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By Seetha Srinivasan. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 23)

In the end a lifetime is not enough, the heart yearns for more. Who can reason with desire? The heart has its reasons that reason cannot know.

One day Sylvie will push open that curtained door to come to me, and despite all that I have known, at the sight of her I will finally believe that all losses are restored and sorrows end.

These words of Julien, the spectral protagonist of Mamta Chaudhry’s Haunting Paris, begin and conclude the novel, the crux of which is the story of the Jewish psychologist Julien and his lover, music teacher Sylvie. Haunting Paris is set in 1989 and recounts Sylvie’s search for Julien’s sister Clara’s daughter who vanished in war-time Paris. Clara and another daughter perished in the Holocaust. Julien, wracked with guilt for not being able to save his sister and her family, is convinced that one of his nieces is alive and spent years searching for her. After his death, a chance find of a letter impels Sylvie to continue Julien’s quest.

This is the barest outline of the plot. Like all fine fiction, it is in its unfolding that Haunting Paris captivates.

We witness the romance of the upper-class married Julien and his sensitive lover Sylvie, the lives of his children and his wife Isabelle (who will not give up Julien), Sylvie’s discovery of the letter that allows her to trace the lives of Clara and her daughters, and the fortuitous encounter that brings their story full circle.

Chaudhry narrates with sensitive attention the lives of her main characters and brings the same skill to drawing portraits of her entire cast, among them: the kindly concierge Ana Caravalho, sisters Marie and Mathilde who protect Clara and her daughters only to unwittingly betray them, and Sylvie’s American lodgers Alice and Will with their experiences of life in Paris.

The novel moves easily between its setting during celebrations of the bicentennial of the Revolution and the horrors of war-time Paris and Nazi atrocities. Chaudhry’s ability to sustain this structure even as she risks having a ghostly narrator is impressive.

The city seems almost a character in itself, and Chaudhry’s evocation of Paris is superb. Her ability to render telling details and convey the sights, sounds, and the very texture of life puts the reader at its center. Those who know Paris will revel in this marvelous re-creation; those who do not will finish the novel wishing to visit.

It is primarily through Julien’s eyes that we view Paris and its history. “But when the Bastille fell into their hands, they discovered half-a-dozen prisoners in the fortress, seven to be precise, and the faces of the freed men gaped at their jailer’s severed head, both wearing identical expressions of astonishment at this shift of power from the grasp of kings into the hands of the people.”

On the Eiffel Tower: “I admire the way its sequined lights shine like early stars in the dark, the filigreed ironwork making it seem to float weightlessly, for all its substance, an inspired emblem for the city of light—in both senses of the word—not just luminosity but also lightness, which we prize above all, in wit, in art, in life.”

Haunting Paris, with its complex and intriguing structure, carefully researched historical details woven with adroit and meticulous care into the narrative, deeply sympathetic characters whose story moves between mysteries of past and present showing the myriad ways in which the past never loses its hold, is indeed, as Kirkus noted: “an elegant debut.” It is also an absorbing must-read.

Seetha Srinivasan is the director emerita of the University Press of Mississippi.

Mamta Chaudhry will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, June 26, at 5:00 p.m. in a joint event with Alex Ohlin (author Dual Citizens) to sign and discuss Haunting Paris.

Author Q & A with Chanelle Benz

By Guest Author

On June 23, 2019

In Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 23)

Born in London and growing up in points around the U.S., Chanelle Benz wound up discovering the Mississippi Delta–which would become the setting for her new novel The Gone Dead–when her husband’s educational path brought them to the University of Southern Mississippi for his studies.

In this evocative story of a young woman who returns to the Delta to answer questions about her past, Benz takes readers inside the unexpected darkness that drew main character Billie James back to her hometown, even as she finds her life in danger.

Benz’s short stories in have appeared in Guernica, Granta, Electric Literature, The American Reader, Fence and The Cupboard; and she is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. Her story collection The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead was named a Best Book of 2017 by the San Francisco Chronicle and was longlisted for the 2018 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Story Prize.

She earned a BFA in acting from Boston University and a master’s in creative writing from Syracuse University. Today she lives in Memphis where she teaches at Rhodes College.

Please tell me about your connection to Mississippi and your time exploring the state. How did this experience inform your depiction of your Southern characters, the fictional town of Greendale and the historical events behind The Gone Dead?

Chanelle Benz

I lived for almost two years in Hattiesburg, where my husband was getting his PhD. Whenever I was feeling restless, I would drive out to whatever town with any sort of interesting history: Clarksdale, Natchez, Vicksburg, Greenwood, Glendora, Yazoo City, Money, Oxford. I kept being drawn back to the Delta and its lush, wounded, storied landscapes. Being there, I understood this country in a way I never had before. How intimately the ache of our racial past is bound up in the present moment. This is a country founded on, built on slavery, and without a true reckoning of that brutal legacy there can be no true reconciliation. I was also surprised by the people I encountered–their rootedness, deep devotion to family, their sense of gratitude and faith, and of course, the master storytellers.

When I think about the haunted quality of the Delta, I think about voices in the air: the longing of the blues, civil rights era speeches, the voices within and calling across the racial and economic disparity. But most of all I was haunted by the voices that have been omitted, forgotten, or silenced, by the long list of names of civil rights era murders whose families have never had anything approaching justice or acknowledgement, although in many cases they know who did it. For so long those families have suffered under that loss and indignity, while the perpetrators and their families have controlled the narrative.

