In case you haven’t heard, Mary Ward Brown was here last Tuesday. I still have this wonderful and inspiring woman on my mind. She read to us from her memoir, the last section in which she gives readers a book tour of her house. Anyone who loves to read and loves books would enjoy reading this essay. I am going to read it again because Ms. Brown lists some of her favorite short story writers . . . I would like to make sure I have read them, too.

Mark wrote such a thoughtful blog relating to a theme that Mary Ward Brown touches on in her memoir: the isolation of the writer. If you get a chance, it’s worth the read.

Thank you Mary Ward Brown for coming to Lemuria! And also, a big thank you to Beth from Alabama Press for helping her make the trip!

The other evening, I listened to Mary Ward Brown reading the final section from her new memoir, Fanning the Spark, about her bookcases and books in her house. As she came to the penultimate paragraph, I was struck by what she said:

When I was writing the stories in Tongues of Flame, nobody, including me, thought that what I wrote would ever be worth the effort, so I was thought to be deluded and was generally let alone. When “The Amaryllis” was published in McCall’s and a newspaper reporter tried to find me, he was told that I was something of a recluse. It hurt my feelings, because I’ve never wanted to shut myself away from the people or the life around me. But to write, one does have to somehow be shut away. In bed every night, I think of people I haven’t stayed in touch with, letters and emails I haven’t answered, opportunities I’ve let go by, even flowers I haven’t put on the graves of my family.”

This idea of the necessity of separation, that the artist must be removed from the world in order to create art and comment on the world, and furthermore the difficulty of re-entering and re-engaging the world when the artistic process is complete, reminded me of a section of Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos.

What is not generally recognized is that the successful launch of self into the orbit of transcendence is necessarily attended by the problems of reentry. What goes up must come down. The best film of the year ends at nine o’clock. What to do at ten? What did Faulkner do after writing the last sentence of Light in August? Get drunk for a week. What did Dostoevsky do after finishing The Idiot? Spend three days and nights at the roulette table. What does the reader do after finishing either book? How long does his exaltation last?

[…]

For a writer to reenter the world he has written about is no small feat. At the least, it is a peculiar exercise, even uncanny — like Kierkegaard going out into the street every hour during work and blinking at the shopkeepers. At the worst, it proves impossible, issuing in the familiar catastrophes to which writers fall prey.

[…]

Theoretically, it is possible for the abstracted self to reenter the world as easily as a doctor leaving his office for Wednesday afternoon golf or the Chartres sculptor goig home to sup with his family.

Was this not in fact the case with William Faulkner, doing a morning’s work, then strolling in the town square to talk to the farmers and have a Coke at Reed’s drugstore? Not quite. Though Faulkner went to lengths to pass himself off as a farmer among farmers, farmer he was not. A charade was being played.

Was it not the case with Soren Kierkegaard, who, ever hour, would jump up from his desk, rush out into the streets of Copenhagen, and pass the time with shopkeepers? No, because, by his own admission, he was playing the game of being taken for an idler at the very time he was writing ten books a year.

Only one example comes to mind of a writer who, though performing at a very high level of twentieth-century art, nevertheless manages to live on one of the few remaining islands of a more or less intact culture, in the very house where she was born, to enter into an intercourse with the society around her as naturally as the Chartres sculptor, to appear as herself, her self, the same self, both to fellow writer and to fellow townsman: Eudora Welty. Perhaps also William Carlos Williams.

If you do not think this remarkable, imagine that you have lived your entire life in the house where you were born. For an American, an uncanny, even an unsettling fantasy.

We are indeed lucky for writers like Welty and Mary Ward Brown, who share not only their art but their lives and selves with us.

Our good friend Tom Piazza won the Willie Morris Award for Fiction! Congratulations Tom! If you haven’t read City of Refuge you ought to check it out – it’s a great book.

We got this great book poster in a few weeks ago.  What actually drew me to it was the Eudora Welty photograph used as the cover of the book.  The saying of don’t judge a book by it’s cover didn’t apply here with me because I couldn’t wait for the book to come in so I could read it.  I picked the book up and then noticed that Fannie Flagg had written the introduction which gave it more points.  So what we have is a brand new southern author, Gin Phillips, with a glowing introduction written by Flagg and a Welty photograph on the cover…I am sure to be disappointed with the story.  Well, I was wrong.

The Well and the Mine is the story of the Moore Family in Carbon Hill, Alabama , a coal mining town in 1931.  Albert is a righteous man who works hard in the mines and then comes home and works his land to provide food and other needs for his family.  Leta works equally as hard to take care of the home and family and sometimes will do without to make sure her family has plenty.  Their children, Virgie, Tess and Jack are slightly sheltered not realizing how hard the times are but that is soon to change.

