What is anybody doing to help children born into poverty to get through school, the elusive first stepping stone to success?

Every variation of this question seems to have been asked before, and there is no use hitting on a nail that’s already stuck an inch deep in the wall. Paul Tough’s new book dives straight into answers about what can be done; his message is grounded in clear argument, while providing thorough anecdotes that deconstruct society’s assumptions about education. He details the subtlety of defining “success,” examines the real predictors of success, and debunks our reliance on measures such as ACT scores, which many assume is the end-all be-all of upward mobility. This book offers a new way of seeing education. And all this in good, page-turning nonfiction.

The groundbreaking documentary, Waiting for Superman, came out in 2010. This book, to me, is the crucial next step in the conversation about education. Rather than focusing on structural changes that could, in theory, work, Paul Tough details stories of schools, charismatic students, and charismatic educators that he has spent time with firsthand. His background is in journalism, and he weaves in supplemental evidence from a myriad of fields with the analysis of his fieldwork with children and educators. He makes points that are so obvious as to be often ignored; for instance, he reminds us that even children who are “privileged” in the traditional sense often lack the character traits that predict successful college graduation and fulfilling vocation. If all that schools need is more money, why are many rich kids also dropouts? Never failing to consider the specific details and pitfalls of the research he calls on, Tough makes fresh points. Unlike some writing, though, it doesn’t seem that Tough is making this point just for the sake of making a point about something; this is real reporting and valid skepticism about education researchers’ and reformers’ understanding of education itself.

Tough argues both movingly and convincingly that character traits, and not results taken from tests of any kind in existence or use today, are “how children succeed.” But the message is hopeful. He shows that skills like confidence and resourcefulness can be developed in schools, even for children who missed out on basic nurturing and attention from their parents. There are things that schools and teachers can do to provide a background of capability that is missing for so many children due – very often – to poverty.

Beyond opening my eyes to fresh possibilities for the future of education, this book really helped to distill for me the types of character traits that I need to develop in myself. To sort of paraphrase Tough, these traits are grit, curiosity, confidence and resourcefulness, optimism, and the belief that even when it seems like you can’t face up to the challenge in front of you, intelligence and character can be learned and developed. The argument for what needs to happen within schools can be taken as doubly hopeful: if children can develop skills that were perhaps absent at the beginning of their time in school, then perhaps U.S. schools themselves can develop, too, at this time when the system can seem so hopelessly inefficient.

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27.00

By Whitney

Writer Susan Cushman shared a portion of this story with us in a comment on our first Miss Welty blog. She has graciously allowed us to republish her original blog post from June of 2012. I love this story! Enjoy. -Lisa

What I didn’t see coming at this past weekend’s Murrah High School mega-reunion in Jackson, Mississippi (classes of 1968, 69 and 70) was the joy of sharing childhood memories. It seemed that most people were (finally) over needing to talk about how successful we are (10th reunion), how great our children are (20th reunion), how great our grandchildren are (30th reunion), and the latest surgery we had or were planning to have (40th reunion). Sure, there was some talk of those things this year (*guilty*) but my favorite stories were those shared from our Mississippi childhoods.

Like Sally McClintock, who lived on my street in first grade. I think she’s the person I’ve known the longest of anyone from my senior class in high school. Sally reminded me of some funny things that happened back in 1956-7 on Belvedere Street in the Broadmoor neighborhood. Most of us didn’t have air conditioning yet, so we spent a lot of time outdoors, looking for shade trees and sneaking out of the neighborhood to get ice cream at Seale-Lily, which was dangerous because we had to cross the railroad tracks. Can you imagine letting your 6-year-old walk a half mile and cross train tracks without any adults? (Of course our parents never knew, and thankfully we lived to enjoy those memories.) The air-conditioning was on full power at Seale-Lily. We sat at those tall bar stools with the plastic covers, which felt cool on the backs of our legs. They served ice water in little paper cones that sat inside aluminum holders. We drank and ate slowly, not wanting to leave the comfort of the air-cooled building.

Seems like lots of our memories from the 1950s involve ice cream. Or Popsicles. The heat plays a huge role in our memories growing up in Mississippi. Another of my classmates, whom I knew not only from school but also from church, told me about going to visit the Popsicle Lady, who lived near her family in the Belhaven neighborhood. The Popsicle Lady lived alone in a big Tudor house, and had lovely gardens.  She was always surprised when she would invite her in for a popsicle and let her eat it inside the house, something our mothers never did back then.

