Author: Guest Author (Page 11 of 28)

Author Q & A with Valeria Luiselli

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger (February 10). Click here to read this interview on the Clarion-Ledger’s website

Valeria Luiselli’s newest novel, Lost Children Archive, is a penetrating work that tells one family’s complicated story as they drive cross-country from New York to Arizona, even as she deftly draws contemporary political and personal struggles together in the mix.

Born in Mexico, Luiselli grew up in South Korea, South Africa, and India, and has enjoyed an award-winning career as a writer of both fiction and nonfiction works.

She has authored the novels Faces in the Crowd, The Story of My Teeth, and Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, and the essay collection “Sidewalks.” She has captured two Los Angeles Time Book Prizes, and an American Book Award; and is a two-time nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Luiselli’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Granta, McSweeneys, and other publications. She now lives in New York City.

Your new novel, Lost Children Archive, chronicles a family’s road trip from New York City to Arizona that served two purposes. The first was to provide research opportunities for both parents’ projects as audio documentarians, with his focusing on the last leaders of the American Apache Indians, and hers on the child refugee crises from the court of immigration in New York. The journey was also a chance to share with their children some lessons of American history about the government’s treatment of Native Americans, as well as opportunities to personally experience what migrant children at the U.S. southern border were encountering. How did you develop the idea of this detailed and intense storyline?

Valeria Luiselli

When I begin a book, I have no idea of what I am going to do. I never think in terms of plot, or even overarching topics. All I have is a question, or perhaps a set of questions, and some intuitions about how to possibly explore them. One of the fundamental questions that drove me to write this novel had to do with the way that we tell stories to children, and in particular, the way we talk about history in relation to the present. And, in turn, the way that their internalization of those stories and versions of history may or may not make the world a less confusing and less terrifying place.

This novel, if anything, is about the process of composing stories, of threading voices and ideas together in an attempt to better understand the world around us. I don’t see this as a novel about the refugee crisis, or about Apaches—but a novel about childhood, and the place of storytelling in the often daunting and sometimes solitary experience of being a child.

An important subplot in this narrative is the crisis within the family itself: the husband and wife, who are the parents of two children—all of whose names are never given—are in an unhappy marriage whose future is tenuous, at best. How does this affect the family dynamic during and after this trip, especially for the children?

I guess the crisis within the family, as they travel across the country inside their car, and the socio-political crisis unfolding around them, are in constant echo of each other. The novel is very much about the blurring of boundaries between our private sphere and the political/public realm.

We live in times where we can no longer draw a sharp division between the public and the private, between political life and family life. The two intersect and collide constantly, and we all have to figure out how to keep our feet on the ground and our heads clear.

Tell me about the decision of the main narrator (the mom) to change her documentary project from telling the story of “the crisis at the border” to that of the “lost,” or “refugee” children.

More than a change, it’s a development prompted by her observations. She begins to pull on that thread when she starts spending time in the New York immigration court. Then, as the family plans to drive southwest, and she begins to learn about the many layers of the crisis, she shifts her attention to the detention centers along the border. Finally, as she gets closer to the border, she starts thinking about all the children who cannot actually tell their story, who cannot actually be seen and cannot actually be heard—because they are either locked away indefinitely, or have gotten lost, or have lost their lives.

What the novel documents in this regard are simply the many layers of a crisis, and we travel through them, as readers, while the narrator herself is learning how to move across them.

During the course of the story, the couple’s two young children become lost on a side trip that they set out on alone. They wind up experiencing circumstances similar to those of refugee children at the southern border of the United States. How did this experience ultimately influence the future of this family?

When I was writing Lost Children Archive, I often found myself thinking about reenactment, both as a weird cultural practice—people reenacting historical moments—and as a more psychological, personal, internalized event, through which empathy for long-gone peoples and communities can perhaps be achieved.

In the novel, the children constantly reenact historical events, but they mix them all up with the present. And in their confusion of past and present—especially the instances of brutal violence against Native Americans and the current treatment of undocumented people—they are able to understand political violence more clearly, and feel it in their own skin, so to speak.

Do you have other writing projects in the works at this time?

I’m doing research on mass incarceration and immigration detention. But I’m still in very early stages of the process, just taking notes, reading a lot, thinking. I have no idea what will come of it. And I am not in a hurry.

Valeria Luiselli will be at the Eudora Welty House on Pinehurst Street on Thursday, February 14, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from Lost Children Archive. Lemuria has selected Lost Children Archive as one of our February 2019 selections for our First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Snowden Wright

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger (February 3). Click here to read this interview on the Clarion-Ledger’s website

Meridian native Snowden Wright’s second novel, American Pop, is a refreshing saga (and it really is a saga) of a Mississippi family’s rise to fame and wealth as their soft drink empire builds and fizzles.

Based in the Panola County city of Batesville, the drink is aptly named Panola Cola (PanCola for short). The book follows not only the often-outrageous behavior of many of the owner’s family members, but the relentless pursuit of “cola hunters” who will do anything to find out the drink’s famous “secret ingredient.”

American Pop has been chosen as an Okra Pick by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. Wright’s debut novel, Play Pretty Blues, received the 2012 Summer Literary Seminars’ Graywolf Prize. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Salon, Esquire, the New York Daily News, and other publications.

A graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia University, Wright now lives in Atlanta.

Tell me about your life as a child in Mississippi.

Snowden Wright

Born and raised in Meridian, I went to Lamar School, where I was an embarrassingly good student, a spectacularly bad athlete, and an obnoxiously voracious reader.

Meridian’s lack of a bookstore for much of my childhood made that last point a bit of a problem. Fortunately, I would often spend time on my family’s farm in Yazoo County, and on weekends my father and I would come to Jackson. He would give me a $20 bill to buy a book upstairs at Lemuria while he enjoyed a couple Scotches at the bar. Back then there was a bar on the first floor of the building.

