Southern Fiction – Page 3

Category: Southern Fiction (Page 3 of 24)

By J.C. Patterson. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Monday print edition (April 1)

For a seemingly demure and grandmotherly-type lady, Janet Brown knows how to scare the crud out of you. Her fourth thriller, Deadly Visits, conjures ghostly visions, creepy critters and elemental disruptions amid a high-tech whodunit.

Brown spent several years in the shivering climes of South Dakota, where the temps make this part of the country laughable. Bundle up and head north, where Emily Dunham, hunkered down in rural Aberdeen, South Dakota, spots a ghost treading down her hallway. It’s a young girl in an old fashioned, long yellow dress, who vanishes as quickly as she’s spotted. Emily’s job-driven husband Alex shrugs the vision off; he’s more interested in dinner.

The call comes at 4 a.m. that night. Emily’s brother Carl relays the bad news: their father is near death. Emily flies south to her childhood home in Jackson, Mississippi, just a hair too late to say goodbye to dad.

After visitation, Emily meets former boyfriend Richard at Old Trace Park. He comforts her and asks that Emily drop by and his tell his wife hello. Emily finds the request strange, especially when she learns the truth about Richard. And his daughter resembles the ghost girl.

Back in South Dakota, Marlis Peterson speaks with the ghost of her childhood friend while waiting in line to pick up her kids from school. Soon more people are seeing dead students walking the halls of the school.

While Emily’s husband Alex argues with fellow worker George Kwivinan, George spots strange lightning closing in on the car they’re travelling in. Yet only George can see it. George also comes across a terrifying mist around his kids’ ankles in the play yard. And what’s with the odd triangles?

If you feel like you’re in an M. Night Shyamalan movie, that’s certainly the vibe Deadly Visits puts forth.

Still in Mississippi, Emily tells a local priest of her odd visions. The priest refers Emily to a local detective who’s dealt with stranger things in his career. M.A. Klugh listens to Emily’s story. He finds it so fascinating, Klugh flies back to South Dakota with his new client.

Emily passes Klugh off as her long lost uncle to her three kids and leery husband. One of Alex’s co-workers has recently died in a plane crash. Or was it murder? Alex is jailed as the most likely suspect while Klugh comes to his defense.

The strangeness continues as Emily and M.A.’s relationship grows. Everything centers around Audio Tech, the mysterious company Alex works for. A nun who speaks to spirits and an aging scientist hold the keys to why the dead have risen. Brown introduces the reader to Augmented Virtual Reality and the very real possibilities it holds.

“A lot of the book is made of short stories,” Brown said. Her late husband told the author she should put them together. The idea came from science fact.“What if you could take your brain and see things that weren’t there, like television.” Or perhaps ghosts.“I like to scare people,” Brown chuckles.

Tune in to the mind-numbing freakiness that arrives with Deadly Visits. Janet Brown’s sci-fi thriller is short and deadly and will definitely keep you up at night.

J.C. Patterson is the author of the Big Easy Dreamin’ series, a collection of New Orleans stories

Janet Brown will be at Lemuria on Thursday, April 4, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Deadly Visits.

New native son battles enemies, self in ‘Cemetery Road’ by Greg Iles

By Guest Author

On March 14, 2019

In Mystery, Southern Fiction

By Matthew Guinn. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 10)

The “Natchez Burning trilogy” cemented Greg Iles’ place in the top tier of America’s literary blockbusters. The novels met with commercial and critical success, spanning 2,000-plus pages of adrenaline-spiked prose, and the third, Mississippi Blood, debuted at the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list.
From that pinnacle, what next? Where to turn after Penn Cage has dragged every skeleton out of Natchez’ historical closet?

Apparently, Iles decided to get out of town.

His newest, Cemetery Road, is set in the fictional town of Bienville, seat of Tenisaw County on the Mississippi and a piece up the road from Natchez. Like many river towns, Bienville has seen its glory days come and go; the town is shrinking from “a slow exsanguination of people and talent that functions like a wasting disease.” That is, until a group of local big shots lure a Chinese paper corporation to town. Their proposed mill will bring billions of dollars to the area and give Bienville a shot at a new life.

But—as happens in Iles’ work—history complicates the present. The site designated for the prospective mill lies atop a trove of Native American artifacts dating back centuries. The moral imperative to preserve these relics butts up against civic progress and private greed. Soon the tension erupts into bitter—and murderous—conflict.

Watching it all come to a boil is Marshall McEwan, a native son who has achieved fame as a Washington journalist but returned home to reconcile with his dying father, owner of The Watchman, Bienville’s newspaper. Soon Marshall is investigating the story of his career—a web of corruption more intricate than any he saw in D.C., right in the sleepy small town of his youth.

