Guest Author – Page 8 – Lemuria Books

Author: Guest Author (Page 8 of 28)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author Q & A with Michael Ford

By Guest Author

On June 2, 2019

In Photography, Southern Culture, Southern History

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Ford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The old way of life was mostly gone forever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author Q & A with Julia Phillips

By Guest Author

On May 26, 2019

In Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

Julia Phillips

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author Q & A with Barry Gifford

By Guest Author

On May 19, 2019

In Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 19)

Chicago native Barry Gifford began writing at age 11 – partly because his childhood (mostly spent living in hotels around the country, including the old Heidelberg in Jackson) offered up a constant cast of “characters” with their own endless stories to tell.

His long career has included more than 40 works of everything from poetry to fiction, nonfiction and screenplays–in addition to journalistic writing.
Gifford’s latest pair of readers include cozy “reruns” of familiar stories that have been reformatted to make it easier for old and new fans to binge-read some of his best work at a relaxed pace.

Southern Nights offers up a Southern Gothic trilogy while Sailor and Lula: Expanded Edition places all eight installments of this couple’s romance and adventures in one laid-back volume.

“My sense of narrative really came from watching late night black and white films on television and growing up in hotels, mostly among adults,” Gifford said. “I was able to listen to all of their stories, make up my own and absorb a variety of dialects. Moving around added to the mix. Being in the company of my father’s friends, most of whom had dubious occupations, served to supply the intrigue.”

His works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, La Nouvelle Revue Française, El País, La Republica, Rolling Stone, Film Comment, El Universal, and the New York Times. He has received awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, the Writers Guild of America, and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation.

His film credits include Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango, Lost Highway, City of Ghosts, Ball Lightning, and The Phantom Father. He has also written librettos for operas composed by Toru Takemitsu, Ichiro Nodaira, and Olga Neuwirth.

Today Gifford lives in California.

Below, he shares comments about his newest releases.

Tell me about your dichotomous growing-up years [living in both the “Deep South” (and including here in Jackson) and in the “Far North,” a.k.a. Chicago] and how this has influenced your writing through the decades.

Barry Gifford

I was born in Chicago and moved to Key West, Fla., with my mother before I was a year old. She had health problems and was advised to live in milder climate. My father kept an apartment in the Hotel Nacional in Havana, so we visited him there.

Later I spent time in Tampa with an uncle who lived there; then my mother, after she divorced my father, had boyfriends in New Orleans and Jackson, so we spent time there and in Chicago, where I went to high school.

We lived mostly in hotels, including the old Heidelberg Hotel in Jackson.

Your recently released Southern Nights trilogy is a package of your Southern Gothic novels Night People, Arise and Walk, and Baby Cat-Face–packed with humor and drama lived out in a strange and straightforward sense of reality. When were each of these novels originally published, and how do their stories still apply to American culture today?

The Southern Nights trilogy was published as separate novels during the 1990s. They deal in an often satirical but deadly serious way with racism and fundamentalist religion. They’re tough, funny, and often violent, just like America.

Sailor and Lula: Expanded Edition is your newest release and contains every Sailor and Lula novel in the collection, including the eighth and last one, The Up-Down. How can you explain the enduring likability of these characters, despite their flaws, among your readers?

Sailor and Lula have been described as the Romeo and Juliet of the Deep South. I hope people keep reading about them as long as they keep reading Shakespeare.

You’ve had a long and incredibly successful career as a writer in several different genres (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, screen writing) and have developed a loyal following through the years. What do you think has continued to draw readers to your work?

I write in different forms about what interests me and never talk down to the reader. I like to think that, once in a while, I come close to telling the truth.

What can readers expect to see in future Barry Gifford works?

It’s possible that Sailor and Lula may be appearing soon in a TV series, with which I may have something to do. And I’ve got a novel-in-progress about Cassie Angola, a young African-American woman who appears as a little girl in the last of the Sailor and Lula novels, The Up-Down. Ask me this question again after I finish it!

I see that your current book tour includes just a handful of cities. I know you spent some of your childhood in Jackson, but you spent parts of your childhood in lots of places! How did Jackson make that limited list?