I would spend hours picking out just the right book. It was basically my indoctrination to the written word. So I often like to say I have two things to thank for my writing career: Lemuria Books and Johnnie Walker Black.

American Pop is a sprawling historical novel about one family’s rise to wealth and success in the soft drink business across much of the 20th century. What inspired you to write a nearly 400-page novel based on a soft drink business?

The inspiration was as easy as opening the fridge. I’m sure most readers will find in their fridge at least a can or two of Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, or Dr. Pepper. To me, soda is emblematic of America, not only because it came into mass popularity here, but also because it’s an ingenious feat of capitalism. Take some water, carbonate it, and stir in some syrup, then, presto, you’ve got a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Once I’d settled on the idea of a soft-drink company, though, I faced a challenge in creating the family that owned it. To craft a narrative with complete omniscience, the kind that provides flash-forwards as well as flashbacks, I needed to know all the family members from the very first line, their personalities as well as their life stories. It was going to take forever!

Then I remembered my multiplication tables.

In second grade, when we were taught the multiplication tables, I gave each number between zero and 12 a place within a large family–10 was the father, 5 the mother, etc.–and when they multiplied with each other, a little story played out in my head, reminding me of their product. I taught myself math through narrative. So, to create the Forster family, I just transposed those numbers into the novel.

Besides its humorous moments, American Pop takes readers on a thought-provoking, emotional ride through the lives of Panola Cola’s founding family members from the late 1800s to the 1970s. What are we to make of the fact that this family lost its fortune, despite the country’s lasting love affair with cola?

The first epigraph in the novel is from Nathanial Hawthorne: “Families are always rising and falling in America. But, I believe, we ought to examine more closely the how and why of it, which in the end revolves around life and how you live it.”

I wanted the novel to embody that quote–as well as its follow-up, “Southerners need carbonation,” by Nancy Lemann–through the use of a fluid timeline. I tried to create a collage of time periods that, from a distance, represents the entire country and, up close, examines the individual lives of the Forsters.

American Pop is a how-and-why-it-happened novel.

Thanks to the Forster family’s Mississippi heritage, the book has a decidedly Southern slant. How does that affect the story?

Do my characters know it’s Sunday because they have a craving for Chick-fil-A? Do they use dilly beans as stirrers in their Bloody Marys? Are there a pair of duck boots wedged upside down between their pickup’s tool box and back window? Yes, on all accounts!

I have a fondness for getting anthropological about the South. From our language to our social customs to our innate “sense of story,” as I like to think of it, the South in general and Mississippi in particular influence everything I write. That’s especially true with American Pop. Its characters are Southerners who, by dint of their wealth, social prominence, and political aspirations, are put on the national stage. That in turn creates conflict, internal and external, due to this region’s tragic history and the weight of its subsequent, persistent guilt.

I’ve experienced those concerns firsthand. Even though I lived up North for most of my adult life, the fork of the South has forever left its tine marks in the peanut-butter cookie that is my subconscious.

Why did you return to Mississippi to write this book?

After college, I lived in New York for nearly a decade, waking early in the morning to write before heading in to a day job. I began American Pop shortly after the publication of my first novel, Play Pretty Blues, and because of the second novel’s greater scope and length, I soon realized it would take me at least five years to finish. Then, sadly, my grandfather, to whom I’ve dedicated this book, passed away, leaving me a small inheritance. I decided to honor his memory and his generosity by using that inheritance to quit my day job, return to Mississippi, and work full-time on American Pop.

My primary residence during that period was in Oxford, but I also spent a lot of time writing in an old shotgun cottage on my family’s farm, where I’d spent much of my childhood. Being in a place rife with memories and family lore…proved the perfect inspiration for a novel that is, essentially, the story of a family.

Do you have another book in the works?

I do, in fact. Although I’d rather keep its plot a secret for the time being, I can tell you a bit about where I will be writing it. On my family’s farm in Yazoo County lies a pecan grove, where, until it burned down 50 years ago, the house my grandmother was raised in used to sit. I recently completed construction of a house in the same spot. I’ve been calling it “The Sweetest Thing,” after the slogan for PanCola in American Pop.

So, when my book tour is over, I’ll live part-time in The Sweetest Thing, writing my next novel and, ideally, raising a yellow Labrador puppy that I plan to name Falkor.

Snowden Wright will be Lemuria on Tuesday, February 5, at 5:00 to sign and read from American Pop. Lemuria has chosen American Pop as one of its February 2019 selections for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Chris Cander

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger (January 27). Click here to read this interview on the Clarion-Ledger’s website

For those of us who continue to promise ourselves we’re finally going to make a clean sweep and part with material objects we’ve long held onto for their sentimental value–but from which we really draw little joy–Chris Cander starts 2019 with The Weight of a Piano (Knopf), a gentle push to examine when it’s time to let go.

In this fictional tale, two women–years and miles apart–unknowingly share such an attachment to the same antique German-made Blüthner piano. The novel “plays out” the story of how the women came to love the same lovingly handcrafted piano while in the midst of very different relationships and life circumstances–and why examining what your heart is really telling you is what matters most.

The author of the previous novels Whisper Hollow and 11 Stories, Cander has also dedicated her talents to encourage children to discover the power of reading and writing, through her work as a writer-in-residence for the Houston-based Writers in the Schools program, and her support of Little Free Libraries in her area. She also writes children’s books and screenplays.

A member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, the Author’s Guild, the Writers’ League of Texas, PEN, and MENSA, Candor lives with her husband and children in Houston, Texas.