The main character of The Gone Dead is 34 (turning 35)-year-old Billie, who returns to the Mississippi Delta from Philadelphia, Pa., to search for answers about her poet father’s death 30 years previous. She was the only child of her white mother and black father, both activists, and both now deceased. During her short stay in Greendale, she reconnects with extended family and experiences flashes of happy memories, along with suspicion, fear, racism, violence, and more than a few surprises, including an unexpected romance. Why is she on this mission now, and why is it so important to her?

Ever since I was a little girl, it was a joke that whenever someone had been looking for my Great Aunt Aggie back in Ireland, they would say to my grandmother, “Go and get your sister Aggie before she throws herself in the river.” Or some other act equally as suicidal. As an adult, I thought wait a minute—what the hell is wrong with Aggie and why is everyone so cavalier about her deep depression? There’s a story there.

Being back in her father’s house as an adult, Billie realizes what a fragmentary and inadequate story she’s been told about what happened to her father–and herself–during that early but consequential part of her childhood.

The mix of characters in The Gone Dead creates a “perfect storm” of puzzle pieces that both taunt and support Billie as she unravels the truth of what really happened to her father. These include a scholar, a land owner, a love interest, a former Klan member, a mother who devoted her intellectual pursuits to medieval studies, a former girlfriend of her father’s (while he was married to her mother), a lovable dog–and an uncle with way too many secrets. How did you develop so many rich characters while threading the details of this story together?

I don’t think that the book really came together until I realized that it wasn’t just Billie’s story, that it was communal, and there are things which she as outsider will never know and only these other voices can tell us. Most of us like to think that we are or would be on the right side of history, but the truth is that in another time under another set of circumstances, we might not. I wanted to overturn my initial biases about who some of these characters might be, where their voices were coming from, and try to channel the story they are telling themselves about themselves that lets them do what they did.

Much of your previous writing (short stories) has included story plots set in a considerable variety of places and times. Do you find it difficult to embrace so many different cultures and time periods to present such a wide range of narratives? And does your training and talent in both acting and writing merge here to make this task easier?

It’s what I like to do best. In acting, you’re taught that it’s all within you, you just have to find that splinter and enlarge it. I love research, I love history, and I’m interested in counter-narratives. I am not particularly interested in writing about myself or my life. Typically, I like to begin far from myself, in worlds I’m curious about, though inevitably my own preoccupations show up.

Did you find things about Mississippi and its people during your stay here that you found encouraging?

Well, there were times in Mississippi where I felt claustrophobic and worn down witnessing the oppressive systems and stagnation that traps people in poverty, and times when I felt humbled by and in awe of the richness of its literary culture, and the intrepid generosity and resilience of so many of its people.

For me, what this country has tried to deny or forget is pretty visible in Mississippi–the pernicious mythology of the Lost Cause, the white backlash after Reconstruction and desegregation, what bodies carry when they do not get to heal from inter-generational trauma–things that are true in every other state but in Mississippi are more out in the open.

But if you believe in redemption or miracles or positive change, it has happened in Mississippi, brought about by Mississippians with everything to lose, and maybe it is the epicenter of where it will happen again.

Any chance you may have other stories set in Mississippi?

Of course–I have so much more to learn.

Chanelle Benz will appear as a panelist at the Mississippi Book Festival on the grounds of the State Capitol in Jackson on August 17.

From Massachusetts to Mississippi in Tammy Turner’s ‘Dick Waterman: A Life in Blues’

By Guest Author

On June 17, 2019

In Biography/Memoir, Blues, Music

By DeMatt Harkins. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 19)

In simply stating, “anyplace they give you food through iron bars is going to be good food,” Dick Waterman encapsulates himself. Tammy L. Turner’s Dick Waterman, A Life in Blues demonstrates his belief in getting the most of life. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

A member of the Blues Hall of Fame, Waterman managed, booked, and/or photographed essentially the entire Delta Blues revival as well as the electric blues apex of the 60s. Who else could write B.B. King’s biography, introduce unreleased Robert Johnson tracks to Eric Clapton, or receive an apology from Bill Graham? Guided by his level head and committed heart, Dick made many allies and musical history.

As a young stutterer in Massachusetts, Waterman found full expression in the written word. His Boston University journalism degree initially landed him sports and financial assignments near Greenwich Village and Cambridge. Dick bore witness to each areas’ historic folk explosion.

The heady minimalism tangentially included Delta Blues. A dialed-in segment became keenly interested in the solo acoustic blues artists of the 20s and 30s. When it came to light that certain members of the anointed may still be living, the quest was on.

Waterman supplemented his early career by freelancing music features and part-timing with the agency handling the rediscovered Rev. Gary Davis and Jesse Fuller. Based on hearsay, he backed into his life’s work.

During a Boston stint in ‘64, someone heard Bukka White say that Ma Rainey saw Son House at a Memphis movie theater recently. Contemporary of Charley Patton and Robert Johnson, Son House stood prominent among the original guard. The notion he was alive created urgency.

Eschewing foresight, Waterman, a computer programmer, a future guitarist of Canned Heat, and the eventual owner of Yazoo Records and Blue Goose Records, all jumped in a Beetle headed for Memphis.