I’ve known (Lemuria Book store owner) John Evans for close to 30 years, and . . . for me, he represents the best of Jackson. Lemuria Books is a treasure.

Barry Gifford will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, May 22, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Southern Nights and Sailor and Lula: Expanded Edition.

Barry Gifford’s ‘Southern Nights’ will keep you awake

By Guest Author

On May 13, 2019

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

By Ellis Purdie. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 12)

When asked to read Barry Gifford’s Southern Nights for review, I agreed without hesitation. Though unfamiliar with Gifford’s (many) books, I had seen the films Lost Highway and Wild at Heart, both directed by David Lynch of Twin Peaks fame and penned by Gifford.

If his novels were anything like his screenplays, I knew one thing for certain: they would not bore.

As of this review, I confirm, the three short novels in Southern Nights, comprised of Night People, Arise & Walk, and Baby Cat-Face will leave you awake at night, pulse racing, double-taking the shadows for Gifford’s people.

These novels are a howling freight train, lit up and pummeling full blast into the darkness. While reading them, I kept thinking of Flannery O’Connor, Barry Hannah, and William Gay: southern writers unafraid of depicting violence, the grotesque, the worst in the human heart.

Though the Chicago-born Gifford is not a “southern writer” proper as the three aforementioned, the setting for Southern Nights is the South, and the novels boast the wildest of Baptist preachers, unashamed deviants, drug peddlers, assassins, flying bullets, and the children who write letters to Jesus in effort to navigate such a relentless world.

At one point while reading Night People, I stopped and called a friend, saying, “If you haven’t read Barry Gifford, go grab this book right now. In the section I just finished, a woman drives over to her husband’s lover’s house, shoots them both, then drives her car into a wall of the Reach Deep Baptist Church, dying upon impact. This is the real stuff.”

In terms of plot, the novels in Southern Nights skirt an overarching narrative, focusing instead on several smaller narratives within the same setting. The last section of Night People, for example, tells the story of a young girl, Marble Lesson.

Marble’s father, Wes, is down on his luck, recently divorced, and in need of work. The story begins with Marble’s leaving New Orleans to live with her mother in Florida.

However, upon hearing of her father’s suffering without her, Marble hitches a ride with a transgender woman who, after some of the most charming dialogue I have read in some time, puts Marble on a plane back to Louisiana.

What follows is fireworks: Wes getting involved with a drug cartel, taking Marble with him to meet his new employer, an assassin showing up with ill intentions, and Marble’s encounter with said assassin that leaves him artfully dead on the floor.

In another episode in Arise & Walk, two characters wait in a hotel room for their purchased dates.

When the women arrive, the men, Wilbur “Damfino” Nougat and Gaspar DeBlieux (Gifford consistently uses the best names), quickly realize they are getting something other than what they paid for. The scene is hilarious, disturbing, and searingly original. Again, guns are involved.

These are only two narratives out of a 452-page book chock-full of thrilling madness. Interestingly, while there are stories of some length in the book, Gifford writes such that you can turn to almost any chapter and read something interesting.

The chapters feel both like the continuation of a novel as well as flash fiction pieces that stand on their own. Like flash fiction, the chapters are short, making each novel a brisk whirlwind of an experience.

These novels are haymakers: stunning, brutal, not for the faint of heart. I greatly admire Gifford’s honesty, his “going there” in these works with no fear.

After Southern Nights, I will be reading Gifford’s Sailor and Lula novels, his books of poetry, and even his nonfiction on horse-racing. Gifford has the goods, and he delivers.

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

Barry Gifford will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, May 22, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Southern Nights.

Author Q & A with Mary Miller

By Guest Author

On May 12, 2019

In Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 12)

Oxford’s Mary Miller highlights a Mississippi coastal town with a thoughtful tale of a middle-aged man facing an uncertain and lonely future–until he adopts a dog on a whim and one thing leads to another.

Her new novel, Biloxi, focuses with compassion, humor and hope on Louis McDonald, Jr., a man who has made his share of mistakes and truly needs a fresh start. The plot is part unconventional, part relatable–and all-around encouraging.
Miller also authored two short story collections, Big World and Always Happy Hour, and her debut novel, The Last Days of California. She is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and a former John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at Ole Miss.

