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Author Q & A with Suzanne Stabile

On May 7, 2018

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

Most of us, Suzanne Stabile says, “have no idea” that other people don’t see things the way we do.

Not only that, but they don’t process their experiences in the same way, either. And to make things even more interesting, it turns out that some of us rely mostly on our feelings, while others are thinkers; and still others are definitely “doers.”

The implications of these truths for relationships can be devastating or magnificent–or a lot of points in between.

Fortunately, Stabile can help us figure it all out. As a highly sought-after Enneagram master teacher, she knows how to help the rest of us bridge the gaps and come together.

In fact, when it comes to coming together, she wrote the book. The Path Between Us: An Enneagram Journey to Healthy Relationships not only describes the nine personality types of this ancient approach to behavior evaluation, but reveals how each relates to the others, fostering more mature and compassionate relationships at every level.

Stabile is also the co-author of the bestseller The Road Back to You and, as an internationally recognized Enneagram master, she has spoken at more the 500 workshops at churches, colleges, and conferences around the nation.

She and her husband, the Rev. Joseph Stabile, are the founders of the Life in the Trinity Ministry in Dallas, Texas, a nonprofit, nondenominational ministry focusing on spiritual growth for adults.

What is the Enneagram, and how did you become interested in it?

The Enneagram is essentially nine ways of seeing. It is an ancient spiritual wisdom that teaches us that there are nine different ways of seeing and nine ways of experiencing the world. Additionally, there are nine ways of answering some of life’s basic questions like: “Who am I?” and “Why do I do the things I do?”

The Enneagram has an unknown origin, but has been used in all faith beliefs in one way or another for at least several hundred years and at most several thousand. The Enneagram is unique in what it offers us as we make our way from who we are to who we hope to be.

I read a book by Richard Rohr and my husband, a former Roman Catholic priest, and I started seeing Father Rohr on a regular basis and learning from his wisdom. Father Rohr was very encouraging about my interest in the Enneagram and he suggested I study without talking about the Enneagram for four or five years. I don’t think he would suggest that to everyone. That was specific to me because he knew I wanted to teach it.

Suzanne Stabile

I spent the time observing others, taking notes about how people were different from me, how they were different from each other, and only listening when others talked about the Enneagram. Without explaining it to me, Father Richard’s advice paved the way for me to gain a deeper understanding of the many facets of Enneagram wisdom.

As a result of my willingness to follow his instruction, when I began teaching, I had more than a passing knowledge of the numbers. I had embraced the depth and seemingly unending possibilities of how this ancient understanding could enhance our ability to be more compassionate with others and with ourselves. The practice of acceptance and the kindness that followed has served me well in every aspect of my life both personally and professionally.

Explain the spiritual component of the Enneagram.

My husband, Joe, and I led an institute for spiritual formation for a long time. It was a two-year program and one of the things we learned early on was that most people share in common the firs two stumbling blocks in a serious spiritual journey towards transformation. The first thing they run into is all the things they don’t like about themselves. That’s followed by the concerns and wounding they bring from family of origin. The wisdom of the Enneagram addresses both effectively.

We are each, by Enneagram number, well suited for some spiritual practices, but not for others. There is great frustration in trying to engage in a spiritual practice that isn’t suited to your number. It seems essential for those who want to know God, that they know themselves.

In your book, you explain the nine personality types: perfectionist, helper, performer, individualist, investigator, loyalist, enthusiast, challenger, and peacemaker. Why is it so important that we understand not only our own Enneagram type, but those with whom we have the closest relationships?

We all live with the idea that we are seeing the same thing and having the same experiences as those around us. We are not. Perhaps, that assumption is the greatest stumbling block for relationships. Learning how others see and process information is a game changer.

I’ve earned in recovery group settings that every expectation is resentment waiting to happen. Without an understanding of our differences, expectations are very likely. Resentment follows, and both discontentment and fragmentation are unavoidable.

The reason I teach the Enneagram is to increase compassion and civility in the world. If your only understanding is about your own number, then it limits rather than adds to our need for a more forgiving and compassionate world view. My teaching is taking a direction toward asking the question “what would be best for the common good?” We have individuated ourselves to such a degree that we’ve lost sight of the necessity for belonging to a great community, and for finding meaning in our lives by contributing to the larger community.

How is the Enneagram different from other personality tests?

In terms of other personality-typing systems, I think they’re all good and each has its place. As a spiritual wisdom tool, the Enneagram names us (according to our strengths, and at the same time provides us with information and opportunity to do something about what we’ve learned.

I have not found the online Enneagram tests to be accurate because they lack the ability to measure motive, the key factor in discerning one’s Enneagram number. That is one of the reasons I wrote the book. The Enneagram has been an oral tradition for centuries. Anyone who has the opportunity to hear the Enneagram taught orally by a qualified Enneagram master teacher will greatly benefit from that experience. The narrative approach has a lot of value because the Enneagram is deceptively simple, and nuance is very important. That nuance is best represented in stories.

What do you say to people who see Enneagram principles or conclusions in a skeptical light, or who may even have a fear that it could be dangerous in some way?

The world needs more acceptance and open-mindedness, and less suspicion and intolerance. Imagine the wars, fights, and pain that can be avoided by asking questions from a place of love and tolerance, rather than casting predetermined judgments from a place of fear and suspicion.

I am often asked, “what’s dangerous about the Enneagram?” I’ve given the question a lot of thought. As I know and understand this ancient wisdom, the only dangerous thing about the Enneagram is if it taken to be more than it is. It is literally just one spiritual wisdom tool. There are many others and they all have their own value. The Enneagram is just one, but it’s pretty great!

What if you read the book and feel like you cannot figure out where you fit among the Enneagram “numbers”?

The Path Between Us is not designed to introduce readers to the nine Enneagram types, instead it is based on the idea that the reader is already aware of his or her own Enneagram type. We can’t recommend highly enough the value of starting with my Enneagram primer, The Road Back to You that I co-authored with Ian Morgan Cron.

