Author Interview – Page 11

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Author Q & A with Malcolm White

On March 12, 2018

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 11)

While Malcolm White describes Hal & Mal’s as “a place where art is made, music plays, and folks gather to share community, and celebrate t he very best of Mississippi’s creative spirit,” a good friend puts it another way, calling it simply “the most talked-about upscale honky-tonk in all of Mississippi.”

White’s salute to the more than three decades of success at the iconic establishment he and big brother Hal opened in 1985 is The Artful Evolution of Hal & Mal’s–a 130-page tribute filled with brief, but loaded, character essays of milestones, food profiles, character sketches, ghost stories, musical acts, and an inside look at the chaotic debut of the now-legendary Hal’s St. Paddy’s Day Parade–along with many, many glimpses of heartfelt family history.

The stories are brought to life in the University Press of Mississippi publication with distinctive watercolors rendered by Jackson native Ginger Williams Cook, who said her mission was to create “a sense of place and connection” to the restaurant’s and family’s “storied past and present.” Describing Cook as a “stunning artist,” White said her contributions to the book “made it the artful project that it is.”

Opening in what Robert St. John describes in the book’s foreword as “a B-location on South Commerce Street inside an old warehouse next to the railroad tracks,” the eatery and arts galleria has thrived, earning itself a spot in the elite category of what St. John calls Jackson’s “classic” restaurants.

It was the childhoods on the Gulf coast, combined with years of working in iconic kitchens in New Orleans, that would bring White and brother Hal to a shared dream of opening their own place someday. That “someday” has become nearly 35 years of family and friends serving up not onky regional food favorites with “a nod toward the Gulf of Mexico,” but a healthy helping of live blues, jazz, and rock music, sprinkled throughout with original works of art.

Malcolm White

White, now on his second stint as executive director of the Mississippi Arts Commission (with a turn at leading the state’s Tourism Division in between), is involved with South Arts, the Mississippi Blues and Country Music Trails and Downtown Jackson Partners.

“I have lived a long and abundant life,” he said, pointing out that he has “managed to amass almost 13 years in the public arena to bookend my 30-plus years in the private sector.”

His previous book, Little Stories: A Collection of Mississippi Photos, was published in 2015.

Tell me about the condition the 1927 warehouse was in when you and Hal leased the property in 1985, and why you chose that unlikely location as the site of the restaurant you had dreamed of opening together.

The building was 95 percent abandoned and dysfunctional. There was no plumbing; it had ancient electrical capacity and was in deplorable condition. It was technically unoccupiable and cost us close to $500,000, in 1980s dollars, over the first couple of years to get it up to code.

We chose downtown Jackson because we believed in Mississippi, our home, and the predication that all centers of population revitalize, and it’s only a question of when, not if. Hal and I used to joke about if we would live to see the vision we had come to pass. I’m still hopeful.

You mention in The Artful Evolution of Hal & Mal’s that “59 percent of hospitality businesses fail within three years of their founding.” What has been the secret to Hal & Mal’s success?

I point out in the introduction of the book that our business philosophy was to include art, culture, and story in the plan and not make it an afterthought; and that we adhered to the sacred axiom that the more money you give, the more you make. And finally, we have always sought inclusion and looked for ways to serve others along the way, like Jeff Good, Robert St. John, Myrlie Evers, and William Winter.

Your book highlights memories of key events, people, and circumstances that have made up the restaurant’s success. Why was it important for you to document the journey of both your family life alongside that of the restaurant that is now an institution in downtown Jackson?

Because the two are inseparable. Our family is the business, and the business tells much of our family story. We actually think we are more than a downtown Jackson institution, we fell we represent a regional, as well as an American enterprise story.

It’s interesting that you’ve been blessed with not only culinary skills, but a love of art and community, a strong entrepreneurial spirit, and the gift of writing. How would you say all of these skills have come to shape your vision for–and the success of–Hal & Mal’s?

The vision for Hal & Mal’s, like the book itself, was shaped over many years of pondering and preparing. Hal and I started talking about this dream when we were in our 20s and didn’t even live in Jackson. We even bought a building in downtown Hattiesburg, the Walnut Street Pharmacy, in the very early 1980s, with the idea of locating there. But fate put us a little further north after I accepted a job in 1979 to come to Jackson. Further, I started collectin ghte Hal & Mal’s decor, furniture and decorations back in the mid-1970s while living and working in both Hattiesburg and New Orleans.

Sadly, your partner and brother Hal White died in 2013, suddenly but only shortly leaving the future of the restaurant in question. Explain what happened that soon made it evident that Hal & Mal’s would survive and continue to thrive.

When Hal died in 2013, I was uncertain that we could or would carry on, but our staff and family rallied and insisted we continue. I had just accepted the job as tourism director and had made a decision that I could no longer work the hours and endure the physical demands of the restaurant and late-night music scene. But here we are, 33 years later, still serving our aunt’s gumbo and Hal’s magical soup concoctions.

You say in the book that Hal & Mal’s is, in some ways, “not just a bar and restaurant, we’re a creative outpost in downtown Jackson,” and it’s obvious that art and music have played important roles in the restaurant’s success. Could you elaborate?

Providing a place for community to gather and break bread is biblical, and paramount to the success of great places. When food and drink, arts and culture are presented side by side in a public house, community is sustained and encouraged. Hal & Mal’s is perhaps the first example of what the creative economy and creative placemaking is all about in Jackson and in Mississippi.

Certainly, there are other examples of this, but in the book and in the programming and continuation of the business, we demonstrate the “how” of such an enterprise and proposition. In many ways, we have shown by example how communities revitalize, sustain, and prosper. If that sounds boastful, then so be it.

At the end of the book you tell readers, “No one knows what the future may hold”–but what would you like to see for Hal & Mal’s going forward? How could it continue to evolve?

We will continue as long as we are able to make a small profit, add to the quality of life and see improvements in our community. We hope to purchase the building in the next few months–after 35 years of paying rent to the state–and begin a renovation of the property.

Since the Hal’s St. Paddy’s Parade and Festival is such a big event and is right around the corner (Saturday), would you also comment on how it has contributed to the evolution of Hal & Mal’s?

Sure. Most people think, mistakenly, that Hal & I started the parade together and that Hal & Mal’s was there in the beginning. Not so. I started the parade–thus the original name, “Mal’s”–in 1983 when I was booking music, producing events, and starting my own company, Malcolm White Productions. I designed the first parade to start at CS’s and end at George Street in a “pub crawl” format. However, as it began to unfold I evolved into thinking more of a traditional parade going downtown, starting at CS’s and ending at George Street.

CS’s dropped out after the first year and George Street, where I worked from 1979 to 1983, became the beginning and ending location. Later, I moved it to the Mississippi State Fairgrounds and finally to Hal & Mal’s in 1986, where it is based today. Hal didn’t join the fun until 1984–though he was living and working in Columbus–when we started the O’Tux Society, our first marching krewe. Hal then moved to Jackson in 1985 when we started Hal & Mal’s.

The parade is an important annual event for both Hal & Mal’s and the city of Jackson as well as teh state. It has an economic impact of $10 million annually on the local economy and enjoys a national reputation as one of the largest and most original St. Paddy’s parades in the country. It is generally associated with Hal & Mal’s and that helps with our brand and our iamge of a place where people meet for arts and culture, and fun and festive occasions.

Malcolm White and Ginger Williams Cook will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, March 14, at 5:00 to sign copies of The Artful Evolution of Hal & Mal’s.

Author Q & A with Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington

By Guest Author

On February 28, 2018

In Civil Rights, Law, Nonfiction, Southern History

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 25)

Nationally known reporter/blogger Radley Balko and the University of Mississippi School of Law’s Tucker Carrington, who is the founding director of the George C. Cochran Innocence Project, have devoted their careers to investigating and helping to overturn wrongful convictions for inmates who have been unjustly imprisoned in this country.

Their new book, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South, exposes their findings of how “institutional racism and junk forensic science” and the actions of Dr. Steven Hayne of Brandon and dentist Michael West of Hattiesburg teamed up to bring many false convictions against Mississippi defendants for nearly two decades. They highlight the cases of Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, who spent a combined 30 years in jail for murders they didn’t commit, before being exonerated in 2008.

The book makes the case that Mississippi’s criminal justice system deserves serious scrutiny and investigation itself if it is to fairly and accurately dispense justice and spare innocent lives.

Radley Balko

Balko, a longtime opinion journalist (now for the Washington Post) and an investigative reporter, writes and edits The Watch, an opinion blog that covers civil liberties and the criminal justice system. He is also the author of the widely acclaimed Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.

Carrington is the founding director of the George C. Cochran Innocence Project and Clinic at the University of Mississippi School of Law. Its mission is to identify, investigate, and litigate actual claims of innocence by Mississippi prisoners, as well as advocate for systemic criminal justice reform.

Tucker Carrington

Prior to coming to Ole Miss, Carrington was an E. Barrett Prettyman fellow at Georgetown Law Center, a trial and supervising attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, and a visiting clinical professor at Georgetown.

