, leaving me constantly thirsting for more and eventually satisfied. It was beautifully written, with lyrical prose that blended sarcastic dialogue with heartbreaking personal revelations. But the characters are truly what carries this novel. Though it shifts between the perspectives of all six Sorenson family members, there is not a moment that the novel loses the reader. It reads like the richest chocolate, decadence slowly melting into total captivation.

In the 1970s, rebellious Marilyn and straight-laced David fall in love by literally running into each other in a university hallway. Their life together unfolds into a strange domestic bliss when Marilyn becomes pregnant with their daughters in quick succession and decides not to finish undergrad. By 2016, when the book is set, their four daughters, Wendy, Violet, Liza, and Grace, are adults and living wildly different lives than their parents had envisioned.

Wendy is a young widow who spends her days with bottles of red wine and younger men. Violet is a mother who gave up her career to give all of existence to her sons, which has resulted in emotional space between her and her husband. Liza has been living with her chronically depressed boyfriend for years, dividing her time between caring for him and her job as a newly tenured professor. And Grace, the youngest by quite a few years, is living far away and successfully lying to her family that she was accepted to law school.

The novel begins when Wendy rashly decides to find out what happened to the child Violet secretly gave up for adoption years earlier. It turns out that Jonah’s life has been far from the idyllic existence Violet had imagined. But while he is welcomed into the Sorenson family with open arms, his presence exposes cracks in their close-knit relationships. Marilyn is crushed that Violet and Wendy kept such a secret from their mother, creating the charade that Violet was studying abroad in France, and David feels as though he understands his daughters less than ever. Liza finds out that she is pregnant, therefore stuck in her loveless relationship forever, and Grace continues to spiral while assuring her parents that law school is just great. But the overpowering force in this book is familial love. Amidst sarcasm, screaming matches, feuds, and heartbreaking internal monologues, the Sorensons do love each other. And in the most non-cliche way, Claire Lombardo uses this lasting bond to not just repair their relationships, but to mature them in directions that ring true.

There are a million novels written about the middle-class American family. They are alike in their celebration of the mundane, in their biting dialogue and their delving into typical family drama. The Most Fun We Ever Had is not one of these novels. It takes the literary trend and turns it from dry rice to a full-course meal, complete with red wine and dark chocolate. It’s no secret that I love character-based novels. If I have to choose between an amazingly twisted plot and a long story that focuses on personal emotions and thoughts, I will always go with the latter. Give me a good family drama, complete with secret children, emotional affairs, and drunken monologues, and I’ll be happy. But I also love truly literary works. Thanks to Claire Lombardo, I don’t have to choose.

Signed first editions of The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo are available in our online store.

Author Q & A with Luke Lampton and Karen Evers

By Guest Author

On July 7, 2019

In Southern History

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 7)

Images in Mississippi Medicine: A Photographic History of Medicine in Mississippi by Dr. Luke Lampton and colleague Karen Evers, presents an unprecedented chronicle of the practice of medicine here from pre-statehood days to the technologies of today.

Along with Lampton’s historical narratives that cover everything from the state’s hospitals to the early physicians, the treatment of mental illness, the advancement of public medicine, the beginnings of medical education and more, the book is illustrated with many rare and significant photos.

The volume is published by the Mississippi State Medical Association (MSMA) under the auspices of the Commemorative Committee for the 150th Anniversary meeting of the MSMA House of Delegates.

Lampton has served for 25 years as a family physician at Magnolia Clinic in Magnolia, where he resides. He was born and grew up in Jackson, and he currently publishes Hinds County’s oldest newspaper, the Hinds County Gazette in Raymond.

A fifth-generation Mississippi physician, Lampton is Editor in Chief of the Journal of the Mississippi State Medical Association (MSMA).

Karen Evers has filled the role of managing editor of that Journal the past 24 years. The daughter of a physician and a nurse, she lives in Jackson. Her professional background before her appointment at the Journal was in advertising in New York City.

The book earned a gold award from the Columbia Books Association Trends contest, which is a top national prize for the best of professional association publications.

The reception for Images in Mississippi Medicine has been so successful that a “volume 2” is already under consideration, its authors say.

Please tell me how this book came about . . . whose idea was it, and why was it 20 years in the making?

Dr. Luke Lampton

Lampton: The origin of the book is the origin of a column in the state medical journal. After the two of us came together as editors in 1998, we contemplated feature columns which would interest our physician readers. One of these columns was Images in Mississippi Medicine, which presents a historical photograph or graphic image with accompanying narrative. We would occasionally discuss gathering them together as a book in the distant future. In 2017, as the state medical association prepared for the 150th meeting of its House of Delegates, Dr. Michael Trotter, chairman of the Commemorative Committee, asked us to create a historical book from these monthly columns, which dated back to 2002. We added many other rarely seen images and settled on 300 in our attempt to tell more fully the story of Mississippi medicine.