Another possibility would be to listen to my “Know Your Number” recordings, or even better, attending a Know Your Number workshop in person. There will be a Know Your Number workshop in Jackson in January 2019, taught by my daughter Joey. I will be there later in the month for an advanced Enneagram workshop.

Why do you believe that more and more people are becoming interested in studying the Enneagram today?

The generations that have followed the baby boomers seem to be more interested in understanding themselves individually rather than collectively. It seems that they have more space for difference and more tolerance for “the other.” The Enneagram, by its very nature, fits within that context as a way of thinking.

At this time in our culture, people don’t seem to be turning only to the church to try to understand life. It doesn’t take long on a journey towards self-knowledge to develop an interest in tools like the Enneagram that have a way of explaining how we’re like other people and how we are different.

From my perspective as a Christian, I would add that the Enneagram helps us in knowing ourselves, so that we might know God and then better understand ourselves in relation to God.

What is your hope for people who read your new book?

I actually believe we are in a relationship crisis. We are becoming more polarized as we try to navigate the episodic meaning that defines our lives both individually and collectively. And, we seem to know ourselves by what we are against instead of by what we are for. We’re more tribal than at any other time in my lifetime and as a 67-year-old that is astonishing to me.

When people are taught the Enneagram by someone who knows it well, it can change how they see the world and how they interact with those who see it differently. Once people are exposed to this ancient wisdom, they begin to respond to difference with curiosity instead of judgment. They respond to misunderstanding with compassion instead of rejection, and diversity becomes a gift instead of a stumbling block.

Suzanne Stabile will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, May 8, at 5:00 to sign and read from The Path Between Us: An Enneagram Journey to Healthy Relationships.

Author Q & A with Rick Bragg

By Guest Author

On May 2, 2018

In Southern Cooking, Southern Culture

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 29)

With equal parts love and humor—not to mention brutal honesty—Southern storyteller extraordinaire Rick Bragg tackles a topic he admits he never thought he’d have the courage to swallow: food. And good Southern cooking.

Fortunately for his readers, the release of his latest volume, The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma’s Table, (Knopf) has proven that old-fashioned Southern fare is indeed in good hands.

“I’m not a cook,” the Possum Trot, Alabama, native is quick to say, but in this 490-page “food memoir,” he lets the stories of “his people” and their hilarious and sometimes heart-wrenching circumstances do the stewing and stirring.

best cook in the world But mostly, it’s a tribute to his mother, 81-year-old Margaret Bragg, whose skills in the kitchen, he says, are still unmatched. This is a woman who never—not once—used a cookbook, a written recipe, a measuring cup or even a set of measuring spoons to put a meal on the table. Her skills came from oral recipes and techniques that go back generations—some even to pre-Civil War days.

Included are recipes for 74 Southern “soul food” dishes he says it took all of a year to convert into written form under his mother’s guidance.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and a journalism professor at the University of Alabama, Bragg is a former New York Times reporter and the recipient of a Nieman Fellowship from Harvard University. A regular contributor to Garden and Gun, his previous books include All Over But the Shoutin’, Ava’s Man, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story, and My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South, among others.

Your new book is a “food memoir” and tribute to your mother, Margaret Bragg, who never used a recipe or owned a cookbook. Since you admit you are not a cook yourself, how did you get the idea to write this book, and why was it so important to you?

One of the reasons I did the book was because my mom had a heart attack, then developed cancer and had two years of chemo. When she first got sick about five years ago, her kitchen was just different when she was gone. When she’s home, the kitchen usually smells like bacon grease and that wonderful Red Diamond coffee. When she was gone it smelled more like lemon dishwashing detergent. Even the cold cast-iron skillets had a different smell.

I had tried before to cook her pinto beans and ham bone, and her beef short ribs, but it didn’t taste like hers. She never, never let us boys (Rick and his two brothers) in her kitchen when we were growing up. We’d have coal dust on us, or a live frog in a front pocket of our overalls. None of us learned any cooking from her.

I asked her where the recipe was written down for beef short ribs and she said, “I’ve never written down any recipe,” and I knew that. I’ve never seen her standing over a written recipe.

I love writing about food, something I do quite a bit, and every part of this book was always about the stories of people with my blood.

All of the recipes in this book come from stories—stories about fist fights or leaving a landlord in the middle of the night—because that’s how we live around here. And you would just remember the food that was there when it happened. The story about the time Sis, my mother’s father’s cousin, shot her husband in the teeth, and what that had to do with her chicken and dressing, is pure “writer’s platinum.”

I just thought I’d like to write these things down. I thought, “Why not? Do a book about food, and set recipes in it.”

Because your mom never uses measuring cups or spoons, you literally had to convince her to come up with the recipes included in the book. Was that a hard sell, since she says in the book, “A person can’t cook from a book”? And it must have been time-consuming creating recipes for so many dishes she knew by heart. How did you go about it?

There are two leather chairs in my momma’s living room. She sat in the one on the left and I sat in the one on the right. I leaned close to her to talk about how much of what would go into the recipes, and it took For. Ever.

To her, there is no “half cup of flour.” She would say “just get a good handful” or “a real good handful.” A tablespoon to her means the big spoon in the kitchen drawer. Or she would say use a “smidgeon” or—my favorite—“some.” It really didn’t matter the quantity of ingredients in the recipes. It’s the process. You have to leave a lot of it to common sense.

It took, probably, a solid year.

I’ve been asked if we tested the recipes in the book. My ambition was to share some of the stories of the food, and some recipes, as best I can. That, and not poison anybody.

This book is not about your typical “cookbook” type of food—there are no restraints on the use of fat (often in the form of lard), or sugar, eggs, meats or other rich ingredients that have lost some favor over the past few decades. What kind of readers and cooks do you hope will be drawn to this book?

First of all, it’s not a cookbook. If people are buying it just as a cookbook, that’s not the point. What I hope happens is that people will enjoy the true narrative, the history.

I’m not a cook and I’m not a cookbook writer. This was a chance to write about where the food came from. I hope that what people in the Upper East Side (of Manhattan), London, Connecticut and everywhere else will enjoy is the narratives, and see the value of the food.

