Biography/Memoir – Page 4

Category: Biography/Memoir (Page 4 of 9)

If you haven’t already heard us talking about Grandbaby Cakes: Modern Recipes, Vintage Charm, Soulful Memories, then please sit down and let me talk to you about the best cookbook of the season.

Grandbaby Cakes gives a nod to heirloom recipe books of yore, but maintains a fresh, accessible, and enormously aesthetically pleasing feel. Jocelyn Delk Adams began the Grandbaby Cakes blog a few years back, and the mini-bio on her “about me” page bears repeating:

“I created Grandbaby Cakes, a blog inspired by my grandmother, to display classic desserts and modern trends while showcasing the pastry and sweets field in an accessible way. I hope to inspire a new generation of bakers and dessert enthusiasts to learn baking skills and not feel guilty about enjoying dessert. At an early age, I loved visiting Mississippi to watch my grandmother, or “big mama” Maggie as my family affectionately calls her, bake. Big mama bakes cakes that literally have her neighbors lined up around the block waiting for a taste. She not only invents (yes, she developed all of her own recipes) the most delicious melt-in-your-mouth desserts I’ve ever tasted, but she also infuses them with so much love.”

Pulling from the recipes passed down from her grandmother to her mother and finally to her, Adams has put together a heartwarming, mouth-watering cookbook of deserts. Before she arrived for her signing a month or two back, a few of us here at Lemuria took the cookbook home; determined to have a few recipes available for tasting during the event. Every single desert was amazing. Here’s a preview of what we brought to the signing:

Cornmeal Pound Cake (with honey-butter glaze)

Zucchini Cupcakes (with lemon-cinnamon buttercream)

Coffe-Toffee Pumpkin Cupcakes

We all pigged out hard, and while we munched, we spoke with Jocelyn and Jocelyn’s mother who was touring with her. These two women were so down-to-earth and happy to discuss recipes and baking techniques, and were so complimentary of our humble cake offerings. When Jocelyn heard that I had hand mixed (with a spoon, not a hand mixer) everything in the recipe I contributed, she ooh-ed and ahh-ed over the cake enough to make me feel like a master baker– and that’s just the way she is. A woman who puts you at your ease, who works hard, compliments hard work, and means it.

Jocelyn (second from left) with the women of her family

It must seem strange to talk more about the author of a cookbook than the recipes themselves (which can stand alone without any of my help- they are phenomenal), but Adams’s thoughtful and kind personality shows through every inch of Grandbaby Cakes. Here is the book you need to put into the hands of any cook you know; from novices to experts in the kitchen, Grandbaby Cakes is the perfect gift this holiday season.

And just remember, a little extra salt from getting misty-eyed while reading about Adams’s family memories will only make your Snickerdoodle Gooey Cake sweeter.

“If this glorious book doesn’t make you want to drop everything you’re doing and go bake a cake right now, then I don’t know what will. Jocelyn’s spectacular cake creations are positively bursting with beauty, color, flavor, and fun. Make no mistake about it: this book will ignite the baking passion within you!” —Ree Drummond, author of The Pioneer Woman Cooks

Rebel Reads: ‘Bo’ by Billy Watkins and ‘The Last Season’ by Stuart Stevens

By Former Lemurians

On November 19, 2015

In Biography/Memoir, Culture, Southern Culture, Sports

by Andrew Hedglin

To be perfectly frank with you, I wasn’t really planning on reading either Bo: A Quarterback’s Journey Through an SEC Season by Billy Watkins or The Last Season: A Father, a Son, and a Lifetime of College Football. But one Saturday in September, I wore an Ole Miss shirt into work, thus betraying my football-watching proclivity in this wonderful land of book nerds. Anyway, John Evans saw it and then personally put both of these books in my hands, so I thought, “Well, I guess I have to read these next.” And the thing is, I’m glad I did.

So I guess I’m addressing this blog post to anybody who might be intrigued, but not
51RabtZhGJL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_ fully convinced, by the Ole Miss iconography on their respective covers. I think they’re both worth your time, but they do work on different levels.

I was trying to explain to a co-worker, who is less versed in SEC football, why somebody wrote a book about Bo Wallace. My co-worker inquired: “Did he win a championship?” No. “Is he an off-field celebrity like Tim Tebow?” Not really. “Is he a big Mississippi high school legend?” He’s from Tennessee.