A week roving Memphis and Tunica County produced a phone number. House’s stepdaughter in Detroit explained he’s been living in Rochester, NY for years. They got back in the car.

Upon arrival, they had no problem meeting and field-recording House. But while others in the party felt satisfied, Dick wondered what would become of him. Where’s the recognition? He used those tapes to secure a booking at that year’s Newport Folk Festival.

Equipped with this vested mindset, Waterman’s reputation among promoters and artists organically accumulated a staggering list of legendary clients and partners. They included Mississippi John Hurt, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Skip James, Robert Pete Williams, Little Walter, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, Arthur Big Boy Crudup, J.B. Hutto, and Lightnin’ Hopkins.

Although some artists leaned brazen, many proved incredibly vulnerable. Dick deftly advocated for appropriate appearance fees, realistic travel schedules, and overdue royalties for decades.

When these artists traveled to Boston, they stayed at Waterman’s apartment. On one occasion, a friend arrived to visit Son House. He brought a Radcliffe student named Bonnie Raitt. When Buddy Guy and Junior Wells played support on The Rolling Stones’ 1970 European tour, Dick asked Bonnie to join him. She would never register for another semester. Their romantic relationship would evolve to a strictly professional one, and Waterman booked Raitt’s gigs through the mid-80s.

Over the years, talent rosters dwindled, and the music landscape changed. In 1984, Bill Ferris, then Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss, invited his old friend Dick to present his photos at a brown bag lecture. They first met when Bill was in grad school at Penn.

Within two years, Waterman moved to Oxford for a fresh start and a return to his roots. He dabbled in promotion, scored a weekly column with the Oxford Eagle, pulled out his cameras for the first time in 20 years, and began marketing his classic shots. Today, Dick still calls The Velvet Ditch his home.

By interweaving primary source and narrative, Turner recounts Waterman’s incredible achievements and hilarious horror stories and, in every case, exhibiting how his conscientiousness benefited the perpetuation and documentation of American music.

DeMatt Harkins of Jackson enjoys flipping pancakes and records with his wife and daughter.

Tammy Tuner will be at Lemuria on Saturday, June 22, at 2:00 p.m. to sign copies of Dick Waterman: A Life in Blues.

Author Q & A with Tammy L. Turner

By Guest Author

On June 16, 2019

In Biography/Memoir, Blues, Music

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 16)

It was about a decade after music professor Tammy L. Turner met blues promoter/producer Dick Waterman in a class at Ole Miss that she came to realize “he had an important story that needed to be told,” and she has captured his extraordinary career in the memoir, Dick Waterman: A Life in the Blues (University Press of Mississippi).

Born in 1935 into an affluent Jewish family in Massachusetts, Waterman began his career in the 1950s as a journalist, honing his skills as a writer and photographer. It was his interest in the folk music of Greenwich Village and Cambridge in the 1960s that would lead him to a position as a music promoter in Boston, which eventually brought him to his “calling in life” with his pursuit of Mississippi Delta Blues artist Son House.

Waterman’s significant influence on decades of American music became evident in the careers of many big names in the music industry, in a variety of genres. Today he lives in Oxford, retired but “still busy.”

Turner resides in Kentucky, where she teaches a variety of university courses in music history. She is especially interested in 20th century music, including blues, jazz, rock, and classical music.

You hold a doctoral degree in music history from the University of Mississippi. Tell me about how you became interested in music–specifically blues music, and Dick Waterman in particular.

I had little exposure to blues music until I took Dr. Warren Steel’s African American musical traditions class at Ole Miss. It was in this class that I also met Dick. He was a guest at one of our class meetings and brought with him a number of his iconic black and white photographs from the 1960s, including a number of the early blues artists with whom he had worked.

Your research for this book is evident in the details, conversations, and interviews you reveal. How long have you known Waterman, and when did you realize his story should be published as a book?

Tammy Turner

Although I met Dick over two decades ago when he was a guest in our class, I did not have an opportunity to converse with him that day. I had classes of my own to teach and left immediately after the class ended. I graduated with my degree a couple of years later and moved away from Oxford.

As I continued my university teaching career, I eventually taught courses in both jazz and rock ‘n’ roll history. Blues music is a component in both courses, so I began to study blues more intently. I remembered Dick and his photos and, over the years, regretted missing such an excellent opportunity to talk with him about his work. In 2011, I traveled to Mississippi to do some blues research and was able to reconnect with him and we spent a delightful afternoon discussing his career.

Through a series of events, I helped arrange a photo exhibition and lecture for him in western Kentucky, where I reside. I enjoyed working with him and felt he had an important story that needed to be told. I approached him with the idea, and, after some consideration, he was amenable to the idea and granted me full access to the details of his life and his archives.

Waterman’s career in blues really began with his journey with Nick Perls and Phil Spiro into the Mississippi Delta in 1964 at the height of the Civil Rights movement to find bluesman Son House, who had faded into obscurity two decades prior. What did this lead to?

They found House, but not in Mississippi. Through contacts they made in Mississippi, they learned he was living in Rochester and drove there to meet him. In meeting House, Dick found a mission. It was in finding Son House that he found his calling and began his career in blues booking and management.

What would you say Waterman accomplished in the blues world (and other music genres)?

Dick played such a critical role in 20th century blues history. He was one of the three men who rediscovered Son House. Due to his tireless efforts, House came out of retirement for approximately 10 years and recorded an album with Columbia Records.

