Guest Author – Page 17 – Lemuria Books

Author: Guest Author (Page 17 of 28)

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 22)

John N. Herbers might not be a familiar name today, but during the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, his byline blazed in The New York Times.
Herbers died last year as his book Deep South Dispatch was being edited (and ably finished by his daughter, journalist Anne Farris Rosen). But many people—especially journalists and leaders of the movement—remember him for his lucid accounts of that turbulent period when he was on the front lines and often at great danger himself.

deep south dispatch Subtitled “Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist,” Dispatch is a fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the arc of his reporting, from covering the Emmett Till trial, to the Birmingham church bombing, to marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to the Kennedy assassination. But it’s not merely a rehashing of old events.

Rather, Dispatch offers insights from a modern perspective, as well as conclusions Herbers made based on is reporting.

As Dispatch details, Herbers was not an “outside agitator,” as Mississippi politicians were wont to describe journalists back then. He was a son of the South, reared in various small towns mostly in the Memphis area, educated at Emory in Atlanta, with strong ties to Mississippi.

He began his journalism career after World War II first in Meridian, and then at the Jackson Daily News under fire-breathing publisher Fred Sullens. From there, he became bureau chief of the United Press (later United Press International) office in Jackson before going to the Times for the bulk of his writing. He was based in Atlanta, but traveled throughout the South and frequently visited his mother who lived in Crystal Springs.

Though from the South, he was at odds with the hate-filled tenor of the times. He believed his objectivity and penchant for journalism was a part of his peripatetic small-town upbringing, where “misfits” could not “escape into anonymity as they could in a city.”

Journalists, he wrote, are by nature and profession “the outlier who is always asking why.”

His love for Mississippi shines through, though, even as he was in anguish over its behavior in matters of race. Were it not for a few courageous voices against bigotry, such as Hodding Carter Sr., publisher of the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times, he wrote, “I think I would have fled Mississippi.”

Dispatch is full of names and places Mississippians remember both for good and ill. His writing is crisp and his life was Forrest Gump-like in his uncanny ability to be at signal moments. It’s encapsulated in such tales as his writing a story under a pecan tree with a manual typewriter on the top of his car at Fannie Lou Hamer’s house before going to interview powerful U.S. Sen. John O. Eastland at his plantation a few miles away.

He notes the ground-breaking reporting of Clarion Ledger reporter Jerry Mitchell that resulted in cold-case convictions of civil rights outlaws and one (of many) photographs includes him standing next to the late journalist Bill Minor of Jackson, himself worthy of note.

Dispatch is an informative, insightful, personal and telling memoir that pricks the conscience still. As he quoted Dr. King in talking about our own personal stances and how they reverberate into our culture, the greatest impediment to true justice in the world is not those oppose it, but those who are silent when they see it breached.

That’s what journalism and journalists are about, too.

Jim Ewing’s journalistic expertise as a writer and editor spans more than four decades, including The Clarion Ledger, the Jackson Daily News, and USA TODAY. A three-time winner of the J. Oliver Emmerich Award (the Mississippi Press Association’s highest honor for commentary), he has also won numerous national Best of Gannett and regional Associated Press Media Editors honors. He is the author of seven books, including his latest, Redefining Manhood.

Author Q & A with Jon Meacham

By Guest Author

On June 5, 2018

In Culture, Politics

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 3) and digital web edition

A Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian, biographer and frequent news commentator, Jon Meacham addresses the political and social divide America faces today by examining its “soul”—and he offers a calming reminder that, just as the nation has faced tough times in the past, it can overcome the current rancor.

In his newest title, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, Meacham reminds Americans of protectors Abraham assuredly said were on our side—he called them “the better angels of our nature”—and they have surely seen rougher times than we now experience, the author declares.

Meacham examines the people and times that facilitated turning points in American history, and he contends that “hope over fear” will, as it has in the past, guide the country through the present tumult.

Jon Meacham

Among his New York Times bestsellers is American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, for which Meacham won the Pulitzer.

A former executive editor at Random House, Meacham is a contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor at Time, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians.

He lives in Nashville with his wife and family and serves as a distinguished professor visiting professor at Vanderbilt University.

As a writer, you are known as a presidential historian. How did that role become yours, as you began to consider and write about so many American presidents?

As John Kennedy remarked, the presidency is the “vital center of action,” so the stories of the office and of the human beings who’ve held it are inherently important and typically interesting. If you live politics—and I do—then you kind of naturally gravitate upward to writing about the presidency.

Your new book takes a deep look at what you call the “soul” of America, and you define that “soul,” of a person or of a country, as being “the existence of an immanent collection of convictions, dispositions and sensitivities that shape the character and inform conduct.” This is an interesting concept that you describe as “ancient and perennial.” Could you explain it more simply, and why it is so important?
I think that’s pretty straightforward: the soul is our essence, whether we’re talking about a nation or a person. Some impulses are good; some are bad. Every moment is thus shaped by whether the better instincts triumph over the worst.

In The Soul of America, you examine what you believe to be the threats of the Trump presidency, and you make the case that America will “overcome” this period, as it has during previous hard times the country’s past. What do you believe are the biggest threats America faces under the Trump administration?

We have a president who eschews the conventions of power and declines to conduct himself with the dignity and the restraint we’ve come to expect. That’s his choice; he won, so he can do as he likes. But issuing threats about the legal system, or bullying people, or insisting that he’s right all the time and that any criticism of him is “fake” has the capacity to erode trust in our already-fragile institutions.

You examine great points in American history when the country “righted” itself and pulled through difficult times, but it always came at a great price. What do you think America needs to make that happen again?

