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Author Q & A with Chris Offutt

On April 10, 2018

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 1)

After nearly two decades, award-winning author and screenwriter Chris Offutt of Oxford has released his long-awaited next novel–and this time it is definitive Southern Gothic, as he lays out the story of Country Dark, a rough read about the tragic lives of one family as they face a difficult life situation, and a husband and father who can’t help but take matters into his own hands.

The story chronicles the family’s life beginning in 1954, when 18-year-old Korean war veteran Tucker returns to his Kentucky home and meets Rhonda, the 14-year-old girl who agrees on that day that they should be married. It carries readers through 17 tumultuous years of poverty, prison, and the despair of dealing with the eventual reality that four of their six children struggled with severe emotional or physical disabilities.

Offutt, who grew up in a community of 200 people on dirt roads in the hills of eastern Kentucky, is himself most comfortable in rural settings.

“I tried cities–Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque–and I didn’t like them,” he said. “I now live at the end of a dirt road in Lafayette County.”

Chris Offutt

His mastery in capturing the tone, the language, and the attitudes of the hill people shows through clearly in this tale of a good man who gets pushed too far, and resorts to violence at any any cost to save his large family.

Now an associate professor of English and screenwriting at the University of Mississippi, Offutt earned a bachelor’s degree in theatre from Morehead State University; and an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa.

He has scripted five screenplays and two films, and has worked on the HBO drama True Blood and the Showtime series Weeds.

A versatile writer, Offutt’s previous books include My Father, the Pornographer in 2016, along with two other memoirs, No Heroes and The Same River Twice. Other fiction works include the novel The Good Brother and two story collections, Out of the Woods and his first book, Kentucky Straight. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Short Stories, and many other anthologies.

Your new novel, Country Dark, is a story of one man’s passion to keep his family together–a desire matched only by his willingness to eliminate any obstacle that would stand in his way. Tucker, the main character, is a complicated mix of compassion, tenderness, revenge, and violence. What was your inspiration for this character and this story?

People who live in the rural South are often portrayed negatively in the mainstream media, movies, and TV. I wanted to write a novel that showed rural people as smart, self-reliant, resourceful, loyal, and loving.

Initially, I’d planned to write a family saga of three generations. I became so enthralled by Tucker that I stuck with him for the entire book.

The story takes place in rural Kentucky from 1954 through 1971, and the characters’ lives are steeped in hardship and varying levels of despair. Why this time frame, and this place?

The book is set where I grew up. The biggest influence on me was the landscape and the adults. I wanted to examine both. Also, I was interested in writing about the “pre-technology” world of no cell phones and no computers.

People had telephone party-lines in their houses, which meant your neighbors could listen to conversations. As a result, nobody really talked personally. If you wanted to communicate with someone directly, you went to their house. In the hills, it was often shorter and easier to walk through the woods than along the roads.

When main characters Tucker and Rhonda first meet, they decide that day that they want to get married–and they go on to endure much heartbreak during their marriage. What was the glue that held them together so securely?

They met very young under difficult circumstances. They fell in love without quite meaning to–which is how most of us fall in love.

Couples of that era in the hills of Kentucky tended to stick together no matter what. Marriage is compromise and personal growth.

Rhonda and Tucker were lucky–they grew together, not apart. They accepted their difficulties and faced them head on as a team.

In the sad descriptions of Tucker and Rhonda’s disabled children, Hattie, the social worker, reminds her boss that “It’s not black and white here. It’s all gray.” Explain what she meant by that, in this family’s situation.

There is a tendency for many people to reduce everything to either/or, good/bad, black/white. It’s easy, but it’s short-sighted and wrong-headed. You see this often with politicians trying to get votes. It’s a divisive way to see the world, one that essentially translates to “us versus them.” I object to that viewpoint.

All humans are complex individuals who respond to their emotions and to a complicated world.

I’m using “black and white” as a metaphor for polar extremes. Everyone I know lives in the middle–the so-called gray area.

After writing three books of memoirs, why did readers have to wait so long for your next fictional work?

A couple of reasons. I needed to send my sons to college and had very little money when they were in high school. I worked in Hollywood to finance their education, which took me away from novels for eight years.

When they graduated from college, I moved to Mississippi and returned to fiction.

I was writing all along, but not in the sustained way that a novel requires. Right now, I have two other completed books–a collection of stories and another novel. Plus, I’m working on a new novel.

You grew up in rural Kentucky. What brought you to Oxford, and when?

I was one of those kids who couldn’t wait to leave my isolated rural environment. As a young man, I hitchhiked out of the hills and lived in several cities, where I never fit in. I then spent the next 30 years trying to get back to the country!

In 2011, I moved to Oxford to teach screenwriting and fiction writing at the University of Mississippi. I live outside of town and have never been happier or more productive.

Your work has been compared to that of the late Larry Brown of Oxford. Did you know him personally? And would you say that is an accurate description of your writing?

Yes, I knew Larry. He was very supportive of my first book, published in 1992. I used to come down and visit him. We’d go fishing and talk about books–in particular, Southern literature.

I’m not objective enough about my own work to know if our writing is similar. If it is, I’m flattered and honored by the comparison. I learned a lot from reading his books. He’s a great writer.

What’s next for your readers?

Novels and short stories. It is my sincere hope that my life is so boring and mundane that it will never again warrant a memoir! All I want to do now is make stuff up.

Chris Offutt will be at Lemuria on Thursday, April 12, at 5:00 to sign and read from Country Dark.

Author Q & A with Francisco Cantú

By Guest Author

On April 9, 2018

In Biography/Memoir, Culture, Nonfiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print and online editions (April 8)

When Francisco Cantú decided to join the U.S. Border Patrol as a new college graduate in 2008, he expected the work to be tough, but after four years, the realities of the job forced him to examine the morality of his duties–and a gut check told him clearly: “It’s not the work for me.”

