Author Interview – Page 4

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Author Q & A with Mamta Chaudhry

On June 30, 2019

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 30)

Mamta Chaudhry’s busy career has taken her from TV and radio stints to published fiction, poetry and feature writing, and with the release of her debut book, Haunting Paris, she happily adds the label of “novelist” to her achievements.

Chaudhry’s work has appeared in the Miami Review, The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Telegraph, The Statesman, Writer’s Digest, and The Rotarian, among others.

A native of Calcutta, India, she and her husband now live in Coral Gables, Fla. They enjoy spending part of each year in India and France.

Since this is your debut novel, please tell me a little about yourself–where did you grow up, your education, what brought you to Florida, family info, and what drew your interest in writing–whatever you would like to include.

Mamta Chaudhry

Even as a child, I always had my nose in a book, and pretty early on I also always had ink stains on my fingers, because I knew that I wanted to write books as well as read them. Fortunately for me, Calcutta–where I was born and brought up–is a book-loving city, with libraries, bookshops, and bookstalls everywhere.

After I graduated from Loreto College, I came to the States for a master’s degree in Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida. I met my husband in one of my classes, and among the many things that attracted me to Daniel is that he loves to read.

For many years, I worked in classical radio as an on-air host and programmer. Because I’m from India, people were always surprised to hear that I was a “deejay,” not a doctor. After I got my doctorate at the University of Miami, I now just nod when people ask if I’m a doctor–without adding I’m a doctor of English. Books also cure a lot of what ails the world.

Haunting Paris is your first novel, and it is packed with details about the city of Paris in its bicentennial year of 1989 (when the story takes place); and the events that unfolded in the city during World War II. How did you become interested in Paris, specifically during these two time periods?

When I start writing, I seldom set out with a place and time in mind. I’m usually transfixed by an image, or an overheard snatch of conversation, and then follow that wherever it takes me. I’ve been in love with Paris for a very long time, and when I began Haunting Paris, I quickly discovered that just as the City of Light has its own dark shadows, so France also sometimes falls short of its tripartite promise of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (Freedom, Equality, Fraternity). It seemed natural to link the bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution, where that inspiring motto originated, with a time when that promise was broken. So, 1989 and 1942 became two of the anchoring dates for the story.

The book focuses on the love story between main characters Julien (a married, Jewish psychiatrist) and Sylvie, (a pianist who is 24 years his junior and stirs him to reconsider his priorities in life). What brings these two together, and what makes their love “work” in this story?

What makes love work between any two people is one of the great mysteries of life. As Sylvie herself reflects, other people’s marriages are unknowable to outsiders. But it’s clear that despite his best intentions, Julien falls in love with Sylvie precisely because of what he feels is missing in his “perfect” marriage: her compassion and her courage. And one of the things that brings them together, time and again, is their shared love of music.

It was after Julien’s death that he becomes a “revenant” who watches over Sylvie. Explain the meaning of that word, especially as it relates to his role in this story.

Behind the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, just beside the Seine, is an underground memorial to those who were deported during the dark days of the Nazi occupation of the city. On the floor, a bronze circle is chiseled with the words: “They went to the other end of the earth and they did not return.”

The end of the earth, the final threshold from which the absent never return. Or do they? My hair rose as I recalled the French word for ghost: revenant, one who returns. So, this is a ghost story, but the ghost is not frightening at all; on the contrary, he is drawn back by love.

Sylvie grieves deeply after Julien’s death, but eventually begins to put her life back together after she finds a mysterious letter in his private desk. Could you give readers a brief explanation of what she finds in that desk and how it helps her deal with her loss?

When Sylvie accidentally dislodges some papers hidden in a secret drawer, at first she is reluctant to follow up the discovery and also hurt that Julien has concealed something from her.

There’s something so mysterious, so uncanny, when you come across a secret–a letter in this instance–that is not meant for your eyes, and the only person you can ask about it can no longer speak to you. But then she wonders if she was meant to find it, and that fateful discovery sets her off on a quest that leads her deep into the secrets of Julien’s past and sheds new light on his character and on the city they both called home.

What is your next writing project that readers can look forward to?

I’m working on another novel and I can’t tell what it is until it’s finished, except to say that once again I’m transfixed by certain images and certain voices, and they are leading me to a completely different time and place from Haunting Paris.

