Fiction – Lemuria Books

On March 31, 2020

By Susan O’Bryan. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 9)

Sisters of the Undertow is not a long book. It also is not a quick or easy read requiring little thought or mental involvement.

Instead, award-winning author Johnnie Bernhard packs delivers a punch to the gut in her third novel, one that makes you think twice about sisterhood, luck and loss. Her characters come to life in what reads—and feels—more like a memoir than a novel.

The story is told from the perspective of Kimberly Ann Hodges, a miracle child born in late 1970 to David and Sandy Hodges, a couple desperate for a baby after several miscarriages. Her parents are overjoyed, and proclaim how “lucky” they are to have a baby girl.

Sixteen months later, Kathy Renee is born, and the family feels that their luck has run out. The baby is premature, and has a variety of medical and developmental challenges. With all the family attention now on Kathy Renee, Kim, as she prefers to be called, begins to resent being the big sister to someone so unlike herself.

One line in the novel says so much—“We were sisters,” Kim says. “I loved and hated her.”

Their biggest difference has nothing to do with physical traits, though. Instead, it’s the particular focus that each girl has on life and faith. Kim feels the pain of ridicule and strict parenting, while Kathy Renee finds the joy in every single day.

Through her story telling, Bernhard shows the strong to be weak and vulnerable, while the seemingly lesser stands firm against the ebb and flow of life.

Kim learns early to distrust men, while Kathy Renee likes to bring home guys considered to be outsiders. One sister trades a small hometown near Houston, Texas, for the co-ed life at Texas Tech University as an escape, while the other cherishes the routine of family and church. Kim prefers books over people, while her little sister only wants to help others. One wants to be a librarian, while the other wants to be a nurse’s aide.

Through their own experiences, the sisters learn to cope with the tides of change and loss. And through these fictional characters, readers gain insight into what it means to weather storms together rather than alone.

Susan O’Bryan was a journalist for 30 years before she joined the University of Mississippi Medical Center in 2010 as a web content coordinator. She is a freelance writer for several newspapers and literary review sites.

Johnnie Bernhard is scheduled to be at Lemuria on Saturday, April 4 at 2:00 to sign and discuss Sisters of the Undertow.

Author Q & A with Taylor Brown

On March 15, 2020

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

A native of the Georgia coast, Taylor Brown offers readers his fourth novel, Pride of Eden, as an “environmentalism” tale of majestic animals that should be living in the wild, and the flawed characters who fight to save them from human exploitation.

Brown’s work has appeared in the New York Times, The Rumpus, Garden & Gun, Chautauqua, The North Carolina Literary Review, and many other publications.

He is the author of a short story collection, In the Season of Blood and Gold, and each of his three previous novels, Fallen Land, The River of Kings, and Gods of Howl Mountain, became a finalist for the Southern Book Prize. He has also captured the Montana Prize in Fiction.

An Eagle Scout who graduated from the University of Georgia in 2005, Brown has lived in Buenos Aires, San Francisco, and the mountains of western North Carolina. Today he makes his home in Savannah, Ga.

Pride of Eden reveals environmental and moral lessons through a narrative that combines the heroism of its flawed characters with the tenderness and fury of the animals they work to save–AND “an underworld of smugglers, gamblers, breeders, trophy hunters and others who exploit exotic game.” It’s also an original, out of the ordinary kind of story. Tell me how you formed the idea for this tale–you must be an enormous animal lover yourself!

Taylor Brown

Indeed, I’ve always been an animal lover, and animals have always found their way into my work–though more indirectly until now. A few years ago, I visited Carolina Tiger Rescue in Pittsboro, North Carolina–a big cat sanctuary that takes in tigers, lions, ocelots, servals, and other wild cats from all over the region. There’s a story behind every denizen there, and most come from pretty bad conditions such as roadside zoos, negligent private owners, circuses, etc. Their stories really moved me, and I began to formulate the idea of someone who took the “rescue” part of an exotic wildlife rescue quite literally…

Main character Anse Caulfield is a retired racehorse jockey and Vietnam veteran who runs Little Eden, an exotic animal wildlife reserve off the Georgia coast. He lives to rescue elephants, big cats, rhinos, and other animals, to save them from a life lived in sideshows or as part of a hunter’s “collection.” What drove Anse to devote his life to this cause?