In a memoir about his duties with the patrol, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border (Riverhead Books), Cantú recounts the physical and emotional toll the experience took on him, and his growing angst about what really happens in the desert to those who attempt to cross.

Written in three parts, the book describes his training and introduction to the brutal field work; his transfer to a desk job in the intelligence division; and his personal involvement in the case of an undocumented friend who got caught up in the legalities of crossing the border.

A former Fulbright fellow, Cantú was a recipient of a Whiting Award for emerging writers in 2017. His work has been featured on the This American Life radio/podcast and in Best American Essays, Harper’s, Guernica, Orion, and n + 1.

He received his MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona. When he’s not writing, Cantú coordinates a research fellowship that connects MFA students with advocacy groups active in environment and social justice issues in the borderlands; teaches at the University Poetry Center; and tends bar.

When you decided to pursue a career as a U.S. Border Patrol, you knew it would be a tough job–that you would be “fetching dead bodies from the desert” in 115-degree heat, and you were cautioned by one of your early trainers: “You will be tested.” What inspired you to seek employment as a border patrol agent?

Francisco Cantú

When I first began to consider signing up for the Border Patrol, I was 22, about to graduate from college. I had become completely obsessed with the border during my studies in international relations, but began to feel that much of the book learning and policy work I had been doing was disconnected from the realities of the landscape and culture that I had known growing up. At the time, the border patrol began to seem like one of the only ways to really be out on the border day in and day out, to see the hard realities of the place.

I joined hoping to be a “force for good” within the agency, imagining I might spend several years in the patrol and then become a policy maker or immigration lawyer equipped with insights that had eluded everyone else. I knew I’d see awful things, but I imagined that I’d be able to just be an observer, not a participant, that my sense of morals and ethics would withstand the numbing forces of the institution. It was incredibly naïve.

Understandably, when your Mexican-American mother heard of your plans to work as a border patrol agent, she feared for you life and your psyche, worried that it would change you in hard ways. Throughout the book, there are episodes of her offering advice and reflections about your work. Looking back, do you see some wisdom in her words now that you didn’t see then?

From the very beginning, my mother sensed the risk I was running of becoming lost. She had spent her career working for the federal government and warned me how it is impossible to step into an institution without it repurposing your energy towards its own ends. I wish I’d listened to her more–like many young adults I thought of myself as infallible.

My mother was the only person in my life that was still holding me accountable, reminding me of the reasons I had given for joining. She was one of the only tethers connecting me to who I was outside of the job. I don’t know if I would have come out of it in the same way without her.

Your book is filled with references to frequent disturbing dreams that haunted your nights. You also suffered from teeth grinding and lack of sleep during your stint as an agent. What did you make of these episodes?

At the time, I pushed them away. But looking back on it, these dreams were the only thing in my life, other than my mother, reaching out to tell me that something was wrong, that I was not alright. It’s alarming to think of how plainly violence and dehumanization was manifest in my dreams and how it correlated with becoming numb to it through my work. I would dream, for example, of dead bodies, of people I had arrested returning to me. I once dreamed that I was in the desert surrounded by people without faces. The longer I ignored the dreams, the more jarring they became. I realize now my nightmares were alarm bells, calling me back to my sense of humanity, calling my attention to something that had been violated.

Your days as an agent were filled with encounters with immigrants headed north, determined to enter the U.S. at almost any cost. Some were drug dealers or worse, but most were just looking for honest work. You admit there were times you would work with desperate people at points along the way, often in miserable circumstances, and you would soon forget their names. Did you feel like you became desensitized to the violence and despair of many of these people?

Absolutely. The normalization of violence is a central theme of this book. That moment you mention, when I realized I had forgotten the names of a pregnant woman and her husband that I’d arrested only hours before, is one of those moments I think of all the time, because I think that’s the first step in dehumanizing someone–forgetting their name, the thing that makes them an individual. It’s a small form of violence, and, looking at that–all the big and small ways we become desensitized to violence and despair–that was one of the principal things that led me to write after I left the job.

It felt like one of the only ways to truly grapple with what I’d been part of. I became interested not only in interrogating the ways I had normalized violence in my own life, but in examining how this also happens on a much broader level, how entire societies and populations normalize violence, especially in the borderlands.

The book includes a great deal of the history of the border situation, along with reflective pieces by other writers whose point of view you deemed relevant. How did you choose these pieces, and why did you add them?

Early drafts of the manuscript included some history of the border, but I was actually given permission by my editor to include even more outside research, to really look at how this border came to be what it is. That was exciting to me–it opened the door for me to include different kinds of work that had influenced my thinking about this place: writing from Mexican poet Sara Uribe, novelist and essayist Cristina Rivera Garza, as well as citations from primary documents like the U.S. Boundary Commission Reports from the 1800s.

The purpose of including such a wide spectrum of research was to encourage an interrogation of borders: most people who don’t live near one would probably tend to think of the border as a political or physical line separating two countries. But part of living in the borderlands is being constantly presented with different manifestations of the border and seeing all the different ways it is thrust into people’s lives.

Why did you ultimately quit your job as a border patrol agent?

I accepted a Fulbright Fellowship to study abroad. There were several reasons I applied for it, and one of them, I’m sure, was to subconsciously provide myself with a way out of the job that didn’t represent a defeat, that represented a path ahead. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see that I had finally started to break down.

Once I left the Border Patrol, I realized that I didn’t get any of the answers I had joined looking for–I only came away with more questions, and the border only seemed more overwhelming and incomprehensible. My turn toward writing was a way of accepting that, of surrendering to the act of asking questions that might not have an answer.

The final third of the book is devoted to the story of José, a friend you met after your border patrol years who became trapped in Mexico after returning to his native home to visit his dying mother. José comments at length about the difficulties of trying to cross the border to return to his family, and he places much blame on the Mexican government for its corruption and lack of aid and support for its own people; while chastising America for its seeming inhumanity in attempting to turn them away. Do you have a sense of what could or should be done to resolve, or at least ease, the crisis?