Signed copies of Haunting Paris are still available at Lemuria’s online store.

Author Q & A with Chanelle Benz

By Guest Author

On June 23, 2019

In Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 23)

Born in London and growing up in points around the U.S., Chanelle Benz wound up discovering the Mississippi Delta–which would become the setting for her new novel The Gone Dead–when her husband’s educational path brought them to the University of Southern Mississippi for his studies.

In this evocative story of a young woman who returns to the Delta to answer questions about her past, Benz takes readers inside the unexpected darkness that drew main character Billie James back to her hometown, even as she finds her life in danger.

Benz’s short stories in have appeared in Guernica, Granta, Electric Literature, The American Reader, Fence and The Cupboard; and she is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. Her story collection The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead was named a Best Book of 2017 by the San Francisco Chronicle and was longlisted for the 2018 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Story Prize.

She earned a BFA in acting from Boston University and a master’s in creative writing from Syracuse University. Today she lives in Memphis where she teaches at Rhodes College.

Please tell me about your connection to Mississippi and your time exploring the state. How did this experience inform your depiction of your Southern characters, the fictional town of Greendale and the historical events behind The Gone Dead?

Chanelle Benz

I lived for almost two years in Hattiesburg, where my husband was getting his PhD. Whenever I was feeling restless, I would drive out to whatever town with any sort of interesting history: Clarksdale, Natchez, Vicksburg, Greenwood, Glendora, Yazoo City, Money, Oxford. I kept being drawn back to the Delta and its lush, wounded, storied landscapes. Being there, I understood this country in a way I never had before. How intimately the ache of our racial past is bound up in the present moment. This is a country founded on, built on slavery, and without a true reckoning of that brutal legacy there can be no true reconciliation. I was also surprised by the people I encountered–their rootedness, deep devotion to family, their sense of gratitude and faith, and of course, the master storytellers.

When I think about the haunted quality of the Delta, I think about voices in the air: the longing of the blues, civil rights era speeches, the voices within and calling across the racial and economic disparity. But most of all I was haunted by the voices that have been omitted, forgotten, or silenced, by the long list of names of civil rights era murders whose families have never had anything approaching justice or acknowledgement, although in many cases they know who did it. For so long those families have suffered under that loss and indignity, while the perpetrators and their families have controlled the narrative.

The main character of The Gone Dead is 34 (turning 35)-year-old Billie, who returns to the Mississippi Delta from Philadelphia, Pa., to search for answers about her poet father’s death 30 years previous. She was the only child of her white mother and black father, both activists, and both now deceased. During her short stay in Greendale, she reconnects with extended family and experiences flashes of happy memories, along with suspicion, fear, racism, violence, and more than a few surprises, including an unexpected romance. Why is she on this mission now, and why is it so important to her?

Ever since I was a little girl, it was a joke that whenever someone had been looking for my Great Aunt Aggie back in Ireland, they would say to my grandmother, “Go and get your sister Aggie before she throws herself in the river.” Or some other act equally as suicidal. As an adult, I thought wait a minute—what the hell is wrong with Aggie and why is everyone so cavalier about her deep depression? There’s a story there.

Being back in her father’s house as an adult, Billie realizes what a fragmentary and inadequate story she’s been told about what happened to her father–and herself–during that early but consequential part of her childhood.

The mix of characters in The Gone Dead creates a “perfect storm” of puzzle pieces that both taunt and support Billie as she unravels the truth of what really happened to her father. These include a scholar, a land owner, a love interest, a former Klan member, a mother who devoted her intellectual pursuits to medieval studies, a former girlfriend of her father’s (while he was married to her mother), a lovable dog–and an uncle with way too many secrets. How did you develop so many rich characters while threading the details of this story together?

I don’t think that the book really came together until I realized that it wasn’t just Billie’s story, that it was communal, and there are things which she as outsider will never know and only these other voices can tell us. Most of us like to think that we are or would be on the right side of history, but the truth is that in another time under another set of circumstances, we might not. I wanted to overturn my initial biases about who some of these characters might be, where their voices were coming from, and try to channel the story they are telling themselves about themselves that lets them do what they did.

Much of your previous writing (short stories) has included story plots set in a considerable variety of places and times. Do you find it difficult to embrace so many different cultures and time periods to present such a wide range of narratives? And does your training and talent in both acting and writing merge here to make this task easier?