In fact, his reputation was as a pretty good SEC quarterback with a penchant for throwing interceptions. If you’ve been watching Ole Miss football at all in the past few years, you’ve heard the announcers endlessly differentiate between “Good Bo” and “Bad Bo” (although, in my heart, he’ll always be Dr. Bo.

Anyway, the reason the book exists is because Billy Watkins thinks Bo is kind of a cool guy. And that reason is not a bad one, or wrong. Bo was tremendously gracious, good-natured, and full of school spirit when he came to Lemuria for the reading and signing. And that very much comes through in the book, as well as the eternally-referenced qualities of competitiveness and leadership. There’s a nuts-and-bolts, behind-the-scenes quality to these football books that always draws me in. Which brings me to the other interesting thing about this book: it simultaneously manages to humanize the person behind the praise and criticism, while also managing to feel very typical of what an SEC player (especially at high-profile one) goes through.

Also, if I might speak frankly with you, my fellow Rebel fans, while I know last season didn’t the end the way we wanted it to (i.e., with a big, gleaming crystal football hoisted high above Hugh Freeze’s head) it was still a pretty good season, and this book will make a nice time capsule for a sometimes-special season when the times get lean, as they are wont to do in the competitive SEC West.

In fact, we all know that rooting for Ole Miss often perfectly embodies what Stuart Stevens calls “the essence of sport”: “disappointment masked by periodic bursts of joy and nurtured by denial.” Stevens, in The Last Season, chronicles the 2013 Ole Miss football season as he retreats from his career for a while to enjoy a season of games with his parents, especially his 95 year-old father who took him to games as a kid.

I was surprised by this book. I was expecting something corny and simplistic, like other examples from the genre of “inspirational” literature. But what I found instead was a writer embracing his world, his family, and himself with a surprising degree of complexity. I mean, a simple Zen-like momento mori truth does echo throughout the book: draw close to and spend time with those who are important to you while you can. But, despite what the title would have you believe (I suspect marketing shenanigans at the publisher), there’s no maudlin tragedy fueling the narrative. If you’d call this book inspirational, I’d call it the best kind.

Also, critically, Stevens can flat-out write. He’s an astute observer, not a half-bad philosopher (with some help from his dad on that front), and fine spinner of phrases. I especially enjoyed his remembrances of growing up in the Belhaven neighborhood, and I laughed out loud in reading some of his pitch-perfect encapsulations of sports fandom. I mean, who among us hasn’t been here: “Dying may feel worse than losing a game like this, but at least with dying there’s the comfort of knowing it’s unlikely to happen again.”

Fundamentally, what I enjoyed most was his subversion of expectations in what a football book should be. In one of my favorite passages, Stevens explains, “Many people loved to point to the game as a metaphor for life, spinning out the lessons learned on the field to the landscape of life. There was surely truth in that, but it had never interested much….It was good because it was good, and that was enough.” Which is why I think The Last Season can also speak to non-Rebel fans, and even non-football fans.

Ultimately, however, in addition to whatever else value they fulfill, both Bo and The Last Season do what they promise on their covers: help pleasantly pass the time until next Saturday or next season, whichever comes first.

Devotion by Adam Makos

By Hillary

On November 16, 2015

In Adventure, Biography/Memoir, Civil Rights, Events, First Editions, First Editions Club, Gift Books, History, Southern Culture, Southern History, Staff Blog

Adam Makos will be here TONIGHT at 5:00! We love this book so much that we’ve chosen it as our December pick for First Editions Club.

Let me start this blog off by saying this….

I don’t read non-fiction. Pretty much….never. Not at all. I can not sit down and read fact after fact about a topic; it just can’t hold my attention the way a fictional story can. I don’t like this, because I want to be able to learn about different things and I obviously have books at my fingertips to do so by working at Lemuria; but, non-fiction is just not my “go to”.

With all that being said…..Let me tell you about this non-fiction book that changed everything.

I’ve always been interested in World War I and World War II and the time period around those years. To be honest, I’ve just always been interested in the history of different wars (obviously more interested in those in which the U.S. were involved). I like watching movies based around war and there are times when I will watch documentaries as well. But, reading a history book wasn’t something I enjoyed.