Your mom insists she is a “cook”—not a chef. Please explain what that boils down to.

A chef expects to be called “chef,” and his underlings have to refer to him as such. A cook doesn’t care what you call him or her. It’s not about pride, but pretentiousness.

There is a great deal of family history in The Best Cook in the World—not only unique, but humorous! Tell me about the process of putting these stories together.

We didn’t have to cobble the stories together. A lot of times the food would spark the story, like the chicken and dressing story. There were recipes I wanted to put in there, but I just didn’t have a good story—like peanut butter pie, fresh garden vegetables and Aunt Juanita’s peanut butter cookies. Now, commodity cheese, I have a great story. Or Ava’s tornado story—I’ve wanted to include that story somewhere for 15 years, and this was my chance.

Among the recipes that are included, what are some of your favorites—and have you, or will you—cook them yourself?

Rick Bragg

I can cook a mean biscuit, but I usually won’t if I can get some good store-bought ones. I make red eye gravy with ham and grits—the good kind. A chocolate pie sounds like something I could do.

I don’t have the patience my momma has, and I can’t make any of it taste like she does.

One of my favorite things she made us was fried pies—but she recently told my brother Sam and me that she never made that. She had forgotten. That was the reason to do this book.

Rick Bragg will beat Lemuria on Friday, May 4, at 5:00 to sign and read from The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma’s Table. The Best Cook in the World is a 2018 selection for Lemuria’s First Edition Club for Nonfiction.

Southern writers share secrets, stories in new anthology

By Guest Author

On May 1, 2018

In Southern Culture, Southern Fiction

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 29)

What makes a writer a writer? Or a Southern writer, especially?
Is it that one writes and, hence, is a writer? Or lives in the South or writes about the South?

In Southern Writers on Writing, edited by Susan Cushman, the answers to these questions might not be as easy as they seem.

Fourteen women and 13 men struggle to answer the question of their calling and their responses show a nuanced look at why, and how, these authors came to be called Southern writers.

They include such well-known authors as Michael Farris Smith, Jim Dees, W. Ralph Eubanks, Harrison Scott Key, Cassandra King, and Julie Cantrell. They quote as mentors such luminaries as Rick Bragg, Willie Morris, Barry Hannah, Shelby Foote, Ellen Douglas, and Walker Percy.

But, still, the answers prove elusive. Dees says it requires “insane courage” to “take the plunge” and commit one’s innermost thoughts to an uncaring, or uncertain, universe.

Joe Formichella says: “The truth is that you write because you can’t not write.”

Patti Callahan Henry, among other reasons, says: “I write because the stories inside have to go somewhere, so why not on paper?”

Some of these writers are from the South, others just came to be here. Like Sonja Livingstone, who found Southern writers “crept up” on her, seeming familiar, drawing her to the region and lifestyle. Most of all, the way Southern writers write is alluring, unleashing inner secrets, she explains, “set out like colorful laundry flapping on a line, (that) I’d learned to keep folded and tucked away.”

Cantrell, who hails from Louisiana, confides that Southern writing taps all the senses. “When we set a story here, we not only deliver a cast of colorful characters, we share their sinful secrets while serving a mouth-watering meal…. The South offers a fantasy, a place where time slows and anxieties melt away like the ice in a glass of sugar cane rum.”

“The South is nothing less than a sanctuary for a story,” she adds. “It is the porch swing, the rocking chair, the barstool, the back pew.”

Being a Southern writer, writes Katherine Clark, is an opportunity and a burden, especially when you consider that you’re entering literary territory with nationally and internationally known explorers, such as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Conner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, James Agee, Harper Lee, and so many others.

But, as John M. Floyd points out, “Within several miles of my hometown lived men and women who were known only as Jabbo, Biddie, Pep, WeeWee, Buster, Puddin’, Doo-spat, Ham, Big ’un, Nannie, Bobo, Snooky, and Button. How could folks with those kind of names be anything but interesting?”

“Writing” is fascinating reading, and, of course, enthrallingly written, as can be expected by writers writing about writing. But it’s also an encouragement for those who have thought about writing, but haven’t done it, thinking there’s some kind of secret to it.

If there is an “inside secret” to Southerners wanting to write, maybe that’s plain, as well.

The South, writes Jennifer Horne, writes itself every day, offering up “a hunter’s stew of history and hope and horror.”

It’s all around us.

As Floyd points out: “In my travels I’ve been inside bookstores all across the nation, and I have yet to see a section labeled ‘Northern Fiction.’ Maybe that, in itself, is revealing.”

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

Susan Cushman, John Floyd, and Jim Dees will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, May 2, at 5:00 to sign and read from Southern Writers on Writing.

‘Delta Epiphany,’ on RFK’s Mississippi visit, raises questions anew

By Guest Author

On April 30, 2018

In Politics, Southern History

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 29)

Ellen B. Meacham’s book, Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi, lives up to its title as a detailed recounting of the former U.S. senator and presidential candidate’s visit to the Magnolia State in April, 1967.

delta epiphany But it goes far beyond a simple retracing of his steps here and his return to Washington that resulted in massive changes in federal food programs for the poor.

For starters, Meacham recounts the context of the times that saw riots in the nation’s largest cities as racial segregation and economic inequality ran rampant in the land, as the civil rights movement was moving turbulently forward, buffeted by murders and assassinations.

She sketches the major players in the national debate, not only Robert Kennedy, but the legacy of his slain brother, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, who was trying to implement a War on Poverty, even as a shooting war in Southeastern Asia itself was taking a bloody toll and spurring protest.

She offers a Mississippi-centric view, naming the local players, including such well-known personas (considered moderates) as Congressman Frank Smith, journalist Bill Minor, political stalwarts William Winter and J. P. Coleman, and their complicated relationships with their sometimes foes, Wirt Yerger, Ross Barnett and Sen. James O. Eastland, among others.

On a lighter note, she even details the seating arrangements of the dinners, the hostesses, and guests of the entourage as Kennedy visited, making Epiphany a holistic, personal, textured, vivid, almost surreal memory of the time.