I think we need to listen to each other more and be willing to acknowledge when the other side has a point or gets something right. And we have to remember that progress and prosperity in America tend to come when we favor the free flow of people, of ideas, and of goods. Openness isn’t a weakness; historically speaking, it’s a sign and a cause of economic and cultural strength and health.

I don’t remember a time when we as Americans haven’t heard every day that we are at a point in history in which politics is more divisive than it has ever been—and that trend, if it is one, doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Is it possible for America to become unified again?

Of course, it is. We were more divided in the 1850s and fought a war in the 1860s. The Klan was a national force in the 1920s. Joe McCarthy divided us in the 1950s. And Southerners know how violent and fraught things were after the Brown decision and well into the 1960s.

Mississippi is a state that voted for Trump by a large margin in the 2016 presidential election. What would you say to those voters about their agreement with some of his policies?

There’s plenty to agree with. As with other presidents, though, there’s also plenty to be skeptical about. He’s imperfect; be honest about that and work to encourage him to reach out beyond his base of support. Because I promise you this: history rewards presidents who govern for all, not just for those who vote for him.

Why was the 1916 painting by Childe Hassam Rainy Day, Fifth Avenue chosen for the cover of this book?

Because it’s a beautiful rendering of a patriotic moment and speaks to the hope of a nation that for all its flaws remains what Lincoln called the “last, best hope.”

You write about women’s suffrage, child labor and Jim Crow laws, etc. Most decent people today realize that those laws needed to be changed. One hundred years from now what causes or existing laws do you think may meet the same fate?

It’s less about specific laws today and more about the ladders to the middle class. We’ve got to find a way for more Americans to prosper and pursue happiness without unreasonable levels of fear about the future.

Your next book will be about James and Dolley Madison. Why did you choose this couple, and why are you writing about both?

Because they were a true team serving the ideals of America at a crucial and contentious time.

John Meachem will be at Lemuria on Thursday, June 14, at 12:00 p.m. to sign and read from The Soul of America. He will also be at the Mississippi Book Festival on Saturday, August 18, in conversation with Karl Rove.

Author Q & A with Joseph Crespino

By Guest Author

On June 4, 2018

In Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 27)

A native of Macon, political historian Joseph Crespino has enjoyed a successful career as a writer whose books help to explain and interpret some of the most pivotal times and people of the American South, especially within the context of politics.

His most recent work, Atticus Finch, the Biography: Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of an American Icon, gives a thought-provoking case for the mostly understood assumption that the character of Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman is, indeed, her father, A.C. Lee.

Crespino ties up the details most readers have only speculated on about the Finch-Lee comparisons, and examines the truths about the real man, A.C.

A professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta, Crespino went on to earn a master’s degree from the University of Mississippi and a doctorate from Stanford University.

His other books include the political biography Strom Thurmond’s America and In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevoultion, which earned the nonfiction prize given by the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, among other awards.

He talks about his Mississippi heritage.

Joe Crespino

“I’m from Noxubee County, where my mother’s side of the family has lived since the 1830s. My dad was from the Delta–he grew up in Benoit–and my parents met at Ole Miss, where my dad played on some of the best of Johnny Vaught’s legendary teams before going on to play in the NFL for eight seasons. My parents moved to Macon after my dad retired, and that’s where I was born and grew up.

“After graduating from college, I taught at Gentry High School in Indianola for two years as part of the Mississippi Teacher Corps and earned my master’s degree in secondary school education as part of that program. My wife, Caroline Herring Crespino, is from Canton.

Describe the character Atticus Finch in your own words.

Atticus Finch is a fictional character that should be understood in the full context of Harper Lee’s creative efforts–not merely as the upright, civic-minded figure who vigorously defends a wrongly accused black man in the 1930s, but also as a character in the 1950s South who is embittered over the changes being demanded by the modern civil rights movement. Exclusive sources that I gained access to in writing this book make clear that Harper Lee always imagined these two seemingly contradictory figures as different aspects of the same character, seen at different times, and through different lenses.

Summarize the real A.C. Lee for us, based only on his writing and actions.

Like Atticus Finch, A.C. Lee was a lawyer and state legislator from a small town in south Alabama. Unlike Atticus, A.C. was also the co-owner and editor of a small-town newspaper, the Monroe Journal, for nearly 18 years. I’ve read every one of the editorials he wrote over those years, and, through them, I’ve reconstructed A.C. Lee’s political worldview. Clearly, he was the inspiration both for the idealistic figure in To Kill a Mockingbird as well as the reactionary figure in Go Set a Watchman.

In your opinion, was A.C. Lee typical of the “educated” white Southern Christians of the time, torn between doing what he knows is right and trying to survive in a racist society?

Well, first off, A.C. Lee wasn’t well-educated, at least not in terms of formal schooling. He was born in 1880, and the highest grade he ever completed was eighth grade, although he was Lincoln-esque in his habits of reading and self-education.

Second, the typical white Southern Christian of the time was not “torn” in the way you describe–and neither was A.C. Lee–so, in that sense, he was typical. Lee had no trouble surviving in the racist society because he was white. I found no evidence that he had any doubts about the rightness of his racist, paternalistic view of blacks. That’s not to say that Lee wasn’t a moral person in many respects, but it’s wrong to assume that white Southern Christians of an earlier era had some moral sensibility in regard to race that they couldn’t act on without threatening their standing in society. It makes it sound like they were among the victims of the Jim Crow South, when, in fact, they were the chief defenders of it. One way A.C. Lee wasn’t typical was as a Christian. He was much more devout and sincere than any of the typical Christians I know, and count me among those typical Christians. He was a pillar of the Methodist Church in Monroeville. But, as was the case with all but a tiny minority of white Christians of his era, his religious faith was in no way in tension with his racial views. One of the most poignant stories in the book is how in the early 1950s, as chairman of the pastoral relations committee of the Monroeville Methodist Church, Lee engineered the ouster of a young minister, Ray Whatley, who spoke too frankly about racial issues. Whatley was reassigned to a pulpit in Montgomery, right before the black community there started a boycott to protest segregation on city buses. Whatley volunteered to serve as president of the local Council on Human Relations. His vice-president was a young black minister new to town himself whose name was Martin Luther King Jr.