However, I really feel as if Devotion has changed my outlook on reading about history. Devotion is an incredible story from military journalist, Adam Makos. As it’s stated on the cover, it’s “An Epic Story of Heroism, Friendship and Sacrifice” between two Navy carrier pilots during the Korean war. One of which is a white New-Englander who comes from a country club background (Tom Hudner), while the other pilot is a share-cropper’s son from Mississippi (Jesse Brown) who became the first African-American Naval pilot. Basically, Jesse was fighting for a country that sometimes wouldn’t even serve him in a restaurant. However, he found much more than just a job in the Navy; he found men that stood by his side no matter what.

Lieutenant Tom Hudner

Makos goes way beyond just slapping down facts on a piece of paper, he takes you into the intense lives of both Lieutenant Tom Hudner and Ensign Jesse Brown during their time in the Korean War by offering you a novel-like feel. He interviewed so many military veterans and used all of that information to make the stories flow together as one- so much so that it feels like you’re reading a novel rather than sectioned off facts about the war.

From what I understand, the Korean War is the Forgotten War, but Makos takes you right into the battlefield; from the Marines on the ground in trenches to Jesse and Tom overhead in their planes. I was definitely taken into the harsh conditions (temperatures as low as -35 degrees) when the Marines were near Chosin Resevoir; and there were moments when I felt like I was in the plane with Jesse or Tom trying to make split-second decisions. Makos included maps to help show the locations of each event, letters, and photos taken during this time as well as before (photos of marines and pilots with their wives, parents, siblings, etc). Having photos and being able to put faces on to the people being described made me become so involved in the story, that there were a few times while I was reading that I became slightly emotional.

Ensign Jesse L. Brown, first African-American Naval Aviator

Makos made me look at non-fiction in a whole new way. I was given facts and I was given true stories …and it was beautiful. This book was such a great way to take a look at history and to teach myself more about sacrifice, war, and one’s devotion to friendship. I feel like I’m going to have to keep sticking my nose in our history section from now on to see if I can learn a few more things.

Eby’s “South Toward Home” pinpoints literary treasures

By Guest Author

On September 28, 2015

In Biography/Memoir, Guest Post, Southern Culture, Southern Fiction

By Jim Ewing. Special to The Clarion-Ledger

If you’re looking for a sequel to the late Willie Morris’ “North Toward Home” in Margaret Eby’s “South Toward Home: Travels in Southern Literature,” you won’t find it. However, Eby’s “Home” is a fascinating travelogue of Southern writers’ home country— including Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Harry Crews, Harper Le and Truman Capote, John Kennedy Toole, and Barry Hannah and Larry Brown.

As Eby notes, Faulkner didn’t write about the South; he wrote about Oxford —fictionalized as Yoknapatawpha. In the same vein, Welty wrote about Jackson, and John Toole about New Orleans.

“What makes a Southern writer,” she writes, “is not just the circumstances of his or her birth but a fierce attachment to a particular place.” Eby goes on to give vignettes about the selected Southern writers’ home towns, the places where they lived and wrote about throughout the Deep South. But they aren’t general overviews or a travelogue, per se; rather, they are unique attributes about the towns or the writers who lived in them as reflected by the physical surroundings.

For example, in Jackson, Eby chronicles Miss Eudora’s fondness for fried catfish and butter beans at the Mayflower Café on Capitol Street, and other local haunts. But she zeroes in on the now-open-to-the-public Welty House where, she writes, it’s less like entering another person’s home “than like dropping in to one of her stories.” The objects in the house — and particularly the garden — are masterfully linked to Eby’s obviously voluminous research in a seamless whole, so that Welty comes alive by presenting her provenance.

The formula is repeated in other authors’ surroundings, not the least of which is the absence of an extant home for Wright, who lived across town from Welty. Since his home has been torn down, she traces the trail he sets in his novel “Black Boy” from Natchez—his boyhood home — to Jackson to Beale Street in Memphis, where he also lived.

Eby describes the racism Wright encountered both before and after publication of his seminal “Native Son,” both in his books and contemporaneous accounts, as well as the physical surroundings that exist now. It’s an absorbing juxtaposition of the old and the new that raises profound questions about how race relations have changed and how they have not.