In June 1965, Dick founded Avalon Productions, which was the only agency at the time devoted solely to representing African American blues artists. He helped book some of the most important blues festivals of the 1960s and ‘70s, including the 1969 and 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festivals, and he helped establish others.

He worked with several older bluesmen to reignite their careers, including Mississippi Fred McDowell, Skip James, Robert Pete Williams as well as others. He discovered a young singer/guitarist named Bonnie Raitt and assisted her career. He also convinced Buddy Guy to leave his day job as a mechanic in Chicago to pursue music as a full-time career. Musicians trusted him to handle their careers because he earned a reputation for honesty and integrity.

Waterman has left his mark on America’s musical history as a promoter and manager for artists who included many big blues names–and some of the biggest rock and other performers in the world, including James Taylor, Bruce Springsteen, and many others. What would you say drove him, and continues to drive him, to become such an important influencer in American music?

Dick inherited a tremendous work ethic from his father, who was a medical doctor. He also has a staunch sense of fairness and both a willingness and determination to advocate for others, especially those who are not in a position to advocate for themselves. It was never his goal to become famous, but to protect the older blues artists from exploitation, to demand competitive compensation for their work, and fight for royalties that some of them were being denied.

Today, Waterman lives in Oxford, where he moved in the mid-‘80s. What is he doing today?

Dick is retired, but still active. After a few decades away from photography, he returned to photographing musicians in the 1990s. In 2003 he published a book of his most iconic works titled Between Midnight and Day: The Last Unpublished Blues Archives and in 2006 wrote the text for The B.B. King Treasures book. He sells his photos, both new and old, at his website dickwaterman.com. He still receives requests for photo exhibitions/lectures and as a guest speaker discussing his work in the blues at various events and classes.

Tammy Tuner will be at Lemuria on Saturday, June 22, at 2:00 p.m. to sign copies of Dick Waterman: A Life in Blues.

Print the Legend: ‘All the Way’ by Joe Namath

By Former Lemurians

On June 12, 2019

In Biography/Memoir, Celebrity, Sports

by Andrew Hedglin

Once upon a time, I used to be a history teacher. I tried to impress upon my students that when we talked about giants of history–Martin Luther, Napoleon, Isaac Newton, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, etc.–that we were using them as shorthand for even bigger ideas. Genius is fine as far as it goes, but the most important human developments are products of collaboration. Few people will ever be giants, and to endlessly study biography for hints on whatever separates these titans from men–we have dozens of volumes on Winston Churchill alone here at Lemuria–might be missing the point.

What was going to talk about here? Oh, yes. Joe Namath. Joe Willie. Broadway Joe. And, specifically, his new memoir, All the Way: My Life in Four Quarters.

Joe Namath has some of the most baffling statistics of any quarterback elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. For his career, he threw more interceptions than touchdowns. Although he was, for the most part, a very good quarterback, especially by the standards of his era, what makes him a legend?

Joe Namath is shorthand for a bigger idea.

Namath smartly structures the book around a recounting of Super Bowl III, where his upstart AFL New York Jets defeated the powerhouse NFL Baltimore Colts, 16-7, beating no less than legends in Johnny Unitas and Don Shula in the process. The win legitimized the new league, proving that the teams of each league, which had been united in a recent merger, could be on equal footing on any given Sunday.

Joe Namath doesn’t talk about this game because it was his finest moment personally–he didn’t throw a touchdown in the game–but because he knows it is what people want to hear about from him. The actual game had its own heroes–runningback Matt Snell and cornerback Johnny Sample, but Joe Namath remains the enduring image–the guarantee, the index finger pointed skyward as he heads victoriously back into the tunnel.

Namath knows what the reader wants to hear about, but in return, he has his own things that he wants to talk about, including a plethora of adolescent tales set in his hometown of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. He throws in a fair amount of story from his playing days at Alabama under Bear Bryant. He reserves most of his privacy for his post-playing days, although his often dotes on his daughters and explains the drunken incident with Suzy Kolber at a 2003 Jets game.

Overall, Namath seems like a pretty good guy, and his co-writers Sean Mortimer and Don Yaeger help guide the story into a very readable format, even if does (charmingly, for my money) meander all over the place. Seeing a man become a legend is fun, sure, but stripping away the legend to see the humanity underneath is always the most fascinating part to me.

Signed first editions of Joe Namath’s All the Way: My Life in Four Quarters are currently available at Lemuria’s online store.

Author Q & A with Wright Thompson

By Guest Author

On June 9, 2019

In Sports

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 9)

Oxford resident and ESPN Magazine senior writer Wright Thompson shares 14 essays (chosen from years of examining the inner lives of sports figures) in his new book The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business.

But Thompson doesn’t just “cover sports.” His is more a literary style that frames the athletes he writes about in a light most have never seen cast on these figures: the struggles, the hopes, the disappointments, and oftentimes the personal failures of men and women who know firsthand the high cost required to make it to the top – and attempt to stay there. Included are the stories of Michael Jordan, Bear Bryant, Ted Williams, and others who know the pain and joy of success in sports at its highest levels. Thompson ends the book with a memoir of his late father and his personal longings to honor his dad’s memory.