Turns out the old boys of Bienville are a good deal more organized and nefarious than Marshall or his newsman father ever thought. Though everything is kept “smooth on the surface, in the Southern tradition,” the Bienville Poker Club has been calling the shots in town since Reconstruction. The Club fully intends for the paper mill to become a reality, no matter the collateral damage. And they have augmented their post-Confederate ranks with ties to the New Jersey mob, courtesy of the town’s riverboat casino. The old boys now have connections to made guys.

Iles dials the tension up higher. Marshall is not long back in his hometown before he runs into his first love, Jet, and begins an affair with her. That Jet is now married to Paul Matheson, a classmate of them both and Marshall’s childhood friend, only deepens the betrayal. And the cost of discovery is high: Paul is a Special Ops veteran of the Middle East conflict and heir apparent to his father’s seat in the Poker Club.

It is impossible to tell more without revealing secrets of an intricate plot where the intrigue is as thick as kudzu and grows at twice the speed. Iles works tension into each page, a threat materializing from every quarter as Marshall digs deeper into the Club’s dealings and his own past. Iles seems to have learned how to squeeze all the menace and suspense of his Natchez trilogy into a single, standalone novel.

But what is best to see in Cemetery Road is that while Iles may have moved on from Natchez, he has retained the melancholic tone and long view of history that made his trilogy an important meditation on Southern history. “I think it’s probably best to leave the past in the past,” Marshall says in a rare moment of surrender. To which an older, wiser Mississippian replies, “If only we could.”

Novelist Matthew Guinn is associate professor of creative writing at Belhaven University, and the author of The Resurrectionist and The Scribe.

Lemuria has selected Cemetery Road as its March 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Greg Iles

By Guest Author

On March 3, 2019

In Mystery, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 3). Click here to read this article on the Clarion-Ledger’s website.

In his first novel since the acclaimed Natchez Burning trilogy, Mississippian Greg Iles offers readers a crime thriller with a fresh setting, new characters and a whole new set of troubles–topped off with a bundle of family secrets that lead to another shocking Iles ending.

Cemetery Road introduces Marshall McEwan–a successful Washington, D.C. journalist returning to his hometown of fictional Bienville, Mississippi, to run the family’s newspaper in the wake of his father’s illness. In a story of love, betrayal, corruption, and, of course, murder, the bonds of family and romantic interests are tested beyond a breaking point–all keeping McEwan a very busy man.

The author of 15 New York Times bestsellers, Iles has seen his novels made into films and published in more than 35 countries. He is a longtime member of the “lit-rock” group The Rock Bottom Remainders, and lives in Natchez with his wife and has three children.

What was it like switching gears and sitting down to write your first novel since the Penn Cage trilogy?

Greg Iles

I really needed a break from the travails of the Cage family, and from the worst years of the civil rights struggle. My readers probably do, too. The Natchez Burning trilogy took me the better part of 10 years to write, and I nearly died (in a serious car accident) in 2011 while trying to finish the first volume.

Cemetery Road is just as intense as the trilogy in some ways, but it focuses less on race, and more on the secrets hidden in marriages and extended families. The secret at the heart of this book is pretty shocking, I think, but I don’t want to say more than that.

The plot of Cemetery Road is filled with danger, crime and surprises–not to mention many regrettable relationships–in the fictitious river town of Bienville, with main character Marshall McEwen in the thick of it. How would you describe his personality (given his past tragedies and his relationship with his father), and the tumultuous events he faces on a daily basis?

As for Marshall McEwan, I think a lot of people can relate to him. He left the small town he grew up in, worked hard for success and fame, yet now he must return home to care for a dying father he’s barely spoken to in 30 years.

That’s the chief difference between Marshall and Penn Cage (in the Natchez Burning trilogy). Penn and Tom Cage loved and respected each other all their lives, but Marshall and his father were driven apart by a family tragedy when Marshall was only 14. Marshall’s father blames him for that tragedy–unfairly. I think.

Marshall returns to Mississippi more to help his mother than to care for his father, but I think we want father and son to find a way to reconcile before the end, because Marshall got a lot of his strength and stubbornness from his dad. And he needs every bit of it to handle the SOBs he faces in Cemetery Road.

Are there any threads of truth (from Mississippi or elsewhere) that were the basis for the goings-on of the Bienville group known as the Poker Club in Cemetery Road?

The Bienville Poker Club absolutely grew out of stories I heard as a boy growing up in Natchez, and from talking to Mississippians from many walks of life. The people who run small Southern towns are rarely those in the official power structure. Always been that way, and probably always will be.