The plot of The Weight of a Piano is filled with nuances that point to the eventual and unexpected fate of a piano, which has a long and interesting history. Did the idea for this story come from your own musical interests or talents?

Actually, the idea of centering the story on a piano didn’t come from a musical perspective at all. Not long after I lost both my grandmothers, I overheard a woman talking about finally letting go of a piano her father had given her when she was a child. She’d been taking lessons for a few months when he suddenly died, and afterward, it became a symbol of her grief–and of him. She didn’t play it, but also couldn’t get rid of it. It struck me how heavy certain possessions with provenance can be, and I knew then that I wanted to unpack that idea in a novel.

The title of the book is a clever take on the actual heaviness of a piano as measured in pounds, contrasted with the emotional weight, which the characters find themselves bearing. How did you come up with this theme?

Chris Cander

I can remember when I was in college, and everything I owned fit into my car. Now I look around my house and wonder, how did I end up with all this stuff? In addition to the typical possessions of an American family of four, I’ve inherited treasures from a large number of artists and collectors: the cedar chest my grandfather made, the chair that had belonged to my mother-in-law, artwork painted by friends, trinkets given to me by my children, and much, much more.

It can be both a blessing and a burden to own so much. It’s one thing to keep an out-of-style heirloom quilt or a broken watch that belonged to a grandparent, but it was fascinating to me to imagine what it would be like to carry an unwanted, 560-pound object through life. How does that kind of albatross affect someone? And what will she do to get out from underneath it?

There are many hints in the book of the meaning of the piano to its former and present owners. What does this story say for all of us about the meaning we place on objects?

You’ve heard the adage: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” I’m fascinated by the different relationships we can have to things. From the minimalist movement to hoarding and everything in between, we–and here I’m speaking of a certain swath of contemporary American culture–seem particularly concerned with what and how much we own. Does it spark joy? has become an easy qualifier for what we decide to keep.

But some objects come into our lives freighted by so much more than joy. The stories that come with them–including the ones we tell ourselves–can trick us into thinking something ordinary is extraordinary, imbued with a sentimental value far greater than its actual worth. We all react to these physical things differently.

Tell me about your writing process. Do you create much of the plot first, and then develop the characters, or is it always different?

Typically, ideas are carried into my imagination on the shoulders of their protagonists, though as I mentioned, this novel was inspired by an event–that of a girl being given a piano by her father, who then dies shortly thereafter. But even the most compelling events don’t carry a story forward; it’s how the people who endure these events react to them, revealing their unique qualities and, hopefully, something about human nature in general.

Do you have another book in the works yet?

Happily, yes. I’m about halfway through a novel titled Zephyr, which explores the unseen forces that affect and connect us all.

Chris Cander will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, January 30, at 5:00 p.m. to sign copies of The Weight of a Piano. She will be in conversation with Knopf editor Gary Fisketjon at 5:30 p.m. The Weight of a Piano is Lemuria’s January 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Hank Burdine

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 20)

A Greenville native who strayed from his beloved Mississippi Delta to do a “walkabout” with his family in Colorado and Florida for a while, Hank Burdine has said since his return that he “really doesn’t care” if he “ever leaves the state lines of Mississippi again.”

The gentleman farmer, road builder, and author, who has gained a reputation as “the historian of the Delta,” has bestowed upon his fellow Deltans–and the rest of the world–a gift of memories and stories that may otherwise have been lost, with his newest book, Dust in the Road: Recollections of a Delta Boy (Coopwood Publishing Group).

The compilation of 60 essays about the people, places, foods, and culture of this enigmatic Mississippi region was gleaned from columns Burdine has contributed to issues of Delta Magazine since its beginning in 2003.

He has authored Mississippi Delta, The Flood of 2011 and was a contributor to The Delta: Landscapes, Legends, and Legacies of Mississippi’s Most Storied Region. He also co-authored, with Melody Golding, Panther Tract: Wild Boar Hunting in the Mississippi Delta.

Hank Burdine

Today Burdine lives on his farm in Chatham (near Greenville), where he hunts, writes, keeps an eye out for good stories, and, as author Richard Grant (Dispatches from Pluto) put it in his epilogue to Dust in the Road, is said to be “good at solving problems” for friends and neighbors.

And, as wild as some of his tales may seem, he emphasizes their authenticity.
“Many times,” Burdine said, “I have heard others say, ‘How do y’all make those stories up?’ Well, we don’t make them up, these things actually happened and are real!”

Below he discusses his book and his love for his home–the Mississippi Delta.

Tell me about your new book Dust in the Road: Recollections of a Delta Boy, and the stories you reveal in it.

I first started writing for Delta Magazine after I read the very first copy with Lee and Pup McCarty on the cover. While living in Florida, I contacted Delta Magazine and submitted a Final Word column titled ‘Mississippi will always be home.” Senior editor Melissa Townsend asked me to write an article and … it was published. The next month she contacted me and said, “Okay, what do you have for us this issue?” And, it has been like that ever since for over 68 articles.

Realizing that there was a book there of these articles, I decided to sort them out. The book just kind of fell into place. It has been such a great honor and pleasure to think of these stories, research and interview and “Dig up bones.” These stories are out there, and they just need to be pulled out and compiled and written down for posterity; if not, they will be lost forever.

The essays in your book recount much of the Delta’s past. Tell me about your research for information about those historical tales.

My research begins when an idea of a story or person comes to mind through conversation or just happenstance. Then I start calling friends and (checking out) newspapers, libraries and the internet, putting together a stack of papers from which to read and highlight until I sit down and start writing. It takes me most of a day to write an article and then another day to critique and edit what was written.

I have had some good editors at Delta Magazine to bounce off ideas. Of course, it’s a group effort, but I have been given the freedom to choose what I want to write about. It’s fun but it is damned hard work also.