He writes frequently about criminal justice issues, including wrongful convictions and legal ethics. His work has appeared in The Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change, The Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, and the Mississippi Journal of Law.

How and why did you two come to collaborate on writing this book?

Balko: One of us called the other–we can’t remember which way that went–shortly after I had an op-ed on Haybe published in the Wall Street Journal. Tucker had just started work at the Mississippi Innocence Project in Oxford and was a little overwhelmed at what he had already seen. Over the years, we discussed these cases often as he litigated some of them and I wrote about some of them. As two of only a handful of people at the time who knew the full extent of what was going on, I think we commiserated a bit. Eventually we realized that a book was really the only way to tell this story with the thoroughness and attention to detail it deserved. By that time, we had both immersed in this stuff for nearly 10 years, so it just sort of made sense to write it together.

Carrington: We met shortly after I moved to Mississippi in 2007. It just so happened that Radley was working on the Corey Maye story (involving the 2001 shooting of Maye, a Prentiss police officer) and called me at my new office at the law school. I think he just wanted to reach out and make contact. From there our paths crossed in one way or another–in the main because he got interested in forensic science issue in the courts–and my practice began to feature exactly those types of cases. We each had ideas about recounting this decades-long episode–and we each slugged away at it separately: Radley in multiple pieces over the years, me through some law review pieces and litigating cases. Ultimately, we decided to join forces for a book.

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist recounts the stories of how Brooksville, Mississippi, residents Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks were falsely accused of murders and served a combined 30 years in prison until their release was navigated with the help of the Innocence Project. Their convictions had come largely due to policies that allowed Dr. Steven Hayne of Brandon and Dr. Michael West, a dentist from Hattiesburg, to become wealthy through a corrupt legal system. Please explain how their “partnership” developed and came to make such scenarios like this possible for so many years.

Carrington: Their partnership developed because the infrastructure and incentives were in place for it to develop. They–and others–just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Had they not, someone else would’ve filled the vacuum–maybe not in precisely the same way, but similarly, as has occurred in other jurisdictions.

Instead of a independent, salaried, fully funded medical examiner office, Mississippi mostly went without one for two decades. That was combined with an anachronistic coroner system, an effort on state and federal levels to crack down on a perceived increase in violent crime and an embrace of the death penalty, as well as a spate of new and novel forensic disciplines that gained acceptance without significant scientific inquiry and rigor.

Finally, reviewing courts found themselves constrained by cynical legislative “fixes” to the “endless” appellate process, especially for those sentenced to death. The ultimate result was a recipe and perfect storm for what came to pass in Mississippi that we recount in the book.

What are the national implications for this book? While it makes the case that “poverty and structural racism” accounted for much of Mississippi’s abuse of a system that relied on autopsies and local coroners’ reports to get away with racial injustice, Mississippi has not stood alone in such discrimination.

Balko: The problems of dubious forensics, structural racism, and the coroner system of death investigation are definitely not unique to Mississippi. And even Hayne and West occasionally testified in other states, particularly Louisiana.

I think the main difference is one of scale. For example, we note in the book that in the 1990s, Texas medical examiner Ralph Erdmann was doing an annual number of autopsies in rural counties across the state that legal experts at the time called astonishing. It became a national scandal, and Erdmann became a poster case for forensics gone amok. Erdmann was doing about 400 autopsies per year. For most of his career, Hayne did at least 1,200. Some years he topped 1,500. He admitted that at least one year, he did more than 2,000. He had a hand in 70 to 80 percent of the homicide cases in the state for nearly 20 years.

The other big differences is that in most other states, once the malfeasance was discovered, there was some effort to assess the damage done and review the cases that may have been affected. Some of those efforts were more thorough than others. But in Mississippi, state officials have refused to conduct any such review of Hayne and West cases.

Tell me about the important role that the “junk science” of bad forensics has played in the outcomes of so many jury decisions in America. It seems that this problem has, to some degree, been a constant in our country’s criminal justice process. Why is that?

Balko: It really comes down to the fundamental differences between law and science. We want to use science in the courtroom, because at times it can help us discover the truth. But science is an ongoing process. Theories can and are tweaked, revised, or even shown to be wrong. The law–and by extension our courts system–values certainty and precedent. We still haven’t quite figured out how to reconcile these differences. So, for example, we’ve delegated the important job of keeping bad or fake science out of the courtroom to judges. But judges of course are trained in legal reasoning, not in scientific analysis. So, they haven’t been very good at it.

This tension between law and science for a long time alienated much of the scientific community from the criminal justice system, creating space for fields like bite mark matching, hair fiber analysis, tool mark analysis, and others to assist police and prosecutors in solving crimes and winning convictions. These fields have the veneer of science, but were never subjected to the rigorous testing and review of the scientific method.

It wasn’t until the rise of DNA testing–which was developed in scientific labs–that we began to see that these fields weren’t nearly as accurate and foolproof as their practitioners claimed. Over the last decade or so, the scientific community has shown more interest in criminal justice and has begun subjecting some of these fields to real scientific testing. They’re finding that many of these disciplines have little to no grounding in science at all. But because our courts tend to put a premium on finality and precedent, it has been really difficult to get them to apply the lessons we’ve learned from DNA testing–that these fields aren’t scientifically reliable–to a much larger pool of cases where DNA isn’t a factor.

In his foreword to your book, author John Grisham, who serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project in New York, laments that actual wrong conviction estimates range from 2 percen to 10 percent of the millions of cases tried each year–amounting to staggering numbers that can never be accurately determined. He said getting these people out of prison is “virtually impossible.” What do you say?

Carrington: He’s correct. In the vast majority of these types of cases, evidence that could lead to an exoneration never existed–because, for example, DNA was not collected and/or present to begin with–the cases are old, witnesses have disappeared, forgotten their accounts, died, and so on. Also, most cases in the criminal justice system plea. And as a result, there can be very little in the way of a record, including an investigative record that would lead to new evidence of innocence.

What do you hope this book will accomplish?

Balko: Mississippi needs to conduct a thorough review of every case in which Hayne or West testified. They need to look not only for cases in which one of them gave scientifically dubious testimony, but any case in which their testimony may have nudged a jury one way or the other. Because forensic pathology can be subjective, even testimony that was within the realm of acceptable science could contribute to a wrongful conviction. Preferably, the review should be conducted by an outside entity, and should include input from forensic pathologists and scientists, not just judges and lawyers.

I’d also hope the book can serve as a warning to be skeptical of claims from forensic disciplines untested by science, particularly emerging disciplines. The courts have been far too quick to embrace new fields of “expertise,” and far too slow to correct the damage done when science later shows those fields to be fraudulent.

Carrington: I’d simply add that we also hope the books ets out what can happen when the wrong incentives are offered up in the criminal justice system. We can learn from this going forward. Or we can continue to ignore and risk finding ourselves in this predicament again at some point in the future.

Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington will be at Lemuria on Thursday, March 1, at 5:00 to sign and read from The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist. This book is a 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Author Q & A: Hidden History of Jackson

By Guest Author

On February 19, 2018

In Southern History

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 18)

hidden history jxn Longtime friends Josh Foreman and Ryan Starrett, who both spent childhood years in Jackson, give readers an unexpected and fresh look at their hometown city’s history through 20 mostly never-before-told stories that bring to life the “Hidden History of Jackson.”

The collection, published by Arcadia Publishing, includes tales of horror and heroism dating back to the 1700s, and touches on Indian mounds, land pirates, frontier life, wartimes, the civil rights movement, school integration, music legends, epidemics, “the Greater University that never was,” and more.

Josh Foreman

Foreman grew up in Jackson, Ridgeland, and “the Rankin County side of the Reservoir.” After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree from Mississippi State University in 2005, he left for a teaching job in South Korea, and remained there for nine years. In 2014, he returned to the U.S. and enrolled in the University of New Hampshire’s Mater of Fine Arts in Writing program. Now a teacher at St. Stanislaus College in Bay St. Louis, he and his wife Melissa make their home there with their children Keeland and Genevieve.

Ryan Starrett

Starrett was born and reared in Jackson. After a 10-years hiatus in Texas, and degrees from the University of Dallas, Adams State University, and Spring Hill College, he returned home to continue teaching at St. Joseph Catholic School in Madison. He and his wife Jackie live there with their children, Joseph Padraic and Penelope Rose O. Starrett.

How did it come about that you two had the opportunity to write Hidden History of Jackson, one in the “Hidden History” series published by The History Press?

Starrett: I completed a degree with a thesis on the integration of the Catholic diocese of Jackson and submitted my work to the History Press hoping it might be published. Ms. Amanda Irle thought differently. She suggested writing a broader history of Jackson.