I remember José explaining to me that as a father there is literally nothing that he wouldn’t endure to reunite with his children. It’s hard to really grasp the significance of somebody saying, “It doesn’t matter how hellacious an obstacle is, I will overcome it to be with my family.”

José explained to me that he respects the laws of the U.S., but his family values supersede those laws. Our rhetoric encourages us to think of people like José as criminals, but under those terms, it’s impossible for me to look at his actions as criminal. I think most of us would do the same in his situation.

I think we have to end the de facto policy of “enforcement through deterrence,” which is something you don’t hear our policy makers talk about in any of their discussions about immigration reform. By heavily enforcing the easy-to-cross portions of the border near towns and cities, we’ve been pushing migrants to cross int he most remote and deadly parts of the desert, weaponizing the landscape.

Hundreds of deaths occur there each year, and those are just the ones that get reported. Around 6,000 and 7,000 migrants have lost their lives since the year 2000. Even last year, the administration bragged that crossings were down to their lowest level in more than 14 years, but what you didn’t hear is that migrant deaths actually went up from the year before, not down. So even though less people are crossing the border, the crossing is becoming more deadly.

I see this as a complete humanitarian crisis taking place on American soil, and I don’t see our country acknowledging these deaths in the way we should. We don’t read their names, we don’t memorialize them, we don’t mourn their deaths. That’s unacceptable. We have to understand these numbers, first and foremost, as representing individual people, individual lives.

Francisco Cantú will be at Lemuria tonight, Monday, April 9, at 5:00 to sign and read from The Line Becomes a River. This book is a 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Francophile Friday: Fiction

By Guest Author

On March 30, 2018

In Fiction, Foreign Fiction

By Annerin Long

French literature has a long and rich history, dating back to the Song of Roland in the 11th and 12th centuries to modern day masters, including two recipients of the Nobel Prize for Lieterature in the 21st century alone (J.M.G. le Clézio in 2008 and Patrick Modiano in 2014). Today, Alliance Française de Jackson members are closing out le Mois de la Francophonie with a few of their favorite novels from French authors.

One of my all-time favorite books–French or not–is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I read this in my pre-Francophile days, but the great adventure, even if sometimes predictable, has always stayed with me and in my opinion, has rightfully earned its place among the great classics.

Wandering Star by le Clézio is a powerful book set during World War II and the years immediately after and tells the story of two young girls whose paths briefly cross, each impacting the other for years to come. This is a book of survival and change and growth in the middle of often unthinkable circumstances.

Non-fiction books from Peter Mayle and Marcel Pagnol have been mentioned in other Francophile Friday editions. Jeanne Cook also lists these authors among her favorites in fiction. Mayle’s Chasing Cézanne takes readers on a mystery through the jet-setter, art-collector world, while Pagnol’s Jean de Florette and Manon of the Springs have been described as Greek tragedy set in Provence.

If you enjoy reading books set in France, regardless of the author’s nationality, Carl Cerco suggests Chocolat (a best-selling book before the movie, and aren’t the books always better?) by Joanne Harris, in which newcomer-to-town Vianne Rocher turns the town upside down with her magical boxes of chocolate. all the light we canot see Two recent books that completely captured me were All the Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr), a World War II tale told from two perspectives. Perhaps the twist of the story is predictable, but this didn’t detract from the suspense. Paris in the Present Tense (Mark Helprin; sadly, I missed his visit to Lemuria last year) is likewise beautifully written, telling the story of widower Jules Lacour, a septuagenarian who must face his past and make difficult decisions for the future, set in a modern Paris with both its good and bad.

I’m going to finish today with a book (or rather, seven) that I confess I have not read all the way through: Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I’m attempting to read this one in French, so it’s slow going for this seven-volume work. The best way to tackle this 20th century masterpiece? With madeleines, of course (there is a great recipe in Ladurée’s Sucré, featured in the first Francophile Friday post.

Other recommendations

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
The Stranger by Albert Camus

About the Alliance Française de Jackson
The Alliance Française de Jackson is a non-profit organization with the mission of promoting French language and culture in the Metro Jackson area. This is done through language classes and other educational programs, cultural programming, and special events centered around French celebrations. Many of our members speak French, but it is not a requirement, and we welcome all who love the language and cultures of the Francophone world.

Canoeist creates part history, part travel memoir in ‘Disappointment River’

By Guest Author

On March 27, 2018

In Adventure, History, Nonfiction

By Boyce Upholt. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 25)

disappointment river The modern explorer has to live with a simple truth: there is nowhere left that has not already been observed. Though that disappointment can also be a gift.
In 2016, the writer Brian Castner canoed the length of the Mackenzie River, the longest in Canada. He was—quite intentionally—following in the footsteps of the river’s namesake, Alexander Mackenzie.

In 1789, the Scottish explorer traveled its length in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. I’ve read about Mackenzie before, but somehow no image of the man and his history has ever stuck. In Canada, meanwhile, Mackenzie is a minor national figure, the namesake for not just the river, but schools and towns.

A few years after his river quest, Mackenzie successfully crossed North America east to west, beating Lewis and Clark by more than a decade. (The American explorers carried a copy of Mackenzie’s book as a guide.)

The result of Castner’s trip is Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage, a rollicking read that, in alternating chapters, sets the writer’s adventures against Mackenzie’s expedition.

The remarkable geography of that river—which, like Castner, I will henceforth call the Deh Cho, in deference to the indigenous people who knew it long before Mackenzie’s “discovery”—are reason enough to read this book.

The Deh Cho, the thirteenth-longest river in the world, is the northern answer to the Mississippi, and drains a basin almost nearly as large. Wide and turbid, it winds past mountains, through tundra, across vast Arctic swamps. Inuit and Dene villages hug its shores.