It’s what I like to do best. In acting, you’re taught that it’s all within you, you just have to find that splinter and enlarge it. I love research, I love history, and I’m interested in counter-narratives. I am not particularly interested in writing about myself or my life. Typically, I like to begin far from myself, in worlds I’m curious about, though inevitably my own preoccupations show up.

Did you find things about Mississippi and its people during your stay here that you found encouraging?

Well, there were times in Mississippi where I felt claustrophobic and worn down witnessing the oppressive systems and stagnation that traps people in poverty, and times when I felt humbled by and in awe of the richness of its literary culture, and the intrepid generosity and resilience of so many of its people.

For me, what this country has tried to deny or forget is pretty visible in Mississippi–the pernicious mythology of the Lost Cause, the white backlash after Reconstruction and desegregation, what bodies carry when they do not get to heal from inter-generational trauma–things that are true in every other state but in Mississippi are more out in the open.

But if you believe in redemption or miracles or positive change, it has happened in Mississippi, brought about by Mississippians with everything to lose, and maybe it is the epicenter of where it will happen again.

Any chance you may have other stories set in Mississippi?

Of course–I have so much more to learn.

Chanelle Benz will appear as a panelist at the Mississippi Book Festival on the grounds of the State Capitol in Jackson on August 17.

Author Q & A with Tammy L. Turner

By Guest Author

On June 16, 2019

In Biography/Memoir, Blues, Music

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 16)

It was about a decade after music professor Tammy L. Turner met blues promoter/producer Dick Waterman in a class at Ole Miss that she came to realize “he had an important story that needed to be told,” and she has captured his extraordinary career in the memoir, Dick Waterman: A Life in the Blues (University Press of Mississippi).

Born in 1935 into an affluent Jewish family in Massachusetts, Waterman began his career in the 1950s as a journalist, honing his skills as a writer and photographer. It was his interest in the folk music of Greenwich Village and Cambridge in the 1960s that would lead him to a position as a music promoter in Boston, which eventually brought him to his “calling in life” with his pursuit of Mississippi Delta Blues artist Son House.

Waterman’s significant influence on decades of American music became evident in the careers of many big names in the music industry, in a variety of genres. Today he lives in Oxford, retired but “still busy.”

Turner resides in Kentucky, where she teaches a variety of university courses in music history. She is especially interested in 20th century music, including blues, jazz, rock, and classical music.

You hold a doctoral degree in music history from the University of Mississippi. Tell me about how you became interested in music–specifically blues music, and Dick Waterman in particular.

I had little exposure to blues music until I took Dr. Warren Steel’s African American musical traditions class at Ole Miss. It was in this class that I also met Dick. He was a guest at one of our class meetings and brought with him a number of his iconic black and white photographs from the 1960s, including a number of the early blues artists with whom he had worked.

Your research for this book is evident in the details, conversations, and interviews you reveal. How long have you known Waterman, and when did you realize his story should be published as a book?

Tammy Turner

Although I met Dick over two decades ago when he was a guest in our class, I did not have an opportunity to converse with him that day. I had classes of my own to teach and left immediately after the class ended. I graduated with my degree a couple of years later and moved away from Oxford.

As I continued my university teaching career, I eventually taught courses in both jazz and rock ‘n’ roll history. Blues music is a component in both courses, so I began to study blues more intently. I remembered Dick and his photos and, over the years, regretted missing such an excellent opportunity to talk with him about his work. In 2011, I traveled to Mississippi to do some blues research and was able to reconnect with him and we spent a delightful afternoon discussing his career.

Through a series of events, I helped arrange a photo exhibition and lecture for him in western Kentucky, where I reside. I enjoyed working with him and felt he had an important story that needed to be told. I approached him with the idea, and, after some consideration, he was amenable to the idea and granted me full access to the details of his life and his archives.

Waterman’s career in blues really began with his journey with Nick Perls and Phil Spiro into the Mississippi Delta in 1964 at the height of the Civil Rights movement to find bluesman Son House, who had faded into obscurity two decades prior. What did this lead to?

They found House, but not in Mississippi. Through contacts they made in Mississippi, they learned he was living in Rochester and drove there to meet him. In meeting House, Dick found a mission. It was in finding Son House that he found his calling and began his career in blues booking and management.

