Lisa – Page 6 – Lemuria Books

Slow Gardening by Felder Rushing

On February 10, 2015

In Cooking, Culture, Gardening, Gift Books, Health, Southern Culture

Slow Gardening is inspired by the Slow Food movement, a movement which supports local food sources and biological and cultural diversity. Felder Rushing’s Slow Gardening supports a similar movement in gardening which encourages us to pay closer attention to the rhythm and seasons in our own gardening community and follow our creative intuition.

Felder’s book is geared toward the new or intermediate gardener, but as a veteran gardener, I found it a refreshing read. The book is laid out in a beautiful and reader friendly format with stories and examples from Felder’s and other gardens. Each section is peppered with quotes which speak to life lessons and gardening. Some of Felder’s advice might seem like common sense, but even the most experienced gardeners can use these reminders because gardening can be trying at times! Perhaps that is why Felder includes an entire section on “Garden Psychology.” Felder also deals with the “Nuts and Bolts” of gardening, dealing with pests, and learning how to compost and fertilize properly.

Slow Gardening is the perfect gift for yourself or your gardening friend as we gear up for another growing season.

Written by Lisa Newman

From the Golden Age of Illustrated Books: Life on the Mississippi

By Lisa

On January 24, 2015

In First Editions, Lisa's First Editions, Southern Fiction

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain. Boston: James R. Osgood & Company, 1883.

“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”

Samuel Clemens, at the age of ten, left his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, on his first riverboat voyage in 1853. He found work as a printer in St. Louis and confidently moved on for other work in New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Several years later he landed his dream job as an apprentice to a veteran steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. Clemens’ career came to an abrupt halt when traffic on the river became impossible during the Civil War. By 1863 he was working as a reporter and first signed his pen name “Mark Twain.” Throughout his writing life, Twain returned to the river, and none more so than in “Life on the Mississippi.”

Twain published a seven-part series of essays,“Old Times on the Mississippi,” based on his travels on the Mississippi River in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875. Seven years later Twain made a trip on the Mississippi with his publisher James Osgood and stenographer Roswell Phelps to gather more material to make a book suitable in length for the subscription book market.

The first edition of “Life on the Mississippi” was lavishly illustrated. The spine and cover featured gold stamped scenes of riverboat life on the Mississippi by the principal artist John Harley. While Harley focused on many of the river folk sketches, Edmund Henry Garrett was employed to capture many of the landscape and shoreline scenes. To meet the publishing deadline, illustrator A. B. Shute was added to the team to complete the final chapters. The illustrations also identify a first edition, first printing: a Mark Twain in flames above a cremation urn was removed from subsequent printings due to objections from his wife.

In 19^th century America, illustrated books were the main way visual images entered the home, influencing how Americans learned about history and faraway places. Altogether the illustrations in “Life on the Mississippi” were, and still are, vital compliments to the text of “Life on the Mississippi.”

Written by Lisa Newman, A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.

Jubilee – A Labor of Love

By Lisa

On December 8, 2014

In Fiction, First Editions, Lisa's First Editions, Southern Fiction

Jubilee by Margaret Walker. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.

Poet Nikki Giovianni described her good friend Margaret Walker as “the most famous person nobody knows.” While known for her signature poem “For My People,” her novel Jubilee was the first modern novel on slavery.

Walker’s parents were both teachers and always encouraged her to do well in school as they moved from Birmingham to Meridian to New Orleans. By the Great Depression, Walker had finished college at Northwestern and was working for the WPA Writer’s Project with Richard Wright in Chicago. Her collection of poems, For My People, was published in 1942 by Yale Press and she became the first black woman to be awarded Yale Younger Poets Prize. Her literary reputation was established.

Despite this literary success, Walker had an even greater and perhaps an even more personal ambition: to write a novel based on the life of her grandmother. Jubilee was a thirty-year labor of love for Walker. The novel was to span slavery, civil war and reconstruction. She immersed herself in historical records and slave narratives, collected the stories of her family and visited old home sites while juggling the responsibilities of teaching and raising a family with four children. Sadly, Walker’s grandmother died before the Jubilee was published in 1966.

Jubilee is significant because until the 1960s black historical fiction had hardly been attempted by black writers. Jubilee was the first novel to be written by a black writer from slavery to reconstruction from the daily perspective of the black population. That Walker took 30 years to research it from a historical perspective while maintaining the heart of the story gleaned from her grandmother’s stories is no surprise. Scholars have credited Walker with paving the way for other black historical novels like Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Margaret Walker devoted her life to teaching and her community at Jackson State University for thirty years before retiring in 1980. As Walker was involved in her community, many may cherish signed copies of her work. For collectors, first editions of Jubilee can be found at a reasonable price though signed copies are scarce.

Learn more about Margaret Walker’s Centennial Celebration at the Margaret Walker Center.

Written by Lisa Newman, A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.

“The Long Valley in the Golden Age of the Short Story”

By Lisa

On November 18, 2014

In Fiction, First Editions, Lisa's First Editions

The Long Valley by John Steinbeck. New York: Viking Press: 1938.

Many of The Long Valley stories were written at Steinbeck’s childhood home in Salinas, California. Unemployed and with little money earned from his previous publishing efforts, Steinbeck cared for his mother after she suffered a stroke. Not a natural caregiver, Steinbeck found the situation quite challenging. While his wife and father carried on with their daily lives, he stayed at home. Steinbeck later commented that it was this very hardship that pressed him to produce his highest quality work yet: short stories composed in three old ledger notebooks he found in his father’s office.