The book is filled with stories of some of the region’s well-known artists, writers, musicians, and “indomitable characters.” Can you name a few among these whom you have personally known and who you believe have been particularly influential to the Delta’s culture?

The Elder Statesman of the Blues, Sam Chatmon, who “Gave Dignity to the Blues” was a dear friend of mine as was Son Thomas, Muriel Wilkins, the indomitable Duff Durrough, Eden Brent, and Jimmy Phillips. These bluesmen and blues women had a tremendous impact on the musical history and mystique of the Delta.

Literary greats Hodding Carter, Bern Keating, Julia Reed, Beverly Lowry, and Richard Grant were and are great and loving friends. Characters like Larry Pryor, Silky Sullivan, Joe Call, Hot Moore, John Ruskey and Bubba Tollison were all good friends and had an impact on my life and the stories I tell. Dinty Moore, the Doe Signa family, Anthony Herrera, Bill Beckwith and Leon Koury all were or are deep and dear friends.

What an honor it is to write for posterity the stories and lives of friends. And to be able to chronicle my son Matt’s personal odyssey on a solo canoe trip from the headwaters of the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico–wow!

Dust in the Road includes nine essays about the Delta’s unique cuisine in its section called “A Bite to Eat and Drink in the Delta.” Why was it important to include Delta food in this collection?

The deep influence of Delta inhabitants such as the Italians, Chinese, Lebanese and restaurants like Lillo’s, Lusco’s and Doe’s, How Joy, The Shady Nook, Abe’s, Josephine’s, and the Rest Haven are indelible in the Delta’s history. And now, newer places such as Dino’s, Vito’s, The Blue Biscuit, and The Onward Store have joined the charge. Stewart Robinson has started a pop-up fine dining experience in unusual places, bringing in award winning chefs from across the country. And Delta Supper Club is the place to be on given dates!

Ecotourism is now alive and well and pushing places like Clarksdale, Cleveland, Indianola and now Greenville to new and expanding plateaus. The Shackup Inn in Clarksdale and Tallahatchie Flats in Greenwood bulge at the seams with international travelers wanting to come to the Delta and experience the Blues.
With venues like the B. B. King Museum, The Grammy, Dockery Farms, Sky Lake, Blues museums and the Hot Tamale Festival, people are coming from far away to experience the Delta and to see first hand what the mystique is all about. The Delta is hot!

Tell me about how you became a storyteller.

If the Delta is anything, it is a place of stories. Those stories you heard as a child, to be embellished as you grow up and learn more about the people within them. And it is stories about the things you do that make an impact on families and friends.

If you don’t retell them, they are lost, and I have been honored to be able to write some of these stories down for future generations to enjoy and use as a reference later on. There was a lot of blood and sweat and tears and joy, triumphs and tragedies that brought this God-forsaken swamp into what it is today, and that does not need to be forgotten.

Signed copies of Dust in the Road are available at Lemuria’s online store.

Jim Harrison’s ‘Conversations’ create poetry

By Ellis Purdie. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 13)

Some years ago, John Evans of Lemuria Books offered me a job, and I joined his crew as a bookseller. John proved invaluable in his knowledge of books and great writers, and he impressed upon me many authors that needed to be read, or “drank,” as he often said. One day soon after I began, John and I were working together and talking shop. At one point he turned to me, eyes full of light in his captain’s chair, and asked, “Have you read Jim Harrison?”

I admitted that I had not, and John said, “Start with ‘Legends.’” I took Legends of the Fall home with me that evening and started in on the first of the three novellas. Reading Harrison was like falling into a dream both soothing and riveting. Sentences moved with the strength and beauty of a river, and I began to notice, possibly for the first time, writing craft.

The title novella used little in the way of dialogue, and yet I heard the characters speaking to one another, saw them—as John said I would—stand up and begin moving in my world. I finished the novellas and moved on to Harrison’s essays in Just After Dark, absorbing his culinary knowledge, experiences in nature, and his disdain for greed and its toll on the wild. Harrison embodied the writer both deeply talented and deeply interesting.

I understood why John loved this author, why Harrison’s photos were pinned and taped to the store’s walls, why Harrison’s section was always well-stocked, and why he had been invited to the store numerous times. “I’m going to try to get him back. We’ll see,” John said.

Sadly, Harrison was unable to return to Lemuria during my time as a fan, and he passed away in March 2016. John once told me conversation with Harrison was always rewarding as the man had a very large brain, and it took a lot of joyful effort to keep up with such erudition over dinner. Though it is no longer possible to speak with Harrison face-to-face, his interviews collected in Conversations with Jim Harrison, the revised and updated edition, are a gift.

This volume contains some of the most artful and gratifying conversation you are likely to read. For those familiar with Harrison’s work, his answers to questions are what you would expect: humorous, dense, remarkably literary, and nonetheless relatable.

Readers yet to pick up Harrison would do well to purchase this anthology along with one of his novella or poetry collections, allowing themselves immersion in Harrison the man as they read his art.

A screenwriter, poet, and novelist, Harrison shifts comfortably from discussing director Ingmar Bergman to elaborating on the necessity of poet Federico García Lorca and novelist Gabriel García Márquez.

Certainly a consummate man of letters, Harrison was also an accomplished cook, and he talks with as much enthusiasm about quail stew as he does his love of William Blake. Read with caution on an empty stomach.

Included with his literary and culinary obsessions is Harrison’s own recounting of his life. His self-analysis is the stuff of fine autobiography. A hunter of birds and a fly-fisherman, Harrison possesses wisdom that comes only from unfettered living.