As Robert Penn Warren knew, corruption is deeply ingrained in our lives, even in the human spirit. And in all politics, sadly… money talks louder than anything else.

Is it possible that we will hear from Marshall McEwan again? Perhaps a sequel or a brand new direction for McEwan. Or, can you tell us of any other ideas you may be working on for your next book?

You may well hear from Marshall again. I’ve been working behind the scenes in Mississippi politics for about three years, and that’s given me some great ideas. I also have a very twisty noir story that’s perfect for Marshall and for Nadine Sullivan, another new character in Cemetery Road.

Another ambitious book tour has claimed your schedule for the month of March–with 27 stops in 19 days!–and once again with the kickoff in Mississippi cities. Tell me about the tour.

I’m always conflicted about my book tours. I like staying home on my country place. Racing to two or three cities a day for a month will wear you out quick. But it’s the only time I get out among my readers, and I always have some wonderful experiences out there. Some people travel a long way to get to my book signings, and I try to give them a great talk, as well as visit with them a bit.

Greg Iles will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, March 5, at 3:30 p.m. to sign copies of Cemetery Road. The reading will begin at 5:30 p.m. Lemuria has selected Cemetery Road as its March 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Maurice Carlos Ruffin

By Guest Author

On February 17, 2019

In African-American, Fiction, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger (February 17). Click here to read this interview on the Clarion-Ledger’s website

New Orleans native Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s debut novel is a darkly thought-provoking satire on race in America that is based on one African-American man’s plan to spare his teenage son from racial disparities he and his own father have endured–thanks to a new medical procedure that can change his biracial son’s skin white.

We Cast a Shadow has been called “a surrealistic satire about identity, race, and family relations” with a plot that, though many will find outrageous, will make readers pause and think.

An award-winning writer, Ruffin has earned an Iowa Review Award in fiction and the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for Novel-in-Progress. His work has been published in Virginia Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, and others.

He is a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop and is a member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance.

In We Cast a Shadow, a well-intentioned and unnamed father of the future–a hardworking, goal-oriented black attorney–works to secure enough wealth to have his son Nigel undergo a “demelanization” procedure to change the teenager’s skin to white, thereby promising his child a brighter future. How did you develop this story idea, and why?

Maurice Carlos Ruffin

I thought about all the ways we’ve tried to push against racism in our history as a nation. We’ve protested, fought the Civil War, passed laws, and, yet, we still deal with the problem today.

The narrator wants to protect his son, and he wants to do it in a way that is foolproof and effective. He reckons that no one will bother his son if he’s white! Of course, we see celebrities alter themselves all the time to gain notoriety: skin tanning, liposuction, rhinoplasty, etc. I was thinking about what would happen once we can change virtually any part of our bodies. It’s not so far-fetched now that we can genetically modify babies in the womb!

It’s clear throughout the story that Nigel and his mother are against the idea of having the procedure done, but the father is adamant. In the end, three lives are changed forever–each of their destinies a thought-provoking surprise. What lessons can readers learn from this anonymous dad’s sobering tale?

One lesson is that racism affects us all. It doesn’t matter your race, gender, or age. None of us are really safe until all of us are. Another lesson is that none of us should be too arrogant about our beliefs. Both parents are sure their approach is right. But what if both are right and wrong at the same time? A bit of humility might go a long way to ultimately ending racism and the damage we do to ourselves and our families.

The word “shadow” is used frequently in the book, as a noun, verb or adjective. Tell me about the title of the book. Was it based on the novelist E.M. Forster’s quote from A Room with a View? “We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place . . . because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm . . . and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.”

I wasn’t consciously aware of the Forster quote! I was thinking of Kanye West’s song “All of the Lights.” In the video for the song we see that he’s trying to protect his daughter from the dangers of their rough neighborhood. With my narrator, he wants his son to have every possible opportunity that any American child should have. He wants him to see “all of the lights.” I flipped that idea on its head to create the title. They are caught in the shadows.

A character in the book told the narrator that race was “just an idea,” and said, “We’ve got to ignore race to transcend it.” Can you explain what this means, and do you agree?

It’s an old idea. People often say they don’t see race, as if that’s a good thing. However, if you don’t see race, then you’ll never understand how policies related to housing, policing, health, education, economics, etc. more negatively affect black people and other people of color.

Racism is a sickness. Imagine how terrible it would be if your daughter had diabetes and you said, “I don’t see diabetes!” That child would not do well with you serving her waffles with syrup each morning. If there is a solution to America’s racism problem, it lies in turning off the systems that automatically disenfranchise people every day. But you can’t turn off the systems if you refuse to see them.

Do you see another novel in your future soon?