Harper’s two books, Mockingbird and Watchman, seem to show two different sides of Atticus Finch. Was this only her attempt to show two different sides of the South at that time?

I don’t think that she was explicitly trying to show two different sides of the South, so much as she was struggling to try to reconcile them in her own mind. It seems to me that if she had really wanted to show that other side of Atticus, then she would have come back to Go Set a Watchman and tried to make that novel work in a more successful way. Why she never did that in the 1960s, or 70s, or 80s after the incredible success of Mockingbird, and when so much political and racial struggle was still taking place, is a fascinating question. I offer some thoughts in the epilogue of the book as to why that might have been.

In a 1964 radio interview, Harper Lee discusses why she thinks the South has produced so many great writers: Western European heritage, agrarian society, etc. Do you see any correlation between this and the racism that she writes about?

Yes. In Go Set a Watchman, the character of Uncle Jack expresses lots of hoary ideas about the ethnic homogeneity of the white South as key to its distinctiveness. There’s no reason to think that Harper Lee’s views on the subject were the same as Uncle Jack’s, but clearly, she knew all those old arguments, and I suspect that, like Jean Louise in Watchman, she was trying to figure out whether there was anything to them, or whether it was all just a bunch of bunk.

It has been reported that Mockingbird is a “highly revised version”of Watchman. What is your opinion?

It’s incorrect. Documents from the files of Lee’s publisher, HarperCollins, make this clear. Harper finished a draft of Go Set a Watchman and her agent shopped it around to various New York publishers. White he did that, she started writing a new novel that used the same characters, but moved the drama back some 20 years in time to the 1930s. She and her agent discussed how she could write a bridge that could connect these separate pieces, a reference that Lee’s representatives have taken to suggest that she has plans at one point for a trilogy.

The documentary record is quite murky on that point, but what is clear is that she always imagined Watchman and Mockingbird as distinct novels that connected as part of a larger narrative arc in the lives of these characters.

What drew your special interest in Harper Lee, Mockingbird, and Atticus Finch?

Many different things. One is that I grew up in a small Southern town like the one that Harper Lee was from. Another is that for a significant part of my life, I wanted to be Atticus Finch; a lot of earnest, well-intentioned white boys like myself, who were also naïve and misguided, have chased that ghost for many decades now.

But in the last year or two, I came back to Harper Lee’s fiction because I think it has resonance for our own political moment. Harper Lee wrote her two books in the late 1950s South, at a time when right-wing, demagogic politicians–many of whom were nobodies, or political jokes in Southern politics only a few years earlier–won tremendous political power by appealing to the most base instincts of voters. I think her struggles in writing the character of Atticus Finch were part of her struggle to make sense of her father’s own conservative political heritage at a time when the conservatives had been overrun by right-wing reactionaries. Why didn’t folks like her father stand up for their principles when it really mattered?

Are you now working on a new book or other writing project?

I have at leas two other books in mind at this point. One is a history of Atlanta during the five or six years after Martin Luther King Jr. Moved back to his hometown from Montgomery. I imagine it as a book about prophets, and hometowns and unwelcomeness.

I also want to write a history of racial violence in Noxubee County, my home county.

Joe Crespino will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, June 6, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from Atticus Finch: The Biography.

Michael Ondaatje’s ‘Warlight’ is a brave map of London

By Guest Author

On May 30, 2018

In Fiction

By Paul Rankin. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 27)

Since the 1972 publication of his first novel, Coming Through Slaughter–an impressionistic-historical fiction set in the seedy underworld of Storyville New Orleans and chronicling the various misadventures of legendary coronet player Buddy Bolden–Michael Ondaatje has firmly established himself among our finest living craftsmen.

Born in Sri-Lanka and based now in Canada, Ondaatje is the author of 20 books of poetry and prose including The English Patient (1992) and Anil’s Ghost (2000), each of which achieved a rare combination of critical acclaim and popular success.

His writings have won numerous awards and honors including the Booker Prize, the Prix Médicis, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. With such a superlative record, expectations naturally run high, and his latest novel, Warlight (Knopf) does nothing to disappoint.

Set in London in the immediate aftermath of WWII, Warlight centers on Nathaniel and Rachel, siblings for whom “life was still haphazard and confusing during that period.” As the story unfolds, we witness the residual effects of chaos and devastation in their lives.

From the opening scene when their parents announce they’ll be going away, leaving their children “in the care of two strangers who may have been criminals,” Nathaniel (the narrator) describes and populates a world where everyone and everything is suspect. Theirs was “a family with a habit for nicknames,” he notes, “which meant it was also a family of disguises.” Nothing is reliable; no one can be fully trusted.

Nathaniel’s fondest memory, in those bittersweet days before the abandonment, involves his mother engaged in “various homemade theatrical performances.” All activity feels staged. Everyone wears some kind of mask. Very few characters even go by their real names.

The mother refers to Nathaniel as Stitch. Rachel, she calls Wren. Their dubious guardians are The Moth and The Darter, and even Nathaniel’s girlfriend “Agnes” has taken this name from the place (Agnes Street) where they had their first rendezvous.