Anse has witnessed, and even been an accessory to, a lot of trauma visited on the animal kingdom, whether it was his experience in Vietnam, his time as a soldier of fortune in Africa, or his career as a quarter horse jockey. So, I think he’s burdened with a lot of guilt and hoping to atone for some of those things in his past, whether they were his own sins or those of his fellow man. That said, he’s a bit of an outlaw and curmudgeon at heart, and he doesn’t always go about things in the most legal manner.

Author Ron Rash has called Pride of Eden a “visionary novel of scarred souls seeking redemption not only for themselves but, in their limited way, for us all.” In what ways would you agree with this observation?

I do think the characters in this book are seeking redemption in their own way. Most of them are dealing with some trauma in their past that continues to haunt and pain them on a daily basis. One of the beautiful things about our species is that we often heal through helping others, be they our fellow humans or members of the animal kingdom.

I think these characters–Anse and Malaya especially–have witnessed things that make them question the “humane-ness” of humanity. By working to help these captive and abused animals, they’re helping to redeem not only themselves, but their faith in humanity as a whole. On the other hand, they’re certainly not saints–they’re as flawed as anyone, and things don’t always go according to plan.

In addition to the obvious flashes of your sizable imagination throughout Pride of Eden, you add a dash of mystery. Is there any chance there will ever be a sequel to this story?

Thank you, Jana. That mystery reminds me of the words of a writer friend of mine, Matthew Neill Null, who once said, “The lives of animals are mysterious, and mystery is the lifeblood of fiction.” Those words continue to resonate with me, whether I’m watching the red-tailed hawk that hunts over our neighborhood or writing about the elephants and rhinos I visited in South Africa. I tried to infuse that mystery into the novel.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have some ideas percolating for a sequel to “Pride of Eden.” Without giving anything away, I’m particularly interested in the story of wolf reintroduction in the American West, as well as the work of Animal Defenders International (ADI), who’ve been instrumental in rescuing animals from circuses in various countries of South America and bringing them to sanctuaries in the U.S. and South Africa.

Why is this a book that you believed needed to be written NOW?

Well, I think the clock is ticking for so many species. Scientists say we’re living through the “Anthropocene Extinction,” in which human activity is correlated with extinction rates hundreds of times higher than normal. It may well be the defining story of our epoch.

We’re living in an age when there are about as many captive tigers in the state of Texas alone as left in the wild in the rest of the world, and in 2018, the last male northern white rhino died living under 24-hour armed guard. I can’t imagine living in a world without such magnificent creatures. I think, if we’re more intimate with the lives and stories of animals, we may be more likely to love, respect, and protect them – and in the process, save something crucial of our own hearts.

Taylor Brown will be at Lemuria on Monday, March 23, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Pride of Eden.

Lee Durkee’s ‘The Last Taxi Driver’ provides wild, dark, hilarious ride

On March 11, 2020

By Jim Warren. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 8)

In The Last Taxi Driver, Lou Bishoff drives for Mississippi All Saints Taxis in Gentry, a university town in North Mississippi. His black 1995 Town Car has seen better days–the roof leaks, the brakes are gone, the shocks are shot, the horn doesn’t work, and the tires are bald. Lou’s future is uncertain. Uber is moving into Gentry. His relationship is over, assuming he can convince her to move out. An old nemesis is back in town after cutting off his ankle bracelet and hitchhiking from Kansas.

Albert Camus said, “The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.” Maybe Al was a cabbie? Lou’s taxi has three air fresheners–Bigfoot, Shakespeare, and a flying saucer–besides working well as conversation starters, they help ward off smells so varied and offensive that he must keep Ozium and Febreze at the ready for backup. Lou’s a Buddhist, but a bad one, “the worst Buddhist in the world.” Nevertheless, he reads about Buddhism between fares in hopes that it might quell the urge to raise his middle finger in traffic. Then he gets another dispatch—All Saints dispatches come by text to thwart the competition’s radio spying—and he’s off on a run while his boss Stella watches through an onboard camera.