Kennedy’s trip was spurred by a confluence of factors, including the complexities of concern over the North’s urban ghettoes and the South’s Great Migration of blacks fleeing Jim Crow and dwindling jobs in the South.

Not the least of those influences, she reveals, was the young Marian Wright (who later married one of his aides, Peter Edelman, and founded the Children’s Defense Fund). Wright operated out of a cramped office above a pool hall on Jackson’s Farish Street. It was her assertion to Kennedy that people were literally starving in Mississippi. She implored him to see for himself.

He did.

In Cleveland, as shown by graphic, heart-rending photos, Kennedy found a family of 15 living in a shack. He asked a nine-year-old boy what he had eaten that day and he replied, simply, “molasses.”

Though it was afternoon, and he had only eaten that morning, his grandmother said, “I can’t hardly feed ’em but twice a day.” And then, the evening meal would only be more syrup, and bread.

It got worse. He saw people living in a shack with only a hole in the floor for a toilet. Their street was mud. For heat was a woodstove burning whatever they could find. With no furniture, their bed was a mattress on bricks. A child lying on it had open sores.

“Children, even babies, were near starvation in the heart of the richest country in the world.”

Meacham chronicles the visit by an American political icon only one year before his assassination, but she goes beyond that, revisiting the region and finding poverty still more than twice that of the rest of the nation; high school dropout rate 43 percent; 70 percent of births to single mothers; infant deaths among the highest.

Even food insecurity remains the second highest nationally. Some 208,530 people “have to choose between paying bills or buying food.”

Epiphany is a moving portrait of a wrenching time in the history of America, the South, Mississippi. It captures an enduring moment of national shame but still begs the question: Has society progressed so much since then?

Or, have we lost our way.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at The Clarion Ledger, serves on the governing board of the USDA’s Southern Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SSARE) program. He is the author of seven books, including Conscious Food: Sustainable Growing, Spiritual Eating.

Ellen Meacham will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, May 1, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi.

Author Q & A with Charles Frazier

By Guest Author

On April 24, 2018

In Fiction, Historical Fiction, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 22)

Amidst a timely controversy about the relevance of Confederate monuments scattered across the South and a national discussion about race, Charles Frazier’s newest novel examines the role of Varina Davis, wife of the Confederacy’s only president, Jefferson Davis, and her influence on history.
In Varina, a work of historical fiction, Frazier places the former first lady of what he refers to as the “imaginary country” at a health resort in Saratoga Springs, New York. The year in 1906, and the story begins just weeks before her death at age 80, when she gets a surprise visit from a middle-aged African-American man she doesn’t recognize.

The stranger turns out to be the young boy she took in off the streets of Richmond 40 years ago, who is searching for clues about his own identity. As she recounts her story of the war years and beyond, he begins to clarify his personal history.

Charles Frazier

Frazier, who won the National Book Award for his internationally bestselling debut novel Cold Mountain in 1997, has said that he believes events of the past few years have left America still searching for a resolution to issues concerning race and slavery.

Frazier’s other novels include Thirteen Moons and Nightwoods. A native of North Carolina, he still makes his home there.

Why did you choose Varina Davis to write about now–was it influenced by the efforts of some today to remove statues of Confederate leaders, including her husband Jefferson David, president of the Confederacy?

varina I was interested in the fact that she left Mississippi shortly after Jefferson Davis died and moved to New York City to become a newspaper writer when she was over 60 years old. I found out that she had lived in London for some time, alone. As she grew older, she stayed engaged with the world around her and her opinions continued to evolve. At a time in life when most people start slowing down, she was digging her heels in, thinking mostly about her work, writing.

The novel is crafted around the conversations of an aging Varina with a man she had apparently rescued as a child–a man she had not seen in 40 years. He has come to her for answers about his own identity, and she provides clues as she tells her story. At the time he visits, she is 80 years old and has been earning her living by writing for publications in New York City. Tell me about their relationship.

It’s not certain that she rescued him. The story that (Varina’s friend) Mary Chesnut told was that Varina was riding through Richmond in a carriage and she witnessed the boy being mistreated and took him in; there is another story that there was a group of boys, including her sons, running around Richmond and they brought him home with them.

The (recorded) history of that child ends in 1865. I elevated him to a grown-up. I wanted it to feel to her like a child had returned. (All four of her sons had died young.) He had always wanted to know his story, so different from hers in that she had benefited from slavery her whole life.

Varina was a remarkably strong and independent woman, well-educated and ahead of her time in her thinking about political and social issues. She married Jefferson Davis when she was 18 and he was 37. How would you describe their marriage relationship, with its many moves, the tumultuous time in the country, and the deaths of their four sons at a young age?

There were lots of separations–sometimes because of his work and sometimes because they were not getting along. They quarreled over his will that left her totally dependent on his brother. There were some rocky periods, for sure, but divorce was out of the question.

When Jefferson Davis learned that he had been appointed president of the Confederacy, he and Varina took the news with a sense of dread. Why was that?

He was appointed and inaugurated (as provisional president) in Montgomery, Alabama (on Feb. 18, 1861), and was inaugurated again in Richmond (on Feb. 22, 1862) after he was actually elected to the post (in November 1861).

Varina had expected him to be named the president and didn’t feel like he had the temperament for the job. She told (her friend) Mary Chesnut that he would be president and that “it will be a disaster.” They had just settled back in at their home at David Bend (near Vicksburg) when word came. Both were depressed about it.

Tell me about Varina’s role as the Confederacy’s only first lady, especially considering that she didn’t agree with her husband on everything politically, and this was a job she never asked for.

Varina Davis

She performed a lot of the conventional duties of a first lady, but was constantly criticized by people in Richmond for being too opinionated, too sharp-witted. Many looked on her as being too Western and crude. Mississippi was still a frontier area when she was growing up there, and it bothered some people who thought that she was not as polished.

Other characters in the book reveal much about Varina. Tell me about Mary Chesnut and her relationship with Varina. Also, who is the mysterious character of Laura, who befriended Varina when they were both guests at the health spa in Saratoga Springs?