In brief, Biloxi is the story of a 63-year-old man, Louis McDonald, Jr., facing his share of insecurities and mistakes (most of which are of his own doing), and who finds a new lease on life when he adopts a dog. As an accomplished young woman, did you find it hard to put yourself in his place, in this story told in first person?

Mary Miller

Thank you for the compliment! Though Louis is different from me in many ways–marital status, politics, gender, age–I understand him pretty well. He’s lonely. Life hasn’t turned out as he planned. He wants to connect with people, but he’s afraid of being hurt or rejected. All of these are human experiences, and there aren’t many among us who haven’t encountered each of them at some point in our lives. In other words, Louis is “everyman,” though he’s certainly more curmudgeonly than most.

The best word to describe Louis’s life–as a man who lives alone and is recently divorced with no real friends and a daughter and granddaughter he avoids–is “boring.” How does adopting a dog begin to change that in no time flat?

You’re right. Reading about a person alone in a house with his own thoughts is boring. When writing, the best thing you can do is give your narrator someone with whom to interact. This is writing 101.

Layla, the dog, gets Louis out into the world. He has to buy her a bed and food and toys; he wants to socialize her, so he takes her to the dog park. Early on, he thinks, “I also felt a strange need to entertain her, be interesting. Lucky for her I was an interesting man.” He comes to life with Layla around, finds himself making up songs and belting them out. He tries to teach her to catch and fetch and navigate the doggy door, and though he has little success, she’s given him renewed purpose. Layla is a reason for him to get out of bed in the morning.

Louis is not only insecure, but brutally frank as he not only ruminates about his fate to himself, but, quite often, when he ventures even the most mundane comments to people he doesn’t even know. This often results in great moments of humor for the reader (even when he’s talking to the dog). Does some of this come from your own straightforward thoughts in conversations with yourself and others in everyday life

Sure, though I’m nicer and more genial than Louis. He makes people uncomfortable a lot of the time. I hope I don’t make people uncomfortable! I do have a tendency to put my foot in my mouth, though, to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. I also talk to my dog a lot, ask her questions and bounce ideas off of her. She seems to appreciate being included.

Louis has a penchant for drinking (as is mentioned every day that passes in the Biloxi story), he doesn’t sleep well, worries about his future a great deal, and has a pattern of getting himself into awkward situations, to say the least. He comes to realize that even his father didn’t seem to care much for him. Why is it so easy to find this character as likable as we do?

I’m glad you found him likeable. Louis, with all of his flaws and self-sabotaging behavior, is pretty funny. Or it’s fun for the reader to watch him get himself into absurd situations. I don’t know if he would find himself humorous, though I think he might get a chuckle out of some of his actions in retrospect, like when he’s shoving religious pamphlets down his pants or lamenting the loss of his stolen blender.

There’s a ridiculous quality to the story, like the fact that his father’s lawyer “died after a swallowed toothpick punctured his bowels.” Even when Louis is taking himself seriously–when he’s dejected or drunk or worried–the prose and storyline work to balance it out. Or that was my goal; the reader will have to decide if I achieved it.

After everything he’s gone through in the course of just a few days, it seems that Louis’s redemption does come in the end. What’s the takeaway here?

Thank you! I don’t think in terms of the takeaway. I just tried to write a book that was true to this character and his life.

Most novels follow a pretty basic formula: put your character up a tree; throw rocks at him; bring him down. Louis is up the tree when I find him, and he’s been pelted with rocks for quite a while. And I keep chucking them. Ultimately, I’m not sure how much Louis’s life has changed by the end–it’s not like there’s any sort of formal redemption. He’s repairing his relationship with his daughter and her family, however, which is a start, and he’s got Layla by his side. Like Louis, I have my dog by my side, too.

Mary Miller will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, May 21, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Biloxi. Lemuria has selected Biloxi as its May 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Harper Lee’s sequel mystery solved in Casey Cep’s ‘Furious Hours’

By Guest Author

On May 12, 2019

In Southern Fiction, Southern History, True Crime

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 12)

One of the enduring mysteries after the 2016 death of author Harper Lee was: Did she work on a book to follow her iconic To Kill a Mockingbird and was there an unpublished manuscript?