For most of us, I have to think, this river is terra incognita. It’s rarely mentioned in the news, and impossible to observe on Google Street View. As Castner puts it, it’s “a place you have to see in person if you want to see at all.”

But Castner’s words are the next best thing, and they will be a delight to any armchair explorer. Frankly, I found the river more compelling than Mackenzie himself. Castner spends nearly half of the book getting us up to speed on the explorer—his youth, his rise in the fur trade, etc.—and it’s all well-told and useful.

But it’s something of a relief when Mackenzie finally embarks on the Deh Cho; now Castner can, too. His taut descriptions of his travel are by far the book’s highlight.
But both stories are necessary, as the book’s strongest message is delivered in its comparisons. Mackenzie, at the mouth of Deh Cho, found a wall of impenetrable ice. Thanks to a changing climate, Castner finds none at all. The river’s wildness persists, but today it’s pockmarked with gritty towns devoted to extracting oil and metals from the earth.

Mackenzie wouldn’t blink these such developments. He was, in Castner’s words, “the product of an age”: explorers in his era weren’t seeking wilderness adventure; discovery, for them, was a way to drag commerce and capitalism forward in the world.

Castner, meanwhile, knows he’s discovering nothing, except maybe himself. But that humility is freeing. Every acre of land on this continent has been known to someone, and for thousands of years. The only story left for explorers is the one most worth telling: why and how a place so vibrant can be overlooked by so much of the world.

Boyce Upholt is a freelance writer based in the Mississippi Delta. He is at work on a nonfiction book about the Mississippi River, and a novel about the aftermath of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Brian Castner will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, March 28, at 5:00 to sign and read from Disappointment River. This book is a 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Author Q & A with Robert Gordon

By Guest Author

On March 26, 2018

In Blues, Music, Southern Culture

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 25)

Memphis’s Grammy and Emmy award-winning author and filmmaker Robert Gordon highlights his city’s lesser known artists who he proudly emphasizes brought “something different” to the Memphis music scene through their authenticity and uncommon styles.

Memphis Rent Party: The Blues, Rock & Soul in Music’s Hometown is a collection of 20 profiles and stories composed throughout his career of more than four decades of passionate writing about the music of his beloved Memphis.

Gordon’s previous books, all about the American South, and its music, art, and politics, include It Came from Memphis, Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters, and Respect Yourself. His work on Keep an Eye on the Sky was selected as a Grammy winner.

His film work includes the documentaries Johnny Cash’s America and William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton. His Best of Enemies was shortlisted for an Oscar and won an Emmy.

Born and raised in Memphis, he still calls the city his home and touts: “I drink my whiskey neat.”

Memphis Rent Party: The Blues, Rock & Soul in Music’s Hometown is a collection of essays about Memphis artists and producers who you believed best convey the spirit of Memphis. What exactly is a rent party?

When I was studying the Harlem Renaissance about 40 years ago, I learned about rent parties, where people who couldn’t make the rent would throw a party, charge admission, sell booze, and get by another month. I loved the idea of friends helping friends by having fun together. And it occurred to me then, way back, that “Rent Party” would be a great name for a collection of stories. The work is already done, you’re throwing a few stories together to get a book deal. But it turned out, when I had the opportunity, I took it much further, interconnecting the stories with new text, digging up old unpublishable pieces, and generally putting in a full book’s effort. The result, Memphis Rent Party, is a lot of fun–like a rent party should be, but it was a lot more work than I anticipated.

And by “unpublishable” I mean, for example, I wrote a piece about the mother of jazz greats Phineas and Calvin Newborn. It’s hard enough to get a piece of either of them published, but on their mom? No way. So, I wrote that for myself, put it in a drawer, and moved on. I dug it out for this, because I could finally get it out.

How did you choose these particular stories?

I didn’t set out with a particular goal, but one formed as I got into the material. I saw a unifying theme, a sense of individuality that is epitomized by Sam Phillips and by what Sam sought.
Elvis would have been singing Perry Como-style ballads and become a forgotten minor entertainer if it hadn’t been for Sam. Sam affirmed for him that the wild streak in him, the uniquely Elvis part of Elvis, was OK to reveal, was something to pursue.

That’s the spirit that unifies the book. These are individuals who have created their own characters, forged new paths. These are not followers, they’re people cutting their own path–and very often, that path becomes a major highway that lots of people follow.

What was it that attracted you to this music at a young age–music that was so unlike your growing up years, at a time when you described your teenage self as a “rebellious outsider” and as a “seeker.”

Robert Gordon

This music hit harder and deeper than anything I’d ever heard. It didn’t say, “I’m hear to rock you.” It didn’t say, “Let’s be entertained.” Though all music is just a combination of notes, the delivery of this music felt different. It had history, meaning, and heft. I wanted to understand it in a way that Molly Hachet, Kiss, and later, Boston–pop groups of the time–offered no deeper meanings.

One of your earliest (if not your first) face-to-face encounters with a music legend was with Furry Lewis, a solo blues artist from Memphis who was “about 80 years old,” when he opened for a Rolling Stones concert in Memphis in 1975. What “bonded” you with Furry almost immediately?

I think the bond was me to Furry, and Furry–initially, anyway–saw me as just another curious person knocking on his door and shelling out a couple bucks. But he did soon recognize me, because I returned often. His duplex was a place different from anyplace I knew, and being there, being with him, observing his environment and his friends–it all posed many questions to me, made me curious, opened up avenues to explore.

You began your writing career in the mid-80s when you began feeding now-defunct magazines stories about musical talents that weren’t first tier stars, but those who offered listeners “something different.” You say that theirs was a “shadow influence.” Describe what that means.