One day she noticed that the Popsicle Lady was often sitting at a typewriter when she was there, so she asked what she was doing. I’m writing stories—would you like to read one? And then she would let her read one of her freshly typed stories. It would be many years before my friend would realize that she had been reading the unpublished manuscripts of Eudora Welty. -Susan Cushman

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Susan Cushman was director of the 2011 Memphis Creative Nonfiction Workshop, co-director of the 2010 Oxford Creative Nonfiction Conference (Oxford, Mississippi) and a panelist at the 2009 Southern Women Writers Conference (Berry College, Rome, Georgia). In June of 2011, she was one of the first “colonists” at the Fairhope Writers Colony in Fairhope, Alabama. Susan is a six-year “alumni” of the Yoknapatawpha Summer Writers Workshop in Oxford, Mississippi. She lives in Memphis, where she will soon be seeking agent representation for her novel, Cherry Bomb, which made the Short List for the 2011 Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. Susan’s essay, “Chiaroscuro: Shimmer and Shadow,” appears in the anthology, Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality (University of Alabama Press, 2012).

You can read more from Susan Cushman at Pen & Palette

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If you have story about Miss Welty that you would like to share on our blog, please e-mail them to lisa@lemuriabooks.com.

Click here to learn about Carolyn Brown’s A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

Click here to see all blogs in our Miss Welty series

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by Kelly Pickerill

The world sometimes seems divided into cat lovers and dog lovers; dog lovers (and, I guess, everyone else who isn’t a cat lover) don’t often understand the fascination cat lovers have with their feline friends. Why is a creature who carefully ignores you, who enjoys shredding furniture and curtains, and who can’t wait to shed a pound of fur all over your freshly cleaned laundry so beloved? Well at Lemuria cat lovers can geek out this week because a new book published by Chronicle has just arrived: I Could Pee on This is a poetry book written by cats for the humans who adore them.

We’ve been giving dramatic readings at the store that have ended in giggles, but don’t take my word for it — take Mittens’s:

“And Now We Know”

Nine-hundred-and-ninety-five

I’m doing this for you

Nine-hundred-and-ninety-six

So please don’t interrupt

Nine-hundred-and-ninety-seven

I’m just keeping them honest

Nine-hundred-and-ninety-eight

So please do take note

Nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine

And now thanks to me we all know

There really were one thousand sheets

in this toilet paper roll

You won’t find any Lehrer-like misquotations in this book; the ghostwriter, Francesco Marciuliano, faithfully represents the feline attitude. If that’s not enough cat indulgence for you, this book of poetry complements some of our other books in the cat genre:

Crafting with Cat Hair, a book in which you can find many uses for the copious amounts of fur Fluffy sloughs off on your couch, is great for the avid felter and cat fan who is tired of being restricted by wool — who says felt should be solely the sheep’s domain?

And one of my favorites: Why Cats Paint, in which you can explore the aesthetic theory of feline art. The book studies the work of twelve cat artists, arguing that the markings of a cat can be interpreted as more than, well, markings. If you dip Tiger’s paws in paint you may just find that he’s the next feline Picasso (or rather, Pollock).

Steve Yates is assistant director/marketing director at University Press of Mississippi, publisher of 28 books by or about Eudora Welty. We knew he just might have a Miss Welty story. -Lisa

While she probably never photographed anything with the intention of being an ambassador, Eudora Welty was this outworlder’s first experience of Mississippi, my first concrete connection to the state. Not through her fiction, though, but through her photography.

One of Welty’s phrases in Country Churchyards very much fits the experience of growing up in the Missouri Ozarks in the 1970s and 1980s. She says in that wonderful book, her last photography book published while she was alive, that cemetery art was one of the only art forms worth traveling to see in Mississippi in the 1930s. It was almost all they had.

In the Missouri Ozarks, literature was something forced on us hillbillies. It didn’t exist around us in actual walking, breathing people who claimed a profession called writing. Someone in high school forced us to read William Faulkner’s “The Bear,” and “Spotted Horses,” but I never understood them as set in a state and a landscape apart. They seemed like rousing rural stories to me, especially the one about the horses and the raw deal. Sounded like people from Chadwick. If we read any Welty in high school, it would have been “Why I Live at the P.O.” Once again, a provincial hick, I would have assumed that setting and those contentious, quirky people could exist just as well in Buffalo or Niangua. My eyes were not open yet. I didn’t know there was a place as different as Mississippi.

Photographs came out when I was in college at Missouri State, junior year. And I remember vaguely someone named Eudora Welty being on CBS’s Sunday Morning, and some buzz around the English department about the woman who had written “The Wide Net” and so many other short stories taking all these spectacular photographs.