Casey Cep in Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee does an admirable job in solving the mystery—in more ways that one.

Foremost, she solves the mystery of the much rumored book that Lee was reportedly working on through painstaking journalism, tracking down sources, doing interviews, resurrecting lost notes and compiling a fascinating picture of Lee’s life post-Mockingbird.

But she also resurrects the tale itself, the story that Lee referred to as “The Reverend,” producing a book within a book by writing herself the book that Lee couldn’t find a way to piece together.

Cep recounts that Lee spent three years trying to write “The Reverend,” going about it the same way that she had helped childhood friend Truman Capote compile his book In Cold Blood.

Just as Lee and Capote spent months in Kansas doing interviews and watching the murder trial that resulted in the “nonfiction novel” Capote wrote to great acclaim, Cep writes, Lee attempted to recreate the feat alone in Alexander City, Ala.

Lee’s case of suspicious deaths revolved around the Rev. Willie Maxwell, beginning with his wife Mary Lou found dead in her car Aug. 3, 1970. While investigators couldn’t prove a murder, they found that “his private life bore little resemblance to the one his parishioners thought he was living, and no resemblance at all to those he extolled in his sermons.”

He was acquitted at trial, based on the possibly perjured testimony of his neighbour, Dorcas Anderson, whom 15 months after the death, he married.

She was 27 to his 46 and, conveniently, and suspiciously also, a new widow.

It was a trend. Then, his brother died and, like Mary Lou before him, Maxwell had taken out several life insurance policies on him, totaling $100,000 (about $500,000 today).

On Sept. 20, 1972, Dorcas was found dead—with 17 life insurance policies the Reverend had on her.

He married wife number three in November, 1974, with Ophelia Burns. Shortly after, a nephew died.

All were under suspicious circumstances that neither police nor insurance investigators could prove were the product of a crime.

The community began to view the black preacher as a hoodoo conjurer. After his first wife’s death, “a lot of people were convinced that he had used voodoo to fix the jury … and charm a younger woman” into marrying him, but “as time passed and more people died, the stories about the reverend grew stronger, stranger, and, if possible, more sinister.”

It was said “he hung white chickens upside down from the pecan trees outside his house to keep away unwanted spirits and painted blood on his doorsteps to keep away the authorities. … Drive by his front door, and the headlights on any car would go dark. Say a cross word against him, and he would lay a trick on you.”

One could certainly see how this Southern gothic tale would be enticing for the creator of such characters as Scout, Atticus—and the scary Boo Radley.

But Cep posits that in “The Reverend” Lee believed she would redeem herself as a story teller of the “true” South—where the status of race relations was more complex and nuanced than black and white, as in the morality tale of Mockingbird.

“Mockingbird had been read as a clarion call for civil rights, but Lee’s views were more complicated than any editor wanted to put into print,” Cep writes, as demonstrated by Go Set a Watchman, the original text for Mockingbird.

When Maxwell was brought to trial a final time, in 1977, with the suspicious death of Maxwell’s adopted daughter, Lee was there to watch it, and she found the medium for writing a book that would parallel Mockingbird, but present it in a more complex manner.

It had a black hero, who was also a vigilante operating outside the law; a black villain, who while masquerading as a preacher was also believed to be evil incarnate; a white crusading attorney, who was also profiting off of black death; crimes that looked like murder but were treated more like fraud, and “white and black lives that existed almost side by side in small Southern towns but were worlds apart.”

How and why “The Reverend” never came to print is a separate story, believably related.

In Furious, Lee’s admirers will discover a new perspective on the reclusive author while also catching an enticing glimpse of the “lost” book that could or would have been a more modern sequel of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Casey Cep will be at Lemuria on Monday, May 13, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. Lemuria has selected Furious Hours as its May 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Margaret McMullan’s ‘Where the Angels Lived’ is a mesmerizing account of a family’s fractured history

By Guest Author

On May 6, 2019

In Biography/Memoir, History, War

By Ellen Ann Fentress. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 5)

Her grandfather, a Catholic University history professor, said he was the last of his accomplished Viennese family. He wasn’t, Mississippi author Margaret McMullan found out in an on-the-ground hunt that took her to Hungary, Austria, and Israel to learn the truth.