What would you say Waterman accomplished in the blues world (and other music genres)?

Dick played such a critical role in 20th century blues history. He was one of the three men who rediscovered Son House. Due to his tireless efforts, House came out of retirement for approximately 10 years and recorded an album with Columbia Records.

In June 1965, Dick founded Avalon Productions, which was the only agency at the time devoted solely to representing African American blues artists. He helped book some of the most important blues festivals of the 1960s and ‘70s, including the 1969 and 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festivals, and he helped establish others.

He worked with several older bluesmen to reignite their careers, including Mississippi Fred McDowell, Skip James, Robert Pete Williams as well as others. He discovered a young singer/guitarist named Bonnie Raitt and assisted her career. He also convinced Buddy Guy to leave his day job as a mechanic in Chicago to pursue music as a full-time career. Musicians trusted him to handle their careers because he earned a reputation for honesty and integrity.

Waterman has left his mark on America’s musical history as a promoter and manager for artists who included many big blues names–and some of the biggest rock and other performers in the world, including James Taylor, Bruce Springsteen, and many others. What would you say drove him, and continues to drive him, to become such an important influencer in American music?

Dick inherited a tremendous work ethic from his father, who was a medical doctor. He also has a staunch sense of fairness and both a willingness and determination to advocate for others, especially those who are not in a position to advocate for themselves. It was never his goal to become famous, but to protect the older blues artists from exploitation, to demand competitive compensation for their work, and fight for royalties that some of them were being denied.

Today, Waterman lives in Oxford, where he moved in the mid-‘80s. What is he doing today?

Dick is retired, but still active. After a few decades away from photography, he returned to photographing musicians in the 1990s. In 2003 he published a book of his most iconic works titled Between Midnight and Day: The Last Unpublished Blues Archives and in 2006 wrote the text for The B.B. King Treasures book. He sells his photos, both new and old, at his website dickwaterman.com. He still receives requests for photo exhibitions/lectures and as a guest speaker discussing his work in the blues at various events and classes.

Tammy Tuner will be at Lemuria on Saturday, June 22, at 2:00 p.m. to sign copies of Dick Waterman: A Life in Blues.

Author Q & A with Wright Thompson

By Guest Author

On June 9, 2019

In Sports

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 9)

Oxford resident and ESPN Magazine senior writer Wright Thompson shares 14 essays (chosen from years of examining the inner lives of sports figures) in his new book The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business.

But Thompson doesn’t just “cover sports.” His is more a literary style that frames the athletes he writes about in a light most have never seen cast on these figures: the struggles, the hopes, the disappointments, and oftentimes the personal failures of men and women who know firsthand the high cost required to make it to the top – and attempt to stay there. Included are the stories of Michael Jordan, Bear Bryant, Ted Williams, and others who know the pain and joy of success in sports at its highest levels. Thompson ends the book with a memoir of his late father and his personal longings to honor his dad’s memory.

The Clarksdale native began writing about sports for his hometown newspaper while in high school, and he went on to the University of Missouri in Columbia to study journalism. Wright would write for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans and The Kansas City Star (where he covered Super Bowls, Final Fours, The Masters and the Kentucky Derby) before joining the ESPN staff in 2006.

Tell me about how you became interested in sports and sports writing, especially “literary” sports writing.

Wright Thompson

I became interested in sports because both my mother, Mary, and my father, Walter, loved sports; they both loved football and my mom is obsessed with basketball. For her last big milestone birthday, I took her to games one through four of the NBA Finals.

I became interested in literature because my mother was an English and creative writing teacher and because I grew up in a house filled with books. We had a room in our house we called the library because it was floor to ceiling bookshelves, and I lived on those shelves. I read Dylan Thomas and Thomas Merton and C.S. Lewis and Willie Morris and on and on and on. My working life started in that front room with the great light through the old glass windows.

The Cost of These Dreams is a compilation of 14 essays you’ve written during your career with ESPN Magazine. Please tell me how the book came about, and why.

The short answer is that I wanted to see how these separate pieces, often separated by years, fit together. The long answer has to do with money and ego. Let’s go with the short answer!

You’ve seen firsthand how fame has affected well-known athletes. What do believe is the biggest challenge they face as their popularity grows?