One night, Tess is daydreaming on the back porch when she notices a woman walk up to the well and drop a baby into it.  She immediately tells her family who think that her imagination is running wild until the next day when Leta grows to draw the daily water and a blanket comes up in the bucket.  This begins a change in the way that the family sees their town, neighbors and basically their own way of life.  Tess of course is affected the most by what she saw and begins to have nightmares which she feels like is a message from the baby.  Virgie and Tess decide they are going to solve this mystery of the “Well Woman” and find out who she is.  The main question being is what would drive a mother to do this type of thing.  They begin by making a list of all the women who they know have had babies recently.  Knowing that in a small town that a missing baby would not go unnoticed they start to visit the homes of the women on their list.  This gives the girls insight into how their neighbors live and the struggles that they are going through during the Depression and how much their parents sacrifice so they can have all of their needs provided for.

The story is told from each family members perspective so you do feel like you are getting the “entire” story by actually knowing how each character is feeling.  Phillips does an excellent job of letting the reader feel like they are in 1930’s Alabama and seeing how each character evolves and how the family as a whole evolves by giving us plenty of storylines but not overwhelming the reader with too much information.

I think that this novel will be a great read especially for those readers who enjoyed The Help and Mudbound.  Bookclubs will enjoy this novel because it will lead to great discussion on many topics.

“When you close the book, you’ll miss these characters. But The Well and the Mine doesn’t just give you characters who’ll stay with-it gives you a whole world.”—Fannie Flagg

Gin Phillips will be coming to Lemuria on Friday, July 24 to sign and read at 5 p.m.

In All the Living, a new debut novel by C. E. Morgan, a very young woman, orphaned at age three, moves in with her grief stricken, farmer lover on his deceased parents’ Kentucky tobacco farm.  Horribly extreme weather conditions mimic the tumultuous erotically charged relationship, which is challenged by the lures of a grass roots preacher who lets Aloma, a budding classical music pianist, practice her tunes on the church’s piano.  Events such as witnessing and assisting in the birth of a calf, fending off the extreme heat, harvesting the scorched tobacco, and dealing on a daily basis with a man obsessed with making a go of this ever challenging farm all propel the reader onto a roller coaster read well worth the time.  Whether to stay in the relationship or flee…that is the question Aloma tosses around in her mind throughout this small, but powerful novel.  Even the cover sets the stage!

-Nan

For those of you who keep up, you know that it’s quite difficult for a first time novelist to make it onto the New York Time’s esteemed bestsellers list amongst the authors who churn out one or two mysteries a year but our native daughter, Katherine Stockett has done just that. Not only has Stockett’s book, The Help, made it on the list, it is showing some staying power and it is still moving up on the list. Last week The Help ranked #13 on the the NYT’s list and this week it has moved up to #11!

Stay up to date on all your favorite authors’ new bestsellers below:

When Frederick Barthelme came to Lemuria to sign and read from Waveland, I knew immediately that he was not the run-of-the-mill Southern storyteller.  Barthelme had a quiet, kind demeanor, and his sense of humor was evident as he read from the first chapter of the novel.  I became interested in Waveland instantly, and Barthelme has delivered with this novel.

It’s refreshing to hear a voice like Barthelme’s coming from the south.  So often southern writers tend to be stuck in the southern gothic tradition of their forebears:  not Barthelme.  Waveland is dark, but it isn’t dark in the Cormac McCarthy or William Gay sense (both of which I love).  The novel reveals the darkness that can find us even in the seemingly common circumstances of life, the pain that emerges in contemporary America.

The novel’s protagonist, Vaughn Williams, is stuck in the post-Katrina coast of Mississippi.  The structural recovery from the hurricane is painfully slow, in the same way that Vaughn’s personal wounds are slowly healing.  Vaughn has been through a divorce, feels guilty for not loving his father hard enough in his final days, is uncomfortable around his successful brother, and is painfully aware of the differences between the days of his youth and being middle aged.

Vaughn remains friends with his ex-wife, Gail, who, in a series of bad decisions, finds herself hospitalized by the boy she is seeing, Tony.  In the aftermath of her abuse, Gail asks Vaughn and his girlfriend, Greta Del Mar, to move in with her until she is back on her feet.  The move-in prompts Vaughn to ask the necessary questions regarding his current lot in life, to assess his love for Greta, and find meaning in a world that appears to have lost its shimmer.  In no time, Gail invites Vaughn’s brother, Newton, to the party, forcing Vaughn to confront his discomfort with his highly successful brother.

Barthelme’s characters are believable, loveable, and charming.  The book is full of laughs, and real to the point that the reader cannot help but cheer Vaughn on as he glues his post-Katrina life back together.  I have not enjoyed a novel this much in a long time.  Laughed out loud, and felt for characters the way this novel has propelled me to do.  Waveland is a small contemporary treasure, and I will be spending a lot of time in the coming months with Barthelme’s stories.

Maud Newton’s Review of Waveland