McMullan’s grandfather Friedrich Engel, who fled Vienna in 1939, was actually part of a renown—and at the time quite alive— Hungarian Jewish family. The Engel de Janosi clan had presided over their corner of Hungary as an economic and civic power, thanks to flourishing wood and coal enterprises that employed thousands. Emperor Franz-Joseph I of the Austro-Hungarian empire granted nobility to patriarch Adolf Engel and his descendants in 1886 in “recognition of economic virtues.” The family lived in palaces.

And yet. As Hungary and the citizens of the Engels’ town of Pecs, Hungary were overrun by Nazi forces in 1944, a century of prominence, good works and assumed assimilation weren’t enough for the Engels. The scion of the Pecs branch of the family—McMullan’s grandfather’s first cousin Richard Engel—died at the Mauthausen concentration camp after being rounded up along with other town Jews in March 1944. The story of Richard’s descent from respected, wealthy World War I war hero and city civic leader to being marched off as townspeople watched is the spellbinding story that McMullan tells in Where the Angels Lived: One Family’s Story of Exile, Loss and Return.

McMullan has crafted a mesmerizing account not solely of the downfall of her prominent cousin Richard Engel, but also of the shocking transformation of a Hungarian town. Interestingly, residents are now more eager to demonize the past Soviet occupation than to explore any town Nazi complicity in 1944.

McMullan’s has done more than tell this story masterfully. To relay an account of Richard Engel, it was up to her to uncover it. “What is not discovered, what is not saved is lost and forgotten,” she writes. “History is so often written and manipulated by winners. History can’t be written by the dead.”

McMullan came to her project when, out of curiosity, she typed in her family’s Engel de Janosi name at the Yad Vashem Holocaust archive in Jerusalem, when visiting with a writers’ group. The name Richard Engel de Janosi of Pecs, Hungary appeared. The archivist handed McMullan a form called the Page of Testimony. “No one has ever asked about this man, your relative, Richard,” the archivist tells her. “You are responsible now. You must remember him in order to honor him.”

Where the Angels Lived tracks McMullan’s steps from learning of the extensive family history hidden by her grandfather up through her eventual excavation of Richard Engel’s life. Her search benefited from extraordinary persistence and also the serendipity of meeting key people with information to share.

Of course, the memoir’s inevitable look at the gradual nature of totalitarianism’s growth resonates today, as both the U.S. and Hungary experience right-wing resurgences.

To research Richard Engel, McMullan applied to teach at the University of Pecs, which was seeking a lecturer in American literature through the Fulbright academic exchange program. She moves there for a university term in 2010 with her husband Patrick and their eighth-grade son James.

McMullan persists and builds a sense of her cousin Richard through her research. Even the holes in his portrait make him more universal, she reflects. “Maybe I can see Richard more accurately than I can see any other human being,” she writes. Her quest deepened her sense of her own Engels legacy as well. “I feel them at my side as I walk. All this time, they were never very far away.”

Ellen Ann Fentress is a writer, filmmaker and teacher in Jackson.

Margaret McMullan will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “Memoir” panel at 1:30 p.m. at the Galloway Fellowship Center.

Author Q & A with Casey Cep

By Guest Author

On May 5, 2019

In Southern Fiction, Southern History, True Crime

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 5)

In her debut book, writer Casey Cep takes on the almost unbelievable 1970s crime story of an Alabama man who dubbed himself “The Reverend” and went on to commit a spree of murders so outrageous that he would meet a shocking end to his own life–and his offenses would bring Pulitzer Prize-winning author Harper Lee to a decision to write her own account of his crimes.

And although the celebrated author of To Kill a Mockingbird spent years dedicated to researching the story of “The Reverend” Willie Maxwell, Lee would never finish the book.

In Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, Cep chronicles the dual stories of Maxwell’s crimes with Lee’s unsuccessful attempt to complete her own narrative of those events, despite her obvious gift for journalism.

A Maryland native, Cep is a graduate of Harvard University and studied as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New Republic, among others.

What drew you this unique story in Furious Hours and write it as not only a chronicle of “the Reverend” and his crimes, but an inner glimpse into the life of Harper Lee?