The Clarksdale native began writing about sports for his hometown newspaper while in high school, and he went on to the University of Missouri in Columbia to study journalism. Wright would write for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans and The Kansas City Star (where he covered Super Bowls, Final Fours, The Masters and the Kentucky Derby) before joining the ESPN staff in 2006.

Tell me about how you became interested in sports and sports writing, especially “literary” sports writing.

Wright Thompson

I became interested in sports because both my mother, Mary, and my father, Walter, loved sports; they both loved football and my mom is obsessed with basketball. For her last big milestone birthday, I took her to games one through four of the NBA Finals.

I became interested in literature because my mother was an English and creative writing teacher and because I grew up in a house filled with books. We had a room in our house we called the library because it was floor to ceiling bookshelves, and I lived on those shelves. I read Dylan Thomas and Thomas Merton and C.S. Lewis and Willie Morris and on and on and on. My working life started in that front room with the great light through the old glass windows.

The Cost of These Dreams is a compilation of 14 essays you’ve written during your career with ESPN Magazine. Please tell me how the book came about, and why.

The short answer is that I wanted to see how these separate pieces, often separated by years, fit together. The long answer has to do with money and ego. Let’s go with the short answer!

You’ve seen firsthand how fame has affected well-known athletes. What do believe is the biggest challenge they face as their popularity grows?

I would say that whether someone is famous (or not) has basically no bearing on their interior life, on their hopes and dreams, while their fame is the single most important and difficult-to- navigate part of their exterior life. This almost inevitably leads to a growing chasm between how they see themselves and how they are seen, and the real risk then is to avoid, as John Updike said, the mask eating the face.

You make an interesting statement in the book’s preface when you say you are using its platform to make a “public vow. . . that (you) will learn from the people (you are) writing about.” Please explain why it was important for you to announce that to your readers.

The main thing I wanted the preface to do was explain how these stories fit together, and what the journey of making them felt like from the inside. I get to spend a lot of time up close and personal with the most driven, successful people on the planet, and I see which of their decisions they are content with, and which ones haunt them; there is no excuse if I am not going to school on their successes and failures.

The last story in the book (titled “Holy Ground”) is an homage to your father and your relationship with him. Tell us about this piece.

It’s a story about my late father, Walter Thompson, from Bentonia. The specifics of the story are about our shared love of watching golf and my regrets over not understanding that time is limited and fleeting and slipping through our fingers every day.

I go to Bentonia sometimes, to see the house where he grew up, and visit the White Front; recently I walked the old football field where he used to play, which is now abandoned, and I tried to imagine a young man there, with his family in the stands, and standing on that grass I wondered what of that young man remains in this place and what lives inside me and what is gone forever. That’s what the story is about. That search.

Briefly, tell me about the thought-provoking title of your book.

It’s a lyric from a Drive-By Truckers song I really like, one that has always moved me more than the collection of words suggested it should. I don’t know why it hit me like that. To me, the title is about the shared price everyone who wants something desperately and at the expense of other things in their life will pay for that dream, should they be one of the rare lucky few to actually reach it.

Wright Thompson will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, June 18, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss The Cost of These Dreams.

Saying and hearing in Ocean Vuong’s ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’

By Former Lemurians

On June 4, 2019

In Fiction, Foreign Fiction

by Norris Rettiger

As a bookseller, there’s a lot of motivation to say that a book won’t hurt you. That it won’t make you uncomfortable or give you the sense that you’re running your eyes along something that was never meant for you. But if I told you Ocean Vuong’s novel debut On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous wasn’t going to cut deep and draw blood, wasn’t going to push you away and make you cry, wasn’t going to get under your skin and find its way into your brain, then I wouldn’t be telling you the truth. There’s a moment in the book where Vuong’s stand-in character “Little Dog” has a conversation with his mother and comes to realize that they were “exchanging truths, which is to say… cutting each other.” If there’s room on your heart for another gash or two, this book has truths to exchange.

Casting off the textbook “conflict-driven” narrative, Vuong’s words cascade over the story of a mother and a son and an immigrant family and the brief beauty of so many things that never get to stay beautiful. In equal parts, it is a loving portrait of men and women and a shockingly blunt attack on the culture they were forced to live in. The bottomless poetry of Vuong’s writing paired with such a soulful story will make you forget the word “plot” exists, drawing you completely into this new way of seeing, of breathing, of bleeding. But it won’t let you be comfortable, because this is a book written by and for young queer Vietnamese-Americans. Vuong is clear about that. And so there’s a constant contradiction that gives the book such elasticity and nuance—the words will immerse you completely, or, it will seem like they do, but really the book cannot help but hold us at arm’s length. Even though the idea of a book communicating something is deemed important by most literary critics, that’s not Vuong’s goal here.

The book is narrated as a letter, but it is not like most epistolary novels: the narrator, Little Dog, is writing to his mother, and she is illiterate. “The very impossibility of your reading this is all that makes my writing possible,” he says. For those of us who can read, and perhaps even do read very frequently, it can be hard to run into a book that so completely believes that we cannot understand it: that it isn’t for us. We say, “no, Vuong, you are wrong, this book is not just for young queer Vietnamese-Americans, that cannot be true, every book is for everyone.” But in that moment we display our ignorance of the fact that this still isn’t about us. Near to the end of the book, the narrator closes a paragraph with a heartbreaking line: “I am worried they will get us before they get us.”