How he came to be a writer is essentially summed up in his own words: “That’s my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.” However, he did more than build sentences. He constructed a deft literature of the Midwest as vital to American letters as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.

His interviews are to be drank.

Ellis Purdie is a graduate of The Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi. He lives with his family in Marshall, Texas.

Rachel Cobb’s ‘Mistral’ depicts photographer’s unyielding chase to catch the uncatchable

By Ellen Rodgers. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 13)

It is immediately evident upon viewing Mistral by Rachel Cobb the amount of passion and doggedness it would require to chase something that is unseen. The wind, for all intents and purposes is invisible. What we really see when viewing the wind is the effects it has on an area.

The Mistral is the wind that plagues Provence, as southern California is plagued by the Santa Ana winds. Over centuries of living in the region, the natives of Provence have learned ways to account for the strong and sudden wind.

Mrs. Cobb started documenting the Mistral in the late 1990s. She began it in a local library in Provence pouring through old books looking for anything about the wind. Over the years, between her assignments with various newspapers and magazines she would travel back to make photos of the wind.

Eventually, she realized she needed to be immersed in the area to make any headway on this project. She, her husband, and their young son moved overseas to Provence. Cobb eludes to the length of time spent on this project, “I started this story using Kodachrome film and digging through a small-town library, and I have finished it using a digital camera and the Internet”.

Cobb’s photographs depict the way people prepare for these sudden and strong gusts of wind, which have been recorded to last up to 65 hours. 2-kilogram weights hold a door open; stones are placed on top of the tile shingles; upside down glasses weigh down tablecloths; paperweights, and plastic clips hold a table edge; cement rings placed on the bottom of wheeled gift card racks keep them from rolling away; the eaves of houses show the multiple layers of roof tiles sometimes number up to four; and the north side of buildings are without windows. That’s the windward side.

Images of fauna show how the wildlife of the region prepares for and copes with the mistral. A horse squints its eyes as a strong wind blows its mane. Spiders position their webs so they are less exposed to the wind, while other spiders will weave a smaller web.

In one photograph, taken on the top of Mont Ventoux, which is said to be one of the windiest places on Earth, a hiker in snow gear is on his heels and appears to be sitting in an invisible chair. The chair is the enormous force of wind that can support his entire weight.

Perhaps nothing is more affected by this natural phenomenon than the inhabitants of this region, people and plant life alike. A young girl holds her skirt down in the wind, whilst descending a set of stone stairs, which show the wear of years and countless foot treads. Cobb’s own son is shown with his arms spread wide to the mistral and leaning into it. Again, her young son has his eyes shielded outdoors from what one can only imagine is the dust. Cherries are bruised on one side where the wind has battered them for too long, thus ruining the crop. The edges of a flower’s petals are ragged and feathered from enduring the relentless wind.

All of these photographs make it a little easier for the viewer to envision what it would be like to live with such a presence nearly two hundred days out of every year.

These photographs are pure and transcendent, employing none of the current and banal trends in photography.

The word mistral means “masterly”. Cobb showcases her enormous talent in this book illustrating the masterful wind of Provence.

Ellen Rodgers, who worked at Lemuria Bookstore for twelve years, is a photographer born and raised in the Mississippi Delta. She exhibits work that focuses on the region, and Vice chose her photographs to represent Mississippi in the 50 States of Art project.

Signed copies of Mistral are available at our online store.

Author Q & A with Preston Lauterbach

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 13)

Former Memphis resident and popular historian Preston Lauterbach puts a new focus on that city’s Civil Rights-era story–including that of critical events that led to the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.–in his newest book, Bluff City: The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest Withers.

Although Withers’ story has been relatively little-known since he made his mark on photojournalism covering some significant events of that time, the bigger picture of his life included his secret undercover work for the FBI at the same time.

While describing the emotions and culture of Memphis during the 1950s and 60s, Lauterbach explains the complicated life that Withers led, and why his dual roles as journalist and spy were not necessarily a betrayal of his beliefs at the time.
Lauterbach’s narrative brings both questions and answers to the ways in which everyday citizens navigated the reality of a new era–sometimes through divergent and challenging paths.

Preston Lauterbach

A former visiting scholar at Rhodes College and a Virginia Humanities Fellow, Lauterbach earned an MFA in Southern Studies from the University at Mississippi in 2003. He calls his time at Ole Miss “by far the most important educational experience to building my career, figuring out what I’m interested in, and learning how to listen, find sources, and tell a story.”

Lauterbach’s previous books include The Chitlin’ Circuit, a Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe book of the year; and Beale Street Dynasty.  Today he calls the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia home.

I’ll start with asking the same question you began with on the flap of your book Bluff City: The Secret Life of Ernest Withers: Who was Ernest Withers?

He’s best known as a photojournalist of the civil rights movement. He worked freelance for the largest African-American newspapers, chiefly the Chicago Defender. He ended up covering the major stories in the South from the Emmett Till murder trial and Montgomery Bus Boycott in the mid-1950s, through the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis.

One of the major episodes of Withers’ career took place in Jackson. He covered the funeral of Medgar Evers in 1963. During the disturbance that broke out on Farish Street, after the funeral, Withers was beaten and arrested. He had been taking pictures of the clash between police and mourners. A police officer confiscated his film and destroyed it. He pursued a First Amendment case against the Jackson police, seemingly with tacit encouragement from the Kennedy White house, but the FBI seems to have quashed it.

How did Withers and his story come to your attention, and why did you decide to write a book about it?

I was working on a book about the history of Beale Street in Memphis when the news came out about Withers having worked for the FBI during his years covering the (civil rights) movement. The Withers studio was located on Beale during the 1950s and ’60s, and he’d been a cop on the Beale Street beat in the ’40s. He’d seen everyone from Elvis to Dr. King come through Beale, and so he emerged as the most compelling character to tell the story through.