The early twentieth century was the golden age of the short story and many writers established their reputation with the form; Steinbeck used it to perfect his craft. The Depression Era market supported the affordable sale of a single story to the average American. Many of The Long Valley stories were originally published on their own in popular periodicals like the Saturday Evening Post or The Atlantic Monthly or as limited editions.

Steinbeck’s friend and editor, Pascal Covici, gathered up the writer’s best short fiction, including “The Chrysanthemums”–one his most anthologized works—and all four stories that comprise “The Red Pony,” for The Long Valley collection. Covici left behind his own failed publishing house and took Steinbeck with him to Viking Press in order to publish The Long Valley. Artist Elmer Hader illustrated the dust jacket and would go on to conceive the art for The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and The Winter of Our Discontent.

In 1938, The Long Valley listed advanced sales at an impressive 8,000 copies. While this print run was much higher than any of his previous publications, it is much smaller than any of his books that followed. Today, The Long Valley is often overlooked in its value for collectors and in its display of Steinbeck’s talent as a short story writer.

Written by Lisa Newman, A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.

“Welty penned Natchez short story collection during WWII”

By Lisa

On November 18, 2014

In Fiction, First Editions, Lisa's First Editions, Southern Fiction

The Wide Net by Eudora Welty. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1943.

While Eudora Welty composed “A Still Moment,” one of eight stories in The Wide Net, the noise of World War II surrounded her. In 1941, the Royal Netherlands Military Flying School was located at Hawkins Field in Jackson. As a further reminder of the time, the 1943 first edition of The Wide Net and Other Stories bears an advertisement for war bonds:

“This book, like all books, is a symbol of liberty and the freedom for which we fight. You, as a reader of books, can do your share in the desperate battle to protect those liberties. Buy War Bonds.”

Three real-life characters converge on the Natchez Trace in “A Still Moment.” Itinerant preacher Lorenzo Dow in search of souls, James Murrell, a storied outlaw of the Trace, whose mission through murder and crime was to “destroy the present,” and John James Audubon, the great recorder of American birds in their natural habitats, meet beside “a great forked tree” and are transfixed by a snow-white heron.

As Dow, Murrell, and Audubon were in awe of the bird, so Eudora Welty must have been captivated by Audubon’s descriptions of travel and painting up and down the Trace and the Mississippi River during the early 1800s. While recording the birds of the deep South, Audubon visited Natchez where he painted $5 charcoal portraits to support his travels. Further south in Louisiana, he rested in the long-gone Bayou Sara—one of the largest shipping ports between New Orleans and Natchez before 1860–where his wife set up a profitable teaching practice for a short time. Audubon even stopped in Jackson on May 1, 1823 when the capital was only one-year-old. He described the village in the wilderness as “a mean place, a rendezvous for gamblers and vagabonds” in Life of Audubon.

First editions of The Wide Net and Other Stories are scarce in good condition and dust jackets are usually marred, in a somewhat charming way, by faded pink print on the spine.

Written by Lisa Newman, A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.

Song of My Life

By Lisa

On November 4, 2014

In Newsworthy

Originally published in the Clarion-Ledger on Sunday, November 2,2014.

aharrison42 Poet Nikki Giovianni described her good friend Margaret Walker as “the most famous person nobody knows.” While known for her signature poem “For My People,” her novel Jubilee was the first modern novel on slavery.

Walker’s parents were both teachers and always encouraged her to do well in school as they moved from Birmingham to Meridian to New Orleans. By the Great Depression, Walker had finished college at Northwestern and was working for the WPA Writer’s Project with Richard Wright in Chicago. Her collection of poems, For My People, was published in 1942 by Yale Press and she became the first black woman to be awarded Yale Younger Poets Prize. Her literary reputation was established.

Despite this literary success, Walker had an even greater and perhaps an even more personal ambition: to write a novel based on the life of her grandmother. Jubilee was a thirty-year labor of love for Walker. The novel was to span slavery, civil war and reconstruction. She immersed herself in historical records and slave narratives, collected the stories of her family and visited old home sites while juggling the responsibilities of teaching and raising a family with four children. Sadly, Walker’s grandmother died before the Jubilee was published in 1966.

Jubilee is significant because until the 1960s black historical fiction had hardly been attempted by black writers. Jubilee was the first novel to be written by a black writer from slavery to reconstruction from the daily perspective of the black population. That Walker took 30 years to research it from a historical perspective while maintaining the heart of the story gleaned from her grandmother’s stories is no surprise. Scholars have credited Walker with paving the way for other black historical novels like Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Margaret Walker devoted her life to teaching and her community at Jackson State University for thirty years before retiring in 1980. As Walker was involved in her community, many may cherish signed copies of her work. For collectors, first editions of Jubilee can be found at a reasonable price though signed copies are scarce.

Learn more about Margaret Walker November, 5 at 5:00 at Lemuria Books as Carolyn Brown signs her new biography on Walker. Also, stay tuned—the Margaret Walker Center will celebrate Walker’s Centennial in 2015.

Jacket (12)

Written by Lisa

Author: Lisa (Page 6 of 6)

Slow Gardening by Felder Rushing

From the Golden Age of Illustrated Books: Life on the Mississippi

Jubilee – A Labor of Love

“The Long Valley in the Golden Age of the Short Story”

“Welty penned Natchez short story collection during WWII”

Song of My Life

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