Many Chesnut and Varina were friends in the real world. They met in Washington when each was 18 and their husbands were members of Congress.

Mary was from South Carolina. She was well educated in Charleston and was known for being smart and quick-witted. Mary’s husband had important positions in the Confederate government (as an aide to the president and a brigadier general in the Confederate Army). The diaries she wrote during the Civil War were later published and they provided a great deal of firsthand information about that period.

For Laura’s character, I pictured someone with lots of problems whose rich parents sent away to get better. At the end of the book, they are trying expensive new medical treatments for her. Also, Varina had lost so many of her own children, and, in Laura, she finds someone to take care of.

The use of mixing wine with morphine, or taking opium or laudanum seemed to be a common practice as a way to relax and forget life’s problems, and we see Varina using it fairly often. How common was this?

You didn’t need a prescription for laudanum (or tincture of opium)–it was the type of thing you could get at traveling medicine shows. It was used for practically anything, especially for women, from mild depression after childbirth, to husbands saying their wives were too high strung or high-spirited. I don’t know if Varina was a big (user), but I do know Mary Chesnut was. I expect some periods of Varina’s life could be explained by her use of it. For example, the way she suddenly left during her husband’s inauguration in Montgomery, with no explanation.

Please tell me how you hope Varina will address your concerns about some of the unrest about race that we still see lingering in our country, with the removal of Confederate statues and the division we continue to hear in the national rhetoric.

I think of historical fiction as a conversation between the present and the past, and Varina Davis’s life offered me a complex entry point into that dialogue. That war and its cause–the ownership of human beings–live so deep in our nation’s history and identity that we still haven’t found a way to reconcile and move forward. And it’s important to remember that most of those monuments didn’t spring up right after 1865, but are largely a product of the Jim Crow South. Their continued presence indicates how much the issues of the Civil War are like the armature inside a sculpture–baked into the framework of our country and our culture.

Do you have other writings in the works at this time, or ideas for your next project?

I’ve got a couple ideas in the works and will decide which one to pursue this summer.

This interview has also been posted on the Clarion-Ledger’s website.

Charles Frazier will be at the Eudora Welty House on Thursday, April 26, at 5:00 to sign and read from Varina, Lemuria’s April 2018 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

‘Bluff’ is a sleight-of-hand narrative achievement

By Guest Author

On April 23, 2018

In Mystery

By William Boyle. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 22)

Forgive me, but I’m obligated to begin this way: Bluff (The Mysterious Press/Grove Atlantic) by Michael Kardos has some killer tricks up its sleeve.

bluff Set in Kardos’s native New Jersey, the novel starts with close-up magician Natalie Webb, on the verge of being washed up at 27, almost blinding a smarmy lawyer at a corporate holiday show by throwing a playing card at his eye. It’s a compelling and darkly funny opening, one that sets the tone for the rest of what’s to come: a book that expertly walks the line between breeziness and brutality.

As Natalie treads water, she tries to make some extra cash by following up on an offer to write a magazine article about poker cheats. From there, Natalie is set up with a grizzled card hustler named Ace who takes her to a private game held in a bakery. To reveal more than this would be to ruin one of the book’s many surprises.

Suffice to say, the book lulls you into believing you know where the narrative is heading and then it jolts you in a new direction. When Natalie winds up as a central piece of a big game with over a million dollars on the line, Kardos’s choices become particularly innovative and intriguing.

Little by little, Natalie’s backstory is revealed, as well: her complicated family history, her apprenticeship with the magician Jack Clarion, her fall from grace at the World of Magic competition. This is never overwhelming or distracting, and Kardos keeps us firmly grounded in the present while letting us know what we need to know about Natalie to understand her motivations, her craftiness, her cynicism.

Natalie is an endearing protagonist. I can’t remember rooting as hard for someone in anything I’ve read lately. She reminds me of Elmore Leonard’s great heroines, especially Jackie Burke and Karen Sisco. Natalie is hardened by experience, funny, capable of great sympathy, and she’s our moral guide here. The product of deceit at the hands of powerful men, we’re cheering for her world to be set right.

The book is populated with memorable, almost Dickensian characters: there’s Ace, the card cheat Natalie hooks up with for the potential profile; Emily, whose slick play in the bakery game impresses Natalie so much she become fixated on her; Cool Calvin, a neighbor boy who first tries to shake her down and later becomes her apprentice (of sorts); Harley, her kind-hearted upstairs neighbor, who takes in stray dogs; Brock McKnight, the lawyer who offers to help with her case because he desperately wants to understand her Four Queens trick; and Victor Flowers, a New Jersey power player who threads his way from her haunted past all the way to her uncertain present.

The work is also wildly cinematic. I kept thinking this would be a tailor-made adaptation for a director like Steven Soderbergh. It’s got the same sort of lightness on its feet as some of Soderbergh’s crime caper pictures. It also has the raw energy of Robert Altman’s classic California Split and the aesthetic values of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s recent Mississippi Grind.

Bluff, as I’ve said, is full of surprises. None of which I aim to spoil here. It’s at turns tender and tough, a book that’s comfortable roaming into Thin Man territory as it is exploring the violent consequences of getting involved with the wrong people.

Like any great magician, Kardos, who teaches creative writing at Mississippi State, encourages his audience to get totally wrapped up in the world of his act. And this act, ladies and gentlemen, is a pure delight.

William Boye of Oxford is originally from Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of the crime novels Gravesend and, this summer, The Lonely Witness.

Michael Kardos will be at Lemuria tomorrow, Tuesday, April 24, at 5:00 to sign and read from Bluff.

Author Q & A with Brian Castner

By Guest Author

On April 18, 2018

In Adventure, History, Nonfiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 15)

For a man who never intended to be a writer and admits that he “stumbled into it,” Brian Castner’s work has landed on solid footing thus far.

His newest book, Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage, follows his own bold journey to retrace a 1789 expedition whose leader had hoped would finally unlock a North American passage to Asia–and change world trade forever.

Castner’s original goal of becoming an engineer got sidetracked years ago, and after a successful Air Force career that found him detonating bombs on a regular basis, the Iraq War veteran returned home to find that writing would become his tool to work through lingering stress from his military years.