Some of Eby’s juiciest commentary involves Faulkner’s Oxford, where she says, some 50 years after his death, he is “more a part of the social atmosphere … than he ever was in his life.” There, “Faulkner is more than the mythical figure that brought home Mississippi’s first Nobel Prize for Literature. His legend is something like that of a bum uncle who died and revealed a hidden fortune — the very kind of uncle Southerners love to talk about.”

“Home” is a must-read for devotees of Southern writers and especially lovers of Mississippiana, if for no other reason, than the Oxford chapter.

She later returns to Oxford on the piece on Hannah (from Clinton) who described the place as “a United Nations with catfish on its breath,” and Larry Brown (from Yocona), since they were both associated with the place, and Lisa and John Howorth’s Square Books, a literati gathering place like John Evans’ Lemuria Books in Jackson. The tantalizing tales leave the reader yearning for more!

I would have enjoyed a piece about Morris and Yazoo City, especially since she notes that his “North Toward Home” served as an inspiration for her book, for its “warm, evocative” sense of place. Even so, without Yazoo’s inclusion, with her meticulous research and refreshing candor about the South, its places and writers, she does Willie proud.

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

Learning about a quiet, respectful love

By Jamie

On August 12, 2015

In Biography/Memoir, Fiction, Southern Fiction, Staff Blog

Initially, I was unsure about reading Meanwhile, There are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald. The feeling of voyeurism was unsettling, disturbing. I soon talked myself out of this, though. Ms. Welty did, after all, give these letters to the Department of Archives and History, knowing full well that someone would read over them. More importantly, Susanne Marrs—one of the book’s editors who is recognized as the leading authority on Welty’s writing—would not allow anything improper to be printed. Dr. Marrs’ devotion to Welty goes beyond the academic: the two were friends, and Marrs’ commitment to that friendship has endured long after Welty’s death.

So, I got a copy. And I’m loving it.

The mystery writer Kenneth Millar, under the pen name Ross Macdonald, dazzled readers with his books for over two decades, starting in the early 1950’s. A longtime reader and fan of Eudora Welty’s fiction, he dropped her a simple fan letter in 1971. Welty reciprocated both the letter and admiration (she was a voracious reader, especially of mystery novels) and a friendship born of letters followed. In Meanwhile, There are Letters, editors Marrs and Tom Nolan (an expert on Macdonald) have arranged the letters chronologically, adding annotations to give context about the world outside of the epistles.

We as readers get to see the friendship emerge, and possibly move into more intimate territory. So many things prevented Welty and Macdonald (Millar) from physically consummating a relationship: his marriage, their age, his declining health. Yet, the love engendered between these two souls is genuine. Don’t pick up this book if you’re looking for high drama and overwrought romance. Instead, get a copy to follow a beautiful companionship based on mutual love of reading, observing, writing, and living. Meanwhile, There are Letters isn’t a rapid page-turner: it’s a leisurely lope through a vast emotional landscape with two guides who know and love the territory.

Dear Diary…

By Former Lemurians

On March 23, 2015

In Biography/Memoir, Culture, Southern Culture, Staff Blog

Keeping a diary is hard. I’ve always been so jealous of people who carry around battered little books, jotting down thoughts and making themselves permanent in the world. In college, I had a friend who journaled in paper thin moleskines, burning through each of them in less than a month. She would decorate the simple brown covers with photographs, her own writing, pieces of her experiences from the weeks before. Instead of seeming like a juvenile scrapbook, I felt like if her thoughts were spread out like a physical map- with little mountains of fear and rivers of contentment.

To be able to chronicle my life in such a way that I leave an honest, unflinching imprint of myself behind is something I fear I’ll never be able to do. It’s something, in fact, that some people would rather never do. Zadie Smith, author of NW, wrote in a recent post for Rookie Mag that journaling was something she could never get the hang of, nor did she want to. She wrote, “I was never able to block from my mind a possible audience, and this ruined it for me”.

Flannery O’Connor seemed extremely self-aware when writing in her prayer journal, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her handwritten notebooks seem meticulously organized, with very few spelling mistakes or crossed-out sentences. I can’t help but wonder if she transcribed these journals from another, messier book. In the pages, she implores, “Please help me dear God to be a good writer”, and it feels like her journal is in fact the preparation for her future as a well-known artist. An insurance policy, as it were, something that needed to be well-done; because once she was famous, people would find it, and they wouldn’t be able to keep from reading its pages.