Disappointed, I dismissed the idea, until several months later when my oldest friend Josh and I met up at Broad Street (Baking Co.) for brunch. We had recently read Richard Grant’s Dispatches From Pluto, and decided to pay our respects to the man who had written so honestly and beautifully about an underappreciated corner of Mississippi. We bought a bottle of whiskey and drove to his house expecting to drop it off and hoping we could deliver a quick “thank-you.” Lo and behold, his wife answered the door and said Mr. Grant was not at home, but told us to wait; she would call him and he’d be home shortly. Ten minutes later, he arrived and proceeded to invite us strangers into his house and graciously spoke with us for half an hour.

When Josh and I left, we drove to Cups and determined that we would try our best to tell the story of Jackson the way Mr. Grant wrote of the Delta. We then jointly submitted a table of contents and synopsis of a new proposal to Ms. Amanda Irle. This time, she enthusiastically championed our proposal and we were contracted to write The Hidden History of Jackson.

Hidden History of Jackson is described as a collection of “20 little-known stories from the history of Jackson,” dating from the 1700s. How did you choose the stories included here and how did you find out about them?

Foreman: Ryan and I first began to make a chapter outline sitting in his backyard in Ridgeland. We started out knowing we wanted to tell certain stories–the true story of Louis LaFleur and the story of Derek Singleton’s integration of St. Joe, to name a couple. We stuck to the original chapter outline to an extent, but many of the stories we ended up telling emerged from the research as the process moved along.

The story of T.F. and Kate Decell is a good example of a chapter that grew organically. WE had originally planned tow rite about vigilante justice in Jackson’s early days. I stumbled on the story of the Decells in old newspapers, and their saga incorporated so many themes from frontier Jackson–the pursuit of riches, alcohol abuse, violence, vigilante justice. Kate emerged from the story as a symbol of toughness, persistence, and hope–a good inspiration for the city.

Tell me about your exhaustive research for this project. How long did it take you to complete this book?

Starrett: Josh and I are incredibly fortunate to be writers in 2018. The research tools available now are unbelievable. Digitalized sources such as newspapers.com and thousands of documents and diaries that have been transcribed and uploaded by archivists throughout the country all made research relatively easy compared to what historians just a decade or two ago had to go through.

In spite of all the tools that seemingly fell into our laps, we never would have been able to complete this project without those who came before us and who traveled to archives, visited historic sights, and conducted exhaustive interviews. Without their work, and without the work of countless archivists and historians, we simply would not have had the tools to put together the Hidden History of Jackson.

Briefly, could you mention two or three stories that were among your favorites?

Foreman: I mentioned the Decell story before–that was definitely one of my favorites. The story was just there in old newspaper articles and court records, waiting to be told, and we were lucky enough to be the first–that I know of–to tell it.

Another subject I enjoyed researching was the creation and naming of the Ross Barnett Reservoir. I spent much of my childhood on the Rez, and as I’ve gotten older the fact that it is named after our former segregationist governor has really bothered me. Obtaining the minutes from the Pearl River Valley Water Supply District meeting when the board decided to name the reservoir after Barnett was satisfying because it showed that the decision was never made in good faith. It was satisfying to tell a more thorough side of the story and to say, with research, that the Rez should never have been named after Barnett.

The chapter about the Nazi generals imprisoned at Camp Clinton really blew my mind. I had no idea before we began researching that some of the highest-ranking Nazi generals spent much of World War II as prisoners in Clinton, and that they sometimes escaped and made their way downtown, undetected, for supper before heading back to camp.

Starrett: Aside from the interviews we conducted, I enjoyed researching the Sisters of Mercy and their service to Jackson as teachers and nurses. I expected to read about saintly women who offered their lives to the service of the poor, sick, uneducated and dying, at great risk to themselves; that is exactly what I found. What I had not expected was to see them as innately human. Teilhard de Chardin claims that “joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God,” and these nuns radiated that joy. They mostly lived under wretched conditions–especially during the Civil War years. They were surrounded by the poor, the uneducated, the sick, and death was always in their midst. Yet, these sisters maintained their sense of service and humor. They were also some of the toughest people I came across while researching the book. They were a feisty, joyful group who made a lasting impact on the history of Jackson.

Since you’re both originally from Jackson, what did you enjoy most about this project, and what did you enjoy most about this project, and what did you find to be most challenging about it?

Starrett: I think the most enjoyable part for me would be the interviews we conducted with Tommy Crouch and Derek Singleton. Mr. Couch is a local mogul. For more than half a century, he has been creating and promoting music right here in Jackson. His company, Malaco Records, is still on Northside Drive and has produced a number of iconic albums. The fact that he believed in and invested his life’s work in his community was rewarded by his company’s success. All you need to do is step into his offices and you’re almost overwhelmed by the hit records and posters covering the wall from internationally known musicians.

Mr. Singleton, likewise, is a Jackson hero. Growing up in Mississippi, I knew the names of Medgar Evers, James Meredith, and a handful of other local civil rights activists. Yet, Mr. Singleton, and his mother, deserve to be remembered, too. He was the first man to integrate St. Joseph school, which in turn was the first high school in the state to integrate. Thus, he is the quiet, humble man who broke down the color barrier in Mississippi’s schools.

The opportunity to learn from men like Mr. Couch and Mr. Singleton, as well as to learn from more than a dozen other now deceased Jacksonians through their memoirs, newspaper clippings, diaries, census records, and other documents made writing the Hidden History of Jackson an incredible joy and blessing.

Foreman: I was lucky enough to have a few months off between finishing grad school at UNH and starting my teaching job in Bay St. Louis. I spent most of that time researching and writing. It was a great joy to be able to wake up in the morning, brew a pot of coffee, sit down at my computer, and just research for hours. I love the research process and how stories can take shape with each old newspaper article or document you read through. I’d call Ryan every day and tell him about what I’d discovered–“You’re never going to believe this–the city of Jackson was planned by Thomas Jefferson!”–and he’d tell me about what he’d found.

I have to give a huge shout out to my wife, Melissa, here–she was willing to take care of our two kids, Keeland and Genevieve–during those long stretches I spent writing and researching at the computer. She has been extremely supportive.

The hardest thing about the whole process for me was just digging into the ugly side of Jackson’s history. It was painful reading about the brutality in Jackson’s past–the chapter on runaway slaves was particularly difficult to research and write. Learning the story of James Brown, a black man who was arrested in Madison County in 1832, imprisoned and likely sold into slavery, was heartbreaking. The only document that exists telling Brown’s story is an old runaway slave advertisement that was published after his arrest. Brown told authorities he was a free riverboat worker from New York City, which was entirely possible. But the law functioned in such a way that even free blacks were easily deprived of their freedom.

We couldn’t figure out whether Brown was ever freed or whether he spent the rest of his life in bondage. It was so sad to read about a man trapped in such a cruel system. Jackson has a tragic heritage in many respects, but I believe facing the reality of our past in an important step in making a better future.

Josh Foreman and Ryan Starrett will be at Lemuria on Saturday, February 24, at 1:00 p.m. to sign copies of Hidden History of Jackson.

Author Q & A (Telling Our Stories)

By Guest Author

On February 14, 2018

In Civil Rights, Southern History

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 11)

The recent opening of two of Mississippi’s premier museums, coinciding with the state’s Bicentennial celebration in December 2017, was a landmark event in the Magnolia State’s recognition of and salute to its history.

Like all states, Mississippi’s past includes not only its memories and accomplishments but its challenges and struggles, as well–along with a bright hope for its future. And, fortunately for those who want to actually bring home an insightful reminder of their experiences while visiting the new Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Right Museum in downtown Jackson–there’s a book for that!

The University Press of Mississippi, working with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, have published Telling Our Stories, a comprehensive “companion book” that highlights the people, places and dates of events (the good and the bad) that are emphasized in the museums and have shaped our culture today

Three MDAH staff members who are serving in vital roles in the museums and have been instrumental in the publication of Telling Our Stories share their thoughts below on the role that the museums and this book will play in Mississippi’s journey to a vibrant future.

AMANDA LYONS

Amanda Lyons is assistant to the MDAH director and served as managing editor of Telling Our Stories. Originally from Louisiana, she graduated from Belhaven College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and now lives in Jackson.

How did the Telling Our Stories book project come about, and why? What is the overall purpose of this book?

We approached University Press of Mississippi about publishing a companion book to the museums a few years ago. They loved the concept! Telling Our Stories celebrates the opening of the museums on the occasion of our state’s bicentennial. It’s also a beautiful souvenir for our visitors and is available in the Mississippi Museum Store.

In the introduction to the book, civil rights leader Myrlie Evers and former Mississippi Gov. William F. Winter remind us that “No state has more stories to tell than we do.” How does this book, and the museums, reflect that sentiment?

Mississippi is full of storytellers. The book and the museums draw on this rich tradition with quotes, oral histories, and primary sources. As much as possible, we wanted each person to tell their own story, in their own words. We also encourage visitors to record their own story before they leave.

The writers of the book’s foreword, former Gov. Haley Barbour and former attorney and judge Reuben V. Anderson, describe the museums as “the largest classrooms in the state,” and they reflect positively on the statewide impact they will have in Mississippi and beyond. What do you expect that impact to be?