Lou works days; he’d rather avoid the drunk college students. He takes people to work, to shop, or to the doctor. He makes deliveries. If you got arrested last night and need a ride this morning from the jail to the vehicle impound lot, Lou’s your man. He’s also there if the hospital releases you to go home, but there’s no family to pick you up. He’ll be there when you get out of rehab, too, if it’s the good rehab, the one next to the VD clinic. He’ll drive you to Clarksdale, Memphis, or across town. Two bucks a mile outside city limits, though, and two dollars for any extra stops.

Gentry, of course, resembles Oxford. It’s no coincidence that Durkee drove an Oxford taxi for a couple of years. At one point, he was driving over 70 hours a week. Durkee includes a chapter filled with advice for Mississippi drivers right in the middle of the book, like an intermission. “Safe driving is all about the neck. Pride yourself in how much you employ your neck while changing lanes. Approach driving as a neck exercise.” Ditch the sunglasses (they create blind spots). Never blink your headlights at a UFO. And of course: “Your main job as a driver in Mississippi is to anticipate stupidity.” Indeed.

The Last Taxi Driver is a pleasure to read. We waited a long time for second novel from Durkee. It was worth the wait. Durkee’s language is unadorned and direct. It’s first person Lou, explaining the North Mississippi taxi business and narrating as we ride shotgun on a long, strange shift. The novel is dark, but quite funny. Lou has a knack for overthinking that turns even the normal stuff into a comedy routine. And Lou has stories to tell, stories about albino possums, UFOs, and adolescent trauma. As the day shift turns into a night run home from Memphis, with a yellow-eyed transplant surgery escapee on board and a gun under the seat, things get … well, they get darker.

Durkee was raised in Hattiesburg. He attended Pearl River Junior College, graduated from Arkansas, pursued a creative writing degree at Syracuse–he started the program with George Saunders, was taught by Tobias Wolff–and ultimately obtained his MFA back at Arkansas. He’s lived in Oxford for ten years. His first novel was Rides of the Midway, published twenty years ago. His memoir Stalking Shakespeare is scheduled for publication in 2021.

Jim Warren is a lawyer in Jackson. He collects books, enjoys music, and occasionally writes about both.

Signed first editions of The Last Taxi Driver can be found at Lemuria and at our online store.

Author Q & A with Michael Farris Smith

On March 8, 2020

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 8)

Oxford’s Michael Farris Smith reinforces his rising prominence as “one of Southern fiction’s leading voices” with his newest Southern noir offering, Blackwood.

Set in “a landscape of fear and ghosts,” this tale of an artist who returns to his (fictional) hometown of tiny Red Bluff, Miss., quickly turns dark as he realizes that the heartbreak of his past is now mingled with an evil that has tortured generations.

The recipient of the 2014 Mississippi Author Award, Smith’s previous novels include The Fighter, Desperation Road, Rivers, and The Hands of Strangers. His short stories have received two nominations for a Pushcart Prize, and his essays have been published in the New York Times, Catfish Alley, Deep South Magazine and others.

Smith is a graduate of Mississippi State University, and he began writing while at the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.

As a child in 1956, main character Colburn inadvertently witnessed–and unexpectedly participated in–his father’s suicide. The weight of this, his greatest burden, soon begins to drag him into deeper gloom when he returns to his hometown of Red Bluff, Miss., 20 years later. Why did he really go back, and why did you choose to set this story in this time period?

Michael Farris Smith

I think I chose to set the novel in the ‘70s, with the initial event occurring in the ‘50s, just because this felt like an older story to me. Almost like a tall tale or ghost story you hear told again and again in some small town. I think a lot of people from smaller places can certainly relate to this. As to why Colburn decides to return, I don’t know if it’s something I can answer so directly. He’s been carrying this around for a long time, he’s haunted by it, confused by it, curious about it, and so maybe he feels like he’s ready to face it.