His previous books include the memoir The Long Walk in 2012 (a New York Times Editor’s Pick that was adapted into an opera); and the nonfiction All the Ways We Kill and Die in 2016. His journalism and essays have appeared in Esquire, Wired, VICE, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and others.

How did your engineering background lead you, in a roundabout way, into your writing career?

Brian Castner

I grew up in Buffalo, New York, went to Marquette University in Milwaukee, and majored in electrical engineering. I was never a good engineer, though. I got good grades, but I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t think like other engineers. But the engineering degree was a means to an end, because I had an ROTC scholarship, and wanted to get into the Air Force to be an astronaut. I’ve always wanted to explore–the further out, the better! Obviously, that didn’t work out, but writing has let me travel the world.

I’ve always liked to read, and as a kid I wrote a lot, in middle school and high school. Even in college, I tried to escape engineering a bit, and studied a semester in Oxford, reading philosophy, history, and English. I even took a playwriting class. But I never considered a career in writing. I didn’t think it was a job that contemporary adults really did. I didn’t know any authors until I became one. I stumbled into it.

You served three tours of duty in the Middle East, working as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer (a bomb squad tech) in the Air Force and winning a Bronze Star. When you returned home, you spent a good while readjusting to civilian life, and fed your adventurous side by working as a river guide. When you decided to retrace Alexander Mackenzie’s 1,100-mile exploration in 1789 of a river he hoped would finally uncover the “Northwest Passage” in northern Canada, how did your family (your wife and four sons) react, and why was it so important to you to make this dangerous journey?

I did struggle returning home, a story I tell in The Long Walk. River guiding really helped me find peace in the tumult–when you are in the middle of the rapid, you have to be totally present, to think about nothing but your line–that is, your safest path through the water–and the water itself. I have a calm feeling in the whitewater and it gave me a safe way to chill out and readjust to home life.

For this trip, I don’t have a good answer to what drove me. I find it to be an urge, a base instinct. I had always wanted to take a long journey like this, walking or canoeing, months in the wilderness. When I came upon Mackenzie’s story, I was entranced by the narrative, but also by the possibility of taking the journey myself, to write a better book. It fulfilled a long-held desire, and that it was Mackenzie’s journey I was retracing is a matter of scholarly research and serendipity.

A few of my four sons wanted to come with me; my wife put the kibosh on that. I also invited her along, for at least a section, but she smartly demurred. They know me, know why this trip excited me. And the good news is that as I get older, the fernweh [wanderlust] seems to be fading. At least a bit.

Disappointment River alternates between the detailed stories of your journey and that of Alexander Mackenzie, a fur trader who knew that his success in finding a Northwest Passage–a trade route through North America that would provide a direct channel to the East–would not only secure his place in history, but would ensure his fortune as well. Why did you decide to tell both stories?

Because these are the kinds of stories I most like to read, a blending of forgotten history and travelogue. But also, one story didn’t make sense without the other. On the one hand, I’ve had enough internal voyages of discovery. I didn’t need to take a long canoe trip to find myself. I needed an external goal and finish line, and retracing Mackenzie’s path provided that. At the same time, if I just told Mackenzie’s story, I think most readers would have an obvious question: I wonder what this land is like now? That Mackenzie encountered fierce pack ice at the end of his journey, and I suspected I would find open ocean, lent another bit of symmetry to the trip.

On your own journey, you worked out a plan that allowed four of your friends to jump in and accompany you, one at a time, via small airports along the way. Their travel schedules dictated that you were allowed little time to rest along the way. Tell me how having these friends join you–and the schedule you were forced to keep–influenced your trip.

As I write in the book, I had no interest in doing a psychological experiment on myself, to see if I could do the trip by myself; it was always about finding the right people to go with me. At first, I hoped to get one friend to do the whole trip, but no one had the time. Doing four friends, and rotating the flights, was a matter of necessity. I think it had benefits in the book, though–a variety of characters for the reader to get to know.

The tight schedule did produce some anxiety, but…pretty early on in the trip, you realize how small and powerless you are against the might of the river. So, I worried before the trip, but during it, you simply make the best time you can and realize how much is out of your control. The cold, wet, heat, thunderstorms, bugs, and hunger drove us as much as a schedule. I wanted to finish the trip, succeed, and get home to my kids.

In the book, you speak often of the difficulties you faced–several serious run-ins with storms and high winds, high waves, and, at times, even hunger. You often mentioned the stress, exertion, filth, heat, and mosquitoes–and how it took a toll on your mind and body. Did you expect it to be this difficult? Of what were you most fearful? What did you miss the most?

I expected it to be physically taxing, and I knew how to patiently endure the weather and hunger. But I wasn’t good at predicting how mentally challenging the monotony was. I didn’t know I would be so bored, for such long stretches–the view never changing, the sun never changing, the food never changing, nothing more to talk about, just paddling through a constant now. That tedium was the biggest challenge.

My biggest fear was not bears or weather or waves, honestly. It was getting injured or sick. I had a big med kit with a lot of drugs, like cipro, but fortunately, I never needed it.

I missed a lot of things on the river, especially my kids. But all the modern conveniences, the thing I missed most was darkness. The ability to draw the blinds and make a dark bedroom. It felt so good to sleep in darkness.

As you traveled north, you were able to get a sense of the cultures and lives of the people in these tiny villages. What did you discover about their hopes and fears?

I had read a lot on the struggles in northern indigenous Canada: poverty, alcoholism, suicide. But I was unprepared for the reality of it, the casual public intoxication at all hours, the pervasive want. Of course, I met wonderful generous people, who took me into their homes and told me stories of living on the land in the traditional way. But they talked about the alcohol and poverty, too, all the time. I didn’t have to bring it up–there is no way to avoid it. There is just a pervasive hopelessness–the traditional ways are hard. Please rid yourself of any romance now–living off the land is hard and dangerous work, a hard life. No wonder the young people are not clamoring to take it up, not when they know all about modern life on satellite TV. But what replaces it, in these tiny villages in the North? The pipeline? Tourism? There is not much answer now.