Absolutely. I’m writing it now. But don’t ask me what it’s about because I don’t know. I tend to throw everything into the pot until it smells right. So, I’ll keep working on it until it’s a dish I’d serve to people I care about.

I always rely on faith that the writing will work out. It usually does. It did with this novel!

Signed first edition copies copies of We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin are available at Lemuria’s online store.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s ‘We Cast a Shadow’ brings rare perspective

By Former Lemurians

On February 11, 2019

In African-American, Fiction, Southern Fiction

By Norris Rettiger. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 10)

Thrilling, terrifying, and true from the first page to the last, Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s debut novel We Cast a Shadow is a hallucinatory vision of a near-future American South.

Narrated by a black father frantically climbing the ladder at a prominent law firm to gain enough money to pay for his biracial son Nigel’s demelanization procedure, We Cast a Shadow is a Kafkaesque nightmare for our times, a fever dream of a novel that is painfully aware of how close America is to becoming a white ethnostate run by reptilian billionaires.

Ruffin thrusts the reader right into the drama of a household torn apart by doubt, anxiety, and fear. The narrator is convinced of one thing and one thing only—being black is a sin that society cannot and will not forgive. As such, he is focused on fixing his son.

To do that, he needs to make money, and in order to make money, he has to navigate an office culture that is as indifferent to human suffering as anything I’ve seen since American Psycho.

The narrator is trapped in a downward spiral of endless capitulation to a system that he knows, deep down, will never allow him to see success as a black man, no matter how much of his soul he sells.

But, it’s for Nigel’s future, and that is something worth fighting for. And so we watch as he buckles down and tries to save Nigel from the systemic racism and humiliation that people of color, the successful father included, face every day in the book.

In a way, the whole book is about a father finding safety in a place that seems to be specifically engineered to make him afraid for himself, for his job, for his life, and for his son’s life.

The twist is that in order for him to keep his son safe, he has to force his son to become something he was never meant to be. The words “it’s for the best” take on a darker tone as a well-intentioned father drives his son away with bleaching cream, baseball caps, and other ways to hide his true complexion.

Relations with his wife are also pushed to the breaking point, as she doesn’t and, according to the narrator, can’t ever understand why he’s so insistent that his son undergo this procedure that will so drastically affect his life.

Ignoring the pleas of his son and his wife, the narrator presses onward and upward, sure that even if he is destroyed by the risks, at least his family will see the reward.

There isn’t a book like We Cast a Shadow on the shelf right now in 2019. This is a very early contender for being the most incisive and timely book of the year, and it is absolutely worth checking out, especially if you’re interested in experiencing a rare perspective that feels so true to life, it must be some kind of great fiction.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin will be at Lemuria on Saturday, February 16, at 2:00 to sign We Cast a Shadow and in conversation with Kiese Laymon at 2:30 p.m.

Snowden Wright’s effervescent ‘American Pop’ goes down smooth

By Former Lemurians

On February 4, 2019

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

by Andrew Hedglin

I was fortunate enough to get my hands on an early copy of American Pop last August. The weekend before, I had just finished making a long overdue pilgrimage to Graceland. After which, as sometimes happens in Memphis, I found myself in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, the fabled start of the Mississippi Delta. I came back to work on Monday to find an incredible book that began where I had just been, and, in some ways, where I have always been, in the tangled legacy of the South in the 20th century.

I was very excited to see a family tree in the first few pages. From Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, some of my very favorite novels have been multi-generational family sagas, books that allow you to hear the echoes of the past. This book did not disappoint on that front.

The fortunes of the Forster family are tied to the genius of paterfamilias Houghton Forster and his invention, Panola Cola, invented fictitiously in Batesville, Mississippi, in 1890. The Forsters’ good fortune in inventing PanCola, as it came to be known, relied on Houghton’s intelligence, luck, and the power of love for his soon-to-be wife Annabelle.

But the story of the Forsters is not an elevator that only goes up, and the story ends well past the end of their cola empire. The emotional center of the are the lives of the four Forster children, Montgomery, Lance, Ramsey, and Harold. Their choices, tragedies, and limitations define their family’s fate, although the vision and determination of one last Forster has the chance to hold the center together, if only somebody in charge had the wisdom to recognize the real thing when they saw it.

There is a mysterious coda to the cola chronicle, one where the truth to decoding the past traverses the lonely stretch of Highway 49 between Yazoo County and Millsaps College here in Jackson. A truth that, if found, could find the missing link–the secret ingredient, if you will–to finally understanding the Forster family legacy.