Casey Cep

I first learned of these murders while reporting on Lee’s novel Go Set a Watchman, so in some ways my book was always going to include her. The more I learned, though, the clearer it became that she wasn’t just a coda to the story, but an integral part of it. Her own reporting had been substantial, so I wanted to honor that, but I also thought her struggles provided a useful way of thinking about the aesthetic and ethical challenges that any journalist faces when trying to write about other people’s lives, especially with true crime.

Lee, who grew up known by her first name, Nelle, has said that she never felt like she fit in during her school years. Why was that?

Right, Nelle is Ellen backward, which her parents chose to honor her maternal grandmother. Stories about Lee as a young girl map onto her beloved heroine, so if you think about how Maycomb reacted to Scout Finch, then you get a sense of how Monroeville reacted to her: no one knew quite what to do with the clever tomboy who wore overalls and liked playing with the boys. Even when she went off to college, Lee stood out: quoting obscure English poets, wearing blue jeans, smoking, and swearing with gusto. From her letters, though, we know it was a bit of a two-way street: she was odd, but not an outcast; her distance from her peers was as much her own doing as theirs.

Lee longed to be a writer and envied her contemporaries whose personalities allowed them to blossom and share their talents, but there were times she found herself unable to write because she was between “perfectionism and despair.” How did this affect her writing?

I think perfectionism can make it hard to finish something and despair can make it hard to start, so if you are a writer who seesaws between the two, it can be paralyzing. Lee could spend an entire day on a single page but also impulsively toss out whole manuscripts, and because she valorized suffering as necessary for artistry, her struggles were self-reinforcing.

But she wasn’t like that when she wasn’t trying to write, and I found it moving when her friends would share memories of how charming she was, and how raucously funny she could be. Harper Lee would hold court with stories about her neighbors in Monroeville and her neighborhood in Manhattan that were like something out of Chaucer or Dickens, and you just wish she could’ve written them down as easily as she told them around the dinner table.

As Lee took an interest in the massive story of “the Reverend” and decided to write a book about it, it turned out that she was a keen investigative reporter, a task she obviously loved and was good at. It seems that she felt a sense of energy and pride as she worked on this crime story–but the book was never completed. Why?

You’re right that she was an incredible reporter. People she interviewed in Kansas while helping Truman Capote with In Cold Blood and people she interviewed in Alabama while working on “The Reverend” say she was the most interesting, inquisitive person they ever met.

She could put any source at ease, and she had the kind of patience it takes to get people to tell you their secrets. She was energized by the social aspects of reporting, but of course the hard part about writing a book is that at some point you have to actually write it, and she really struggled with that solitary work. She was also living in the shadow of her own bestselling, prize-winning masterpiece, so on top of everything else, she was facing sky-high expectations, from herself and from the world.

Your research for Furious Hours is impressive, as you give readers an inside look into decades-old crimes and their outcomes; as well as information about Lee that many have never heard. How did you approach the research and organization of this book?

Early on, I did what I always do when I’m starting something new: I read everything I could get my hands on. Not just about Harper Lee, but also voodoo, murder, the insanity defense, sharecropping, dams, revivals, insurance fraud, courthouses, and on and on and on. After that, I started tracking down leads about the original crimes, and then doing the same thing for Lee. I always knew the structure–the Reverend, the Lawyer, and the Writer–so I would just file what I found into folders and then organize the folders, and every day I’d hope to find some new document or convince someone new to talk with me. But at some point, you have to accept that some things are lost to time and some people just won’t talk with you, so you say a prayer, and start writing.

You say in the book that Lee “was so elusive that even her mysteries have mysteries.” Please explain.

I wrote that line when I was particularly struck by the incongruity between the tremendous interest in Lee and the paucity of information about her. She was always private, and she remained that way despite having written one of the world’s most popular novels. After years of reporting, and even getting to interview some of those who knew her best, there was still just so much more I wanted to know. I realize that everyone’s inner lives are somewhat mysterious–even those closest to us, like our siblings or our parents–so of course the mind and heart of an artist like Harper Lee will always remain a little elusive.