This precarious sense of reality leads Stitch to draw “detailed maps” early on, obsessing over each detail “as if what was not recorded might be in danger.”

The process of mapping is one of the primary ways humans have sought to order the overwhelming complexities of life. Storytelling is another. Every map tells a story, we might say, and every story is a kind of map by which we attempt to navigate the world. Later, Stitch will turn from cartography to narrative in his attempts at preservation.

The result of that effort is the novel itself–a subtly crafted frame story in which we observe him deep in the throes of reconstructing his own life history. It is also, in a sense, a sort of existential detective story in which he sleuths for clues as to his parents’ true identity and their roles during and just after the war.

From his early cartographies to his later retrospective narrating, we bear witness to Stitch’s desperate attempts to stitch his own life together, gathering the various scraps of memory and documentary evidence, quilting them together in a coherent pattern. What emerges is a self-conscious, self-reflective composition in which Nathaniel fills in blanks as best he can.

This constitutes an impressive feat: the way Ondaatje manages to present a character who is essentially bewildered (as so many of us are), living in a bewildering place and time (as so many of us do), without the book itself descending into bewildering chaos at any point.

It was, as they say, bravely done.

Paul Rankin is a freelance writer and editor, holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College, and lives with his family in Jackson where he is working on a novel.

Signed first editions of Warlight are still available at Lemuria’s online store.

Two of Will Campbell’s memoirs create balm for healing, love

By Guest Author

On May 29, 2018

In Biography/Memoir, Religion, Southern Culture

By Carter Dalton Lyon. Special to the Clarion-Leger Sunday print edition (May 20)

On this Pentecost Sunday, when believers mark the arrival of the Holy Spirit that empowered the apostles to go forth and proclaim the good news of the Gospel, we would be well served in examining the words of one of God’s more modern-day disciples, Reverend Will D. Campbell. It has been nearly five years since Brother Will’s passing, but his wit and wisdom are as needed now as they have ever been.

Even if you are familiar with Rev. Campbell or one of his seventeen books, I would encourage you to revisit them. Thankfully, the University Press of Mississippi has just published new editions of his two memoirs: Brother to a Dragonfly, which first came out in 1977 and contains new forewords from longtime friends Jimmy Carter and John Lewis, and Forty Acres and a Goat, which was first published in 1986.

The books chronicle Rev. Campbell’s life from his upbringing in Amite County, Mississippi, to his time as a pastor and mentor to civil rights activists, though they are really books about who we are and how we relate to others, whether they are family members, friends, adversaries, or yes, a goat. During an era in which he shaped historical change, he is more interested in explaining how we are shaped by the personal bonds with those around us and how vital it is to seek out those connections.

Few books could justifiably be called game-changers, but Brother to a Dragonfly was one for me when I first read it in college. It covers his formative years through the height of the civil rights movement as he became, in his words, a self-satisfied white southern liberal. You meet those, like his grandfather, the son of a Confederate soldier, who introduced him to the idea of nonviolence. From the first sentence to the last, you get to know Joe, the titular protagonist who was troubled but was ever the supportive critic, constantly pushing Will to truly evaluate his motives within the movement.

The murder of a friend, Jonathan Daniels, provided the moment of clarity for Rev. Campbell. He had spent his adult life in a state of self-assured sophistication, but now realized that in seeking racial justice, he had been overlooking the true nature of the tragedy, that poor whites—the murderers of activists like Daniels—were part of the tragedy, too.

Forty Acres and a Goat is a companion memoir that develops on the lessons from Brother to a Dragonfly and extends them in time as he returned to a rural home, this time to a farm outside of Nashville, Tennessee. We meet Jackson, the goat and gatekeeper to the draft-dodgers and other non-conformists who visited or found refuge in the Campbells’ company.

We also meet his black friend T. J. Eaves, a relationship that spans the book and is framed by the fracturing of the movement itself, as the calls for Black Power collided with the commitment to nonviolent inter-racialism. Rev. Campbell never gave up on the project of the Beloved Community, even fashioning his own version in microcosm of what his friends called the Church of the Forty Acres and a Goat on his farm.

One can read these books for their value as eyewitness accounts into this era, but they should also be read because Rev. Campbell is a great writer and an incredible storyteller. He is hilarious, as in the time he and his classmates have to submit fecal samples as part of a New Deal program to eradicate hookworms, or the time he stepped to a lectern for his opening speech during a televised debate over the death penalty, and simply asserted, “I just think it’s tacky,” and then sat down.

Ultimately, the books offer appropriate reflections on this day of Pentecost, when all tongues and races were together at the Christian church’s inception.

Carter Dalton Lyon is the author of Sanctuaries of Segregation: The Story of the Jackson Church Visit Campaign and chairs the history department at St. Mary’s Episcopal School in Memphis, Tennessee.

Story of Cat Island resonates in prose, photographs

By Guest Author

On May 24, 2018

In Nature, Southern Culture

By Don Jackson. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 20)

Southern storytelling is a beautiful art form. Through the ages it has been the glue that has bound us across generations. Although facts are always subject to questioning, the truth is always there. It becomes a shared truth that gives us strength and meaning within a framework of profound identity, and as a people with a common heritage.

Such is the wonder and the power of Discovering Cat Island by John Cuevas. It gives us the story of a unique and fascinating place on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and of the people who have been part of its history. It brings us light and shadows, and allows the reader to fill in the colors, both in prose and in photography.

This is not a scholarly work created for academics, although it is rich in information and required extensive research. Rather, it is a story that will hold the reader transfixed, with wonderfully-written, almost poetic, prose. A word of warning here… Do not sit down with this book unless you are prepared to sit where you are for at least a couple of hours. You will not be able to put it down. You very likely will read the entire text in one sitting. I certainly did.