While there is melancholy infused in the center of this concoction, it would be misleading to let you think this reads like a sad, sorrowful tale. American Pop is very alive and frequently funny, drenched in irony told with a Southern drawl. There are sly winks and “fridge brilliance” to spare that reward close reading. There are references to pop culture (no pun intended) and Mississippi history that are guaranteed to make you smile. And t all starts with that party in the Peabody Hotel.

Ultimately, I can recommend American Pop as one of the best books you might read this year. Grab a can of Pan and get ready to settle in for some major fun.

Snowden Wright will be Lemuria on Tuesday, February 5, at 5:00 to sign and read from American Pop. Lemuria has chosen American Pop as one of its February 2019 selections for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Snowden Wright

By Guest Author

On February 3, 2019

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger (February 3). Click here to read this interview on the Clarion-Ledger’s website

Meridian native Snowden Wright’s second novel, American Pop, is a refreshing saga (and it really is a saga) of a Mississippi family’s rise to fame and wealth as their soft drink empire builds and fizzles.

Based in the Panola County city of Batesville, the drink is aptly named Panola Cola (PanCola for short). The book follows not only the often-outrageous behavior of many of the owner’s family members, but the relentless pursuit of “cola hunters” who will do anything to find out the drink’s famous “secret ingredient.”

American Pop has been chosen as an Okra Pick by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. Wright’s debut novel, Play Pretty Blues, received the 2012 Summer Literary Seminars’ Graywolf Prize. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Salon, Esquire, the New York Daily News, and other publications.

A graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia University, Wright now lives in Atlanta.

Tell me about your life as a child in Mississippi.

Snowden Wright

Born and raised in Meridian, I went to Lamar School, where I was an embarrassingly good student, a spectacularly bad athlete, and an obnoxiously voracious reader.

Meridian’s lack of a bookstore for much of my childhood made that last point a bit of a problem. Fortunately, I would often spend time on my family’s farm in Yazoo County, and on weekends my father and I would come to Jackson. He would give me a $20 bill to buy a book upstairs at Lemuria while he enjoyed a couple Scotches at the bar. Back then there was a bar on the first floor of the building.

I would spend hours picking out just the right book. It was basically my indoctrination to the written word. So I often like to say I have two things to thank for my writing career: Lemuria Books and Johnnie Walker Black.

American Pop is a sprawling historical novel about one family’s rise to wealth and success in the soft drink business across much of the 20th century. What inspired you to write a nearly 400-page novel based on a soft drink business?

The inspiration was as easy as opening the fridge. I’m sure most readers will find in their fridge at least a can or two of Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, or Dr. Pepper. To me, soda is emblematic of America, not only because it came into mass popularity here, but also because it’s an ingenious feat of capitalism. Take some water, carbonate it, and stir in some syrup, then, presto, you’ve got a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Once I’d settled on the idea of a soft-drink company, though, I faced a challenge in creating the family that owned it. To craft a narrative with complete omniscience, the kind that provides flash-forwards as well as flashbacks, I needed to know all the family members from the very first line, their personalities as well as their life stories. It was going to take forever!

Then I remembered my multiplication tables.

In second grade, when we were taught the multiplication tables, I gave each number between zero and 12 a place within a large family–10 was the father, 5 the mother, etc.–and when they multiplied with each other, a little story played out in my head, reminding me of their product. I taught myself math through narrative. So, to create the Forster family, I just transposed those numbers into the novel.

Besides its humorous moments, American Pop takes readers on a thought-provoking, emotional ride through the lives of Panola Cola’s founding family members from the late 1800s to the 1970s. What are we to make of the fact that this family lost its fortune, despite the country’s lasting love affair with cola?

The first epigraph in the novel is from Nathanial Hawthorne: “Families are always rising and falling in America. But, I believe, we ought to examine more closely the how and why of it, which in the end revolves around life and how you live it.”

I wanted the novel to embody that quote–as well as its follow-up, “Southerners need carbonation,” by Nancy Lemann–through the use of a fluid timeline. I tried to create a collage of time periods that, from a distance, represents the entire country and, up close, examines the individual lives of the Forsters.

American Pop is a how-and-why-it-happened novel.

Thanks to the Forster family’s Mississippi heritage, the book has a decidedly Southern slant. How does that affect the story?

Do my characters know it’s Sunday because they have a craving for Chick-fil-A? Do they use dilly beans as stirrers in their Bloody Marys? Are there a pair of duck boots wedged upside down between their pickup’s tool box and back window? Yes, on all accounts!

I have a fondness for getting anthropological about the South. From our language to our social customs to our innate “sense of story,” as I like to think of it, the South in general and Mississippi in particular influence everything I write. That’s especially true with American Pop. Its characters are Southerners who, by dint of their wealth, social prominence, and political aspirations, are put on the national stage. That in turn creates conflict, internal and external, due to this region’s tragic history and the weight of its subsequent, persistent guilt.