The most clear sense of shadow influence is that many pop hits were built on, of simply copies of, previous blues, soul, or other songs. The Stones cut Robert Johnson songs, and Fred McDowell and the Rev. Robert Wilkins. The Stones were influenced by artists that many of their fans would never realize. All of pop music was. That day in 1975, when I heard Furry open for the Stones, he was immediately more interesting than they were. Nowhere near as huge–in sound, popularity, onslaught, or in any way–but imbued with more than the Stones could hope for. That was in part because he was a living relic of a previous time, but also because I think fewer notes say way more than many notes. In music, in cinema, in writing, it’s about the space, the air, the room you leave, nor the room you take up.

In the book’s preface, you predict that 100 years from now, the music of these marginalized artists “will still be popularly unpopular–will still be hip.” Explain why you believe that.

History has shown it to be. Popular music doesn’t remain popular. It catches a sense of time, then moves on. The Romantics or the Cars scream “1980s,” but they don’t have much power other than that now. They evoke a time. These marginalized artists also evoke a time, but more than that, they tell a story. A personal story, a universal story, a news story of the day–their songs and lives and art.

OK, I’m interrupting myself, because here’s the key: individuality. The credo of godhead Sam Phillips. “Give me something different.” Pop artists capture their times, sound like anyone in those times could. These more marginalized artist sound only like themselves. Individuality lives on, popularity fades with the times.

What is the book about the overall message of Memphis Rent Party?

It’s about flouting the trends to become a unique individual. It’s the Sam Phillips mindset applied to people Sam never encountered. He encountered Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King and Jerry Lee and Johnny Cash and Elvis, and for all of them, he shifted them away from their pop dreams to finding their own artist.

By expressing themselves, these people created new paths, new styles, new trends. And the same is true about the people in the book. They’re all sui generis–they created their own thing. Sam once said, Nashville has a follower’s mentality. That’s why he stayed in Memphis.

An accompanying LP will be released by Fat Possum Records, with the artists on the soundtrack among those featured in the book. What kind of music will the soundtrack have?

This soundtrack, like the Memphis and Mississippi artists it covers, is all over the place. There’s blues, jazz, country, rock and roll. There’s everything but gospel, but there’s definitely the gospel of rock and roll.

Do you have potential projects that you want readers to know about?

I work on a lot of projects at once. In this kind of work, you have to. I’m hoping to announce a new feature doc, music-oriented, real soon. I’ve got several feature docs in the works. I’m shooting in North Carolina for two weeks in April for the second half of a documentary with a UK artist, Bill Drummond. We shot the first half in Kolkata, India. He’ll do his thing in the two places and, I think, the different reactions he gets will reveal a lot about the world we live in today.

Robert Gordon will be at Lemuria on Monday, March 26, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from Memphis Rent Party.

Francophile Friday: History and Nonfiction

By Guest Author

On March 23, 2018

In History, Nonfiction

By Annerin Long

Bonjour! The Alliance Française de Jackson (AFJ) is back for another Francophile Friday during le Mois de la francophonie, with more book recommendations from our members. This week’s selections are a mix of history and memoirs, including a book for French-speakers by one of our own members.

you will not have my hate On November 13, 2015, the world watched in horror as terrorists attacked Parisians going about life at football matches, concerts, dinners, time spent with friends and family. Journalist Antoine Leiris lived another horror that night: turning on the news and seeing that the Bataclan Club, where his wife was attending a concert, had been attacked. In You Will Not Have My Hate, Leiris recounts the hours and days immediately after the attack, confirming that his wife was one of those killed, handling the duties related to her death, but also the day-to-day life that continued with their infant son. You Will Not Have My Hate is a short, powerful book, sometimes difficult to read because of the subject, but also heartbreaking, and one that I read in just a little more than one sitting.

A favorite book of AFJ member Jeanne Cook is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s memoir Wind, Sand and Stars. The stories from his life that he tells in this collection also serve as a frame for his commentary on broader themes of human life.

Marcel Pagnol’s My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle are two more recommendations from Mrs. Cook. Pagnol was an author and filmmaker (the first filmmaker elected to the Académie française) and is generally considered to be one of France’s greatest 20th century writers. These two books are the first two in his four-book series Souvenirs d’enfance (Memories of Childhood), capturing his days growing up in Provence.

A few years ago, AFJ was fortunate to host Memphis historian for a program based on his book, Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910. This is especially relevant as Paris is only a few weeks removed from flooding in several areas of the city this past winter. Paris Under Water details not just how the flood happened and crippled the city, but also how the people of Paris came together, often forgetting class distinctions that would have normally separated them, to help each other and to rebuild their city.

Finally, for today’s selections, I want to mention a book that is not about the history of France in the way we usually think of it, but rather, the history of the French here in the United States, including Mississippi. Recontres sur le Mississippi, 1682-1763, is actually a French-language reader developed for classroom use and written by AFJ member Gail Buzhardt with Margaret Hawthorne. While written with classroom use in mind, anyone who speaks or reads French and is interested in learning more about this part of our country’s history will find the book to be a great resource.

Be sure to visit Lemuria Books for many of these titles or help with ordering.

Other Recommendations

Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne
How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City by Joan DeJean
City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris by Holly Tucker

Robert Gordon recalls vintage rock, blues scene in ‘Memphis Rent Party’

By Guest Author

On March 22, 2018

In Music

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 11)

For a deep dive into vintage rock ‘n’ roll and blues legends of the Memphis scene, music journalist Robert Gordon offers a mother lode of insights and information in his latest book.

Titled Memphis Rent Party: The Blues, Rock & Soul in Music’s Hometown, Gordon’s book offers a collection of essays, interviews, liner notes and observations covering nearly four decades of his work.

In addition to depicting the work of singers, producers, blues and rock stars that made the Memphis music scene distinct from its rival Nashville, New York, Los Angeles, and Motown music hubs, Gordon delves into the thoughts and motivations of its native artists, as well as local characters.

The result is an eclectic foray into matters large and small, including the wisdom of Elvis, the real life of Robert Johnson, and the philosophy behind making the music happen from the artists themselves.