Every book I’ve done starts off one way and ends up going in all sorts of different directions once I get going, so this one isn’t strictly about Beale, but I can’t ask for a more colorful setting or more compelling cast of characters.

What are some events or themes that Withers’ body of photojournalistic work is best known for?

His work hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, and the National Civil Rights Museum. Withers boarded one of the first integrated city buses in Montgomery and photographed a young Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to make King an icon.

Withers also took some tremendous photographs of Elvis Presley. There’s still some debate about whether Elvis was racist. Withers said, emphatically, no. Withers tailed Elvis on Beale Street during the singer’s earliest days and observed how Elvis interacted with African-American people. Withers came away impressed with the respect and humility Presley carried himself with. This character trait really shows up in Withers’ pictures of Elvis with B.B. King. And by the way, it was a highly risky PR move for Elvis to pose with an African-American man on equal terms in 1956, when challenges to segregation were causing major turmoil in this country.

Do you believe Withers felt “compromised” working in his dual roles as a photojournalist and an informant for the FBI? His was a complicated situation.

I don’t believe that he felt compromised. One of the challenges of this story is seeing past the shocking headline that this civil rights icon secretly worked for the hated J. Edgar Hoover, and reading the facts.

Many of Withers’ case files have become available, thanks to Memphis reporter Marc Perrusquia, who broke the story and had the documents declassified. To me, it becomes clear that Withers had a rapport with his FBI handler, and through their relationship, Withers acted as a mediator or translator, in many cases, for the Beale Street community. He explained to the Bureau what groups like the Nation of Islam–a target of Hoover–were really up to, and successfully kept the heat off. Withers was an NAACP lifetime member and came from a long line of military veterans, and so he was against the presence of Communists in the movement, which aligned with the FBI reasons for investigating civil rights groups.

He acted also as a threat gauge, judging the likelihood of groups to engage in violence. But, you can’t get involved with the Hoover FBI without getting wrapped up in some fishy stuff, and Withers certainly did.

Explain Withers’ role in the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike and demonstration in spring 1968, and how that day’s activities compelled Martin Luther King, Jr., to return to Memphis a week later, where he was assassinated.

Withers took one of his most famous pictures on March 28, 1968, the I AM A MAN photo, that shows the striking sanitation workers displaying signs with that iconic slogan. He helped make those signs, by providing the lumber for signposts. Those posts became weapons during the march that King led that day in Memphis, in the hands of a lot of younger demonstrators.

King had never led a march that turned violent from within. He vowed to change his schedule and return to Memphis to prove that a peaceful demonstration could be held there. He needed this both for the strike and his own reputation. No one at the time knew that Withers was on the Bureau payroll, and so his involvement with the photo props that became riot weapons has eluded attention until now.

Ultimately, how do you look back on Withers’ life and career, and why do you call him a “flawed hero’?

He had a talent for getting himself into very sticky situations. Both his time as a police officer and a state liquor board member were scandal-shortened. He’s got cojones. That makes him a highly interesting figure, but also prone to trouble. His heroism is a bigger part of his life, having braved the South in the 1950s and ’60s, to show America what was happening down here. He was beaten, arrested, and threatened with death for doing his job, and he did it anyway.

What can we all learn from the tangled and intriguing story of this African American man who had a birds-eye view of some of the nation’s biggest news stories, and who some apparently viewed as a traitor on both sides?

If we’re to really get something out of history, and I think this applies to the present as well, we can’t oversimplify our understandings of each other and say, well he’s black, therefore he can only be pro-civil rights in this one acceptable manner or else he’s a scoundrel. There are good, important people who are torn between opposing forces, or, in courageously attempting to bring those forces nearer together, they risk their livelihoods, reputations, and lives. And, we can’t judge a person’s role in history entirely on what we know now.

You have authored two previous books (Beale Street Dynasty and The Chitlin’ Circuit) that are also in the narrative or historic journalism genre. What drew you to this type of writing, and do you have another book project on the horizon at this time?

I love research most of all, but research itself doesn’t pay, so writing narrative history emerged as the best way to fund my research habit. It’s still costly, but I have something to show for it.

My next project is either top secret, or I haven’t figured out yet what to do. I have a Withers figure in my life, alluded to in the introduction to Bluff City. My grandfather was involved with intelligence. He was the person I admire most and pattern myself after, and yet he’s also the biggest mystery in my life. I’ve reached a point where I need to and want to answer my questions about his role in history, and I have some ideas about where to look.

Preston Lauterbach will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, January 16, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from Bluff CityBluff City is Lemuria’s January 2019 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Natural storyteller James L. Robertson relates Mississippi’s wild legal history in ‘Heroes, Rascals, and the Law’

By Leslie Southwick. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 6)

Expectations about reading legal history likely start at boring and work down the tedium scale from there. With the right guide, though, a trip to historic places found on Mississippi’s legal landscape can intrigue the mind and stir the soul. Jimmy Robertson, it is clear, was the right person to narrate the journey in Heroes, Rascals, and the Law.

Robertson is a former Mississippi Supreme Court justice, a long-time practicing attorney, and a frequent law professor. He recounts ten occasions from statehood to the late 1940s when the Mississippi constitution impeded or impelled justice. Fortunately for our enjoyment, John Grisham’s comment on the book’s cover that Robertson is a gifted storyteller is spot on.

No doubt, lawyers will appreciate the book differently than readers not encumbered by that knowledge. Yet all interested in this state’s history can enjoy and be enlightened by the stories. It helps that Robertson’s exhaustive explanations are expressed in a conversational style.