Typically I consider books like Discovering Cat Island as coffee-table books that allow one to leisurely pick up the volume and thumb through the photographs… easy to pick up… easy to put down. They provide opportunity for light, transient entertainment. They’re on the table as fillers, just there as something to do, while other things are going on. Interruptions don’t matter. Accordingly, I’m more inclined to spend time with the photographs in such books than I am with their text. Rarely will I even bother with the text.

But with Discovering Cat Island, it was just the opposite. The photography was excellent. But it was the text that kept me spellbound. I’m not sure why, but I broke my rule and started reading the text when I first got a copy of this book.

Once I did that I could not take time to look at the photographs as I desperately turned the pages to get beyond the photographs and to where the story continued.

Only afterward did I go back to look at the gorgeous black and white photography of Jason Taylor. And when I did this, those photographs provided rich seasoning for the story I’d just read. The echoes of the story reverberated deeply within me as I went page by page, slowly catching the spirit of each one of Taylor’s masterpieces.

I strongly suggest that this be the sequence for future readers of this book. Start with the story. But, don’t just read the story. Listen to it! After you’ve heard the story then, as it resonates within you, go back through the book and let the photographs etch this powerful story deeply into your heart.

It is, after all, your story too. Soon thereafter you will realize that this story must be shared with those near and dear to you… with a daughter, son, grandchild, or good friend… together in a porch swing, or out under a live oak, or in front of a fireplace, or wherever your special place may be.

Cat Island is and has for been for generations such a special place for so many people. So, why not just go there with that special someone and share the story there, together. Become part of that story, right there where it all happened and is happening. Pass it along through the tumbling generations for whom, in their hearts, the Deep South and its Gulf Coast is home. It really doesn’t matter whether or not you live here. Cat Island is part of your story. Come discover it.

Donald C. Jackson is the Sharp Distinguished Professor, Emeritus at Mississippi State University. He is Past President of the American Fisheries Society, Past President of the Mississippi Wildlife Federation, and has worked extensively with fisheries resources along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He is the author of three collections of outdoor essays: Tracks, Wilder Ways and Deeper Currents.

Signed copies of Discovering Cat Island are available at Lemuria’s online store.

Prominent Enneagram teacher forges understanding in ‘The Path Between Us’

By Guest Author

On May 23, 2018

In Metaphysical, Psychology, Religion

By George Patton Jr. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 13)

We all see the same things in life, but what we do with what we see can be very different for each of us.

For over twenty-five years, Suzanne Stabile, one of the foremost teachers of the Enneagram, has taught multitudes of individuals throughout the United States and around the world.

The Enneagram describes nine unique personality types, or, as they are also known, essence types. Our behavior, interactions, and how we relate to others are determined by the characteristics unique to each number. This wisdom has been accumulated over many years from the great philosophers and the teaching of all the world’s great religions.

In The Path Between Us, Mrs. Stabile gives us priceless information and advice to govern our interactions with others, many of whom will approach life from a much different perspective than you or me. Christian, Jew, Muslim, man, woman, gay, or straight. If this country and the world are to survive, then we must be able to communicate, not by social media, but by verbal and physical interaction. If we have no concept of who we are and much less who others are we will never have truly meaningful relationships. If we are ever to have crucial conversations with each other and if we are ever to truly love and have compassion for our neighbor then The Path Between Us is a must read.

In her introduction, Mrs. Stabile describes each Enneagram number. She follows with ten chapters that lead to a better understanding of our Enneagram number and the Enneagram number of those around us. We are not, she adds, simply a number, but a complex personality who must interact with other complex personalities.

Mrs. Stabile is a master of storytelling, and each chapter contains entertaining and important stories. Mrs. Stabile highlights ways that your Enneagram number may interact with all of the other Enneagram numbers. Each chapter ends with suggestions on how to better interact with other specific Enneagram numbers.
The Path Between Us certainly can stand alone but is best read after reading her original collaboration with Ian Cron, The Road Back to You which describes in depth each Enneagram number.

Mrs. Stabile shows us how to avoid diverging paths and instead leads us toward converging paths. These will ultimately become the paths to love, compassion, and understanding. I believe it was said best in her own words, “when we are able to see ourselves as we are, and as we can be, it’s a beautiful thing.”

George Patton Jr. has practiced internal medicine in Jackson for 35 years and annually judges scholastic writing awards.

Author Q & A with Kevin Powers

By Guest Author

On May 21, 2018

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

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

In his newest work, A Shout in the Ruins, award-winning writer Kevin Powers presents a powerful story of the brutal realities of violence and oppression in the American South during and long after the Civil War period.

Set in Powers’ hometown of Richmond, Virginia, the stories that make up A Shout in the Ruins stretch across nearly a century, from antebellum years to the 1980s. The plot during Civil War times unfolds for the partners of an ill-fated marriage between a plantation owner and the young daughter of a wounded veteran; as well as two young lovers enslaved on the plantation.

In a separate theme that runs alongside these characters is the story of George Seldom, a man in his 90s who was left orphaned by the war, and, in the 1950s, is looking back on his childhood. The strain of the destruction of his neighborhood brought on by the building of an interstate highway through Richmond prompts him to travel south in hopes of capturing glimpses of his origins.

In his search he meets Lottie, who helps him locate the house in which he grew up. The journey ultimately brings him to consider both the changes and the constancies of his long lifetime; and Lottie later reflects on her own middle age during the 1980s.