Dr. Lampton, what was your primary role in the production of this book?

Lampton: As author and creator of the monthly historical column, I wrote all of the copy and collected the majority of the images over the years utilized in the book. I also wrote all of the essays, narratives, and cutlines used in the book; thus, I was the primary author. That said, I did want to acknowledge Karen’s significant editorial assistance and vision with the book, and I requested her inclusion as joint author with me.

Ms. Evers, what was your primary role in the production of this book?

Karen Evers

Evers: As managing editor of the Journal during the life of the column and the creation of the book, I assisted Dr. Lampton in research, copy editing, and coordinating publishing and printing. I also helped him locate [the] many of the images [that] did not come from his extensive personal collection of photographs. It was fun! Discovering the story behind the images and how the pieces of history were relative was amazing. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History and the University of Mississippi Medical Center Department of Archives (Misti Thornton) were invaluable resources, as was The Mississippiana collection at Mississippi State University’s Mitchell Library (Fred Smith). We also worked closely with Adrienne Dison in the artistic production of the book.

Can you name a few of the standout doctors and/or medical accomplishments that have taken place in Mississippi over the years?

Lampton: There are many, and perhaps the major accomplishment of this book is to shine the light on many neglected heroes in our state’s historical parade. Certainly, Dr. William Lattimore (1774-1843) deserves more prominent remembrance by both citizens and physicians for not only his public health accomplishments, but also his selfless political leadership. He, with the help of his brother and other Natchez physicians, created the state’s first hospital, its first board of health, its first use of vaccination and quarantine, and the first board of medical censors. These are remarkable and progressive public health accomplishments. Lattimore also served as Mississippi’s first Territorial Congressman and in that capacity determined the dividing line between Alabama and Mississippi and located the current site of Jackson. He is remembered for making morally justified decisions but not politically opportune decisions, which cost him the governorship.

In the more modern period, Dr. Joseph Goldberger’s brave and groundbreaking work eliminating pellagra in Mississippi in the early 20th century had global implications. Few realize that this Orthodox Jew who was an immigrant to New York married the niece of Jefferson Davis, who was his right hand in all of his brilliant public health work. Goldberger’s Mississippi connections through her proved critical in the success of his work.

Also featured in the book is the work of public health legend Dr. Felix Underwood, who revolutionized public health in Mississippi and was called “the man who saved a million lives.” Other public health leaders are featured, including Dr. Waller Leathers, Dr. Ed Thompson, Dr. Mary Currier, and Dr. Alton Cobb. Cobb may have made the most important contributions to public health and medicine of any Mississippian over the last 50 years. The modern public health system in Mississippi can be credited to his work and vision, and he set standards of excellence at the Department of Health and a focus on science which endure today. Thank Alton Cobb for Mississippi not having a measles outbreak recently, because he was the one who helped fashion our strict vaccination laws well before other states realized their importance.

As well, the University of Mississippi Medical Center plays a central role in the history of medicine in the state. Its purpose is explored beginning with the earliest development of a two-year school in Oxford up to the bold move to Jackson in the 1950s. The legendary early professors, Drs. Guyton, Pankratz, Snavely, Hardy, Batson, and others are mentioned. Early attempts at medical education are also discussed, most notably the first four-year medical college, the Mississippi Medical College, which operated in Meridian from 1906-1913.

The role of mental health, especially the long history of the state’s mental health institutions, is discussed in detail, with fascinating images of the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum–as it evolved into the Mississippi State Hospital–in both Jackson and Whitfield and the East Mississippi Insane Hospital in Meridian. Also, the development and growth of community hospitals and sanatoriums are explored around the state, from 1805 to the Civil War to the later King’s Daughters movement to the later Hill-Burton period.

And there is more.

Why is this book important to Mississippi, and who should read it?

Lampton: The book reveals that medicine played a vital role in the broader history of our state. Education, politics, race, poverty, and public health come forth on every page. There exists no comprehensive history of medicine in the state.

This book provides the framework for the state’s medical history, and we hope it encourages more writing and research on many of the topics highlighted. The book is important not only for historians and physicians but also for students and lay readers.

Signed copies of Images in Mississippi Medicine are available at Lemuria’s online store.

Love, American Style: ‘Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory’ by Raphael Bob-Waksberg

By Former Lemurians

On July 1, 2019

In Fiction, Short Stories

by Norris Rettiger

As someone who has graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing, I know there’s a strangely consistent correlation between writing that tries to “break down conventions and experiments with the form” and writing that is utterly unreadable. I’ve read it, hell, I’ve written it. We all know it, because sometimes it manages to pass through the filters of the publishing sphere and maybe lands itself squarely in the “revolutionary” or “visionary” box, and it is hailed by critics as being the hottest book you’ve ever laid your sensitive little bookworm hands on… but it still has that remarkably under-mentioned quality of being painfully unreadable.

Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s book, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory breaks down conventions in the conventional “breaking conventions” genre by being an absolute joy to read from cover to cover. Rarely will the comments “brilliant disregard for deeply-entrenched constraints of prose” and “the funniest summer read on the shelf” sit so close to each other as they do with this gem of comedy and insight.

There’s so much that could be said about the humor, the creativity, the style, and so on, but the real reason to fall in love with this book is: this book has already fallen in love with you. That “You” in the title? That’s you. And that “someone” is Raphael Bob-Waksberg, who has filled this book to bursting with absolute, undying affection for the human condition in all its damaged glory. This is a book that doesn’t only feel like it was written about you (it’s the most relatable thing ever), it feels like it was written for you. Bob-Waksberg writes like a good friend coming up with magnificent and personal stories that will help you through late night anxieties and those sudden moments of hopelessness that can make us all feel like we’ve missed something important. Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory might be about the ways we mess up and struggle to live honestly and meaningfully in a messed up world, but in those hard and sometimes bizarre moments we are at our most human, and Raphael Bob-Waksberg is celebrating and loving that humanity with every page he writes.

Whether it’s finding strange beauty in nonsensical wedding rituals or that moment of eye contact on a train that sometimes lasts a lifetime, no story loses touch with humanity, even if they do tend to spin off from reality. With creativity and a heightened sense of events, Bob-Waksberg takes our quirks, fears, loves, and wonders and explodes them up in bursts of narrative genius that make you laugh for pages on end, thinking to yourself that surely nothing could be so accurate and so ridiculous, but then, when each moment lands, he allows us to feel the honesty of what he wrote, and the emotions of what we’ve been laughing at.

Sometimes, I think, we start to believe, mostly subconsciously, that the best books are written by the best liars; lie upon lie, creatively layered so deep and dense until we believe it, until we are convinced. But this book reminds me that’s just not how it is. The best books are written by the truth-tellers. Raphael Bob-Waksberg is a truth teller. These stories tell the truths we forget and the truths we tell ourselves are lies, the truths that are hard to stare in the face and the truths that can only be shouted after a long silence. Truth is quiet, truth is unpredictable, truth is big, truth is weird, truth is too much, and truth is everything. I guess you might say truth is us, and maybe that’s why we like it so much.

For anyone who recognizes the fact that nothing will ever be quite as strange as people, these creative and completely original stories will be a comfort, a wild ride, and a mile or two in the never-ending marathon of human empathy and our desire for connection. This is the book for anyone looking for a fresh, modern, and incisively humorous take on human relationships and the many ways we just can’t seem to stop making a beautiful mess out of our strange and brief time on earth. It’s one of my favorites of the year.

Author Q & A with Mamta Chaudhry

By Guest Author

On June 30, 2019

In Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 30)

Mamta Chaudhry’s busy career has taken her from TV and radio stints to published fiction, poetry and feature writing, and with the release of her debut book, Haunting Paris, she happily adds the label of “novelist” to her achievements.

Chaudhry’s work has appeared in the Miami Review, The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Telegraph, The Statesman, Writer’s Digest, and The Rotarian, among others.

A native of Calcutta, India, she and her husband now live in Coral Gables, Fla. They enjoy spending part of each year in India and France.

Since this is your debut novel, please tell me a little about yourself–where did you grow up, your education, what brought you to Florida, family info, and what drew your interest in writing–whatever you would like to include.

Mamta Chaudhry

Even as a child, I always had my nose in a book, and pretty early on I also always had ink stains on my fingers, because I knew that I wanted to write books as well as read them. Fortunately for me, Calcutta–where I was born and brought up–is a book-loving city, with libraries, bookshops, and bookstalls everywhere.

After I graduated from Loreto College, I came to the States for a master’s degree in Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida. I met my husband in one of my classes, and among the many things that attracted me to Daniel is that he loves to read.

For many years, I worked in classical radio as an on-air host and programmer. Because I’m from India, people were always surprised to hear that I was a “deejay,” not a doctor. After I got my doctorate at the University of Miami, I now just nod when people ask if I’m a doctor–without adding I’m a doctor of English. Books also cure a lot of what ails the world.

Haunting Paris is your first novel, and it is packed with details about the city of Paris in its bicentennial year of 1989 (when the story takes place); and the events that unfolded in the city during World War II. How did you become interested in Paris, specifically during these two time periods?