Now there’s a book I will never forget opening. Photographs. A well-meaning but doomed girlfriend set us out one evening to buy Photographs as a gift for a retiring professor. We found it in a Walden’s in a Mall; Springfield did not have anything like Lemuria. Photographs. Such a plain title. And so large and expensive—this was the hardback edition!

But on opening it, I knew I had something very different in my hands, something from far away in time and certainly in place. And the framing, the narrative in each photograph, the men throwing their terrible knives, the black women in costumes and shopping at the window, the toughs, the wags, the innocents, the idiot. Every photograph bore the seed of a story. So much emotion: people were real-live bored, tired, dirty, enthralled, in love, in pride, sparkling, dressed to the nines, ready to sing. Humanity. And not my people. Some other people, clearly now, from a place called Mississippi. I was racing over bridges, over seething big rivers. Walls were crumbling.

The poor girlfriend was talking and talking, mistaking my reverie for a balk at the price—I was a noted, cheap, and very boorish knothead. She was giving her whispered all in the bookstore to get me to buy this book with her and gift it to a sweet, dedicated man who had taught us, especially taught me. There was only the one copy on the store shelf. Who knew when anything like this would be back?

“We cannot give this to Dr. Heneghan,” I said.

She had a great big chin and could wear dismay twisted like someone in a Thomas Hart Benton painting. I wanted my camera; and I wanted this book. I didn’t want to give it to anybody.

When I came to Mississippi for the first time in 1998, it was to work at University Press of Mississippi, the publisher that brought Eudora Welty’s Photographs to the world. If that wasn’t a buzz enough, within two years the Press brought through the publishing process a new collection of photographs Eudora Welty said she had always wanted to publish. One on Country Churchyards.

I was beginning to understand some of Mississippi. Things were so different from the Ozarks— no real winter, such soil heaving up and down, no limestone, but azaleas, anolis, bamboo, and gardenias. I longed to get out in the country, get away from Jackson and Flowood, and really immerse. When this picture was taken, Hunter Cole, who taught me more about publishing than any one, and more about English than almost any professor, struck on a scheme to visit the cemetery sites and churchyards Welty photographed. We would see what was left.

We set out very early in the mornings, because we also intended to photograph. And the light, Hunter explained, at midday and afternoon was far too bright. Seeking these places where she took photographs, especially in river country around Rodney and Port Gibson and Grand Gulf, was like hunting something elusive and alive. I even saw my first bobcat alive and running, and touched my first alligator gar on these treks. We passed the Rodney church Welty photographed, with the cannon ball still stuck in its brick. We crept way up on a ridge until any fear of trespass was overthrown, the place was so abandoned.

“Imagine Eudora back then coming all the way out here from Jackson,” Hunter said. We were easing through archways of slick, green thorns, funerary plants gone haywire and wild. “The roads were terrible. It was a long way. A woman, alone, with a car and a camera. Nothing else. Those men with the knives in ‘At the Landing.’ Think of it. It was brave. Daring.”

This photograph Hunter took of me in the Rodney cemetery, where we found extant the remarkable tablet-like crypt that Welty photographed at the edge of a ridge where the sky opens up in her photo as if the river were again near. Now vegetation covered a once bright place in green and black murk. There were, I swear, frigid spots along the ground amid the graves, though it was the blast furnace of summer. Above me in a cedar tree thousands of bees are swarming with a low, urgent hum. I have not seen the bees, and my hands are aghast in one of the cold spots. I never heard the camera snap. I was all in, fully in the moment, truly in Mississippi, probably for the first time. And it was Welty’s photography that brought me there.

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Steve Yates is assistant director/marketing director at University Press of Mississippi, publisher of 28 books by or about Eudora Welty. His novel Morkan’s Quarry was published in 2010 by Moon City Press. His collection, Some Kinds of Love: Stories, won the 2012 Juniper Prize for Fiction and will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in April 2013. He lives in Flowood with his wife, Tammy. And Lemuria is his hometown bookstore now.

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If you have story about Miss Welty that you would like to share on our blog, please e-mail them to lisa@lemuriabooks.com.

Click here to learn about Carolyn Brown’s A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

Click here to see all blogs in our Miss Welty series

As we get ready for the signing and reading for A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty by Carolyn Brown, Mary Alice Welty White shares her memories of a very special aunt.

Dodo was the name my sister Liz and I called our aunt Eudora until we went to college. We were the only children in the family, and Eudora was our Auntie Mame. She drove cool cars. The first in my memory was a red Ford convertible. Her last was a two-door, four-on-the-floor Oldsmobile. She always chose cars with a standard transmission.