Powers’ first novel, The Yellow Birds (2012), was a National Book Award Finalist that captured both the PEN/Highway Award and the Guardian First Book Award. His first collection of poetry, Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, was published in 2014.

Kevin Powers

With a bachelor’s degree from the Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, Powers is a U.S. Army veteran who served in Iraq in 2004 and 2005.

Today, Powers lives in Austin, and admits that, on the home front, he is “an avid but mostly unsuccessful gardener. There is a pathetic-looking, but still living, gardenia in a pot on my front porch that is a testament to this fact,” he said. “I also try to spend as much time outdoors as I can. Las tyear, I bought a little 250cc Honda dirt-bike that I take up to the mountains in Colorado whenever I’m able.”

You obviously did a lot of research for A Shout in the Ruins about life in and around Richmond after the Civil War. Some of the scenes are gut-wrenching. Was there any one thing that you learned in your research that surprised you? And was anything about this book that was (as in your former book) that was inspired by your own experience of war?

Growing up in Richmond, one learns a lot about all the history that has happened in and around the city, but it was different returning to that history as an adult, having the experiences I’ve had in life, and now with children of my own that I’ll someday need to explain that difficult history to.

I suppose I knew this intellectually, but in researching the period it was shocking to recognize how the institution of slavery permeated every aspect of life, and moreover, that it could be treated so casually by those who perpetrated and depended on its existence. And so, you come to see how strategic the thinking was that allowed the standing order to remain unchanged after the war, even though it temporarily no longer had the force of law behind it.

An example of a particularly shocking moment was reading the obituary of Robert Lumpkin, whose slave jail is featured in the novel and who died in 1866. It read, “He was born and raised in this city, was 61 years of age, and was an honest man.” It’s hard to imagine a more fitting representation of the banality of evil.

I assume the title of A Shout in the Ruins comes from chapter 10, when George and Lottie visit the cabin he was born in. Explain how the title of the book fits with that scene.

Yes, and it’s a reference to all the ruins in the book. Certainly, the cabin George and Lottie visit, but also the ruined plantation house at Beauvais, and specifically that shout when Emily is discovered hiding nearby. But in a larger sense, I hoped the title would be evocative of the urgency with which I feel it is necessary to truly and honestly reckon with our shared past. The title is also a reference to a poem I love by Louis Aragon, called “Poem to Shout in the Ruins,” which while not related to the book thematically, embodies just that kind of urgency.

I loved how you wove time and place around the character of George, who came off as the light in the story’s darkness. Who or what was your inspiration for the idea of this character?

Thank you. I must admit I didn’t begin with him in mind. He emerged through the telling of the story, and the more it developed, it became clear to me that part of the process was looking for a character who could embody Virginia in all its true complexities. In my mind, George is the quintessential Virginian, to the point where I almost titled the book “The Virginian” after him. But then I realized there were already a dozen or more books, films, and TV shows bearing that title, so I went with the one it has now.

Lottie was a very pivotal character in regard to George’s attempt at making sense of his life. After George’s death, you continued to develop her character well into the 1980s. Tell me about that.

I felt it was essential to connect this history to the present, or at the very least to a world that was recognizable to me. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t treating the past as something quarantined, something disconnected from life in contemporary America.

Lottie allowed me to do that, but also having attempted to face and address the past as honestly as I could, I wanted to see what remained. What hope could there be for us, what love, what compassion? Would it be naive to think that these aspects of life were truly possible given the burdens of history that we carry into the present moment? I could see how a reader might conclude her story is tangential, but for me she is thematically fundamental to the book.

Her brief time with Billy allowed me to ask all those questions with a new perspective. I don’t presume to have the answers to our country’s awful legacy of suffering and violence, but it does seem to me that a new level of honesty will be a prerequisite to finding them. that level of honesty is present in the relationship between Lottie and Billy, and aspirational for me as an ordinary man in the world. I genuinely feel like an optimist at heart and telling Lottie’s story allowed me to put that optimism to the test.

The book ends in 1906 with George and Emily meeting by happenstance on a park bench, but not knowing one another. Emily was talking to herself out loud about love being “the only miracle.” Explain why you chose to end the book this way.

I wanted to leave the reader with a question. So, having read everything that comes before that encounter, I hope readers will ask themselves if she’s telling the truth.

I noticed a lot of references to the color yellow in this book. Does it have anything to do with your first novel The Yellow Birds?

It may just be a tic! I’m not sure. In The Yellow Birds, I wanted that connotation of cowardice to be present, but I didn’t realize it had bled into the new book. I’ll have to think more about that.

According to some reviews of your work that I’ve read, your writing compares to that of Faulkner. What do you say?

It’s certainly not a claim I would be prepared to make about my own work, but I am flattered that others have made it. For many writers from the South, his books are touchstones, and that is definitely true for me.

Can you share any ideas you may be exploring for an upcoming work?

Nothing has cohered yet, but my recent reading has tended toward the spiritual: Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, C.S. Lewis, and others.

My own spiritual life is characterized primarily by doubt and confusion, but whenever I’ve had those feelings about a subject in the past, I’ve tended to write about it, to see if there’s a way that I can crack the code or at the very least throw words at the mystery in a way that might be interesting to myself and others. So, I’ll either do that or write a love story. I can’t say for sure at the moment.

Kevin Powers will be at Lemuria tomorrow, May 22, at 5:00 to sign and read from A Shout in the Ruins. A Shout in the Ruins has been selected our May 2018 selection for Lemuria’s First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with George Malvaney

By Guest Author

On May 13, 2018

In Biography/Memoir, Southern Culture

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion–Ledger Sunday print edition (May 13) and digital web edition

George Malvaney was a high-spirited child whose teenage years (like so many) often found him engaging in reckless behavior—fighting, drinking, and once even taking a snake to school.