When I start writing, I seldom set out with a place and time in mind. I’m usually transfixed by an image, or an overheard snatch of conversation, and then follow that wherever it takes me. I’ve been in love with Paris for a very long time, and when I began Haunting Paris, I quickly discovered that just as the City of Light has its own dark shadows, so France also sometimes falls short of its tripartite promise of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (Freedom, Equality, Fraternity). It seemed natural to link the bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution, where that inspiring motto originated, with a time when that promise was broken. So, 1989 and 1942 became two of the anchoring dates for the story.

The book focuses on the love story between main characters Julien (a married, Jewish psychiatrist) and Sylvie, (a pianist who is 24 years his junior and stirs him to reconsider his priorities in life). What brings these two together, and what makes their love “work” in this story?

What makes love work between any two people is one of the great mysteries of life. As Sylvie herself reflects, other people’s marriages are unknowable to outsiders. But it’s clear that despite his best intentions, Julien falls in love with Sylvie precisely because of what he feels is missing in his “perfect” marriage: her compassion and her courage. And one of the things that brings them together, time and again, is their shared love of music.

It was after Julien’s death that he becomes a “revenant” who watches over Sylvie. Explain the meaning of that word, especially as it relates to his role in this story.

Behind the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, just beside the Seine, is an underground memorial to those who were deported during the dark days of the Nazi occupation of the city. On the floor, a bronze circle is chiseled with the words: “They went to the other end of the earth and they did not return.”

The end of the earth, the final threshold from which the absent never return. Or do they? My hair rose as I recalled the French word for ghost: revenant, one who returns. So, this is a ghost story, but the ghost is not frightening at all; on the contrary, he is drawn back by love.

Sylvie grieves deeply after Julien’s death, but eventually begins to put her life back together after she finds a mysterious letter in his private desk. Could you give readers a brief explanation of what she finds in that desk and how it helps her deal with her loss?

When Sylvie accidentally dislodges some papers hidden in a secret drawer, at first she is reluctant to follow up the discovery and also hurt that Julien has concealed something from her.

There’s something so mysterious, so uncanny, when you come across a secret–a letter in this instance–that is not meant for your eyes, and the only person you can ask about it can no longer speak to you. But then she wonders if she was meant to find it, and that fateful discovery sets her off on a quest that leads her deep into the secrets of Julien’s past and sheds new light on his character and on the city they both called home.

What is your next writing project that readers can look forward to?

I’m working on another novel and I can’t tell what it is until it’s finished, except to say that once again I’m transfixed by certain images and certain voices, and they are leading me to a completely different time and place from Haunting Paris.

Signed copies of Haunting Paris are still available at Lemuria’s online store.

Extending the Narrative: David Blight’s ‘Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Peace’

By Jamie

On June 25, 2019

In African-American, Biography/Memoir, History

I’ve read and taught Frederick Douglass’ first autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, for years, so when I saw David Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Peace, I was intrigued. Douglass’ Narrative covers just a sliver of his life, but it does so with intensity and purpose—namely, to help Americans in 1845 see and vicariously experience the horrors endured by enslaved people in America.

Blight’s biography, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in History, offers a similar intensity, but pulls the camera back to offer a wider-angle view. We are greeted with the larger political and social contexts through which Douglass’ life flowed, yet Blight’s writing never looses its focus on Douglass’ own experiences. Showing these intersections between national history and Douglass’ personal history allows Blight to muse on how Douglass’ writing and activism affected the American abolitionist movements, and how the various gears of those movements affected Douglass personally.

The book does a fantastic job of both lionizing Douglass, with quoted, researched descriptions of his wildly popular speeches, and humanizing the man by showing us his personal struggles with family and dear friends. Especially heartbreaking is the deterioration of the friendship between Douglass and abolitionist stalwart William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison was the first major abolitionist figure to recognize Douglass’ genius. Garrison thrust Douglass to the forefront and encouraged him to use his story as a weapon against those who deemed slavery just. Both men valued each others’ opinions and held the other in high esteem. Yet ego and ambition (from both men, honestly) eroded their relationship into one of petty bitterness.

Blight’s biography does what all great biographies do: it gives insight into the character, showing complexities beyond the blurbs in history books. And while Blight’s tome is a thick one (760 pages of narration, with an additional 100 of end-notes) the detail with which he tells Douglass’ story doesn’t get bogged down in useless minutia. His writing is lively and thorough at the same time—a true rarity.

Page 8 of 257

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Selfish Reading: ‘The Most Fun We Ever Had’ by Claire Lombardo

Author Q & A with Luke Lampton and Karen Evers

Love, American Style: ‘Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory’ by Raphael Bob-Waksberg

Author Q & A with Mamta Chaudhry

Extending the Narrative: David Blight’s ‘Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Peace’

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