I’ve got to say, I have never once journaled without the thought of someone reading it after I’m gone. In high school, I was drowning in ALL THE FEELINGS, yet instead of keeping a journal, I wrote everything, all the excruciating details of my DEEPLY FELT FEELINGS in a blog. A blog, people. The antithisis of a secret diary. Maybe it says something about how self-absorbed my generation is, but maybe for some people, an audience is somehow necessary. Is it possible for a journal to be just as truthful and cathartic if the author knows that someone else will read it? And because I never kept a secret diary, I don’t have the answer.

Jacket There are several talented people, thankfully, who are up for the task of intimate, non-blog journaling. Sarah Manguso’s new book, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary chronicles her fear of forgetting, and her obsession with the passing of time. While not a diary itself, Ongoingness offers very poignant thoughts about the process of keeping a journal. Some around Manguso lauded her as committed and hard-working for keeping up with a diary, meticulously writing down every detail; while in reality, to her it sometimes felt like a vice. A diary wasn’t a way for her to unwind and contemplate the events of the day, it was a a place to write in a panicked, grasping gasps, never quite able to fit the realness of a day onto the pages.

“Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.”

Vice or laborious ball and chain? To each his own, I suppose, but it is clear in the abundance of published diaries that wrestling with the idea of how to document our short time on earth is nothing new. Guess it’s time for me to try a new format.

Written by Hannah

When Women Were Birds

By Former Lemurians

On March 31, 2013

In Biography/Memoir, Poetry

I just returned from a 2 week trip to the Pacific Northwest for a graduate school residency. Out on Whidbey island, a stone’s throw from Puget Sound, I went on long walks along the coast and took the ferry to Port Townsend, a quaint port town with some good bookshops. (I’m including some photos I took so you can enjoy the views, too.)

shore2

lighthouse

shore

At one such shop, I bought Terry Tempest Williams’ When Women Were Birds. William’s has worked throughout her career as an environmental activist and as a result, much of her work focuses on our relationship with the natural world. However, in When Women Were Birds, Williams focuses on her relationship with her family, her mother in particular.

Upon her death, Terry Tempest Williams’ mother left her all of her journals. The journals were all blank. Spurred on by this mysterious silence on the page, Williams, in 54 small essays, explores voice–what it means to both speak and be silent. With poetic prose, she ventures into her relationship with her mother, her Mormon faith, and her own writing voice.

Even the beautiful Washington coast couldn’t pull me away from this book, and I highly recommend it to mothers and daughters, wives, artists, and women of faith. Terry Tempest Williams charts the female coming-of-age with poignancy and language that is sure to curl your toes.

Here’s one of the shorter essays:

Conversation is the vehicle for change. We test our ideas. We hear our own voice in concert with another. And inside those pauses of listening, we approach new territories of thought. A good argument, call it a discussion, frees us. Words fly out of our mouths like threatened birds. Once released, they may never return. If they do, they have chosen a home and the bird-words are calmed into an arts poetica. The women in my family didn’t always agree, but it was in their comp

any I felt inspired and safe.

What is birdsong but ‘truth in rehearsal’?

Here I Am: Tim Hetherington

By Former Lemurians

On March 16, 2013

In Biography/Memoir, War

A couple of years ago a friend of mine recommended that I watch a war documentary called Restrepo. My friend had been an infantryman with the 10th Mountain Division and mentioned to me that the film held particular importance for him as his old Battalion had taken a lot of casualties in the Korengal Valley. The documentary follows the 2nd Platoon of the Battle Company (2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team) as they are deployed to the Korengal Valley, first to the Korengal outpost and then later as they construct the Restrepo outpost.

It’s a stunning film. Too often war movies are praised for giving the viewer a realistic depiction of war. Reviews abound with phrases like “a gritty, raw first-hand view” or “exposes the violent and absurd nature of war.” Besides being seldom true, these phrases reveal something about what we expect (want?) from these films. The “realism” is restricted only to battle scenes. What struck me most about Restrepo was not that it caught the constant and overwhelming violence of war; on the contrary, it’s the lack of action that is unsettling. In the middle of the Korengal Valley, the “most dangerous place on earth”, the soldiers go about their daily tasks. The ever-present danger that surrounds the outpost becomes part of normal life. The moments of violence break into the mundane routine and the contrast makes them that much more powerful.