School buses filled with children pull up at the museums every day! We want every child in Mississippi to visit the museums at least once during their K–12 years, and we are raising funds for an endowment for school visits. People of all ages will learn more about where they come from–and where they are going–at the museums. One man was amazed to see his grandfather, a civil rights activist, featured in the exhibits. Here, we can discover new facets about ourselves and how our stories fit into the complex tapestry that is Mississippi.

Museum of Mississippi History

PAMELA JUNIOR

Pamela Junior is director of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. A resident of Jackson, she is a graduate of Jackson State University with a degree in education.

Mississippi’s civil rights story has been long and complicated. While it may have a way to go, much progress has been made. How does the museum reflect that story, and what do you think (or hope) remains to be accomplished in Mississippi on the civil rights front?

The stories of the Civil Rights Era are complex, but Mississippi has done something that people thought couldn’t be done. Mississippi has reconciled its differences by making sure that all content in this museum is truthful!

What I know will happen is conversation–conversation about race relations. What I hope for is that people will be honest enough to share their inner thoughts, to tell the truth and face the problems regarding race so that we can get to the next level of making Mississippi the best it can be. Right now, we have done the spectacular, and that is building the civil rights museum in Mississippi–ground zero during the Movement.

Could you share an overview of the contents of the museum (its layout, major exhibits, etc.)? What have been some of the most popular displays?

The Museum is laid out chronologically and forms a circle that can be approached from either side.

There are eight galleries in total. The first, “Mississippi’s Freedom Struggle,” gives the history of Africans coming here through slavery and includes the Civil War. Gallery two covers Reconstruction and explores the flowering of African American communities and the passage of Jim Crow Laws. This gallery also contains the first of the monoliths that appear throughout the museum and lists the names of all the people known to have been lynched in Mississippi.

“This Little Light of Mine” is a large central space to stop, reflect on what you’ve seen, and to rest as the music of the Civil Rights Movement plays. An interactive sculpture hangs from the ceiling surrounded by pictures of the heroic women and men of the Movement.

The “Closed Society” gallery highlights the return of African American soldiers from World War II, the “separate but equal” doctrine, and the murder of Emmett Till. “A Tremor in the Iceberg” tells of the young people joining the Movement and the assassination of Medgar Evers. The “I Question America” gallery focuses on the work of Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, Aaron Henry, Ed King, and others, and contains an original film on the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner.

Mississippi Civil Rights Museum

“Black Empowerment” tells the story of the marches, sit-ins, and other protests that were continuing, changes in public education, and the murder of Vernon Dahmer. The final gallery–“Where do We Go from Here?”–examines the election of African Americans to political office across the state and gives visitors a chance to reflect on the courage of the many people who died for a cause greater cause than themselves–and what they might do to make things better today.

Why is this museum and its message so important to Mississippi?

Our message is of hope and racial healing. Out state has some of the greatest people and the greatest minds. We must put our heads together and fight the demon of racism. We have more in common than we have differences.

RACHEL MYERS

Rachel Myers, director of the Museum of Mississippi History, has lived in Jackson for 10 years. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in religious studies from Brandeis University and her Master of Arts in museum studies from Johns Hopkins.

The opening of these museums came as Mississippi marked its bicentennial–a history that the Museum of Mississippi History and this book examine through, among other things, our state’s role in conflicts and wars, survival during the Great Depression, its economic swings, racial strife and progress, and its accomplishments in sports, music, storytelling, writing, crafts, and the arts. How does the Museum of Mississippi History play an important role, as historian Dennis Mitchell puts it, in “sharing our stories, clearing away myths, and inspiring and children and grandchildren’?

Our role is to inspire the exploration and appreciation of our state’s history by presenting an honest representation of Mississippi. Visitors will find stories that resonate with their experiences, but we hope they’ll also find new and surprising ways of looking at our state and its many stories.

This museum is a place that elicits stories. I’ve enjoyed watching families reflecting on the history of their communities and sharing stories passed down over generations. The experience of seeing an artifact or a film or standing in a recreated historic site can facilitate conversations that strengthen our identity and challenge perspectives.

Some students find it hard to engage with lessons about history. What would you say are some of the exhibits/displays at the museum that may win them over? Are there some things that patrons may be surprised to see?

With four original films, dozens of digital interactives and immersive scenes, and more than 1,600 artifacts, the museum is designed to capture the attention of a wide range of visitors.

Students have been excited to walk through time and peek into the different living spaces of Mississippians throughout history, investigate their artifacts, and hear their stories. Visitors are often surprised by the size and scale of this museum, the amount of history we are presenting, and the range of voices that are highlighted and uplifted in the exhibits.

The book tells us that Mississippi’s story has evolved as history has recorded the presence of its first native peoples, followed by Europeans, Africans, and later people from Germany, Russia, Poland, Slavonia, Italy, Lebanon, China, and others. How do we see the impact and the accomplishments of such diversity of our people reflected in our state today?

To me, the story of Mississippi is one of the most fascinating in our country. We see here on the local scale our national themes of people from different groups and places coming together to form something greater than themselves.

Our theme of One Mississippi, Many Stories celebrates all those who have shaped and defined our state–and continue to do so today.

The hours and admission for the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum can be found here. The hours and admission for the Museum of Mississippi History can be found here. Telling Our Stories can be purchased at the museums’ store, or from Lemuria Books and its online store.

Author Q & A with Ann Fisher-Wirth

By Guest Author

On February 8, 2018

In Gift Books, Photography, Poetry

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 4)

As an Army brat who swore in her teen years that she’d never live in Mississippi, poet and University of Mississippi professor Ann Fisher-Wirth has, after nearly 30 years as an Oxford resident, decided that Mississippi (along with parts of California) now feels like home.

Not only has she felt moved to compose poetry honoring Mississippi’s culture, history, and people, but she is devoted to preserving its land, which she believes has suffered “severe environmental degradation that cannot be separated from its history of poverty and racial oppression.”

Her newest book, titled Mississippi, is a collaboration with acclaimed photographer and Delta native Maude Schuyler Clay, offering a different perspective on her current home state–one that is both visual and literary. The volumes includes 47 sets of Clay’s striking–and sometimes haunting–photos, each paired with one of Fisher-Wirth’s reflective poems.

Photographs and letterpress poems from this project are on exhibit throughout Mississippi, and a performance piece involving six actors has been created from two dozen of the poems.

Fisher-Wirth’s other poetry books include Dream Cabinet, Carta Marina, Five Terraces, and Blue Window. She has alos published an academic book on William Carlos Williams and four poetry chapbooks. With Laura-Gray Street, she co-edited the groundbreaking Ecopoetry Anthology.

She has been the recipient of several residencies, is a Fellow of the Black Earth Institute, and received a senior Fulbright to Switzerland and a Fulbright Distinguished Chair award to Sweden. She is also a past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. Fisher-Wirth teaches American literature and poetry workshops and directs the Environmental Studies program at Ole Miss. She has recently completed a sixth poetry book manuscript, Because Here We Are.

There was a time when you swore you’d never live here. Tell me about your Mississippi experience, and why you’ve stayed.

I was an Army brat; when I was 10, my father retired and my family moved to Berkeley, California, where I spent my teenage years. Living in Berkeley in the 1960s, I paid careful attention to the civil rights movement; that’s why I swore I’d never live in Mississippi. I lived in southern California, Belgium, and Virginia.

Ann Fisher-Wirth

But in the late 1980s, we cam here (to Ole Miss), lured by the terrific English department, the literary community centered in Square Books, and the fact that Mississippi seemed to be a very complicated, culturally fascinating, beautiful and troubled place. We came in a spirit of adventure, and a feeling that we could do good work here. We’ve stayed because we want to. The English department has just gotten better and better–it’s a friendly and increasingly heterogeneous department. I love working with our MFA poets as well as with the undergraduates who study American literature and creative nonfiction with me. I also love directing and teaching for the minor in Environmental Studies, and ahve had some fantastic, dynamic students over the years.

Our children are all grown–our three daughters live elsewhere, but our two sons are here, as are two of our grandchildren–a major attraction. I’m attached to our house, old and drafty as it is. And Oxford is just plain an incredible place to be a writer.

How did you and Maude come up with the idea to create a book together? Were the poems written to go with the photographs, or were the photographs taken to go with the poems?

Maude Schuyler Clay

Maude and I have known each other socially for decades and have known each other’s work. At one point or the other of us casually remarked, “We should do something sometime.” She thinks I was the one; I think she was the one.

A few years ago she started sending me photographs she had taken but never published. I had recently published Dream Cabinet and The Ecopoetry Anthology and was looking for a new project. I was moved by her photo of a tree in water–this has turned out to be the cover image for the book–and I wrote the poem based on the yoga pose Vrksasana that begins “You stand in Tree…” A little later, she sent me a hauntingly beautiful image of a boat in greenish water. I knew I wanted to write a poem based on this photo, but had no idea what it could say until Made mentioned that the boat had belonged to her close friend who had just died. Immediately, the poem “Between two worlds / the soul floats…” came to me, and eventually that became the opening poem of the book. Others followed as Maude continued to send me photographs over the next couple of years.