For reasons I’ll let readers discover, Mackenzie believed for the rest of his life that his voyage to find the Northwest Passage was a “spectacular failure”–but he could never know the truth. His book about it became a worldwide bestseller, and he received much affirmation. What do you think his greatest achievement was?

I think his greatest…achievement is that he never lost a man or woman on his expeditions. This was hardly an assured thing. Voyagers died in the rapids all the time. Attack by the indigenous tribes was a real threat–the next expedition to follow Mackenzie down his river, in 1799, was ambushed and wiped out. John Franklin followed Mackenzie’s route in 1819, and his party resorted to cannibalism. Despite the hazards of the whitewater, violence, and starvation, not a single person died on his great journeys in 1789 and 1793. In retrospect, that is remarkable.

What did this experience help you learn about yourself? Would you do it again?

After this trip, I feel like I have nothing left to prove. Even to myself. Maybe especially to myself. That might sound funny, since I have survived other crucibles that are supposed to impart that feeling–in EOD school, 30 of us started and only three finished. But I had never taken a long wilderness journey like this before. And I feel like I’m good now–if I never hike the Appalachian Trail, I’m fine.

I wouldn’t do a trip like this again, not without my wife and some of my children. There is nothing hiding behind the next spruce tree that is more important than them.

Do you have another book or idea in thew works at this time?

I have started my next book, and it will be published again by Doubleday. But I hesitate to say too much, lest the ideas and inspiration slip away into the ether. I can say this, though: it is nonfiction, history, a story of the North, and I do have to take a backpacking trip into the mountains. Yes, my sons go, too!

Disappointment River is a 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Charles Frazier’s ‘Varina’ is an immersion in the Civil War South

By Guest Author

On April 16, 2018

In Civil War, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Southern Fiction

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 15)

As historical fiction, Charles Frazier’s Varina can be seen as an imagined memoir of the widow of Confederate President Jefferson Davis—but only barely.

varina It draws heavily from the verified facts about the former Varina Howell of Natchez, but is seamlessly layered with the insightful thoughts and personality of a woman from an attractive belle to an arch and wise matron in her later years. It’s truly a fascinating journey.

It covers her courtship as a young girl with the then-widowed Davis more than a decade her senior, from living on their plantation at Davis Bend near Vicksburg to moving to Washington, D.C., when he was first a congressman from Mississippi, then a U.S. senator, to being secretary of war, and, finally their days after the Civil War.

Davis himself does not get off lightly in her estimation. For example, she confided to one newspaper reporter after his inauguration as the Confederate leader that sometimes even she wanted to murder him. (Married folk can relate!)

But she speaks fondly of him, too, recalling his young man’s dream of being simply a country lawyer who wrote poetry; much as she wistfully recalled her own dream of being First Lady, not of the South, but residing on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., back when Davis was a U.S. senator and war hero. It seemed a likely prospect at the time.

The tale is told through her words to a black man who tracks her down as she is living out her later years in New York. The man, James Blake (or James Brooks), was known as Jimmie Limber when she and Davis took him in as a child from the streets of Washington and raised him, until they were split apart by the war.

As oddly as it might sound to the uninitiated, the story of a black child being raised side by side with their other children is true—at least, for a short time until the war intervened.

Some of the most gripping of the narrative (a la Gone with the Wind) involves Varina and Blake’s flight for Havana and hoped-for sanctuary in an arduous journey that ended on the Florida-Georgia border as their world came crashing down.

Frazier, known for his masterful work Cold Mountain, draws the reader in with broad strokes of often quite profound observation, along with period details, powerful accounts of the hard life of citizens after Sherman’s march, and thoughtful reflection.

For example, how she came about understanding the complex nature of slavery as a child amazed her, how even slight gradations of skin color could be so determinant. It boiled down to the sense “that a strong line cut through all the people she knew and everybody who existed,” one that “traced divisions clear and precise as the sweeping shadow of a sundial.”

And it was firmly enforced, in society, in public, in private, in homes and churches, a biblical injunction (Luke 12:47): “He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.”

The South and all in it were beaten down by it, wholly, individually, even the land itself “defaced and haunted with countless places where blood … would keep seeping up for generations to come.”

It makes one wonder, have the scars ever healed?

Frazier has produced a time machine where the reader is immersed in the Civil War era, pondering through the eyes of Varina Howell Davis the complexities, mysteries, brutalities and banalities of days long gone.

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

Charles Frazier will be at the Eudora Welty House on Thursday, April 26, to sign and read from Varina, Lemuria’s April 2018 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Campbell’s ‘Conversations’ probes heart of Christianity

By Guest Author

On April 12, 2018

In Religion, Southern Culture

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 1)

University Press of Mississippi has produced one its most fascinating books in years with publication of Conversations with Will D. Campbell.

A collection of interviews with Campbell over the course of nearly 40 years, the book edited by retired Jackson lawyer Tom Royals is thought-provoking, humorous, outrageous, and delightful—like Campbell himself.

conversations will campbell Campbell, an Amite County native, died in 2013, but his impact remains. He got his preaching certificate at age 17 at East Fork Baptist Church, and prized it above all his awards and degrees—including one for divinity from Yale.

He first distinguished himself as chaplain at the University of Mississippi, 1954-56, leaving after being threatened for his tolerant racial views. He became a staff member of the National Council of Churches and worked closely with such luminaries in the civil rights movement as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Afterwards, he attracted a celebrated following—including much of the country music scene in Nashville—publishing more than a dozen books and writing prolifically in magazines and journals.

Called alternatively a “renegade bootleg preacher” or a preacher without a church, he was reviled and celebrated by both liberals and conservatives—sometimes by both at the same time—immortalized by a cartoon character named Will B. Dunn and dubbed variously the “Aquinas of the Rednecks” and “the conscience of the South.”

As Conversations fleshes out, his theology goes to the heart of Christianity. His was a uniquely Southern Christian spirituality grounded in the Protestant tradition of direct relationship with God and personal connection with Christ. It requires honesty, humility, acts of faith, self-doubt, open-mindedness, and willingness to disobey rules when they conflict with conscience.