Another formidable, undeniable “character” in Blackwood is the kudzu–the living, invincible vine that could swallow not only the landscape, but any manmade object in its path. Explain its role in this story.

The kudzu is what started this story, much like the idea of endless hurricanes started Rivers. This is the second time I’ve had the landscape be the jumping off point. I’ve always thought the great expanse of kudzu was strange, spooky, dark. We’ve all seen it, how it takes everything, methodically and patiently. I just had the idea of a valley covered in kudzu and the small town surrounding it, and the whispers and maybe even madness that seems to be living on its edge, and then going beneath the vines to find out what is going on. I let my imagination have it and that was that.

“The voice” seems to pervade the community. Tell us about its intrusion into the lives of those who hear it, and its gossip value among those who have merely heard about it.

The gossip value carries some of the weight, no doubt. Back to earlier when I mentioned that Blackwood had the feeling of being a ghost story passed along, year after year, I think the characters in the novel experience the same. One person claims to hear the voice. Another thinks it’s ridiculous. Another falls somewhere in between. It seems like those who are drawn to the notion of a voice below are the ones who want to hear it.

Among the many story lines and characters whose lives are beyond “complicated” in this tale is the presence of characters known as the man, the woman, and the boy–who all live tragic lives. In the end, it is the boy with whom Colburn finds an attachment. Why is this quasi-relationship so important to Colburn?

The best way I can answer is that we are all looking for someone to find things in common with, people who make us feel accepted or part of something. Hopefully it comes from family, but for too many people, like Colburn, that isn’t the case. He’s spent a lifetime with the shadows of his mother and father drifting in his mind, and he has been a loner, isolated, and maybe this is his chance to find that connection he has missed.

The names of the woman and the boy are never revealed, although the man finally tells the local sheriff, “My name is Boucher.” You know what my question is! How does this fit in with the main character of your previous novel, The Fighter?

I’ve never had characters spill from one novel into another until now, and that wasn’t the original plan. I was very late in the process of Blackwood when I realized the man and woman who have broken down in Red Bluff are the man and woman who abandoned young Jack Boucher in Tunica at the beginning of The Fighter. It was such an exciting idea, and the time frame fit, and it gave their story so much more complexity. It raised Blackwood to a higher level, and in some ways, I feel like it has raised the level of The Fighter, as well.

Please tell me about the title of the book, Blackwood, and its significance to the story.

On page 56, I used the description of the “blackwood underneath” in a passage where we first really go under and see what it’s like. As soon as I used the word blackwood, I knew that was the title. It fit the landscape but also fit the kind of story I knew I was going to tell.

Lemuria has chosen Blackwood as its March 2020 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction. Signed first editions can be found at Lemuria and at our online store.

Author Q & A with Lee Durkee

On March 4, 2020

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

Twenty years after his first book Rides of the Midway made its debut, Lee Durkee has returned with his new release The Last Taxi Driver, a one-night study of the life of Lou Bishoff as he takes stock of the things that really matter, while transporting his final passengers to their own destinations.

In between his novels, Durkee’s stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the Sun, Best of the Oxford American, Tin House, New England Review, Mississippi Noir, and other publications.

His memoir Stalking Shakespeare, which recounts his 10-year quest to locate lost portraits of William Shakespeare, will be released in 2021.

Born in Hawaii, Durkee grew up in Hattiesburg and lived in Vermont for 18 years (among other places) before moving back to his home state to escape the harsh winters. A former cab driver himself, he now lives in North Mississippi.

I’ll start with the obvious first question: why so long (20 years) between Rides of the Midway, your debut novel, and The Last Taxi Driver, your new release?