While he always knew his greatest love was for the outdoors—hunting, fishing, exploring and adventure-seeking—he was certain of one thing in his life: he hated school. He dropped out during his junior year at Murrah High School and predicted he was on a “a wild and reckless stretch that would end badly.” He was right—except that it wasn’t the end.

cups up The unlikely story of this Jackson native lives up to the title of his debut book, Cups Up: How I Organized a Klavern, Plotted a Coup, Survived Prison, Graduated College, Fought Polluters and Started a Business.

For a man who literally wrote the book on what not to do—and ended up not only surviving, but succeeding—he pulls off a truly hopeful tale of what it took to come out on the other side. He wrote the book, he says, to encourage and inspire others who may need a spark of hope to overcome their own challenges.

After you dropped out of Murrah High School your junior year, you joined the Navy and wound up being honorably discharged for organizing and leading a Ku Klux Klan unit on your ship. How and why were you drawn to the Klan?

That’s a good question. I get asked that a lot. I was 19 years old. At this point, 40 years later, it just doesn’t make sense to me. What would have made me do that? I don’t see why I did it. Apparently, it must have been an emotional decision. It certainly couldn’t have been logic. It was a bizarre, crazy thing. It was probably the influence of (Klan leader) Bill Wilkinson, (a friend of a friend). I did it, I own it, and I’m not proud of it.

In 1980, after your Navy experience, you fell in with Dannie Hawkins, a man you described as your “new friend and mentor,” who convinced you to join his group plotting to invade the Caribbean island of Dominica and replace the government with a right-wing, anti-Soviet regime. What was this group’s ultimate goal, and why did you decide to join their cause?

George Malvaney

There was a lot of debate as to the real reasons behind it that I was not aware of at the time. One was that they wanted to use it as a point for a cocaine smuggling ring. I never heard any of that. There must have been some ulterior motive. I was just out of the military, very patriotic, and naïve. To me it was more of an anti-Communist move to replace a government with Castro leanings to one that was more in line with American values. In hindsight, adventure and an emotional influence definitely played into it.

When the Dominican invasion plan was averted by the FBI before it ever started, you were arrested and sentenced to four years in prison, which was reduced to 18 months. Tell me about how your time in prison changed your beliefs about racial differences.

It didn’t actually change my beliefs at the time—that took years, but it started me thinking about it. When a prisoner named Leon asked me to write letters for him at the Atlanta Penitentiary, it kind of intrigued me. He was in for murder. He wanted me to write to his mother, but he didn’t want anyone to know, so he would whisper to me. He would tell me what he wanted to say, and I could feel the emotion in his voice. I couldn’t write it down the way he was saying it because he had a very limited vocabulary, but I knew what he was trying to say, so I put it in my own words.

I realized that, here’s this black guy—in for murder—and what he wanted to say was the same thing as my letters to my own family. I could see that there was good in this guy, too—lots of bad things, but, good things, too.

There were two fellow prisoners I wrote several letters for, and another I think I only wrote one letter for. The letters were very similar. Leon got a letter back from his mother and asked me to read it to him. It was clear that she was functionally illiterate herself, but I paraphrased it for him because what I knew she was trying to say.

I was in a unique situation. Here I was with black convicts opening up to me with their personal feelings. These were hard case convicts, trying to get their feelings out. It gave me a different perspective.

Tell me about how the decisions you made while in prison would change the path of your future forever.

I tell people that my time in prison was a wonderfully terrible experience that I would not ever want to repeat under any circumstances but would not trade for anything. It was one of the most valuable experiences of my life.

I was in prison because I made irrational and reckless decisions that were going to end badly. It wasn’t until my first day in federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, that it struck me. I had a four-year sentence. I asked myself a lot of questions. How was I going to spend the next four years? Do you want to spend the rest of your life in prison? How are you going to improve? I made a very concerted decision my first day in prison: I was going to keep my head held high and get through this.

I had been making bad decisions to get to the point I was in. I didn’t how and where this would lead, but I decided my life as a convict would be done when I got out. I did not want to be involved with criminal activity, ever, when I was released.

I was in prison with murderers, bank robbers, drug dealers, kidnappers. They would become my friends, the people I was hanging out with, my peers, but I did not want to be influenced by them. It was a mental challenge. I really focused on keeping a positive mental attitude that I was going to be a better person.

When I was in the penitentiary in Atlanta, I spent months in my cell all day with almost nothing to read. I was self-examining myself. I had literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours to think about it. I looked at where I had gone wrong. I knew the Klan had been a bad decision. I knew I had to get away from those people. I decided I was going to go to college and get an education because I really wanted to become something—I didn’t know what, but it would be anything but a criminal.

After your release from prison, you went on to graduate from college and build a career based on your degree in environmental studies. Why did you choose this field?

I had thought about law school. I had seen what I thought were real injustices in prison. I wanted to try and address that, to seek some prison reform. But I came to the realization that even if I got accepted to law school, the fact that I was a convicted felon meant that I may not be able to practice law.

I had another passion, and that was the outdoors. I remembered one time, as a boy, standing on the banks of the Pearl River that went through my grandfather’s land in Hopewell, south of Jackson. An industrial plant had discharged large amounts of sulfuric acid and killed thousands of fish. I recall standing there with my father and watching dead fish float down the river for hours. It made me very sympathetic to environmental causes.

Briefly explain your role in the cleanup efforts of the BP oil spill along the Gulf coast in 2010.