It is not so much about communication as it is about the barriers to that communication. There is so much here in this book; so many specifics that are conveyed with the knowledge that they really can’t be truly understood. There’s a frustration with language and a reaching for the poetry that transcends, while also recognizing that transcendence is really just nothingness. And nowadays, nothingness is a dangerous void that fills rapidly with the ugliness and the divisive rhetoric that enslaves the minds of millions. Ocean Vuong leaves no voids, attempts no grandness, and leaves behind only the cipher of a life—symbols on a page in a book in a hand on the earth in this particular moment. And that’s not nothing. That’s something—and that’s the thing that matters the most.

And so, as a bookseller, I have a problem with communication, too. I can’t tell you how you’re going to react to this book, and I can’t even adequately and reasonably express my own experience with it. But that’s okay. Because it’s not always about communication. Sometimes things just need to be said, and sometimes it works out that the thing that’s said is heard by someone, and sometimes that thing gets heard in a way that makes it understood more than it was before. Maybe not by much, but maybe by a little, and that little bit finds itself remembered. And that remembering turns that understanding into a memory and memory might, someday, give us a second chance—Vuong writes obsessively about second chances. Because second chances are the opportunity to remember, to allow ourselves to learn.

And there is something in it for us, the people who this book “isn’t for.” There’s a reason to dive in and take the shock and pain with gritted teeth and open heart—because every second spent reading this book will be a chance for us to become more, to become more human, to become more “us.”

Signed first editions of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous are currently available at Lemuria’s online store.

‘Life Between the Levees’ unleashes powerful legacy of American river commerce

By Guest Author

On June 3, 2019

In Southern Culture, Southern History

By Lovejoy Boteler. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 2)

One summer in my twenties I worked as a deckhand on the Greenville, a towboat that plied the upper Mississippi River from Alton, Illinois to Davenport, Iowa. In that short span of time I came to understand the tremendous power of the river and the importance of its commerce. Melody Golding’s superb book, Life Between the Levees: America’s Riverboat Pilots, with its countless tales of adventure and antics on “brown water” transported me straight back to that time.

Golding is uniquely qualified to have compiled Life Between the Levees. She states in the first line of the introduction, “I come from a river family.” With that simple but powerful statement, she hints at the soul of the river as it can only be revealed by the folks who have an intimate connection with that life. Her deep love for the river comes through, and must have fueled her passion to create this comprehensive work. She has given us a book with beautiful documentary photographs, both personal and archival, and authentic stories told by colorful characters, many of whom she has known.

For ten years, with single-minded purpose, Golding of Vicksburg traveled thousands of miles on the Mississippi and its inland waterways to record over one hundred voices and stories of brown water mariners: steely-eyed captains, pilots, deckhands, cooks, and chaplains, some of whom have now passed from the scene. Her interviews reveal events that occurred over a seventy-year span of time. Older captains who were trained by the legendary pilots of the great paddle wheelers of the nineteenth century provide poignant, provocative and sometimes hilarious insights. Life Between the Levees: America’s Riverboat Pilots captures a slice of history that is destined to become an important and lasting part of American folklore.

Sometime the call of the river came at an early age. Joy Mary Manthey, from Louisiana, remembers steering a towboat as a young girl. “I had to stand on the milk crate to see over the wheel, and I steered the boat. I loved it. I mean…I was only ten years old.” After some interesting life adventures, Joy Mary became a nun, and then a towboat chaplain.

Perry Wolfe remembered his first experience on the river as a young boy. His dad called him “his first mate.” He slept on sandbars. Perry soon realized that his life would forever be on the river. He would eventually become a deckhand with Brent Towing, out of Greenville and talked about how life on the river was in the old days. “Actually up there at Lock 26, it was more wild than Natchez Under the Hill … being a captain back then was a lot harder because you had to referee all the fights.”

Captain William Torner, on old-timer, recalled the steamboats of yesteryear. “I am one of the few river men still living who has worked on a steamboat built in the 1800s”. In 1940 Captain Torner worked on the Reliance out of Pittsburgh.

The Mississippi River and its tributaries have influenced the shape of the collective psyche of America through Mark Twain’s tales of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and now with Melody Golding’s seminal book, the voices of modern-day captains and crews.

The river is a place where a person can find peace. Patrick Soileau, thirty years on the waterways summed it up. “…it’s your time for solitude…I could probably solve the world’s problems up here.”
In Life Between the Levees: America’s Riverboat Pilots, through captivating interviews, Melody Golding chronicles stories of hope and pathos, friendship and sometimes disaster, away from the bustling world of landlubbers. Life Between the Levees is a book to be savored and enjoyed for years to come.

Lovejoy Boteler is author of Crooked Snake: The Life and Crimes of Albert Lepard published by University Press of Mississippi. He lives in Jackson.

Melody Golding will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “Mississippi: The Delta” panel at 9:30 a.m. at the State Capitol Room 201 A.

Author Q & A with Michael Ford

By Guest Author

On June 2, 2019

In Photography, Southern Culture, Southern History

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 2)

Pennsylvania native Michael Ford will tell you that his “snap decision” nearly 50 years ago–to ditch a dream job offer in Massachusetts, uproot his family, and move to Oxford, Miss. to pursue a hunch–turned out to be the best decision he ever made, as he launched his dreams that would ignite a successful and fulfilling career.