After watching the film I took note of the names of the two codirectors: Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington. Junger I was familiar with; he visited Lemuria for his book A Death in Belmont and I had enjoyed A Perfect Storm as well. But I wasn’t familiar with Hetherington before Restrepo. I looked him up and found incredible photographs from various conflicts and battlefields around the world. And then I learned that he had been killed a few months prior while on assignment in Libya, observing and recording the Arab Spring. Alan Huffman’s book Here I Am tells Tim Hetherington’s story. I was happy to see news of a book about Hetherington; I was even happier that Huffman was writing it. The man can write. Chapter 7 of Here I am opens:

When Staff Sergeant Kevin Rice saw the Taliban fighter taking aim at him with an RPG, he was on his hands and knees on a remote mountainside in Afghanistan, bleeding from his stomach and shoulder onto the ground. At that moment, Rice thought, “Wow, this is the last thing I’m going to see.”

Alan Huffman could have written a fine book about war, but in Here I Am he’s done something a little more complicated — he’s captured and communicated how Tim Hetherington saw war. At the end of Chapter 7 Huffman quotes from Hetherington’s book Infidel:

As anyone who has experienced it will know, war is many contradictory things. […] There is brutality and heroism, comedy and tragedy, friendship, hate, love, and boredom. War is absurd yet fundamental, despicable yet beguiling, unfair yet with its own strange logic. Rarely are people “back home” exposed to these contradictions — society tends only to highlight those qualities it needs, to construct its own particular narrative. Rather than attempt to describe the war in Afghanistan, I have sought to convey some of those contradictions.

If Hetherington sought to convey the contradictions in war, Huffman has the task of conveying the contradictions of Hetherington: a noncombatant seeking out every conflict and war, an artist looking for truth and beauty on the battlefield. Huffman writes:

Hetherington had felt a need to prove himself to the soldiers from early on. He was a journalist, a British guy, approaching middle age, among a group of rowdy, young, tattoed soldiers from California, Florida, New Jersey, and Wisconsin. He had a tendency to view war intellectually, with an artist’s eye, and in some ways he stood out as much as he had when he was the white guy on the motorcycle in Monrovia.

I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to finishing Here I Am and hearing Alan Huffman speak. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch Restrepo. Look at some of Tim Hetherington’s war photos. Read Here I Am, and join us on Thursday, March 28 at 5 PM for Alan Huffman.

A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

By admin

On August 2, 2012

In Biography/Memoir, Southern Fiction, Staff Blog

Carolyn Brown tells us how she came to write a new biography on Eudora Welty.

My love of Eudora Welty goes back 20 years, to graduate school at UNC-Greensboro, and a class I was taking in literary theory. In that class I was given a very open-ended assignment: take one of the modern literary theories we had studied (Jung, Nietzsche, Derrida, etc.) and apply that theory to an author’s work (any author). Why I chose Welty I do not know, but I took a few of the short stories in A Curtain of Green and The Wide Net and explained that the mystery of Welty’s fiction can be understood as a tension between the Apollonian and Dionysiac visions of the world described in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. In very simplistic terms, characters like Mrs. Larkin from “A Curtain of Green,” Hazel Wallace in “The Wide Net,” and Howard in “Flowers for Marjorie” seek order (Apollo) amidst the chaos (Dionysos) of their worlds. This graduate school paper was the first article I ever published; it appeared in the 1990 edition of the journal Notes on Mississippi Writers.

Flash forward to 2006. I am married with two children, and my husband gets a job in Jackson. I haven’t thought much about Eudora in the intervening years, but I receive a gift from the company which is wooing my husband to Jackson. It is Suzanne Marrs’ biography of Eudora, newly published and signed by the author! I am overwhelmed. I think, “This company gets it–this is not the standard fruit basket. It’s a wonderful, meaningful gift.” We move to Jackson, and a few months later I am hired by Millsaps and meet the author, Suzanne Marrs.