Lee Durkee

I have so many answers to this question! Let me explain to you why I failed so spectacularly at publishing for 20 years. My friend Bill at Square Books (in Oxford) used to give me pep talks at the bar at City Grocery in which he emphasized how hard Michael Farris Smith worked, and other well-meaning friends have gently lectured me about drinking or smoking to excess. But I suspect the real reason I never published a second novel was a lack of practicality in what I wrote about.

I don’t have much control over what pours out. My relationship with writing is an opium-like addiction I enjoyed every day for those 20 years of obscurity during which I wrote two unloved books set in Kathmandu as well as a hip-hop version of Hamlet set to Nas’s Stillmatic. I also wrote two books about Elizabethan portraits and a short story collection set in Tokyo told from the point-of-view of nine different Japanese sex dolls. Then there were my Vermont novels, one in which I hideously murdered my real-life jerk of a landlord by having him stuffed, while still screamingly alive, down an ice hole drilled into a frozen lake. None of these books could be described as commercial ventures.

Please tell me about your own experiences as a taxi driver yourself. Did crazy things happen? Were you ever frightened? How did getting that job come about? And, finally, how did that experience influence The Last Taxi Driver?

I drove for two different cab companies in Oxford for a year each and was frequently very frightened. There were times I drove 70-hour weeks–the only way I could eek out a living while saving money for my own car. My first cab company specialized in trailer parks and projects and dirt roads. We also carted the poor people who got kicked out of the local hospital back to their hovels to die. But, as to being afraid, it was mostly the cackles of drunk frat boys who worried me. Like the time I kicked a hoard of them out of my cab for yelling the N-word at this couple. These giant frat boys got out, surrounded my cab, and started kicking the doors etc., while calling me the N word. And I’m white! That’s how racist those punks are. Racists always assume their cab drivers are fellow racists. Same with perverts. The things I heard those kids say about women and Obama would harrow your blood to hear. I drove with a big Kershaw knife under my leg. Other cabbies I worked with had guns.

It was my friend Joyce Freeland, a do-good lawyer, who got me hired by my first cab company after I’d explained to her I couldn’t bartend any more due to back spasms. And the actress Joey Lauren Adams hooked me up with my second cab job. Both Joyce and Joey are members in high standing of the Save Lee from Himself Club, whose president is (Oxford author) Lisa Howorth.

And yes, both taxi jobs influence the novel. Grist was the whole point of me not working in an English department like 98 percent of all writers today do. We live in a world where the bulk of noir fiction is now being written by schoolteachers who have never even had night jobs. They write with their imaginations! Along those lines, the first thing I do whenever I pick up a new book these days is turn it over, trying to deduce if the author has ever stepped outside of an English department.

The Last Taxi Driver is the detailed story of cab driver Lou Bishoff’s last evening on the job, as he shares it in first person, with a penchant for getting off the subject now and again. Despite the state of his personal life (girlfriend problems, his health and his career direction) he always has humor to fall back on, lending a kind of slanted optimism to what many would deem a dire existence. How does Lou, who seems to take things in stride as he reasons through his sometimes-tangled trains of thought, manage to keep it together?

Actually, I’m not sure Lou does keep it together, and his shift-from-hell can certainly be read as a descent into madness. But dark humor must be a survival mechanism, right? I’ve worked in restaurants all my life, and the jokes you hear there are 1,000 times funnier and dirtier than the meticulously censored ones you’ll hear inside English departments. Both my novels are rife with the black humor of servers who have to smile-smile-smile and then walk back into the kitchen and just let loose that venom. I am nothing if not a child of restaurants. They raised me, they sustained me.

How much of Lou Bishoff is Lee Durkee? (They seem to have a lot in common.) What are the differences?

I suppose Lou could be described as a more tragic version of me who exists in a darker dimension–cue Rod Serling. But that’s also true for other characters in The Last Taxi Driver. There are tricks writers play to make you think a book is more autobiographical than it is. We want you to think that. I’ve always been a huge fan of The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, which takes the illusion of verisimilitude to a new level–he even named his main character Tim.