I’ve experienced those concerns firsthand. Even though I lived up North for most of my adult life, the fork of the South has forever left its tine marks in the peanut-butter cookie that is my subconscious.

Why did you return to Mississippi to write this book?

After college, I lived in New York for nearly a decade, waking early in the morning to write before heading in to a day job. I began American Pop shortly after the publication of my first novel, Play Pretty Blues, and because of the second novel’s greater scope and length, I soon realized it would take me at least five years to finish. Then, sadly, my grandfather, to whom I’ve dedicated this book, passed away, leaving me a small inheritance. I decided to honor his memory and his generosity by using that inheritance to quit my day job, return to Mississippi, and work full-time on American Pop.

My primary residence during that period was in Oxford, but I also spent a lot of time writing in an old shotgun cottage on my family’s farm, where I’d spent much of my childhood. Being in a place rife with memories and family lore…proved the perfect inspiration for a novel that is, essentially, the story of a family.

Do you have another book in the works?

I do, in fact. Although I’d rather keep its plot a secret for the time being, I can tell you a bit about where I will be writing it. On my family’s farm in Yazoo County lies a pecan grove, where, until it burned down 50 years ago, the house my grandmother was raised in used to sit. I recently completed construction of a house in the same spot. I’ve been calling it “The Sweetest Thing,” after the slogan for PanCola in American Pop.

So, when my book tour is over, I’ll live part-time in The Sweetest Thing, writing my next novel and, ideally, raising a yellow Labrador puppy that I plan to name Falkor.

Appalachian Asphyxiation: ‘Sugar Run’ by Mesha Maren

By Former Lemurians

On January 8, 2019

In Southern Fiction

by Julia Blakeney

I picked up Mesha Maren’s debut novel Sugar Run just as I was finishing a semester-long study of Cormac McCarthy’s work. McCarthy’s Appalachian novels are some of the most wonderfully written books I have read in a long time. Once the class was over, though, I really felt like I wasn’t done with this niche genre of fiction. So, I started looking for similar novels, set in Appalachia, to read to fill the gap. Luckily, Sugar Run jumped out at me from a stack of advance readers.

This novel certainly gave me what I was looking for. With a fantastically driven plot, compelling prose, and beautiful descriptions of that unique, rural, mountainous region of West Virginia, this novel was really hard to put down. I found myself carving time to read this novel into every moment of my day, something I haven’t done with a novel (one not for school) in a long time.

One of the most compelling things about this book was the charged atmosphere in which the protagonist Jodi McCarty finds herself once she returns to her hometown after 18 years in prison. One of her brothers has resorted to selling drugs to make ends meet. He asks Jodi to hide drugs for him–first bribing her with money, then using blackmail to force her to do so. Jodi herself has trouble finding work, since no one wants to hire a convicted felon. She has no money to buy back her grandmother’s land that was sold out from under her while she was in prison. An oil company is also fracking on the mountain, which pollutes the water and drives people away. All of this is a recipe for disaster for Jodi as she struggles to acclimate to life outside of prison.

As Maren alternates between Jodi’s life before and after prison, I became engrossed in her story. I looked forward to reading each new chapter and uncovering each new discovery in Jodi’s and other characters’ pasts that Maren has to share with me. I loved this book from beginning to end: from Jodi’s determination to make a life for herself and save her family land from fracking, to the secrets Maren reveals at a slow pace, this novel is raw and compelling, as well as an interesting representation of how the working class struggles to make a living in the early 2000s in West Virginia.

Mesha Maren will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, January 15, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from Sugar Run.

Author Q & A with Mesha Maren

By Guest Author

On January 6, 2019

In Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 6)

West Virginia native and resident Mesha Maren explores the questions and the difficulties of coming home again–and the fear of not fitting in anymore despite the strong pull of the land itself–in her debut novel, Sugar Run (Algonquin Books).

The novel tracks the stories of main character Jodi’s life through two time frames–as a 17-year-old in 1988-1989, when she landed in a Georgia prison for killing her girlfriend; and the “present” year of 2007, which finds Jodi, now 35, being newly released from prison and eager to get on with her life. It soon becomes complicated, though, by acquaintances old and new who have their own problems to settle.

Maren is the recipient of several writing fellowships and grants, including the 2014 Jean Ritchie Fellowship in Appalachian Writing and the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize. She is the 2018-2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the Beckley Federal Correctional Institution in West Virginia.

Her short stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, the Oxford American, Hobart, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial and other publications.

You’ve said that you started writing seriously in 2007 when you realized you “had stories to tell.” Tell me about the kinds of stories you believed should be told.