Nearly all the poems were written to go with photographs; in only on or two cases, we found photos to go with poems I had already written. But as you know, the poems don’t just describe the photographs, and, with one exception, the photographs don’t have people in them.

Instead, the poems are spoken in voices of fictive characters that the photographs somehow suggested to me. Creating this book was, for me, very much an act of channeling voices, scraps of lives that I have encountered since living in Mississippi, sometimes combined with scraps of memory from my own life–exploring the incredible richness of this region’s spoken language.

What is the message of the blending of this poetry with the sometimes bare, sometimes harsh images of the state’s landscape, that you want to leave with your readers?

Poems are more about experiences than messages, so I don’t really have a message per se. I wanted the poems to reflect the variety of voices, and hence the variety of people, in Mississippi: old, young; wise, foolish; poor, middle-class, wealthy; loving, hateful; male, female; lettered, unlettered; black, white, Native American. Some of the poems are harsh and bleak, and speak to the realities of racism, poverty, violence, and environmental damage that are part of Mississippi. Others are lush and beautiful, as befits the beauty and gentler aspects of the people and places.

How did you develop an interest in writing poetry–and then realize that you were so good at it?

I come from a family of English teachers and readers, and I’ve always wanted to write poetry. I wrote a little bit in high school, then stopped, then wrote a little bit more while writing my dissertation, then stopped. Until I got tenure at the University of Mississippi, my writing was academic–a book on William Carlos Williams, a numbers of essays on Williams, Willa Cather, Anita Brookner, Robert Haas, and others.

Then just for fun I audited a poetry workshop that my friend Aleda Shirley was teaching, and after the first day, I said to myself, “This is it. I’m writing poems from now on, and never looking back.” Some time later, I attended a week-long workshop in California called The Art of the Wild, and wrote a poem called, “What Is There to Do in Mississippi?” It became my first published poem, in the magazine The Wilderness Society, and it even paid–so I took my whole family out to dinner to celebrate at City Grocery (in Oxford). After that, it took a while to get my first book, Blue Window, published, and the rest has followed. It’s always a a lot of work, always an adventure.

Thank you for saying I am “so good at it.” I sure love it. I’ve always loved writing, but my confidence about it is never a steady-state thing.

Your poetry style here is at once stark and powerful–there are no titles, no punctuation, no apparent patter of wordplay–and grammatical rules are cast aside. Tell me how this design contributes to the interpretation of the poetry.

I wanted to get rid of the conventional accouterments of poetry and just let the voices be heard. I also wanted the eye to be alive on the page–to treat the page as a field of composition and make use of negative space in order to capture the way we actually speak, which is never a steady march forward, and never completely grammatically. One of the strongest elements of Southern literature is its orality, and I wanted to honor the living voices in every way.

There are several recurring themes in your poetry in this book: racism, sexual desire, death, family, tragedy, memories, and nature’s beauty and fury. Why these topics?

Is there anything else? I’m partly kidding. But a writer doesn’t exactly get to choose his or her themes; these are topics that have greatly concerned me my whole life. They’re central to human experience, no matter where or when. By the way, I love the phrase “nature’s beauty and fury.” That “fury” is so important.

Do you have plans for future writing projects?

Well, I have a lot of uncollected poems and a desire to create another book, but as yet it has no shape. I’m writing new poems all the time, some of which are worth keeping. For the pas two fall semesters, I have team-taught with my colleague Patrick Alexander in the Prison to College Pipeline program for pre-release prisoners at Parchman. This has been an intensely rich experience for me and I’ve been writing about that. And there are a couple of editing projects I’ll be working on–but it’s too early to talk about them.

Ann Fisher-Wirth and Maude Schuyler Clay will be at Lemuria on Friday, February 9, at 5:00 to sign and discuss their new book, Missisippi.

Author Q & A with Nathaniel Rich

By Guest Author

On January 30, 2018

In Historical Fiction, Mystery, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 14)

New York native Nathaniel Rich has made his home in New Orleans for nearly a decade, drawn, he said, by the city’s strong sense of its own identity, and its proud “indifference” to what is going on elsewhere–not to mention, as he puts it, “all the usual things” New Orleans is known for–unrivaled food, music, culture, and landscape.

But it was the history of the city that sparked Rich’s inspiration for his newest novel, King Zeno (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) an engaging tale that incorporates true events from early 20th-century New Orleans and weaves together the stories of the lives of three unlikely characters in a surprise ending that is both chilling and redemptive.

A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Rich’s essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and The Daily Beast, among others. He is also the author of two previous novels, Odds Against Tomorrow and The Mayor’s Tongue.

You come from a literary family–your brother Simon Rich is a humorist, novelist, short story author, and screenwriter; your dad Frank Rich has enjoyed a career as a columnist, essayist, and TV producer; your mom Gail Winston is an executive editor for a major publisher and, and your step-mother is a magazine writer. What’s it like to be in a family with so much writing talent, and what have you learned from each other?

Nathaniel Rich

Many writers at some point have to overcome their parents’ disapproval, if not outraged incomprehension, at their choice of profession. I was fortunate to have to face down only thinly veiled discouragement and queasily suppressed anxiety.

My brother is a brilliant writer of fiction and I learn tremendously from his example, his work, and his counsel.

Coming after your first two novels, The Mayor’s Tongue (an imaginative sand telling story of shared miscommunications in everyday relationships) and Odds Against Tomorrow (a catastrophic look at the effects of a major hurricane that hits Manhattan)–it seems that King Zeno is in many ways a departure from their style in that it is a historical novel based in part on real-life events (including the still unsolved “Axeman murders”) in New Orleans as World War I was drawing to a close in 1918. Did you feel like you were in some ways “switching gears” with King Zeno?

In a number of superficial ways King Zeno is unlike the earlier two–just as the first two novels are unlike each other. They are set in very different periods with characters who wouldn’t know what to make of each other if they showed up in the same room together (something like this happens at the end of The Mayor’s Tongue). But all of the novels came about the same way, from an initial suggestion–in this case, a historical article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune–that attracted other ideas and stories and subconscious embellishments until it had achieved the weight and requisite spookiness of a novel.

The are commonalities that go deeper than questions of plot and setting. Each of the novels contends with a desire to examine a problem without an easy resolution: the limits of language (The Mayor’s Tongue); the fear of the future (Odds Against Tomorrow); the desire for immortality (King Zeno). Each novel also balances on a knife’s edge between a plausible, lifelike reality and a fantasy realm, so in that way they all seem to me to occupy the same world. And the sensibility, or the voice, is the same–an inevitability, since they were written by the same person.

With in-depth stories of each of the three main characters that converge at the end, set in New Orleans during a severe Spanish Flu epidemic, the Axeman murders, the growing popularity of jazz, and the construction of the industrial canal connecting the Mississippi River with Lake Pontchartrain, there is a lot going on in King Zeno. With so much historical detail to cover, how did you conduct the research for this book, and how long did it take?

king zeno The initial idea grew out of my fascination with two historical events: the series of unsolved ax murders that reached its culmination with a bizarre letter to the Times-Picayune; and the excavation of the Industrial Canal, a hubristic manhandling of the local terrain that has haunted New Orleans ever since.

I visited the New Orleans Historical Collection and the Louisiana Research Collection at Tulane, devouring newspapers and other publications from the period. The newspaper crime journalism, written in a breathless, panicky, Gothic style, gave me an element of the novel’s tone.

Louis Armstrong would have been about 18 during the action of the novel, about the same age as Isadore Zeno. His memoir about growing up in New Orleans, Satchmo, has novelistic detail about life in the part of the city then known as Battleground, explaining, for instance, the differences between a third-rate and second-rate honky-tonk; which railroad tracks grew the best medicinal herbs; where to buy fish heads cheap. Jelly Roll Morton’s conversations about the period with Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, taught me how to “shoot the agate” and how to pass as a “sweetback man.” There are a few other fascinating books about jazz in the period: Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans by Thomas Brothers; Donald M. Marquis’s In Search of Buddy Bolden, and John McCusker’s Creole Trombone.

My most valuable source, however, was an oral history project conducted by the Friends of the Cabildo historical society. Beginning in the 1970s, these amateur historian set out to interview elderly New Orleanians about their pasts. There are roughly 200 interviews in total, most of them conducted about 40 to 30 years ago. They are only available on cassette tape at the New Orleans Public Library’s Louisiana Division. I was able to find about tow dozen interviews in which the subjects recalled life in New Orleans between 1910 and 1920. From those conversations, I learned that the great merchant ships from Buenos Aires brought to the wharves sacks of coffee, bones, and dried blood; that riding the ferry back and forth across the Mississippi was through to be a cure for whooping cough; that the chimney man used a palmetto frond for a brush.