The first account is from 1818. A group of slaves who had lived with their masters in free territory for decades, were then brought to Mississippi to be sold in a slave market. Some of them escaped, found lawyers, and argued in court that their residing where slavery was barred had irrevocably freed them. The Mississippi Supreme Court had little legal precedent to direct it. Justice Joshua Clark, Robertson’s earliest hero, proclaimed that when the law was unclear, he would presume it would “be in favor of liberty.” The 28 slaves were declared to be free.

Among the quarrels are a few in which the legislature enacted controversial laws. In 1912, for example, the legislature limited a workday in the lumber industry to ten hours. Robertson explains why with his vivid descriptions of the dangers to the workers cutting the trees and those in the mills who lost their fingers, their arms and legs, and even their lives with appalling frequency. The Mississippi Supreme Court upheld the limit despite arguments that it interfered with the right of everyone to enter any contract they wanted.

Other chapters focus on officially approved lawlessness. One explores the blatant ignoring of statewide Prohibition laws in the “Gold Coast” in western Rankin County. Beginning in the 1930’s, the thirsts of Jacksonians could be quenched at such ramshackle establishments as the Red Top, Dipsie Doodle, the Silver Moon, and many more. The governor literally sent in the troops (the National Guard), and the Supreme Court later upheld his boldness.

Robertson is a tenacious biographical archaeologist, bringing to light what had been buried about those populating these historic events. Robertson is as concerned with giving narrative life to the parties in the lawsuits as to the public officials who arbitrated their disputes.

Justice Virgil A. Griffith is another hero the book allows us to know. He dissented in 1935 to allowing confessions that had been beaten out of three black suspects from being used at their murder trial. The U.S. Supreme Court soon vindicated Griffith’s dissent.

Another forwarding-thinking judge whom Robertson praises is Chief Justice Sydney M. Smith. He upheld legislation that allowed the state to experiment with ways to promote industrial development despite constitutional barriers reflecting the laisse-faire attitudes of earlier times.

Indeed, Robertson’s view of right and wrong in his chronicles is whether Mississippi’s constitution was allowed to be muscular or whether the dead hand of legal tradition restrained it. The author’s preferences are explicit, but he fairly discusses different perspectives.

Readers of all political persuasions will be entertained, enlightened, and even dumbfounded by what litigants and courts have gotten themselves into, and only sometimes out of, during 130 years of Mississippi history. The book is a triumph of storytelling.

Leslie Southwick is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Jackson. He is the author of a memoir, The Nominee: A Political and Spiritual Journey.

James L. Robertson will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “Crime and the Law” panel at 4:00 p.m. in the State Capitol Room 201 H.

Margerita’s Gridiron Adventure: The revealing perspective of a Slovenian on Southern football and culture

Margerita Jurkovic recently moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to extend her legal education. A highly successful young lawyer from the small European country of Slovenia, her passion lies in representing victims of domestic violence, and she is working diligently on legislative improvements in the anti-human trafficking field. She came to the United States to finish her doctoral research while concluding her American LL.M. program and had the terrific opportunity to work with Mike Frascogna Jr., her former law professor.

In the meantime, something interesting happened.

Before August 2018, Margerita had never seen a football game. Not “American football,” anyway. Her first game experience was at Jackson Academy, where the Raiders hosted Lamar School at the Brickyard. This was where she learned firsthand what it means to make a tackle and to sack an opponent—and she was hooked! Soon she started a blog, which is sharing her life-changing experiences with both the American and European public. After highly encouraging feedback from readers, she decided to write a full-length book—a visual, highly-compelling look at not only her perspective from the field, but the culture around football . . . and especially the culture of the steamy, sun-drenched south.

Margerita keeps a sharp eye on all aspects of the habits, cultural experiences, and politics deriving from her stay in the Magnolia State and finds the inhabitants of her “home away from home” fascinating. Through moments both humorous and poignant, readers will have a keen sense of just how a visitor from across the world sees and interprets surroundings that so many locals take for granted. This exciting blog is just a taste of what readers will enjoy upon release in summer 2019.

WHAT I’M UP TO . . .

When I moved to Jackson, I developed an addiction for the first time in my life—an addiction to football! No, I’m not from Hattiesburg or Tupelo or Gulfport or Standing Pine, Mississippi. I’m from Slovenia! Yes, that Slovenia, way across the world in central Europe (the former Yugoslavia, where Melania Trump is from). And I have opinions—including some pretty strong ones—about what I see not only on the sidelines of games at Mississippi State University, Jackson State University, Belhaven University, and Jackson Academy, but what I’m learning about Americans—specifically some really interesting Mississippians—along the way. I know this much: Y’all drink a lot of sweet tea here! Please check out my website and be a small part of my game of life!

Author Q & A with Mesha Maren

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 6)

West Virginia native and resident Mesha Maren explores the questions and the difficulties of coming home again–and the fear of not fitting in anymore despite the strong pull of the land itself–in her debut novel, Sugar Run (Algonquin Books).

The novel tracks the stories of main character Jodi’s life through two time frames–as a 17-year-old in 1988-1989, when she landed in a Georgia prison for killing her girlfriend; and the “present” year of 2007, which finds Jodi, now 35, being newly released from prison and eager to get on with her life. It soon becomes complicated, though, by acquaintances old and new who have their own problems to settle.

Maren is the recipient of several writing fellowships and grants, including the 2014 Jean Ritchie Fellowship in Appalachian Writing and the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize. She is the 2018-2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the Beckley Federal Correctional Institution in West Virginia.

Her short stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, the Oxford American, Hobart, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial and other publications.

You’ve said that you started writing seriously in 2007 when you realized you “had stories to tell.” Tell me about the kinds of stories you believed should be told.