Since I have lived in Jackson, I have loved seeing the Welty House and Visitors Center grow–moving from Eudora’s garage into the beautiful facility that houses the museum today. I have loved giving tours, making presentations to the docents, and working closely with Suzanne on her books. Living in what I affectionately call “Welty World” reawakened my love of the author and my desire to write about her again.

The idea for the biography grew out of my own enjoyment of reading biographies as a young girl, especially biographies of strong women, as well as being a mother to middle school and high school age boys. It became apparent to me that there was a dearth of biographies in general for middle and high school age students. It’s a wide open field–there are many writers like Welty who have a long scholarly biography devoted to their life and accomplishments, but not a shorter one that offers an introduction to their lives and works. I also believe students and all readers can learn a lot about recent history as Welty’s life closely follows the 20th century arc, and she was closely affected by the major historical events of the century–the depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. Finally, I believe Mississippi needs more biographies of their famous citizens, which is why I am writing a second one–on Jackson writer Margaret Walker–whose papers, like Welty’s, are archived here and whose life is also a great example from which we can learn. -Carolyn Brown

A signing for Carolyn Brown will be held Wednesday, August 15th at 5:00. A reading will follow at 5:30. Click here for more details.

A Daring Life is published by University Press of Mississippi. Signed copies are available at Lemuria, $20.

wwwwww

The Principles of Uncertainty

By Former Lemurians

On July 26, 2012

In Art/Photography, Biography/Memoir, Culture

A few weeks ago in Chicago, I saw a wonderful Roy Lichtenstein exhibit at the Art Institute. It was arranged roughly chronologically, each room both a different stage and style in Lichtenstein’s work and a deeper, novel-like exploration of the artist himself. You never know when you’re going to have a unique experience of the art like that when you’re going into a museum or a new exhibit. And I had no idea that I’d have one when a friend scooted this quirky little book across a table towards me.

People just love Maira Kalman’s illustrations. I told Kelly that I was reading this book (it took about a day), and she got so excited to show me Michael Pollan’s book, Food Rules, in which he and Kalman collaborated for an illustrated version of his popular, no-nonsense, list of back-to-basics rules about eating that is a lovely read—or just good for the curb appeal and approachability of the art. Here is Kelly’s November blog post about that book. People have already bought two of them since we put them on display near the front desk about a week ago.

This is a case of an artist who knows her medium so well because she’s put in her ten thousand hours, the requisite amount of time that Malcolm Gladwell famously explores in Outliers. This is also one of those exciting cases in which the artist was born outside of the U.S., and has a hint of that untraceable sensibility that the rest of us can sniff out at page one. It makes for some of my favorite art, visual and of the written type. Kalman’s style is to intertwine hand-painted illustration and an episodic storyline (hand-written signature font) to patiently share her detail-oriented and gracious perspective on all things earthly. The key element here is empathy. It is shameless compassion with which she paints the way people wear hats, the funny piece of paper that she finds on the sidewalk, or a bowl of berries fed to her by an aging friend.

Her illustrations for other books shine with this empathy, but this one stands apart because it is a kind of memoir, with each observation reflecting back on the story of the author herself. It reminds me a little of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking in that sense. This is a book in which we are graciously invited to try on Maira Kalman’s eyeballs and see her person, her history, and her suffering. Somehow I found a way to personally connect my own feelings of uncertainty having just graduated from college with hers about life around age 58. And isn’t that sort of exactly what we’re digging for when we pick up any book?

Visit Kalman’s New York Times blog for a sampling of her work. It contains a year’s worth of a column she wrote about democracy in America at kalman.blogs.nytimes.com.

The Principles of Uncertainty, Maira Kalman, Penguin Books, $20

by Whitney

Category: Biography/Memoir (Page 4 of 9)

Gifting the Perfect Book: Bakers With Hearts as Soft as Melted Butter

Rebel Reads: ‘Bo’ by Billy Watkins and ‘The Last Season’ by Stuart Stevens

Devotion by Adam Makos

Eby’s “South Toward Home” pinpoints literary treasures

Learning about a quiet, respectful love

Dear Diary…

When Women Were Birds

Here I Am: Tim Hetherington

A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

The Principles of Uncertainty

Authors

Categories

Tags