I was the chief operating officer for a company that was BP’s prime contractor in Mississippi. Early on in the response effort (April 2010), I was called into some meetings with Gov. (Haley) Barbour to examine initial information pertaining to the oil spill. Mississippi didn’t have a lot of expertise in large oil spills, and I kind of became the go-to guy for Gov. Barbour and his staff. There was a big push politically to use Mississippi companies and Mississippi laborers, and I was managing 4,000 people from all over, and a $400 million budget.

The well was plugged on July 15. We saw very little oil on the mainland after that, but the barrier islands had really taken the brunt of the oil, so there was a long-term cleanup. I was able to help local mayors, supervisors and local officials, and I know I made a positive difference for Mississippi.

Tell me about your support of Big House Books, and how you found out about it.

I was at the 2016 Mississippi Book Festival and was coming out of the Authors’ Alley tent and noticed a booth that had a logo with a prisoner behind bars looking out. I saw the sign that said, “Big House Books.” They wanted to show me a loose-leaf binder filled with letters from convicts asking for book donations, but I told her I already knew what they said. I had once been locked in a hole starving for something to read. It really brought me back in time—it was an odd feeling. I dropped a $100 bill in their jar that day, and I’ve continued to support them ever since.

Please explain the title of your book.

That phrase, “cups up,” made a huge impact on me. I remember my first day in the Federal Correctional Institute in Tallahassee in July 1981. It was stifling hot. I could hear voices. They kept getting closer and closer. There was a rattling noise. I was thinking, “Why in the hell am I here? How did I get here?” They were getting closer and I was asking myself “What have I done? How am I gonna get out of here?” Then all of a sudden, a prison orderly was in front of me with a cart, and I realized I was supposed to hold my cup up for coffee. I remember having this dialogue with myself. It was a really powerful, life-changing moment.

Why did you decide to write this book, and what do you hope it will accomplish?

The Sun-Herald newspaper (in Biloxi) called me during the BP crisis. They had heard about my story and wanted to write an article about me. I did not want to do that article. I didn’t have anything to hide, but it was terrible timing. I was afraid it would all blow up in my face and distract from the BP effort.

It came out on the front page and I was just waiting for the worst—but I heard nothing but positive comments. What I heard over and over and over was “How did you go from that to leading and coordinating this massive response and dealing with the highest officials in the state?” I also heard “You need to write a book,” and I would just say that it would take a long time. But it got me thinking about it.

Part of what I wanted to do was recognize that a lot of people are having a difficult time in life, and it’s good to hear about others who have had tough times and pulled through it. I wanted to say, “Be positive, keep focused, learn what you can from it.” I wanted to give them inspiration and hope.

George Malvaney will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, May 15, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from Cups Up. Malvaney will also speak at the History is Lunch at the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium at the Two Mississippi Museums on Wednesday, May 16, at 1:00 p.m.

‘Southern Splendor’ explores the restoration of pre-Civil War homes

By Guest Author

On May 9, 2018

In Southern Culture, Southern History

By Jordan Nettles. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 6)

In Southern Splendor: Saving Architectural Treasures of the Old South (University Press of Mississippi), historians Marc R. Matrana, Robin S. Lattimore, and Michael W. Kitchens celebrate pre-Civil War homes across the American South. The authors document stories of these homes, with chapters devoted to Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The book includes 391 pages and over 275 photographs that showcase the beauty of the historic houses. Selected because of their architectural styles and restoration stories, the nearly fifty homes in Southern Splendor have overcome all types of hardships, from natural disasters and vandalism to abandonment.

The walls of every pre-Civil war home have witnessed a myriad of stories, and Southern Splendor captures many fascinating ones. There are accounts of the slave labor that allowed the houses to be built, the lives of the wealthy owners and their families, the tragedies that pressed the homes toward destruction, the restorations that saved them, and the cultural and economic roles the homes now play. These narratives make the homes feel like dynamic characters of history rather than static pieces of the background.

The detailed descriptions of the exterior and interior features are interesting and establish the book as a must-own for any fan of Southern architecture. Accompanying these descriptions are breathtaking photographs of the grand homes. Flip to almost any page, and you’ll find the image of an imposing portico and columns or of an interior room, complete with a striking chandelier and ornate furniture.

As the book notes, the homes of Southern Splendor are “survivors.” Countless other colonial and antebellum homes have not been as fortunate. The authors insist that by letting historic homes deteriorate, we lose vital pieces of the past and irreplaceable resources for understanding our nation’s history. The intersections between these homes and history are extensive.

The book features several homes whose former occupants, such as Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis, are tightly woven into the fabric of American history. Then, there is the strikingly significant Whitney Plantation, a monument and museum of slavery that deals unflinchingly with the South’s difficult history and ensures that the horrors of slavery are never forgotten.

Most of the homes in Southern Splendor are well cared for and open to the public, so it’s hard to believe that many of them were nearly lost forever. Words like “disrepair,” and “dilapidated” are associated with even the most magnificent houses. Without the work of concerned individuals, communities, and organizations, the homes in this book may not exist today.

There’s something exciting about seeing a familiar location celebrated in a book. I have visited the House on Ellicott’s Hill in Natchez and Arlington House in Virginia and enjoyed reading about their histories and architecture. Residents across the South will likely find familiar homes in Southern Splendor. Equally enjoyable is discovering new gems. My personal favorite discovery was Laura House, a unique creole plantation in Louisiana that was run mostly by women.

Southern Splendor brings the included homes to life and makes a solid case for the importance of preservation and restoration. While admiring the beautiful houses, readers will likely find several new destinations to add to their bucket lists.

Jordan Nettles is a graduate of The University of Southern Mississippi and the Columbia Publishing Course in New York.

Author: Guest Author (Page 17 of 28)

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