He was focused on the miracle of grace, extended to all people, from liberal firebrands to KKK. He believed it was his duty to “witness” to all sinners, which he said, included everyone. He remonstrated his beloved Baptist church for straying from its early roots as a revolutionary pillar of liberty and individual conscience to become a rules purveyor with its own orthodoxies and proscriptions.

Yes, he was an iconoclast, following only what he believed “Mr. Jesus” and his Gospel would approve.

A few nuggets from “Conversations” include:

Jesus “didn’t say which prisoners to visit—black or white—guilty or not guilty—which sick, which poor to bring good news to, deserving or undeserving.”
“I believe that our Lord was among the most antireligious ever to come along, for He came breaking the rules, smashing idols, tearing down structures, and proclaiming freedom from all such. And rules, crusades, and structures are the stuff religion is made of, whereas Jesus came proclaiming deliverance.”
“Love of country is not the same as love for God.”
“The blacks and whites worshiped together until the Civil War…. (if) the church had managed to stay as a nonracial institution, I think it would have made a great deal of difference.”
“I never rejected Mississippi.…You can’t grow up in that atmosphere and environment and not, I think, have that as long as you live. Even in your denying of it is affirming it.”

It was my honor to visit with Campbell at his Mt. Juliet, TN, farm shortly after the 1986 publication of his book 40 Acres and a Goat. At the time, I was an editor at the old Jackson Daily News, and we spent an afternoon talking about all things Mississippian. I was in awe.

Reading Conversations is just like sitting on the porch with him.

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

‘Artful Evolution’ provides lively history of Hal and Mal’s

By Guest Author

On April 11, 2018

In Southern Cooking, Southern Culture, Southern History

By Sherry Lucas. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 4)

Art, culture, community and family are the vines that wind through The Artful Evolution of Hal & Mal’s (University Press of Mississippi), a project that pairs Malcolm White’s words and Ginger Williams Cook’s illustrations with engaging results. Much like the iconic eatery, bar, and live music institution at its heart, it entertains at the outset and sustains in the long haul.

artful evolution Hal & Mal’s is not one story, but many, and the book sheds a warm and witty light on the background and influences that fed into this cultural outpost in Jackson’s downtown. Of all those vines, family clings the strongest with tendrils in every story of the boys who grew up in Perkinston and Booneville, lost their mother young, and held the love of father, stepmother, brother, grandparents, relatives and friends close.

Brothers Hal and Malcolm White opened Hal & Mal’s Jan. 8, 1986, and it became the capital city’s hub. It’s the junction where food, music, song, dance, words and art met, mixed, mingled, likely had a drink or two and got along famously.

Author White shares the major tenets of Hal & Mal’s business philosophy: (1) embrace art, culture and creativity as a strategy, not an afterthought; and (2) the more we give, the more successful we are. Anyone who has patronized Hal & Mal’s over the decades knows the result: a lively, generous atmosphere that boosted the best our state offered.

White’s vignettes—on red beans and rice, comeback sauce, the genius of Sambo Mockbee, Willie Morris’ bowling trophies, the Tangents, Albert King and the Autograph Wall, to name a few—share the essence of their subjects with a deft, authentic touch. An attractively breezy layout, like the happiest hours at Hal & Mal’s, works as well for dropping in, as it does for digging in for the night.

These are fine tributes, all—done with a clear eye, a fond gaze, an occasional wink and the fine appreciation of a good story. Nuggets pull you deeper into the Hal & Mal’s lore, such as the logo inspired by Smith Brothers Cough Drops, the St. Paddy’s Parade start in a snarl of rush-hour traffic, and how to start a literary stampede. “My Brother the Ampersand,” about brother Brad White, is a delight.

You can get lost in the photos on the walls at Hal & Mal’s. The same goes here as each self-contained jewel opens a window to the soul of this venerable spot. Cook’s artwork captures that ineffable lure with a sure, loving hand.

Hal White died in 2013. “Hal’s Recipe Cards,” illustrated with those index cards stained and worn with age and use, touches deep, and his younger brother Malcolm’s reference to “these pieces of folk art” speaks volumes about family, nurturing, legacy and love. He includes Hal’s daughter Brandi White Lee’s words, “the smell in those cards captures the cooking bliss … embedded into all his hugs.” For anyone who misses Hal’s soups nearly as much as they miss his presence at the end of the bar, it’s enough to pull your hand to the page for a rub.

Hal & Mal’s fed the soul as well as the belly of Jackson, with concerts and events and fundraisers and festivities that brought the creatives together for a good time and often, a better tomorrow — with a good meal in-between.

As chef and restaurateur Robert St. John notes in the foreword, Hal & Mal’s is a classic. He waxes eloquent about the killer gumbo and best roast beef sandwich east of the Mississippi River. I’ll single out the catfish po-boy as the best on either side of that river.

Doubtless, readers will bring their own stories to this table, nudged by a mention or memory, or Cook’s evocative art, into their own personal reverie. Because if you ever went there, ate there, drank there, danced, partied, mourned, celebrated, fund-raised, hell-raised or simply gathered there, Hal & Mal’s became a part of your story, too.

Sherry Lucas is a freelance writer covering food, arts and culture in Jackson. She is a long-time Hal & Mal’s patron.

Signed copies of The Artful Evolution of Hal & Mal’s are available at Lemuria’s online store.

Author: Guest Author (Page 18 of 28)

Author Q & A with Suzanne Stabile

Author Q & A with Rick Bragg

Southern writers share secrets, stories in new anthology

‘Delta Epiphany,’ on RFK’s Mississippi visit, raises questions anew

Author Q & A with Charles Frazier

‘Bluff’ is a sleight-of-hand narrative achievement

Author Q & A with Brian Castner

Charles Frazier’s ‘Varina’ is an immersion in the Civil War South

Campbell’s ‘Conversations’ probes heart of Christianity

‘Artful Evolution’ provides lively history of Hal and Mal’s

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