The storyline of King Zeno revolves around the ambitions, fears, and hopes of its three main characters: police detective Bill Bastrop; business executive and Mafia widow Beatrice Vizzini; and struggling jazz musician Izzy Zeno. Tell me how you approach character development, and what you find to be the most rewarding and challenging aspects of this skill in ficiton writing–especially in this book.

There were a number of technical challenges in making sure the dramatic narratives of the three characters lined up, to avoid allowing one storyline’s revelations from interfering with another’s. It’s not the most exciting part of the writing process, but I find it satisfying to make the trains run on time.

When it comes to writing characters, however, the only reward is when you feel that a character has come to life. Until then, it is torture.

You have written one non-fiction book, San Francisco Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present, and you are known for your magazine work of short stories and essays. Between these and your novels, what kinds of writing would you say you enjoy the most?

Fiction is the most pleasurable, since it grant the greatest freedom; it’s the form that occupies most of my time. But getting out into the world for the journalist pieces–getting out physically as well as mentally–keeps me sane. It also allows for a more immediate response to an idea or a subject than the fiction; my novels have taken about five years to write. As for the critical essays; among other advantages, studying other writers’ work helps me to clarify my thinking about my own writing.

Each of the three forms–fiction, journalism, criticism–informs the others. I am a better novelist for spending as much time as I do thinking critically about literature, and for forcing myself into uncomfortable situations as a reporter. But the forms are not as different as they might seem. The y each require a similar puzzling with a narrative logic, dramatic structure, tone, argument, description, precision.

After growing up in Manhattan, why did you eventually choose to make your home in New Orleans, and are you a jazz music fan yourself?

Like a lot of people who leave the places they’re from, I was ready for something different. The city began to seem stale to me, as crazy as that might sound when applied to a metropolis of that size. But I was getting the sense, about 10 years ago, that New York–or at least, my New York–was shrinking. I’d wanted to live in New Orleans since I was a teenager. It seemed like a city that knew itself, sores and all, and was largely indifferent to what was going on elsewhere. I loved that. The last thing I’d want is to move to a city that saw itself as a junior New York, a lesser rival with a chip on its shoulder.

I was also drawn to the lushness of the city’s culture, its difficult relationship with its landscape, the food, the music, the enchantment, the feverish energies–all the usual things that bring people here. After nearly 10 years, the city continues to surprise me, for better and worse. I don’t think you could say that about most places in America.

I do love jazz, and especially love the early New Orleans music, before it became self-conscious, when it was considered dangerous.

Are there future writing projects on the horizon for you that you can tell me about at this time? Any plans for more nonfiction?

I have a (long) short story in the new issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review called “Blue Rock” about three bad men trapped together in a lighthouse far out in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s based on a true story, and takes place around the same time as King Zeno.

Nathaniel Rich will be at Lemuria tonight (Tuesday, January 30) at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from King Zeno.

Author Q & A with Steve Yarbrough

By Guest Author

On January 29, 2018

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 28)

Indianola native and longtime author Steve Yarbrough once again branches out into new territory (geographically speaking) with his newest novel The Unmade World, set in both Fresno, California, and Krakow, Poland, as he spins a tale of tragedy, remorse, grief, and, finally, redemption.

Steve Yarbrough

After living in Fresno himself for two decades even while becoming intimately familiar with his wife’s native country of Poland, Yarbrough weaves these two sites together seamlessly as his main characters are fatefully bound together by unimaginable pain. The story chronicles their decade-long struggle, 6,000 miles apart, to make sense of a life-changing tragedy.

The author of 10 previous books, Yarbrough has received numerous awards for his novels and short stories, including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Awards for Fiction, among others.

An “aficionado” and instrumentalist of jazz and bluegrass music, he teaches in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College and lives in Stoneham, Massachusetts, with his wife Ewa.

How did the Poland and California locations and your familiarity with them drive the plot that forever ties an American journalist with a working-class, financially strapped Polish man who had come to the end of his rope?

Well, as you said, I lived in Fresno for two decades got to know it pretty well. It’s a city with some complexes, chief among them, the awareness that it’s ridiculed by people in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, and though I seldom felt moved to write about it when we lived there, the day finally came.

As for Krakow, we lived there, too, having bought an apartment there in 2002. I know it better than I know any American city. We don’t own a car in Poland, and so I walk everywhere. I came to love the city. Many of my best friends live there, and though we sold our apartment last year for reasons I won’t delve into, I fully expect to buy another one there one day, maybe even to retire there. It’s a magical city.

You have said that, in your writing, you’ve found that not boxing yourself into an outline is key to character development. Please explain how this works for you.

If I never surprise myself, how can I hope to surprise a reader? And if I sit down to do only what’s already planned out, when do I experience the joy of discovery, that galvanizing moment when the story takes a turn I didn’t foresee? Those are the moments I prize above all others. Not just in writing, but in life as well.

After the death of his wife and daughter in an automobile accident, main character Richard Brennan blames himself each day for having had too much to drink at dinner that night. He is convinced that, if he had been behind the wheel, instead of his wife, “everything that did happen wouldn’t have.” He begins to think of himself as a “lost man,” eventually realizing that he’s lost his motivation to work as a reporter. Meanwhile, life for Bogdan Baranowski, the driver of the other car, has become even more frayed as he deals with his guilt. What keeps them going as they begin to slowly carve out the roles that are left for them?

unmade world I believe each of them is stronger than he initially thinks is the aftermath of that tragedy. Richard is a naturally skilled writer, and those abilities, along with a lifetime of trying to do an honest job as a reporter, eventually re-involve him in life.

Baranowski’s problem is that he had a hard time handling the transition from a state-controlled economy to the free market model and his business failures left him desperate. They’ve both got some resilience, and I think both of them are ultimately decent people.

Baranowski comes to realize that, as he puts it, his companion Elena’s world had become “unmade” in respect to the mysteries of how people come together in meaningful relationships. Describe the notion of the “unmade world.”

Elena is from that part of the Ukraine that was devastated by the recent conflict. Like Richard, she’s lost most of those who matter. Yet she’s tough. She’s a survivor, and ultimately all of the people at the heart of this novel–Richard, the female reporter named Maria who helps him investigate a gruesome murder, Baranowski, his criminal partner Marek–they’re survivors.

The world is coming unmade all around us. Wars all over the lobe, people being run down on the street in New York, subjected to acid attacks in London, to drone attacks in Iraq. There’s not a lot of stability anywhere. We need to find it in ourselves.

There is a scene in the story in which Baranowski is challenged by the idea that telling his story, and not walking away from it, could bring redemption. What can we learn from this?

In the era of alternative facts? I think we could adhere to what my grandmother used to tell me: “Don’t try to make folks think you’re something you’re not.” As Americans, we cling to the myth of our own innocence. Poles, in my experience, are a lot more likely to own up. As you know, having read the novel, Baranowski finally meets someone whom he trusts enough to tell her what he did. And she helps him begin to live a better life.

For several characters, there is a thread throughout the story that suggests the relevance of a belief in God, i.e., how just being in church by yourself can build courage, and how faith can help soothe the inevitable pains of the human experience. Why did you include this as an important element in the story?

Well, I’m a believer. Always have been. But I’m not a churchgoer. Or to say this more precisely, I don’t go to church services.

But I go to church frequently, especially in Poland, where churches are open pretty much all the time and you can go in and sit down and meditate or say prayers of whatever. I find comfort there.

I think about those who have sat there before me, in a country that suffered so brutally in the Second World War and then survived another 45 years with the Soviet boot on its neck.

I have faith in the triumph of the human spirit, even now, and I have faith in those who seek to help people in need.

Throughout the story, the continuing description of Baranowski includes an unsightly facial mole that seems to define his appearance. Is it in any way a metaphor of his life situation and the hurts he has endured?

I’d say it could represent both the hurts he has endured and those he has inflicted on others. At the same time, I’m not an overtly symbolic writer. As Flannery O’Connor told us, the wooden leg in “Good Country People” is first and foremost a wooden leg. That mole is first and foremost a mole.

Are there future writing projects you can us about?

I just started a novel about a pair of sisters. It begins in the Delta in the mid-70s. Right now, that’s about all I know. I’m waiting for the story to tell me where it wants to go.

Steve Yarbrough will be at Lemuria tonight (Monday, January 29, at 5:00 to sign and read from The Unmade World.

Author Q & A with Jamie Quatro

By Guest Author

On January 22, 2018

In Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 21)

Jamie Quatro’s debut novel, Fire Sermon (Grove Atlantic), weaves a pensive tale of lust and desire that comes as an unexpected but surprisingly desirable consequence of an innocent exchange of digital messages between main characters Maggie (a writer) and James (a published poet whose work she admires).

The twist on the Nashville author’s story is that both parties are devoted spouses and parents who had no intention of ever finding themselves drawn into the daring–but undoubtedly pleasurable–relationship. And then there’s the matter of Maggie’s faith, which clearly disallows such behavior, and quickly adds tension to an already questionable turn of events.