But Lou, like all characters in fiction, is mostly a creature of plot. To say Lou is me would be wrong–Lou at least has a girlfriend. And half of Lou’s dialogue was ripped off from customers I’ve eavesdropped on. Like all my characters, Lou is a mutt who is made up of traits culled from a dozen or so different people.

Tell me about your upcoming memoir, set to be released in 2021.

Stalking Shakespeare is a memoir about my decades-long obsession with being the first person to ever find a portrait of Shakespeare painted from life. The memoir is funny, not academic, and concerns my time living in Vermont, Tokyo, London, and my eventual return to Mississippi after 37 years away. I’ve long given up writing anything that isn’t funny.

Signed first editions of The Last Taxi Driver can be found at Lemuria and at our online store.

The Border Between: ‘American Dirt’ by Jeanine Cummins (with new material in review)

By Former Lemurians

On January 21, 2020

This review was originally posted on Tuesday, January 21, 2020. The introduction was added on Thursday, January 30.

Advance copies of American Dirt arrived at the store from Flatiron Books with a lot of fanfare, as do many books. I first heard about American Dirt from another reader at our store whose taste I tremendously respect, from whom I had first learned about Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (another story about a culture very different from mine, and one of my favorite books of all time, albeit written by a writer with first hand cultural experience with parts of the story she was telling). I read American Dirt myself, and was genuinely moved by what I thought was a compelling human story written with what I still believe were good intentions. However, prominent members of the Latinx literary community have disagreed, arguing that celebrating such an inauthentic depiction of their culture would be a disservice to the real experiences of Mexicans and migrants (Rebuttal view points will be linked below the review). Reasonable people can debate what the exact guidelines should be for writing about other cultures, especially ones socially and economically marginalized by those in power, but one of the chief pleasures of reading fiction I have found is to expand experiences beyond what I can live myself. If we who are not Latinx wish to experience that culture, it feels appropriate to listen to Latinx voices, from authors to beta readers to critics, at whatever stage of the process we hear them.

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins is, with all due respect to its competition, probably the best book of any kind that I’ve read in almost two years. It is a novel whose narrative and emotional power comes from being stretched taut between dual forces: senseless terror and redemptive generosity, life and death, dreams and nightmares, home and hope. I would recommend this book to anybody who reads for the same basic reason as I do: to have your soul made more expansive by the experience.

Lydia Pérez is a normal woman with a middle-class life in Acapulco, Mexico, when that life is destroyed violently and instantly at her niece’s quinceañera as her entire family–except for her eight year-old son, Luca–is murdered because of her husband Sebastián’s reporting on the leader of a local cartel. If anything could even be added on to this horror, Lydia knows this cartel leader, known to her as Javier Crespo Fuentes, one of her most cherished, thoughtful customers at her bookstore.

Questions of complicity haunt Lydia in her spare moments. But she doesn’t have time for guilt; she doesn’t have time for grief. Her number one priority is to keep her son safe by leaving Acapulco, the state of Guerrero, and all of Mexico. Only in America, el norte, does Javier’s reach not extend. Both Lydia–and her gifted son, forced to act beyond his years–are plenty smart, but also not prepared, because who could bear to be prepared for this? Marked for death, with nobody in their family left to turn to, Lydia and Luca are forced to press every advantage, rely on their wits, and learn which strangers to trust, and, even more importantly, who not to.

Lydia and Luca form a family unit, of sorts, with fellow migrants Soledad and Rebeca, who are sisters from the mountains of Honduras escaping trauma and danger of their own. Lorenzo, a former sicaro from the very cartel Lydia and Luca are fleeing from, flits in and out of their journey, casting a shadow of doubt and fear on the hopes of escape.

Don Winslow, the author of cartel crime books like The Power of the Dog calls it “a Grapes of Wrath for our times,” and I think the Steinbeck comparison is apt. You could call American Dirt an issue book, in the way it humanizes the headlines, and shows who migrants are and what they face, but it definitely stands on its own two feet as a gripping story all on its own.