I would say that whether someone is famous (or not) has basically no bearing on their interior life, on their hopes and dreams, while their fame is the single most important and difficult-to- navigate part of their exterior life. This almost inevitably leads to a growing chasm between how they see themselves and how they are seen, and the real risk then is to avoid, as John Updike said, the mask eating the face.

You make an interesting statement in the book’s preface when you say you are using its platform to make a “public vow. . . that (you) will learn from the people (you are) writing about.” Please explain why it was important for you to announce that to your readers.

The main thing I wanted the preface to do was explain how these stories fit together, and what the journey of making them felt like from the inside. I get to spend a lot of time up close and personal with the most driven, successful people on the planet, and I see which of their decisions they are content with, and which ones haunt them; there is no excuse if I am not going to school on their successes and failures.

The last story in the book (titled “Holy Ground”) is an homage to your father and your relationship with him. Tell us about this piece.

It’s a story about my late father, Walter Thompson, from Bentonia. The specifics of the story are about our shared love of watching golf and my regrets over not understanding that time is limited and fleeting and slipping through our fingers every day.

I go to Bentonia sometimes, to see the house where he grew up, and visit the White Front; recently I walked the old football field where he used to play, which is now abandoned, and I tried to imagine a young man there, with his family in the stands, and standing on that grass I wondered what of that young man remains in this place and what lives inside me and what is gone forever. That’s what the story is about. That search.

Briefly, tell me about the thought-provoking title of your book.

It’s a lyric from a Drive-By Truckers song I really like, one that has always moved me more than the collection of words suggested it should. I don’t know why it hit me like that. To me, the title is about the shared price everyone who wants something desperately and at the expense of other things in their life will pay for that dream, should they be one of the rare lucky few to actually reach it.

Wright Thompson will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, June 18, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss The Cost of These Dreams.

Author Q & A with Michael Ford

By Guest Author

On June 2, 2019

In Photography, Southern Culture, Southern History

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 2)

Pennsylvania native Michael Ford will tell you that his “snap decision” nearly 50 years ago–to ditch a dream job offer in Massachusetts, uproot his family, and move to Oxford, Miss. to pursue a hunch–turned out to be the best decision he ever made, as he launched his dreams that would ignite a successful and fulfilling career.

Now a filmmaker in Washington, D.C., Ford’s photo essays in his new book North Mississippi Homeplace: Photographs and Folklife (University of Georgia Press) reveal his passionate reverence for the area he has come to call his “homeplace.”

The unique volume contains only two chapters: one about moving to rural Mississippi and living in Oxford from 1972 to 1975; and the other explaining what brought him back multiple times four decades later. It includes scores of color photos taken during both periods. Ford notes that all these images–taken decades apart–invariably settled into three main themes: the land, the light and the people.

The materials he recorded for the documentary film he produced during his Mississippi stay are now archived in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress as The Michael Ford Mississippi Collection.

During your first trip to visit in-laws in Oxford in December 1971, you made a quick decision to leave a secure teaching position at Boston’s Emerson College and move to Oxford with the idea of making a documentary film. Explain how this came about.

Michael Ford

I was working on my thesis film for my master’s program in film at Boston University. We had to design a master’s project and I had considered something about rural America, maybe in Vermont or New Hampshire.

When I began exploring the land (around the outskirts of Oxford) during that Christmas break, I had no reference for what I saw–the remoteness, the country shacks, the hogs’ legs hoisted in tree branches for gutting. I had studied (photography history) and I knew things like this shouldn’t exist in America anymore. I had done hard news for two years, and I knew there was a story here.

So, four months later, here I was, a Yankee, driving into Mississippi in an old VW bus with a peace sign on it and New York plates. I was just beginning to figure out that everyone might not like us so much. I began settling in with a deep immersion into the Mississippi hill country. I started reading Faulkner. I spent maybe six months driving and talking to people, getting a cold drink, and sometimes taking their pictures.

My number one anchor to the community was (Oxford blacksmith) Mr. (Morgan Randolph) Hall, who hired me as his apprentice. Number two was Hal Waldrip, who owned and ran an archaic general store in Chulahoma, Miss. He saw himself as one of the “keepers of the lore.” He told me, “I could fix this store up. I could add air conditioning and heat and clean it up. But it would lose some of the atmosphere.”