Now a filmmaker in Washington, D.C., Ford’s photo essays in his new book North Mississippi Homeplace: Photographs and Folklife (University of Georgia Press) reveal his passionate reverence for the area he has come to call his “homeplace.”

The unique volume contains only two chapters: one about moving to rural Mississippi and living in Oxford from 1972 to 1975; and the other explaining what brought him back multiple times four decades later. It includes scores of color photos taken during both periods. Ford notes that all these images–taken decades apart–invariably settled into three main themes: the land, the light and the people.

The materials he recorded for the documentary film he produced during his Mississippi stay are now archived in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress as The Michael Ford Mississippi Collection.

During your first trip to visit in-laws in Oxford in December 1971, you made a quick decision to leave a secure teaching position at Boston’s Emerson College and move to Oxford with the idea of making a documentary film. Explain how this came about.

Michael Ford

I was working on my thesis film for my master’s program in film at Boston University. We had to design a master’s project and I had considered something about rural America, maybe in Vermont or New Hampshire.

When I began exploring the land (around the outskirts of Oxford) during that Christmas break, I had no reference for what I saw–the remoteness, the country shacks, the hogs’ legs hoisted in tree branches for gutting. I had studied (photography history) and I knew things like this shouldn’t exist in America anymore. I had done hard news for two years, and I knew there was a story here.

So, four months later, here I was, a Yankee, driving into Mississippi in an old VW bus with a peace sign on it and New York plates. I was just beginning to figure out that everyone might not like us so much. I began settling in with a deep immersion into the Mississippi hill country. I started reading Faulkner. I spent maybe six months driving and talking to people, getting a cold drink, and sometimes taking their pictures.

My number one anchor to the community was (Oxford blacksmith) Mr. (Morgan Randolph) Hall, who hired me as his apprentice. Number two was Hal Waldrip, who owned and ran an archaic general store in Chulahoma, Miss. He saw himself as one of the “keepers of the lore.” He told me, “I could fix this store up. I could add air conditioning and heat and clean it up. But it would lose some of the atmosphere.”

There were others–Doc Jones, who sold molasses at Waldrip’s store; AG Newson, who actually made the molasses with the help of his mules, Frank and Jake.
These were the people I found. They found me. They were important because they were all preserving this last flash of old times.

Tell me what you discovered about Mississippi–and yourself–as you began to capture the images in your book.

I had no idea this kind of life still existed in the U.S. anymore. I was making an independent documentary. You couldn’t make any preconceived ideas about where it was going. It designed itself. You can shape and interpret it, but you can’t invent it.

I realized that in a concrete sense when it came time to write it. It was the essence of the documentary–the experiences of the intuitive or spiritual side of life–that I wanted to share.

So, one of the things I had to learn as a documentarian was to shut up, that is, shut up the (analytical) left side of the brain, so the (creative) right side can do what it needs to do. I learned over the years that the best situation I could ask for was to shoot something and say, “I got it!” You just know. Words define a thing, but a photograph speaks for itself.

You write that your return visits to Mississippi in 2013-2015 were initially driven by nostalgia and curiosity. How did these trips of new discovery turn out?

What really sparked it were several things that came together at once. My grown daughter, who was a baby when we moved to Oxford, was insisting I do something with my film and audiotapes from Mississippi before I “croaked,” in her words; and technology had advanced to a point that I could do much of the work myself. That stuff had sat for 40 years in cans and boxes in my closets–not forgotten, but definitely ignored.

While reviewing old audio tapes, I listened to a recording of Mr. Hall talking to me. Out of nostalgia I Googled his name and (wound up getting) in touch with Andy Waller, an apprentice of Mr. Hall’s after I left Oxford. Andy had bought Mr. Hall out when he retired.

(That conversation) convinced me there was no doubt it was time to return . . . That was in April 2013. I’ve been back another half dozen times since then.

What I discovered was that it was different. The country people were gone, especially the older people. The sense of community had diminished. Today, even as far out as you can go in the country, you have can have a TV satellite and the internet. Having a place where people get together is difficult. There is not a downtown in most of these communities anymore.

The old way of life was mostly gone forever.

What did you ultimately learn from this whole unique experience, and how has it affected your life and career?

Two answers: one would be “everything.” It has affected everything. I lived where I’ve lived and done what I’ve done all because of it. I started my own film production company, Yellow Cat Productions, which I’ve had for 45 years. Maybe it taught me that I learned to take risks.

On our 1972 trip headed (from Massachusetts) to move to Mississippi, we stopped in New York and visited with (a friend). At that time, it felt in some ways like we were going to a land of darkness, chasing something I barely knew existed and wasn’t sure what to expect.

I told (my friend) that I wasn’t really sure why I should do this, and she said, “Why not?”

Everything changed at that instant. It was like I got it. I learned that when you look back, you see that it’s the single microseconds, not the big bangs, that change the course of a life.

I see the world in patterns, visually, and this is the way Mississippi works in my mind. Mississippi has a special place in this world.

Author Q & A with Julia Phillips

By Guest Author

On May 26, 2019

In Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 26)

As a Brooklyn native who spent her college years studying the Russian language and who has long been fascinated with true stories of crime and violence–especially those within an ethnic or gender context–writer Julia Phillips presents Disappearing Earth, her debut novel that describes in detail how the effects of one heart-wrenching crime touches an entire Russian community.