As a fiction writer, Quatro said she doesn’t remember a time in her life when she wasn’t creating stories.

“In fact, I wrote my first story in second grade,” she said. “I only member this because my mom saved it. It was called ‘The Sad Day and the Happy Day.’ The sad day was when Sally’s mother told her it never snowed in teh desert on the border of Mexico, where they lived; happy day was when Sally woke to see snow covering the cacti. I suspect the story was heavily influenced by Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day.”

Today, Quatro’s fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in The New York Times Book Review, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, and others. Her stories have also appeared in teh 2017 Pushcart Prize Anthology, Ann Charters’s The Story and Its Writer, and in O. Henry Prize Stories 2013.

Her debut collection, I Want to Show You More (Grove Press), was a New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. I twas also chosen as a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2013; a New Yorker Favorite Book of 2013 and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Georgia Townsend Fiction Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.

A contributing editor for the Oxford American, Quatro teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program. She lives with her husband and four children in Lookout Mountain, Georgia.

An accomplished author, you are already known for your fiction, poetry, and essays. Fire Sermon is your debut novel. In what ways was it different from previous writing projects?

Jamie Quatro

I was under contract for a different novel and kept sneaking away to write sections of Fire Sermon. It was a delicious form of procrastination. I was sure I would never show anyone the pages. Once I reached page 100 or so, I told my agent about the cheating. She loved the pages and urged me to finish the book. I wrote the rest of it quickly, in a couple of months.

Fire Sermon is your first novel–one that’s sure to catch the attention of many readers. You’ve taken an age-old plot–two happily married people are drawn to other loves, and find themselves caught between their dual loves and their faith in God. Why this topic?

In my first book, there were six or seven stories about an almost-affair. I felt I’d only begun to scratch the surface of the infidelity theme. I hadn’t pushed as far as I’d wanted to, into the physical and spiritual. A professor in graduate school told me, once, that I needed to let my characters be messier–to do things on the hpage I would never do.

The main characters, Maggie and James, are unquestionably drawn to each other, and are amazed to discover their similarities…both are middle-aged writers, happily married for the same number of years, with the same number of children, and they even have 96-year-old grandmothers. How did this make the story more powerful?

The fact that James and Maggie have so much in common–even as Maggie has increasingly less in common with her husband–is in many ways the very appeal of the affair. The superficial commonalities mirror the much more significant intellectual, spiritual, and sexual bonds.

Your writing style is varied, to say the least–no quotation marks, no particular chronological order, conversations with an unnamed therapist, random journal entries, sometimes a stream of consciousness style of quickly firing strings of facts. Characters are referred to as “the husband,” “the wife,” “the daughter,” etc. How did you develop this approach?

The structure of the novel evolved over time, draft after draft. I think it has something to do with the desire to tell a story from multiple angles and time frames. Maybe a wish to escape the confines of linear time altogether. So rather than stringing beads along a thread, drafting felt more like rotating a cut diamond in the light, to watch the light reflect and refract from various facets.

What are the messages Maggie shares in her attempts at poetry?

The first time she sends poems (to James) she’s hoping for feedback–hoping, too, that James won’t think the poems are bunk. The second time the poems are more erotic. I suppose you could say she’s using them to draw James in.

After a few businesslike e-mail exchanges that begin when Maggie contacts James to praise his new book of poetry, the flirtations in their messages soon grow bolder and bolder, encouraged initially by him, but with Maggie’s immediate complicity. It becomes a relationship that will haunt them forever, as it tries Maggie’s Christian faith. Why did you choose to include the element of faith into this story?

When an act is forbidden, it often becomes more enticing. In this case, the religious rules against adultery heightens the thrill of breaking that rule. It also magnifies the subsequent guilt Maggie feels. How to lose the guilt but keep the erotic thrill alive somewhere inside–this becomes Maggie’s psychological and spiritual struggle.

As Maggie watches her 21-year-old daughter growing into an accomplished young woman, she realizes that her children are “the reason for [her] existence.” Is this a reflection on the state of her marriage and her split loyalties, or one you believe is shared by most mothers at this stage of life?

I can’t speak for other mothers, but I certainly don’t see my children as the reason for my existence. As they’ve grown, I’ve felt more and more like the person I was before having children. There’s something sad and lonely about Maggie’s statement. It’s probably more a reflection of the state of her mind and marriage than it is a universal feeling.

Please explain the title “Fire Sermon.” Certainly, it was a “sermon” Maggie had needed to say out loud for a long time.

The title comes from the Adittapariyaya Sutta–the Fire Sermon–in the Buddhist Pali Canon. It was one of the first sermons the Buddha gave after his enlightenment. T.S. Eliot, of course, also used it as a section title in “The Waste Land,” in which he references St. Augustine’s Confessions, and links the Buddhist Fire Sermon to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. So, the title references two ways of dealing with yearning and desire, Eastern and Western: confession and repentance, or recognition that burning is the result of attachment and illusion. The dialogue between Eastern and Western modes of thought is a thread throughout the novel.

Do you have other writing projects in the works?

I’m working on another novel and have almost finished a new story collection.

Jamie Quatro will be at Lemuria on Thursday, January 25, at 5:00 p.m. to sign copies of Fire Sermon and read from the book at 5:30 p.m. Fire Sermon is Lemuria’s January 2018 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Karen L. Cox

By Guest Author

On January 16, 2018

In Civil Rights, Southern History, True Crime

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 7)

Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South (University of North Carolina Press) uncovers the details of what came to be the highly sensationalized case of the 1932 murder of Jennie Merrill, a wealthy white Natchez woman who was killed during an attempted robbery of her antebellum home.

goat castle The book, which documents the obvious racial injustice with which the case was handled by local officials, gained national attention because of the eccentric lifestyle of initial suspects Richard Dana and Octavia Dockery, who lived in a decaying antebellum home overrun with crumbling furnishings, pervasive filth–and a pen of goats, among many other animals.

Emily Burns, an African-American domestic worker and Natchez resident who unwillingly found herself at the scene of the crime, was unjustly tried and convicted of the murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment at Parchman Penitentiary.

It was award-winning author Karen L. Cox, a history professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who came across the story when she was conducting research for another book at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson.

Karen L. Cox

A native of West Virginia, Cox said her ties to Mississippi go back to when she first arrived in Hattiesburg to pursue her doctorate degree at the University of Southern Mississippi in 1991.

“There’s hardly been a year that I haven’t been back to the state to work on a research project,” she said. “After writing Goat Castle, I fell in love with Natchez and made good friends there.”

Cox, who teaches courses in American history and culture, also authored Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, which won the Southern Association for Women Historians’ Julia Cherry Spruhill Prize; and Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. She is also editor of Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History.

As a distinguished historian widely recognized for her knowledge of the American South, Cox has written op-eds for The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Huffington Post, and she has been interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other American newspapers, as well as papers in Germany, Denmark, Ireland, and Japan. She has also appeared on numerous television news outlets around the country, as well as the BBC.

How did you learn about this case, and why did you decide to write this book about it?

I learned about this case while working in the State Archives in Jackson. I was researching a previous book, which included the tourism generated by the Natchez Pilgrimage, when Clinton Bagley–a longtime historian/librarian at the Archives–told me that I should be looking at Goat Castle. As soon as I learned the barest of information on the story, I instinctively knew I’d write this book. It has so many layers to it and the “characters” are real. The truth is really stranger than fiction.

The investigation after the crime revealed that Dana and Dockery, white neighbors of Merrill’s, had plotted with George Pearls, an African-American, to rob Merrill’s home. But things wen terribly wrong, and Merrill was shot during the attempted robbery. After Pears was soon killed by an Arkansas policeman for an unrelated incident, an innocent black woman, Emily Burns, would ultimately be charged with the murder and imprisoned. The book states that the murder had become national news within less than 48 hours. Why was this?

Why it became national headlines so swiftly had to do with Jennie Merrill’s status as a descendant of planter aristocracy and being the daughter of Ayres Merrill, Jr., who was the former Belgian ambassador. Yet, within a week the story became less about her death and more about her eccentric neighbors, Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery. They, too, were from elite Southern families, but in 1932 lived in absolute squalor at their home Glenwood, which the press nicknamed “Goat Castle” since the pair kept a pen of goats inside the house.

The news coverage after the murder seems to have focused much more on the strange, eccentric lifestyle of Dockery and Dana than it did on the fact that a murder had been committed and Burns’ future was at stake. Please describe the public’s obsession with “Goat Woman” and “Wild Man,” and the press’s fascination with keeping the story focused on their “Old South” heritage–even as Burns remained in prison.

In addition to the squalor, the press nicknamed Dick Dana the “Wild Man” and, it seems, needed to give one to Octavia Dockery as well. She became the “Goat Woman.” The press was obsessed with what it saw as the decline of the Old South as seen in the lives of Dana and Dockery–the shocking contrast between the grandeur of the Old South and what appeared to be a Gothic novel come to life. This obsession resulted in a tourist trade to go to Natchez to see the house and the odd couple who lived there. It should be no surprise that little attention was paid to Emily Burns, a black domestic. Jim Crow justice meant that she was assumed to be guilty.