The balancing act of Cummins’ novel manages is to be tense and terrifying without seeming exploitative. The story shows the cruelty of a broken world without reveling in it. It shows not the machinations of power, from the perspective of the cartels or the politicians, but the consequences of it. It shows migrants as individual humans, each with different stories, even if there are all centered in tragedy. Each of those stories is worth telling, and each one, worth hearing.

Lemuria has chosen American Dirt as its January 2020 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Reading for further consideration:

Dear Oprah Winfrey: 124 Writers Ask You to Reconsider ‘American Dirt’
…You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake…Social Justice Literature by Myriam Gurba (strong language advisory)
Sandra Cisneros Calls Critics of Highly Controversial ‘American Dirt’ Novel “Exagerados”
‘American Dirt’ has us talking. That’s a good thing. by Reyna Grande (New York Times opinion)
A Mother and Son, Fleeing for Their Lives Over Treacherous Terrain by Parul Sehgal (New York Times review)

Author Q & A with Mark Barr

On December 29, 2019

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

Mark Barr’s debut novel Watershed literally sheds light on the true story of how electric light first came to rural Tennessee in the 1930s–and how its arrival changed those communities in ways they never expected.

Through its pages, Barr chronicles the stories of fictional characters Claire and Nathan, whose complicated fates are drawn together only through the enormity of the construction of the hydroelectric dam that would supply the power to turn the lights on. Barr’s meticulous research adds an attention to detail that draws the reader into the time and place of the story.

A software developer who likes to spend his spare time baking bread, Barr has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including those from Blue Mountain Center, I-Park Artists Enclave, Jentel Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Millay Colony, and Yaddo. He earned an MFA from Texas State University.

Barr resides in Arkansas with his wife and sons.

What was it about the Tennessee Valley Authority hydroelectric dam project in 1930s rural Tennessee that caught your interest and inspired this story?

I had been working as an advertising copywriter, and I was assigned to write a brochure for an electric cooperative client. During my preparation for that, I was shocked to learn that, while electricity was available in our large cities in the early years of the 1900s, it wasn’t until 1937 and the Rural Electrification Act that much of the rural countryside finally got electrical service. I was kind of shocked, not that we’d experienced this divide, but that we don’t much collectively remember it.

The prospect of life with electricity was an unknown in 1930s rural Tennessee. Explain how the dam’s construction in Watershed would bring more changes to the community than just electric power–and how the book’s title reveals that.

We don’t stop to think about it much, but we today enjoy a standard of comfort and living that is far beyond 99 percent better than what our preceding ancestors had. Consider the fact of air conditioning when it is hot, lights when it is dark, our global communications network and internet–all of these things are available by and large because of electricity. It’s a foundation for so many other conveniences. It is hard to overstate the reach of its benefit.

Please tell us about the fears and ambitions of central characters Claire and Nathan.

I think a lot of the novel has to do with our past and our inability to ever escape it. Nathan is bound to his. Claire is shaped by hers, even as she grows into a new life. When I set out to write the book, Nathan was, to my mind, the main character. It surprised me when Claire came along and then grew into what I now think of as the primary character. It’s Claire’s struggle and growth that defines the arc of the novel’s story. I feel that it is because of Claire that the book is an optimistic one.

With the scarcity of jobs during the post-Depression years of the ‘30s, explain the tension between the locals and the outsiders who competed for employment on this project in Hardin County, Tennessee.

Here’s a story that reflects the scarcity of jobs during this time period: I visited a couple different dams that had been built in 1937 during my research. At one of them I learned that, during the construction effort, a camp had sprung up just adjacent to the dam site. It was comprised of men seeking work. Each morning, men from the camp would venture over to the dam site to inquire if anyone had died during the previous day, and if so, if a position had opened up as a result! A version of that story made it into the novel.

What can you tell us about future works you may have in progress now? Do you plan to stick with historical fiction as your main interest?

I’ve got a couple different projects that I’m working on next. The one that currently has the upper hand is set in an Illinois coal mining town in the 1990s. I’m drawn to stories about communities as they change, and this one deals with the strains placed on a particular town, generationally, after the mines shut down.