I don’t believe that there are any particular stories that “should” be told, like in a social novel kind of way, I think that I just come from a community and a family that trained me to have a good ear for great stories and to enjoy telling them.

Mesha Maren

When I was growing up, I was always hearing stories from my neighbors and my dad. My dad is not from West Virginia. He moved to Greenbrier County in 1979, but he has a huge respect for the people who came before him in this place and he always impressed upon me how important it was to know the story of the place, the people who walked across this field and over the cliff to work in the quarry and then back home again with 50-pound sacks of chicken feed on their shoulders, men who were killed young and mostly outlived by strong women who kept their stories going. These stories don’t very often make it out into the world, though–they are not represented very well in mass consumed books.

There is a thing that happens in all forms of art, I guess, but it particularly happens in writing about Appalachia, where the stories get diluted to please the lowest common denominator. It’s like adding corn syrup to food–you sweeten it up and smooth it out so that it appeals to the masses and you end up with something sweet and quaint with all the fangs taken out, a little bit like how the minstrel shows worked in the early 19th century: you show people what you think they want to see, to entertain them and show them that you are harmless and funny.

I guess that even though I don’t believe that there are any particular stories that “should” be told more than other stories, I do believe there is a way to tell a story that is real and right. I’ve never wanted to write something that people could passively consume–I want you to feel uncomfortable.

You have said that Jodi, around which Sugar Run revolves, “took up residence” in your head. Tell me about that.

I started to become infatuated with Jodi McCarty in about 2010. And it was really that, an infatuation, like I would daydream about her all the time and when I tried to put her down I just couldn’t. In writing Sugar Run, I was really teaching myself how to write. It was the first big writing project I ever undertook, and it was hard, and I doubted myself a lot. I doubted if I could really write a novel, much less this novel, but Jodi wouldn’t let me alone. There were multiple times when I wanted to give up on Sugar Run and I’d say, ‘I’m done’ and throw the pages in a drawer, but Jodi haunted me–it felt like I had slighted a friend or partner.

Finally, I made a pact with Jodi, I told her I would do my damnedest to write a good novel, find an agent and a publisher, but if I tried my best and nothing came of it, no one picked up the novel, then I’d get to be free and work on writing something else.

Your childhood experiences of your father taking you with him at an early age to counsel incarcerated women in your home state of West Virginia obviously influenced much of the plot around which Sugar Run is based. Tell me about those visits, and the impression they made on you.

My dad worked for a nonprofit and he would go in to the prison in Alderson to see the women who had not been visited by friends or family for over a year. I would often come along with him. As a kid, I was most impressed by the fact that I got to eat whatever kind of candy I wanted from the vending machines, but yeah, I think seeing those women, hearing them talk about their lives, it left an impression on me that was part of what maybe inspired Sugar Run, although I never really thought about that until after I’d written the novel.

All of the main characters in Sugar Run are facing their own kinds of struggles, including poverty, violence, pervasive fear, substance abuse and other addictions. The fact that they are all headed to West Virginia, a state with its own difficulties, compounds the suffering. Was it was hard for you to find spots of redemption for these characters in the end?

I honestly think that everyone, everywhere, not just in West Virginia, is probably closer to the edge than we ever let ourselves believe, closer to making a few “bad” decisions and seeing everything fall apart around us. The thing is that a lot of folks have a stronger safety net and, really, that comes down to money. If you come from a family with more money and you slip up, it’s easier to get back on track but if you live in a rural place and have few resources the fall is much more steep. Trying to find work after prison is really…hard for anybody, but of course, it is even harder when you live in a rural place.

In a lot of ways West Virginia has always been and will always be both the balm and the sting–it is not an easy place to live and never has been, both because of the economy but also just the natural geography, but that is also what makes it one of the most beautiful places in the world and it brings folks closer together. I’ve never known community like the communities in West Virginia, the way that people band together to care for each other–it doesn’t happen like that in other places.

The book actually tracks two alternating story lines of Jodi’s life, interdependent on each other. Tell me about your decision to tell these plots using this technique.

These two parts of the story, 1988-89 and 2007, came to me in very different colors and textures–like they were always distinctly different but of course part of the same story. I think that’s why I ended up writing the 1988-89 sections in present tense because I needed them to feel different and in a certain way almost more immediate and tangible to Jodi than her present 2007 reality–they’re like a picture show she has watched a million times during her years in Jaxton prison.

Sugar Run is your first novel. Did it surprise you that your manuscript was sold on the first round of publisher bids? Tell me about that experience.