Eudora enjoyed travel and took us on trips. We would go to Vicksburg and picnic in the park. Our favorite stop was the Illinois Memorial where we would go inside the large monument to hoot and holler and listen to our echoes reverberating around the marble walls. We would ride the train to New Orleans, stay at the Hotel Monteleone, eat at Galatoires, and listen to jazz at Preservation Hall. When Eudora took us on a two-day train trip to New York, we had our own private compartment. We stayed at the Algonquin Hotel and toured the usual sites including the Empire State Building and Museum of Natural History. Because Eudora loved the theatre, while in New York we went to see Damn Yankees, No Time for Sergeants, and Auntie Mame. Eudora appreciated all the performing arts. She loved to dance and won a Charleston contest while she was a student at the W in Columbus, Mississippi.

Our Aunt Dodo doted on Liz and me. She fixed up the sleeping porch in her home so we would enjoy spending the night, which we did quite often. The bookcase in the room was filled with fairy tale books for us to enjoy. We were even allowed to type our “stories” on her typewriter.

Eudora arranged for local artist Helen Jay Lotterhos to give Liz and me art lessons, and she sent us to camp. For college graduation, Eudora gave me a two and a half month trip to Europe. I sailed on the France and visited 16 countries – a truly wonderful gift.

I will always be grateful to Eudora for imparting a love of family, books, travel, art, and humor to Liz and me. -Mary Alice Welty White

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If you have story about Miss Welty that you would like to share on our blog, please e-mail them to lisa@lemuriabooks.com.

Click here to learn about Carolyn Brown’s A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

Click here to see all blogs in our Knowing Miss Welty series

Having grown up in Jackson, I can remember having Eudora Welty sightings around town.  I mostly had mine at the Jitney 14 and along State Street, while Miss Welty was driving maybe back and forth from Lemuria.  I had grown up with Miss Welty’s great nieces and nephews and remain friends with them all today, and I was lucky that she came and spoke at my school (but I do wonder if that day I understood the enormity of what I was witnessing).  Now, I work at Lemuria, Miss Welty’s bookstore, and though she was not coming to the store anymore when I started, her presence and influence is still felt here everyday.

When the Welty House opened, Lemuria became a Jackson stop for many of the groups that came to tour the house.  I began to notice that some of the groups had begun to ask for me.  At first I was bewildered, how did these women know my name?  I then realized that my Dad, Coleman Lowery, was sending them to the bookstore.  As a part of his being ‘docent to the world’; he had begun giving tours at the Welty House.

If you know my Dad, you know he loves to talk and tell stories.  Growing up we would be driving down the street in Jackson and he would all of sudden start talking about a party he had gone to in a house we had just passed.  The party, however was in the 1960s and the hosts don’t even live there anymore.  He loves to point out a house and say, “I drank a lot of whiskey in there!”  If my Dad is telling a story that would normally take 5 minutes you can count on it lasting 15-20 minutes because he ‘editorializes’ as I affectionately call it.  I can guarantee you that if you were in his tour group at the Welty House the tour lasted at least 20 minutes longer than normal.  Most of the ladies who ended up at Lemuria would go on and on about how fun it was to have Daddy as their tour director because they felt like they got a lot of Jackson’s back story and history.

Unfortunately, my Dad is unable to do tours anymore but when we decided to do this Welty project in honor of A Daring Life by Carolyn Brown, I asked him to share with you some of his “editorializing” . . .

Here’s his Miss Welty Story:

From the summer of 1946, when I was in the 8th grade at Bailey Junior High School, until the spring of 1951, when I graduated from Central High School (called Jackson High School in Brown’s book), I was a package boy at the Jitney 14 on Fortification Street where Miss Eudora was a regular customer.  She tipped the package boys a dime.  We were making thirty cents an hour-so we fought over the ladies who tipped.  Mrs. Fred Sullins and Mrs. Robert Kennington both tipped a quarter!

In the fall of 1951, I entered Vanderbilt University, where I graduated in 1955, and that fall in my freshman English class we read “Why I Live at the P.O.” During the discussion that followed, I raised my hand  and said “I know Eudora Welty.  I carried her packages at the grocery store at home.”  That semester I received an A in freshman English which was one of the few A’s I received during my college career at Vanderbilt.

–F. Coleman Lowery, Jr.

Photo of the Jitney 14, ca. 1950, courtesy of The Mississippi Department of Archives and History

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If you have story about Miss Welty that you would like to share on our blog, please e-mail them to lisa@lemuriabooks.com.

Click here to learn more about Carolyn Brown’s A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

Click here to see all blogs in our Knowing Miss Welty series