This book is well-documented, with 20 pages of notes. It seems that the research must have been painstaking, as you include a great deal of description about the city of Natchez, its crumbling antebellum homes at that time–and, just 70 years after the Civil War had ended, the mindset of the descendants of those who had fought in the Civil War and those who had been enslaved. How did you approach the research for this material, and how long did it take?

The timeline of the research looks like it took me five years (2012-2017), but it’s important to note that as a professor of history, I am also teaching classes, grading papers, going to meetings, etc. So, I’d have to plan research trips to Jackson, Natchez, and even Baton Rouge–a week here and a week there. Fortunately, I had a sabbatical that allowed me to write full time beginning in the fall of 2015. I wrote the book in about seven months. It went through a few months of editing and then was submitted in 2016. It takes about a year after submission for a book to come out.

Please describe the run and filth that Dockery and Dana lived in–along with ducks, geese, chickens, cats, dogs, and of course, the goats–and explain how they actually profited off of their eccentric lifestyle.

I’d rather that people read the book for those descriptions. They profited off of their notoriety by selling tickets to tour the grounds. There was a second charge to enter the house, where Dick Dana played piano. The pair also went on a tour of towns in Mississippi and Louisiana and appeared on stage as the “Wild Man” and “Goat Woman” of Goat Castle.

The city of Natchez was not fond of the publicity brought on by the trial at that time, but it was a boon for tourism.

How did the city deal with this circus of a crime story invading it on a national scale?

It’s not clear how the city of Natchez dealt with it. Certainly, local restaurants benefited. People would also tour other houses while in Natchez. On the one hand, there was profit to be made. On the other, it had become an embarrassment. So, the best way to deal with it was not to talk about it publicly.

What can we learn today from this story of criminal injustice 85 years ago–as a state and as a nation?

What is evident in this story is that the double standard of justice that sent an innocent black woman to prison still exists. Octavia Dockery’s fingerprints were found inside of Merrill’s home, not Burns’. Yet Dockery got to go home. Also, 85 years late, it’s still true that the majority of women sent to prison are women of color, especially African-American and Hispanic women.

Do you have other writing projects in mind that you can share with us?

I’m still trying to figure that out. Goat Castle only came out in October and I’ve still got book events coming up. I’ll be back in Natchez in February for the Literary and Cinema Celebration, which will be focused on Southern Gothic. I’m also going to be in New Orleans in march for the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. My guess is that my next project will include Mississippi, as all of my books have done.

Author Q & A with Philip Stead

By Guest Author

On January 2, 2018

In Oz: Children's Books, Oz: Middle Grade

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (December 24)

Award-winning children’s book author and illustrator Philip Stead has the unique honor of being the only person alive today who can claim the title of “co-author” to a Mark Twain tale.

LIke most things associated with Twain, who died in 1910, the story of how that came about is, well, an interesting story.

But first things first. Before his collaboration with Twain on the newly released The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine, Stead and his artist wife Erin Stead claimed a Caldecott Medal, along with the titles of New York Times Best Illustrated Book of 2010 and a Publishers Weekly Best Children’s Book of 2010, for their book A Sick Day for Amos McGee.

Together the couple also created Bear Has a Story to Tell, an E.B. White Read-Aloud Award honor book and, among others, Lenny and Lucy. As an artist as well as author himself, Stead has written and illustrated several books, including his debut, Creamed Tuna Fish and Peas on Toast.

The husband and wife team met in a high school art class, “and from the very first days, we planned on making books together,” Stead said.

steads

Today, they live and work in northern Michigan, along with their dog, Wednesday, and their 5-month-old daughter, Adelaide.

How did the idea for this book come to be–it’s quite unusual!

The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine began as a story told by Mark Twain to his tow young daughters in the year 1879. Twain probably told countless stories to his children, but this is presumed to be the only time he committed notes for one of these stories to paper.

In 2011, the notes were discovered at the Mark Twain Archive in Berkeley, California. They were unearthed by a scholar who was doing research for a Mark Twain cookbook. He opened a folder labeled “Oleomargarine” expecting to find something food-related and instead discovered 16 pages of handwritten notes for a children’s story begun but never finished. Eureka!

How was it that you were chosen to write this book?

Honestly, I wish I knew! Probably there were others before us who were smart enough to say, “thanks, but no thanks.” But seriously, my best guess is that Erin’s artwork gave our editor confidence that maybe we could do this. Erin’s work is often described as old-fashioned. In an increasingly digital world, Erin has stuck with traditional techniques like woodblock printing and pencil drawing, both of which were around in Twain’s day. One challenge with this book was how to bridge the divide from 1879 to 2017. I think Erin’s art style helps bridge that gap.

Please give me a brief description of the story line, including the main characters. (Your technique of serving as the narrator for your own story, and holding conversations with Mark Twain, was great!)

olemargarine Johnny, a poor, kind, young boy, is forced one day by his cruel grandfather to sell his pet chicken at the market. In doing so, he unexpectedly comes into possession of some magical seeds. From the seeds grow a flower, and upon eating the flower, Johnny is granted the ability to speak with animals. Led by a skunk named Susy, Johnny and all the animals in the land set out on a quest to rescue a stolen prince, and with some luck, perhaps cross paths with a familiar chicken.

Generally, where did Twain’s notes on this book end, and where did you take up the story?

Twain’s notes end at the mouth of a dark cave where, presumably, Prince Oleomargarine is being held by giants. Twain’s final words are: “It is guarded by two mighty dragons who never sleep.” So, Twain was very close to an ending already.

What we discovered was that the ending was not really the missing piece. The missing piece was the beginning. Twain’s notes begin abruptly with: “Widow, dying, gives seeds to Johnny–got them from an old woman once to whom she had been kind.” That’s certainly a nice place to begin, but Twain left us with nothing about the character of Johnny–who he was and why we ought to love him.

Some characters in the book were created by Erin and me to address this problem. The most notable additions are probably the cruel grandfather and Johnny’s luckless pet chicken, Pestilence and Famine. The name Pestilence and Famine, by the way, comes from a piece of Clemens family history. The Clemens family had many household cats with peculiar names. There was a cat named Sour Mash, and Satan, and my personal favorite, Pestilence and Famine.

What inspired the direction you decided to take in finishing this tale?

The book became a story within a story. First, there is the story of Johnny, and Susy, and Prince Oleomargarine. But then there is the story of Mark Twain and myself, sitting together at a secluded cabin, arguing over the direction of the story itself. These conversations between Twain and me came about because of a problem I encountered early on. The problem was that every now and then I wanted to deviate from Twain’s notes. It didn’t seem right, though, to make changes without giving Twain a say in the matter. The easiest and most fun solution to this problem was to make Twain (and myself) a character in the book.

Tell me about the artwork Erin produced for this book. How does it help to convey your own “vision” for this story?

Erin’s artwork is rendered in woodblock printing and pencil drawing. The colors are muted and atmospheric. In many ways, Erin became a third author for this story. So many choices were left completely up to her. It was never just a matter of executing my, or Twain’s, vision.

For example, the setting is all Erin’s. Oleomargarine is a fairy tale, but it is not a European fairy tale. It is American through and through. Erin wanted the setting to reflect that. She also wanted the setting to exist somewhere in time between Twain’s day and our own. So, having given herself those two guidelines, she settled on a world reminiscent of the American dust bowl–a perfect setting for her naturally dusty, airy, and melancholy artwork.

For what ages is this book most appropriate?

twain1 This story began as a piece of oral tradition. It was as a story told out loud, maybe over the course of several nights by an adult to children. I would hope the finished book is used in much the same way. While the language might be difficult for a child under the age of 9 or 10, I believe that children of all ages will be able to appreciate the story–its rhythm, its humor, and its message–especially when told directly to them by a parent, or grandparent, or some other important adult figure in their life.

In what ways did you find it most challenging to complete the task of finishing Twain’s story, and on the flip side, what did you enjoy most about tackling this project?

The most challenging thing about this book was also the most rewarding. For me, the real work and the real joy was in finding Twain’s voice. Twain left notes for almost every element of plot, but he left very little finished prose. Because of that, I had to really immerse myself in Twain’s other works, sometimes listening to Twain’s writing as if it were music. Because of that, there is a little bit of Twain inside of me now forever.

Tag: Author Interview (Page 11 of 14)

Author Q & A with Malcolm White

Author Q & A with Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington

Author Q & A: Hidden History of Jackson

Author Q & A (Telling Our Stories)

Author Q & A with Ann Fisher-Wirth

Author Q & A with Nathaniel Rich

Author Q & A with Steve Yarbrough

Author Q & A with Jamie Quatro

Author Q & A with Karen L. Cox

Author Q & A with Philip Stead

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