There were others–Doc Jones, who sold molasses at Waldrip’s store; AG Newson, who actually made the molasses with the help of his mules, Frank and Jake.
These were the people I found. They found me. They were important because they were all preserving this last flash of old times.

Tell me what you discovered about Mississippi–and yourself–as you began to capture the images in your book.

I had no idea this kind of life still existed in the U.S. anymore. I was making an independent documentary. You couldn’t make any preconceived ideas about where it was going. It designed itself. You can shape and interpret it, but you can’t invent it.

I realized that in a concrete sense when it came time to write it. It was the essence of the documentary–the experiences of the intuitive or spiritual side of life–that I wanted to share.

So, one of the things I had to learn as a documentarian was to shut up, that is, shut up the (analytical) left side of the brain, so the (creative) right side can do what it needs to do. I learned over the years that the best situation I could ask for was to shoot something and say, “I got it!” You just know. Words define a thing, but a photograph speaks for itself.

You write that your return visits to Mississippi in 2013-2015 were initially driven by nostalgia and curiosity. How did these trips of new discovery turn out?

What really sparked it were several things that came together at once. My grown daughter, who was a baby when we moved to Oxford, was insisting I do something with my film and audiotapes from Mississippi before I “croaked,” in her words; and technology had advanced to a point that I could do much of the work myself. That stuff had sat for 40 years in cans and boxes in my closets–not forgotten, but definitely ignored.

While reviewing old audio tapes, I listened to a recording of Mr. Hall talking to me. Out of nostalgia I Googled his name and (wound up getting) in touch with Andy Waller, an apprentice of Mr. Hall’s after I left Oxford. Andy had bought Mr. Hall out when he retired.

(That conversation) convinced me there was no doubt it was time to return . . . That was in April 2013. I’ve been back another half dozen times since then.

What I discovered was that it was different. The country people were gone, especially the older people. The sense of community had diminished. Today, even as far out as you can go in the country, you have can have a TV satellite and the internet. Having a place where people get together is difficult. There is not a downtown in most of these communities anymore.

The old way of life was mostly gone forever.

What did you ultimately learn from this whole unique experience, and how has it affected your life and career?

Two answers: one would be “everything.” It has affected everything. I lived where I’ve lived and done what I’ve done all because of it. I started my own film production company, Yellow Cat Productions, which I’ve had for 45 years. Maybe it taught me that I learned to take risks.

On our 1972 trip headed (from Massachusetts) to move to Mississippi, we stopped in New York and visited with (a friend). At that time, it felt in some ways like we were going to a land of darkness, chasing something I barely knew existed and wasn’t sure what to expect.

I told (my friend) that I wasn’t really sure why I should do this, and she said, “Why not?”

Everything changed at that instant. It was like I got it. I learned that when you look back, you see that it’s the single microseconds, not the big bangs, that change the course of a life.

I see the world in patterns, visually, and this is the way Mississippi works in my mind. Mississippi has a special place in this world.

Author Q & A with Julia Phillips

By Guest Author

On May 26, 2019

In Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 26)

As a Brooklyn native who spent her college years studying the Russian language and who has long been fascinated with true stories of crime and violence–especially those within an ethnic or gender context–writer Julia Phillips presents Disappearing Earth, her debut novel that describes in detail how the effects of one heart-wrenching crime touches an entire Russian community.

Phillips is a Fulbright scholar who holds a special interest in the Russian peninsula of Kamchatka. After visiting the sparsely populated and fiercely rugged (thanks to the ravages of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions) area, she decided this was “an ideal place to disappear.” The book describes the abduction of two young girls and the yearlong process of local strangers who, in their own ways, were all affected by the crime.

Today she’s back in Brooklyn, working on a new novel that she says will take place “a little closer to home.”

Since this is your debut book, please tell me a little bit about yourself.

Julia Phillips

Though I wrote this book about Russia, I’ve spent my whole life in pretty much the same area of the United States. When I was born, my family was living in Brooklyn, but we moved to New Jersey when I was four years old. I came back to New York City to go to college–I went to Barnard, a small women’s college that’s part of Columbia University–and have been here ever since.

All that time, I’ve dreamed of being a novelist. My short stories, essays, and articles have appeared in different literary magazines and outlets including The Atlantic and Slate. The first story I ever published was in a tiny online journal in 2009. This book coming out now, a decade later, is a dream come true.