Casey Cep will at Lemuria on Monday, May 13, at 5:00 to sign copies of and discuss Furious Hours. Lemuria has selected Furious Hours its May 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Wisdom of southern womanhood in Helen Ellis’s ‘Southern Lady Code’ sparkles with humor, savvy, sound advice

By Guest Author

On April 30, 2019

In Essays, Humor, Southern Culture

By Emily Gatlin. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 28)

The ways of Southern women are shining front and center recently, thanks to the recent success of Garden & Gun guides and most notably, Reese Witherspoon’s Whiskey in a Teacup, which takes everything our mamas taught us as we rolled our eyes at her, and packages it with glossy photos of unattainable wallpaper goals in a sleek pink coffee table book. Basically.

But as a whole, Southern women aren’t biscuits and sweet tea, and we’re certainly not M’Lynn Eatenton or Mrs. Gump, although we do tip our big floppy hats to Californian Sally Field for her performances and pseudo-passable accent attempts.

No, our blood even has its own special genetic code, forged by generations of literal sweating. The oppressive humidity we, as Southern women, curse every year like we aren’t expecting it, is its own Fountain of Youth. Our dewy glow springs eternal. We are witches who do not age. And when we do, Botox and fillers seem to magically do what they are supposed to.

We’re much more complex—always nice (even when we must call on our better angels to be so), and tiptoe a tightrope between being passive aggressive and genuine. For example: A woman at the grocery store is wearing bright pink lipstick, a strapless romper and flip flops with a French pedicure. Instead of saying, “She’s tacky,” we’d say my personal go-to, “Look what she likes!” Feel free to borrow that one.

This is what bestselling author and Alabama native Helen Ellis calls “Southern Lady Code,” which is also the name of her new book. It’s a technique by which, if you don’t have something nice to say, you say something not so nice in a nice way. It’s all about phrasing with us. Think of “investment pieces” you have in your wardrobe. That’s Southern Lady Code for “The Oscar De La Renta cocktail dress hanging in the back of your closet that costs more than a Henredon bed, but you’ll wear it for decades!” Which is half true—you’ll realize you’ve been clinging to a size 4 dress that you haven’t been able to wear since 1986 and give it to your daughter when you’re downsizing at 70. (Thanks, Mom!)

“Wheelhouse” is Southern Lady Code for “comfort zone.” If a friend, and even a close one who should know better, were to ask, “Would you like to go mud riding with us at Sardis Lake?” you would say, “No, thank you. That is not really in my wheelhouse. Would you like for me to pack you a picnic basket with cold salads and fruit?”

Fresh off the heels of American Housewife, Ellis’s brilliant collection of short stories, she takes a turn here at an essay collection, explaining Southern Lady Code to the masses, as she gives glimpses of her life as a Southerner who has called New York City home for the majority of her adult life. Bless her heart, she married into it.

Her deadpan humor is razor sharp and laugh out loud funny, a rare pearl in the canon of “Southern”-themed books and essays that too often read like tea that’s been steeped too long. She’s the guest at the dinner party you really don’t want to attend, but go anyway in hopes that you’ll be seated near her. (A Southern word of advice from Ellis about dinner parties: Be the first guest to arrive and the first to leave. Sound.)

Ellis’s essay collection covers everything from manners to monograms, a man who fakes his death at her eighth grade birthday party, and when she turned herself into a dominatrix version of Donna Reed to save her marriage.

Southern Lady Code is one you’re going to buy for yourself and share the joy with every woman you know.

Emily Gatlin is the Digital Editor of the Wonderlust travel website and the author of The Unknown Hendrix and 101 Greatest American Rock Songs and the Stories Behind Them. She lives in Oxford, Miss.

Author: Guest Author (Page 8 of 28)

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Author Q & A with Michael Ford

Author Q & A with Julia Phillips

Author Q & A with Barry Gifford

Barry Gifford’s ‘Southern Nights’ will keep you awake

Author Q & A with Mary Miller

Harper Lee’s sequel mystery solved in Casey Cep’s ‘Furious Hours’

Margaret McMullan’s ‘Where the Angels Lived’ is a mesmerizing account of a family’s fractured history

Author Q & A with Casey Cep

Wisdom of southern womanhood in Helen Ellis’s ‘Southern Lady Code’ sparkles with humor, savvy, sound advice

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