Yeah, it did kind of surprise me–I mean Sugar Run is essentially a novel about a convict lesbian living on a mountain in West Virginia–not the kind of story you think of having huge mass appeal, and I think that a lot of New York publishers didn’t know what to do with it. There wasn’t a neat little box they could fit it in, they weren’t at all sure how they would market it.

So, Algonquin is the perfect home, you know, it just makes complete and total sense that Sugar Run is being published by a publishing house that started out being housed in a woodshed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Algonquin began the year before I was born in Louis Rubin’s woodshed and one of the first people they published was Larry Brown, a firefighter who started writing fiction in his spare time. So yeah, Algonquin feels like the perfect home for me and Sugar Run.

What’s next? Do you have another book idea in the works yet?

Yes, I just finished a second draft of my new novel, Perpetual West. This new novel is about Mexican professional wrestling. The story follows Alex, a sociology student who was born in Mexico, but adopted and raised by a white couple in West Virginia, and his wife Elana, who move to the U.S.-Mexico border where Alex is writing his thesis on lucha libre.

It’s been a real fun novel to write and I got to go do research in Juárez and Mexico City, and I took wrestling lessons, too. I was terrible at it though, so I guess I’ll stick with writing.

Mesha Maren will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, January 15, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from Sugar Run.

John M. Floyd’s ‘The Barrens’ is full of surprises

By Guest Author

On October 30, 2018

In Mystery, Short Stories, Southern Fiction

By J.C. Patterson. Special to the Mississippi Book Page

Well, the season is upon us: hundreds of hungry children dressing up like princesses and superheroes, anticipating candy by the truckload. But my treat came early in the form of John M. Floyd’s seventh exciting collection of mystery short stories. The Barrens contains thirty tales set mainly in the south, some in different time periods. But they all have zingers of a punch line.

In Floyd’s opening volley, “The Sandman,” the owner of a diner is being forced to close by nefarious mobsters. One of her patrons gets a double shot of revenge through his deceased friend’s help.

An escaped prisoner uses a one-armed fisherman as his hostage in “Crow Mountain.” But where will the old man lead the escapee? “Trails End” features an out of the way café that caters to murder, a returning sheriff and some suspicious circus folk.

Thugs confront an elderly man in a protection for hire scheme in the clever “Safety First.” Watch out for what the old fellow has up his sleeve. Set in New Orleans, “Dawson’s Curse” drums up some villainous voodoo that backfires on its owner. “Merrill’s Run” traps a man in the trunk of a car with a very unexpected outcome.

The middle section of “The Barrens” makes way for six chuckle-worthy short stories in Floyd’s “Law And Daughter” series. Featuring small town sheriff Lucy Valentine and her crime-solving mom Fran, these snappy stories convey some of the author’s most fun efforts.

In “Flu Season,” a talented knife thrower with a cold aims to keep his blades true when his wife is the target. An ex-gunslinger investigates a 22-year old murder in “Gunwork.” Another period piece, “Rooster Creek” would make a sure-fire movie, in which a young woman returns to her childhood home, only to find it inhabited by true evil.

“Pit Stop,” my personal favorite, tells a double tale of a mother defending her kids in the present while recounting a chilling narrative of how she became so brave.
A killer on the run with a fear of snakes confronts his worst nightmare in “The Blue Delta.” One of the shortest stories ever written, “Premonition” casts a shadow on a couple getting ready for an evening at the theatre. A deadly west coast virus threatens a family’s happy vibes in “Life Is Good.” A mom minding her daughter’s store must make a harrowing decision in “Rosie’s Choice.”

In one of Floyd’s strangest stories ever, “The Red Eye To Boston,” an old man tells a fellow passenger that there’s something in the bathroom in the back of the plane they’re on. And it isn’t extra toilet paper.

The finale takes two children into The Barrens, a dark haunted woodland featuring a vengeful stepfather, monsters and a witch who will surprise them all.
Be sure to grab this creepy, fast, violent, mischievous, clever and fun collection of some of John M. Floyd’s finest short stories. Each tale in The Barrens is like popping Halloween candy into your mouth. Savor these tasty tidbits of mystery gold.

J.C. Patterson is the author of Big Easy Dreamin’ and Mo’ Dreamin’.

John M. Floyd will be at Lemuria tonight on Tuesday, October 30, at 5:00 to sign and read from The Barrens.

Category: Southern Fiction (Page 3 of 24)

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Author Q & A with Greg Iles

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Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s ‘We Cast a Shadow’ brings rare perspective

Snowden Wright’s effervescent ‘American Pop’ goes down smooth

Author Q & A with Snowden Wright

Appalachian Asphyxiation: ‘Sugar Run’ by Mesha Maren

Author Q & A with Mesha Maren

John M. Floyd’s ‘The Barrens’ is full of surprises

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