Lemuria has selected Watershed its November 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction. Signed first editions of Watershed are available in our online store.

Author Q & A with Ann Patchett

On December 22, 2019

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

New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett’s seventh novel The Dutch House is a tale that lingers long after the final page.

A story of home, love, disappointment and forgiveness, the novel centers around the family home of siblings and parents through decades of their changes, longings and, eventually, a comfortable sense of healing that bridges to the next generation.

A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Patchett has won numerous awards and fellowships, including England’s Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She has authored six previous novels, three books of nonfiction, and a children’s book.

In November, 2011, she became co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, where she lives with her husband, Karl VanDevender, and their dog, Sparky.

Reviews for The Dutch House often refer to it as “a dark fairy tale,” and, indeed, its main characters–two siblings whose childhoods were darkened by the abandonment of their mother, followed by the presence of a cruel stepmother, and their attachment to a large and looming home–spend their lives lamenting their misfortunes in later years, but are still drawn back to the house. Tell us briefly about their childhood regrets.

Danny and Maeve regret that they didn’t get the house. They regret that their stepmother won, and they lost. Funny, but when I think about regrets, I tend to think about my own actions and not the actions of others. I think they see themselves as fairly blameless in how the events of their childhood unfolded, and I think they’re right. I don’t want to give too much away but when Danny is a teenager, he feels he dealt with a terrible situation terribly, but I believe that as an adult he doesn’t blame himself or harbor any regret.

The house that siblings Maeve and her younger brother Danny grew up in–and would be banished from–is practically a character itself. The design and features of this unique structure, not to mention its furnishings–loom as large as its physical presence. In what ways does this house stand as a metaphor of this story?

Ann Patchett

I think of houses as our public face. Our house is how other people see us. Houses represent our success and our failure, our good times and bad. It’s where we store our memories. If you’ve ever had the experience of driving past a house you used to live in, you remember very quickly how you felt when you were there. So, for Danny and Maeve, the house represents a happier time when their mother was still with them, and it also represents the security of wealth. They had never imagined another kind of life for themselves, and while Maeve was already out of the house, and in a very small apartment, Danny had no idea about the turns that life might take. Children rarely do.

The story goes far beyond the siblings’ childhood years, continuing through their middle age and beyond–as it unfolds their divergent careers and personal lives, and, near the end, the unexpected appearance of a character. When you’re developing a story, do you map out the way their lives evolve for such a long time?

I do. Different writers approach this question differently. I really have to know where I’m going, or I just meander around and get nowhere. I like structure and plot, so I work out the larger details of the novel before I start writing. It’s my favorite part of the process, thinking a story up. I don’t write things down. I keep everything in my head. That way I don’t get too attached to a certain idea. I can change my mind. I can just forget about something. My outlines aren’t specific, but I have a clear idea about all the characters, who they are, what they want, as well as their arrivals and departures.

It seems that the Dutch House redeems itself at the end. What does that state for the entire story?

I’ve been told this is a very sad book and I’ve been told it has a happy ending. I like the fact that different people can read it in different ways. The house never changes. It is, after all, just a house. It’s incapable of feelings, a fact that irritates Danny and Maeve who believe on some level that the house should have collapsed in solidarity when they were thrown out. Again, I don’t want to give anything away. Let’s just say the house is loved and obsessed over for many generations.

Ultimately, this story doesn’t seem to be the expected “good guy, bad guy” tale; rather, it’s pretty much everyone doing the best he or she can. Could you comment on that?

I’m awful at writing villains. I definitely lean towards sympathetic characters, mainly because most all of the people I know personally are sympathetic. We seem to be living in a world of good and evil now, and who is good and who is evil depends on who you’re listening to. But I think most people do the best they can. That said, Andrea is the closest thing I’ve ever come to a villain, and I can even see how she was young and in over her head. I keep meaning to try harder with my villains, but I spend so much time with my characters and look at them so closely I can’t help but feel some empathy for most of them.

Lemuria has chosen The Dutch House as its September 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Lara Prescott