For example, Gordon reports legendary music producer and Sun Records owner Sam Phillips helped Elvis differentiate from the pack in his early career. Elvis was trying to be a “lame-ass Perry Como imitator he thought he was” at the studio and did some impromptu riffs “to reinvigorate his sidemen when his recording session was flagging.”

Phillips overheard the off-the-cuff music and convinced Elvis to “try to find a place to start and try it again”—this time, with the tape going.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Some of the observations are profound, such as musician and record producer Jim Dickinson explaining his motivation to record music.

“It is literally the fear of extinction; it’s the wish to record the unretainable nature of the moment,” he said. “Time is going away from us and the art wish is that desire to retain the moment. By recording and playing back, you have made time into space; you have captured the moment…. The event has a soul: It is the essence of the event that you record, and the whole idea of immortality is right there.”

Gordon’s personal history is intriguing in itself. He came to write about the blues in the 1980s. He was a 14-year-old middle-class kid from Memphis who found epiphany at hearing bluesman Furry Lewis at a Rolling Stones concert.

“Furry’s playing was unlike anything I could have anticipated. His rhythms were slow, his songs full of space, his notes floated in the air. His music invited us listeners instead of dazzling us with its size and force … (it) let me feel the wrinkles on the hands wrapped around the guitar neck, the texture of the strings; he let me hear the human being.”

In other words, he was hooked.

Gordon cut his teeth on the old print media, such as Music and Sound Output, Request, Pulse, Option, Creem, Spin, Details—magazines and fanzines that no longer exist, he notes, “whose remnants are dusty, crumbling pages in landfills hither and yon.”

Now the magazines are gone “and so are most of these artists, but the art continues to thrive.”

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.

Robert Gordon will be at Lemuria on Monday, March 26, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from Memphis Rent Party.

Author Q & A with Michael Farris Smith

By Guest Author

On March 21, 2018

In Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 18)

Oxford resident Michael Farris Smith has come out swinging with his latest fictional work, The Fighter (Little, Brown), treating readers to a rough-and-tumble saga of good intentions gone wrong for a main character whose already hard life has suddenly fallen onto even harder times.

Smith’s previous novels, which have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire, Southern Living, Book Riot, and many others, include Desperation Road, Rivers, and The Hands of Strangers.

He has been awarded the Mississippi Author Award for Fiction and the Transatlantic Review Award for Fiction, and his essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Bitter Southerner, Writer’s Bone, and more.

The wide appeal of Smith’s work has seen Desperation Road longlisted for the UK’s Gold Dagger Award for Best Novel, and it is now a finalist for France’s Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle, a French literary prize awarded by readers of Elle magazine.

International promos for Smith’s books have recently taken him to Australia, and, after a whirlwind Mississippi tour March 20-26 for the release of The Fighter (with stops in Oxford, Greenwood, Jackson, Pass Christian, McComb, and Columbus), Smith will head to France in early April.

Michael Farris Smith

“It’s busy, but very interesting to see my work being so well-received both at home and in other countries,” he said.

The son of a Baptist minister and a graduate of Mississippi State University, Smith began writing while at the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. His family relocated to Oxford from Columbus last summer.

The Fighter is your fourth novel, and it touches readers with the same eloquent writing style as your previous works, even as it again introduces us to characters who find themselves in desperate situations, facing heartbreak, brokenness, and regret–wand who are longing for a second chance. In other words, real people facing tough problems, whose hopes have worn thin. When you are developing characters and plots, where do you think these moving stories and characters come from?

I’m not sure. I guess it’s just a culmination of what I see, of what I know is out there. I wish there was no such thing as heartbreak and brokenness, but there is.

I also know I only want to write about characters who are at the end of the rope, fighting to survive emotionally, or physically, or spiritually, and maybe all of the above. I learned that from Barry Hannah and Larry Brown. The stories I write are the stories that challenge me on an emotional level and when I fell those emotions rise in me, I know I’m going in the right direction.

As the main character in The Fighter, Jack Boucher (pronounced Boo-shay) has lived a hard life–he never knew his parents, grew up in foster homes and owed what good times he had to a woman who took him in at age 12 and devoted her life to keeping him on the right track. But when the story begins with his attempts to set things straight as a worn-out fighter, gambler, and drug addict in his early 40s, things quickly unravel and his intentions are suddenly sidetracked–but why is it that we just can’t help but like this man?

fighter You win the prize for my favorite question about The Fighter so far. Maybe it’s because we are all fighters. We all have made mistakes, we have hurt people who love us, we have done things we regret and knew we were going to regret it as we were doing it, and we all fight to try and fix what we’ve done after we’ve broken it.

Jack was dealt a tough hand, and then as time wore on, he helped to dig the hole deeper and deeper. But I understand Jack. And I think it’s possible I feel more emotionally attached to him than any character I’ve written, and I don’t even know if I can put my finger on it as to why.

Jack’s last foster mother, Maryann-who became his permanent parent and the only person he believed ever loved and understood him, was his anchor, no matter how bad things were in his life. Why was it so important to him that he honor her by saving her family home and property from foreclosure?

Everybody hits rock bottom. Sometimes we recognize it. Sometimes we don’t. I think after all Jack has been through, all he’s suffered, all he’s brought on himself, he maybe finally realizes only one thing truly matters. Which we have a tendency to do when our lives break down.

For all his brokenness, Jack has his share of homegrown wisdom, a set of principles to which he has clung, and even a tenderness when it came right down to it. In the violent world in which he lived, it was fear that motivated him to live, and hope and forgiveness that often guided his dark moods. In what ways did Annette, another main character, come to see this in Jack?

I feel like Annette is a kindred spirit, and I do agree about the tenderness. She’s lost, like him. And searching, like him. But I think what separates Annette is that while Jack knows what he’s after in this moment, Annette really doesn’t. But that doesn’t keep her from looking, and she lives by her “church of coincidence” theology to keep driving her forward. She’s dedicated to it, to the signs that seem to be leading her. To what, she doesn’t know.