I don’t believe that there are any particular stories that “should” be told, like in a social novel kind of way, I think that I just come from a community and a family that trained me to have a good ear for great stories and to enjoy telling them.

Mesha Maren

When I was growing up, I was always hearing stories from my neighbors and my dad. My dad is not from West Virginia. He moved to Greenbrier County in 1979, but he has a huge respect for the people who came before him in this place and he always impressed upon me how important it was to know the story of the place, the people who walked across this field and over the cliff to work in the quarry and then back home again with 50-pound sacks of chicken feed on their shoulders, men who were killed young and mostly outlived by strong women who kept their stories going. These stories don’t very often make it out into the world, though–they are not represented very well in mass consumed books.

There is a thing that happens in all forms of art, I guess, but it particularly happens in writing about Appalachia, where the stories get diluted to please the lowest common denominator. It’s like adding corn syrup to food–you sweeten it up and smooth it out so that it appeals to the masses and you end up with something sweet and quaint with all the fangs taken out, a little bit like how the minstrel shows worked in the early 19th century: you show people what you think they want to see, to entertain them and show them that you are harmless and funny.

I guess that even though I don’t believe that there are any particular stories that “should” be told more than other stories, I do believe there is a way to tell a story that is real and right. I’ve never wanted to write something that people could passively consume–I want you to feel uncomfortable.

You have said that Jodi, around which Sugar Run revolves, “took up residence” in your head. Tell me about that.

I started to become infatuated with Jodi McCarty in about 2010. And it was really that, an infatuation, like I would daydream about her all the time and when I tried to put her down I just couldn’t. In writing Sugar Run, I was really teaching myself how to write. It was the first big writing project I ever undertook, and it was hard, and I doubted myself a lot. I doubted if I could really write a novel, much less this novel, but Jodi wouldn’t let me alone. There were multiple times when I wanted to give up on Sugar Run and I’d say, ‘I’m done’ and throw the pages in a drawer, but Jodi haunted me–it felt like I had slighted a friend or partner.

Finally, I made a pact with Jodi, I told her I would do my damnedest to write a good novel, find an agent and a publisher, but if I tried my best and nothing came of it, no one picked up the novel, then I’d get to be free and work on writing something else.

Your childhood experiences of your father taking you with him at an early age to counsel incarcerated women in your home state of West Virginia obviously influenced much of the plot around which Sugar Run is based. Tell me about those visits, and the impression they made on you.

My dad worked for a nonprofit and he would go in to the prison in Alderson to see the women who had not been visited by friends or family for over a year. I would often come along with him. As a kid, I was most impressed by the fact that I got to eat whatever kind of candy I wanted from the vending machines, but yeah, I think seeing those women, hearing them talk about their lives, it left an impression on me that was part of what maybe inspired Sugar Run, although I never really thought about that until after I’d written the novel.

All of the main characters in Sugar Run are facing their own kinds of struggles, including poverty, violence, pervasive fear, substance abuse and other addictions. The fact that they are all headed to West Virginia, a state with its own difficulties, compounds the suffering. Was it was hard for you to find spots of redemption for these characters in the end?

I honestly think that everyone, everywhere, not just in West Virginia, is probably closer to the edge than we ever let ourselves believe, closer to making a few “bad” decisions and seeing everything fall apart around us. The thing is that a lot of folks have a stronger safety net and, really, that comes down to money. If you come from a family with more money and you slip up, it’s easier to get back on track but if you live in a rural place and have few resources the fall is much more steep. Trying to find work after prison is really…hard for anybody, but of course, it is even harder when you live in a rural place.

In a lot of ways West Virginia has always been and will always be both the balm and the sting–it is not an easy place to live and never has been, both because of the economy but also just the natural geography, but that is also what makes it one of the most beautiful places in the world and it brings folks closer together. I’ve never known community like the communities in West Virginia, the way that people band together to care for each other–it doesn’t happen like that in other places.

The book actually tracks two alternating story lines of Jodi’s life, interdependent on each other. Tell me about your decision to tell these plots using this technique.

These two parts of the story, 1988-89 and 2007, came to me in very different colors and textures–like they were always distinctly different but of course part of the same story. I think that’s why I ended up writing the 1988-89 sections in present tense because I needed them to feel different and in a certain way almost more immediate and tangible to Jodi than her present 2007 reality–they’re like a picture show she has watched a million times during her years in Jaxton prison.

Sugar Run is your first novel. Did it surprise you that your manuscript was sold on the first round of publisher bids? Tell me about that experience.

Yeah, it did kind of surprise me–I mean Sugar Run is essentially a novel about a convict lesbian living on a mountain in West Virginia–not the kind of story you think of having huge mass appeal, and I think that a lot of New York publishers didn’t know what to do with it. There wasn’t a neat little box they could fit it in, they weren’t at all sure how they would market it.

So, Algonquin is the perfect home, you know, it just makes complete and total sense that Sugar Run is being published by a publishing house that started out being housed in a woodshed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Algonquin began the year before I was born in Louis Rubin’s woodshed and one of the first people they published was Larry Brown, a firefighter who started writing fiction in his spare time. So yeah, Algonquin feels like the perfect home for me and Sugar Run.

What’s next? Do you have another book idea in the works yet?

Yes, I just finished a second draft of my new novel, Perpetual West. This new novel is about Mexican professional wrestling. The story follows Alex, a sociology student who was born in Mexico, but adopted and raised by a white couple in West Virginia, and his wife Elana, who move to the U.S.-Mexico border where Alex is writing his thesis on lucha libre.

It’s been a real fun novel to write and I got to go do research in Juárez and Mexico City, and I took wrestling lessons, too. I was terrible at it though, so I guess I’ll stick with writing.

Mesha Maren will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, January 15, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from Sugar Run.

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