Phillips is a Fulbright scholar who holds a special interest in the Russian peninsula of Kamchatka. After visiting the sparsely populated and fiercely rugged (thanks to the ravages of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions) area, she decided this was “an ideal place to disappear.” The book describes the abduction of two young girls and the yearlong process of local strangers who, in their own ways, were all affected by the crime.

Today she’s back in Brooklyn, working on a new novel that she says will take place “a little closer to home.”

Since this is your debut book, please tell me a little bit about yourself.

Julia Phillips

Though I wrote this book about Russia, I’ve spent my whole life in pretty much the same area of the United States. When I was born, my family was living in Brooklyn, but we moved to New Jersey when I was four years old. I came back to New York City to go to college–I went to Barnard, a small women’s college that’s part of Columbia University–and have been here ever since.

All that time, I’ve dreamed of being a novelist. My short stories, essays, and articles have appeared in different literary magazines and outlets including The Atlantic and Slate. The first story I ever published was in a tiny online journal in 2009. This book coming out now, a decade later, is a dream come true.

The format of Disappearing Earth is unique in that it begins with the abduction of two young girls, with each chapter (beginning in August when the girls were taken) titled chronologically by the names of the 11 months in which the book takes place, ending the next July. Nearly every chapter introduces new characters who relate how this crime touches their lives. When you were first developing this book, is this how you originally planned to present the plot, and why?

Yes, this structure was very much the plan from the start. I’m an avid reader and watcher of missing-person stories like the ones on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but the stories that most excite me are those that show the relationships between individual acts and larger systems. I don’t want to hear only about a single perpetrator and victim–I want to know about the families, neighbors, witnesses, investigators, and politicians involved. How did this terrible thing happen? A person decided to hurt someone else, but who else knew about that decision? Who did or didn’t try to help the person who was hurt? Looking at that larger context can turn a shocking headline into a real, resonant experience that illuminates the power structures that surround us.

A situation like the one in this book, where two girls go missing for so long, doesn’t just involve one person. It reaches many. And so, I wanted Disappearing Earth to tell the story of a whole community affected by this one act. Every chapter focuses on a different woman in order to explore the ways violence comes into women’s lives, ranging from the rare and highly publicized, such as an abduction by a stranger, to the everyday and often ignored, such as a toxic relationship or a doctor’s appointment gone wrong. These different hurts echo each other, overlap, and end up connecting the characters in ways they never anticipated. Ultimately, their connections are the key to understanding this crime.

The book is set in the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia, an area not familiar to many of us, but a thought-provoking lesson in its long-held ethnic tensions. Tell me about your knowledge of and interest in this region, and why you chose it as your setting.

I studied the Russian language through college, and Kamchatka was always mentioned in our classes as a distant, magical place. It’s a remote volcanic peninsula cut off from mainland Russia. During the Soviet Union, no foreigners were allowed to go there, but since the Berlin Wall’s collapse, it’s become a global destination for adventure tourism. Socially, politically, geographically, Kamchatka is full of extremes. The more I learned about it, the more the region’s isolation, natural beauty, and dynamic history appealed. By the time I went to Kamchatka for over a year to write this book, I was convinced: this was the perfect setting for an enormous locked-room mystery.

Tell me about the title of the book. There are a few references in the story about a “piece of earth that disappeared.” How does the phrase explain or reinforce the story?

When we first meet the two young girls who will go missing, one is telling the other the tale of a tsunami that swept a whole cliffside town off Kamchatka. Only a few pages later, these girls are also swept away by something out of their control. That tsunami story represents so much loss experienced in this novel: the girls are abducted; the women around them don’t trust their surroundings; the peninsula itself is risky, prone to earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions; the community is still reeling from the collapse of their entire nation in 1991. These characters are walking on unsteady ground. Anything and anyone might disappear next.

Without giving it away, can you tell why you chose the unique ending that wraps up the story? It’s a stirring departure from the style of the rest of Disappearing Earth.

In the year that follows the girls’ disappearance, this novel explores so many different characters. It was important to me that no matter where the narrative ranges, we maintain our connection to those two missing girls. We are invested with them in the start and we need to know what happened to them in the end. It wouldn’t feel right any other way.

After all, I wrote Disappearing Earth not only to investigate what violence and loss look like in a community but also to argue for that community’s ability to grow, find closure, and heal. All these people on Kamchatka are hurting because of this one crime. Chapter by chapter, they connect to each other, seeking answers. Those links are meaningful to the characters, as they help each other through their daily lives, and to us readers, as we wish for the girls’ abduction to be solved. My hope is that the book’s ending affirms the importance of those connections and gives us all the satisfaction we were looking for.

Julia Phillips will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, May 29, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Disappearing Earth. Lemuria has chosen Disappearing Earth as its June 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Page 9 of 257

A story of love and loss and hope in ‘Haunting Paris’ by Mamta Chaudhry

Author Q & A with Chanelle Benz

From Massachusetts to Mississippi in Tammy Turner’s ‘Dick Waterman: A Life in Blues’

Author Q & A with Tammy L. Turner

Print the Legend: ‘All the Way’ by Joe Namath

Author Q & A with Wright Thompson

Saying and hearing in Ocean Vuong’s ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’

‘Life Between the Levees’ unleashes powerful legacy of American river commerce

Author Q & A with Michael Ford

Author Q & A with Julia Phillips

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