But she attaches this tangible thing to her own questions about who she is and what she’s doing, and she has a tremendous amount of faith. Blind faith. Which is truly the only kind. So, she is able to notice another like herself. So many of us look for signs, little hints of recognition to encourage us to keep us going through hard times. And Annette’s eyes are always wide open to such things.

Explain the symbolic message of the appearance of a hawk at different times throughout Jack’s life.

I can’t really explain a symbol, because it means one thing to me, but will mean something different to everyone else. I will say that when the hawk appeared in the sky in the opening, it just appeared and wasn’t planned. But I knew once I was finished with the passage that the hawk would find itself in the story again.

Some Native American cultures believed the hawk was responsible for transporting the soul from one world to the next, and I love that. The natural simplicity of our spirits being gathered by such beautiful creatures and carried away. I don’t know why it showed up, but I was happy to see it when it appeared in the sky above Jack. So was he.

What is next on the horizon in your writing? Have you ever considered writing a sequel to any of your books?

I was hoping to finish a new novel manuscript before the release of The Fighter, and I was able to do that. I love the story and very much enjoyed the quiet of the last few months, going to those characters each day and living in their world. And I think what it has in common with the others is that you can have a very different conversation about it. Something I’m proud of with each of my novels.

As far as sequels, it’s strange because I expected to be asked that about Rivers, but I’ve also been asked that question about Desperation Road more than I anticipated. And some readers make pretty good points about why there should be another part. But I don’t know. The ideas has a way of choosing you, and not the other way around.

Michael Farris Smith will be Lemuria on Thursday, March 22, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from The Fighter, which is one of Lemuria’s two March 2018 selections for our First Editions Club for Fiction.

Tiffany Quay Tyson’s ‘The Past is Never’ delivers mesmerizing Southern Gothic

By Guest Author

On March 20, 2018

In Southern Fiction

By Susan O’Bryan. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 18)

Is the past ever dead? Can it be put behind you, and if so, how far back in the past can you leave something? Can the present—and future—be affected by a past you didn’t even realize existed?

Those are the questions readers will be asking themselves after the final page is turned in The Past is Never, the latest novel by Tiffany Quay Tyson. The author first left her mark in Southern fiction with Three Rivers, a finalist in the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction. With The Past is Never, Tyson uses her native Southern voice to tell a story of family dysfunctions, historic myths, and courage to look behind the past.

Sixteen-year-old Willett and his two younger sisters, Roberta Lynn “Bert” and Pansy, live in fictional White Horse, Mississippi. It’s 1976, and there’s not much for entertainment in the small town. Fun is something they make for themselves. They can’t help but be drawn to an old rock quarry and its cool swimming hole waters.

When their dad is home, which isn’t often, he warns them to stay away from the cursed Devil’s place. He tells them frightening stories about how the quarry was built, the lives it has claimed, and haunted woods that protects it.

Dad’s away, Mama is busy, and it’s hot outside. There’s no keeping the siblings from the quarry. The three walk there together. Only two leave.

The disappearance of six-year-old Pansy changes life as they knew it for the entire family. Pansy, the unexpected “miracle child” born with four teeth, coarse black hair, a blotchy tan and a large purple birthmark on her thigh. Pansy, the feisty, the spoiled, the charmed … the gone.

So begins the unsettling future of Willett and Bert, neither who can let go of what happened that day. There’s more than enough self-blame, accusations, and heartbreak to go around as their dad stays away and their mom dies of a broken heart and a cigarette habit.

In turn, Willett and Bert leave home, not only to find themselves but also search for clues about their family’s past. Reports of their dad’s lonely death in Florida takes the brother and sister to the Everglades where they learn the past becomes the present, which leads to the future. As William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” To say more might spoil the thrill for readers.

Those three elements–past, present and future–are at the heart of The Past is Never. Readers will learn about Fern, Granny Clem, Earl and a host of others. About the creatures beyond the trees who long to give voice to the past. Tyson ties them together through alternating voices as she explores family lines, tragedies and curses.

“Those eyes you feel watching you are the eyes of your family,” Bert tells her niece seven years after Pansy disappears. “They mean you no harm.”

The author’s skillful storytelling reaches a high mark with this novel. Nothing is as it first appears in this dark, complex story that draws upon inner strength, extended family ties and personal determination. As with her first novel, Tyson has an award winner on her hands.

Susan O’Bryan is a former Clarion Ledger and Clinton News editor and writer with more than 30 years of journalistic experience. She now is the web content coordinator at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Tiffany Quay Tyson will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, March 21, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from The Past is Never.

Author Q & A with Jonathan Miles

By Guest Author

On March 19, 2018

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 4)

Jonathan Miles

A former Oxford resident and author of two acclaimed novels, Jonathan Miles returns with his latest tale, Anatomy of a Miracle, an ambitious story of an Army veteran who comes back to his hometown of Biloxi a paraplegic–until his world is turned upside down one day when he inexplicably stands up from his wheelchair and walks.

An Ohio native who wound up in Oxford as a teenager, Miles began his career as a journalist for the Oxford Eagle newspaper and later became a columnist for the New York Times. His novels include Dear American Airlines and Want Not, and he also authored a book on fish and game cooking, The Wild Chef.

Miels said he “spent years living in a tiny cabin in the woods near Abbeville until I married a Coast girl–she’s a Ladner, so the Coastiest of Coast girls–and got civilized.”

He and his family now live in rural New Jersey, “a little up from Princeton,” he said, adding, “my wife and children spend much of the summers in Mississippi, and this seems to have immunized my kids from acquiring New Jersey accents.”

Tell me what brought you to live in Oxford in the first place, and when.

Short answer: blues, 1989. The longer one: I came to Oxford as a blues-obsessed 18-year-old, having stumbled upon Living Blues magazine in a record shop and noting it was published by Ole Miss.

But after a few years of guitars and harmonicas another stumble happened: I wandered into a writing class (at the University of Mississippi) taught by Barry Hannah and frankly got my ears blown back. Barry resurrected a childhood ambition to write, and soon after, Larry Brown took me under his wing and kept me there until his death. At the time, I didn’t realize I was getting an education from Larry, because most of the time we were laughing and cutting up, but in retrospect I’d put all those years spent riding backroads and talking books and writing up against any Ivy League MFA program.

One of the things I’m most proud of in life is that Larry’s daughter Leanne named a son Larry Miles. That little boy has no choice but to become a novelist.

Anatomy of a Miracle tells the story of a paralyzed Biloxi Army veteran’s miraculous recovery, and the many ways this event changes his life forever. What inspired the story?

anatomy of a miracle It began with a simple what-if question: What if a miraculous-seeming event happened today, in America? An event that defied all explanation? What would it look like–in the press, on social media? What kinds of cultural fault lines would it cause to rumble? And what effects–aside from the physical recovery–would this event have on the lives of those it touched? It was a spiral of questions.

Main character Cameron Harris’s story of healing spawns many side plots, including the tireless pursuit of his doctor to find out how this could be medically possible; the effect his healing has on the convenience store at whose front sidewalk Cameron realizes he can suddenly rise from his wheelchair and walk; a Vatican investigation of whether this event qualifies as a miracle; and the back story on what really happened in Afghanistan that left him paralyzed. Was it difficult working with so many characters and subplots?

I wanted to depict the effects of Cameron’s recovery as broadly as possible–to map the reverberations as they went shaking through the local community, the country, and in some ways, the world. In real life, I knew, Cameron’s story would be claimed by many different people, tweaking and twisting it to fit their own desires and worldviews, and part of Cameron’s struggle in the novel is to reclaim that story–with all its complexities–for himself.

As for any difficulty with writing it that way: very little, to be honest, I felt like I had this buffet of intriguing characters, from the convenience store owners to the Roman investigator to the VA physician who’s the uneasy daughter of a fabulizing Delta novelist. I just grazed on this buffet of characters and storylines.

Cameron’s sister Tonya is a strong force in his life, after his parents died and he suffered life-changing injuries in Afghanistan. She’s an interesting character who regularly adds humor to the story. Please tell me about her.

Tayna Harris is, to my way of thinking, one of the strongest people in the book. When Cameron recovers, it’s after four years in her care; and you could argue that, because of the way she parented him after their father abandoned them and their mother died, she’s really been his lifelong caretaker. Aside from jobs at Dollar General and Waffle House, taking care of her little brother has been her primary occupation–which means that Cameron’s recovery upturns her life just as radically as it upturns his. But she deals with life differently than Cameron does. He mulls. She cracks jokes. She meets life’s absurdities on their level.

A question that runs throughout the story is Cameron’s longing to know why such an extraordinary miracle happened to him. It’s interesting that Cameron’s healing changes his life to such an extent that he finally confesses to his sister that he doesn’t know who he is anymore. In what ways did he find that to be true?

For Cameron, the mystery of his physical recovery is compounded by the mystery of why it happened to him. He didn’t explicitly ask for it, through prayer or other means; he didn’t strive toward it by taking care of his own physical and mental well-being–for instance, he filled most days with beer drinking and video games–and, deep down, he doesn’t even think he deserved it.

What his recovery ultimately forces is a very hard look in the mirror, provoked in part by so many other people digging into his life to determine for themselves why Cameron was on the receiving end of a possible miracle. Cameron is a mystery to them as well as to himself, and part of his quest to understands his recovery is finally coming to grips with who he is.

The fact that Cameron and his sister Tanya were offered–and accepted–an opportunity to star in a reality show, Miracle Man, about their lives since Cameron’s healing, was an interesting subplot, but his feelings about that project seemed to change quickly after he heard of the shooting death of his neighbor’s grandson. How did that alter his attitude about that show?

It struck me early on that, in the wake of press attention to the recovery, of course reality-television would come calling. In our current media climate, that’s as certain as the sun rising. Reality-television is also, of course, not anything like reality; it’s as scripted as a novel.

Cameron is willing to go along with the lie until seeing himself through his neighbor’s eyes in the wake of a pointless tragedy, and viewing his senseless fortune as the flip side to that senseless misfortune. As well, Cameron buckles under the responsibilities of his new life at that moment: the neighbor had asked him to pray for her grandson, and he’d let her down. He realizes he can no longer stand being a vessel for faith, either onscreen or off. It breaks him, and ultimately causes all hell to snap loose.

Anatomy of a Miracle is your third book. Do you have other projects on the horizon?

This was my first fiction set in Mississippi, after one novel set in New York and the other set in a terminal at Chicago O’Hare airport. There’s another novel in the works, and the characters have already landed in Mississippi for a while–this time the 1930s Delta.

Sometimes being a novelist is like being a travel agent. You book travel for your characters with promises of a time they won’t forget. Though being a novelist is better because you get to come along with them.

Jonathan Miles will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, March 20, to sign and read from Anatomy of a Miracle. This book was chosen as one of our two March 2018 selections for Lemuria’s First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author: Guest Author (Page 19 of 28)

Author Q & A with Chris Offutt

Author Q & A with Francisco Cantú

Francophile Friday: Fiction

Canoeist creates part history, part travel memoir in ‘Disappointment River’

Author Q & A with Robert Gordon

Francophile Friday: History and Nonfiction

Robert Gordon recalls vintage rock, blues scene in ‘Memphis Rent Party’

Author Q & A with Michael Farris Smith

Tiffany Quay Tyson’s ‘The Past is Never’ delivers mesmerizing Southern Gothic

Author Q & A with Jonathan Miles

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