The format of Disappearing Earth is unique in that it begins with the abduction of two young girls, with each chapter (beginning in August when the girls were taken) titled chronologically by the names of the 11 months in which the book takes place, ending the next July. Nearly every chapter introduces new characters who relate how this crime touches their lives. When you were first developing this book, is this how you originally planned to present the plot, and why?

Yes, this structure was very much the plan from the start. I’m an avid reader and watcher of missing-person stories like the ones on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but the stories that most excite me are those that show the relationships between individual acts and larger systems. I don’t want to hear only about a single perpetrator and victim–I want to know about the families, neighbors, witnesses, investigators, and politicians involved. How did this terrible thing happen? A person decided to hurt someone else, but who else knew about that decision? Who did or didn’t try to help the person who was hurt? Looking at that larger context can turn a shocking headline into a real, resonant experience that illuminates the power structures that surround us.

A situation like the one in this book, where two girls go missing for so long, doesn’t just involve one person. It reaches many. And so, I wanted Disappearing Earth to tell the story of a whole community affected by this one act. Every chapter focuses on a different woman in order to explore the ways violence comes into women’s lives, ranging from the rare and highly publicized, such as an abduction by a stranger, to the everyday and often ignored, such as a toxic relationship or a doctor’s appointment gone wrong. These different hurts echo each other, overlap, and end up connecting the characters in ways they never anticipated. Ultimately, their connections are the key to understanding this crime.

The book is set in the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia, an area not familiar to many of us, but a thought-provoking lesson in its long-held ethnic tensions. Tell me about your knowledge of and interest in this region, and why you chose it as your setting.

I studied the Russian language through college, and Kamchatka was always mentioned in our classes as a distant, magical place. It’s a remote volcanic peninsula cut off from mainland Russia. During the Soviet Union, no foreigners were allowed to go there, but since the Berlin Wall’s collapse, it’s become a global destination for adventure tourism. Socially, politically, geographically, Kamchatka is full of extremes. The more I learned about it, the more the region’s isolation, natural beauty, and dynamic history appealed. By the time I went to Kamchatka for over a year to write this book, I was convinced: this was the perfect setting for an enormous locked-room mystery.

Tell me about the title of the book. There are a few references in the story about a “piece of earth that disappeared.” How does the phrase explain or reinforce the story?

When we first meet the two young girls who will go missing, one is telling the other the tale of a tsunami that swept a whole cliffside town off Kamchatka. Only a few pages later, these girls are also swept away by something out of their control. That tsunami story represents so much loss experienced in this novel: the girls are abducted; the women around them don’t trust their surroundings; the peninsula itself is risky, prone to earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions; the community is still reeling from the collapse of their entire nation in 1991. These characters are walking on unsteady ground. Anything and anyone might disappear next.

Without giving it away, can you tell why you chose the unique ending that wraps up the story? It’s a stirring departure from the style of the rest of Disappearing Earth.

In the year that follows the girls’ disappearance, this novel explores so many different characters. It was important to me that no matter where the narrative ranges, we maintain our connection to those two missing girls. We are invested with them in the start and we need to know what happened to them in the end. It wouldn’t feel right any other way.

After all, I wrote Disappearing Earth not only to investigate what violence and loss look like in a community but also to argue for that community’s ability to grow, find closure, and heal. All these people on Kamchatka are hurting because of this one crime. Chapter by chapter, they connect to each other, seeking answers. Those links are meaningful to the characters, as they help each other through their daily lives, and to us readers, as we wish for the girls’ abduction to be solved. My hope is that the book’s ending affirms the importance of those connections and gives us all the satisfaction we were looking for.

Julia Phillips will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, May 29, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Disappearing Earth. Lemuria has chosen Disappearing Earth as its June 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Barry Gifford

By Guest Author

On May 19, 2019

In Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 19)

Chicago native Barry Gifford began writing at age 11 – partly because his childhood (mostly spent living in hotels around the country, including the old Heidelberg in Jackson) offered up a constant cast of “characters” with their own endless stories to tell.

His long career has included more than 40 works of everything from poetry to fiction, nonfiction and screenplays–in addition to journalistic writing.
Gifford’s latest pair of readers include cozy “reruns” of familiar stories that have been reformatted to make it easier for old and new fans to binge-read some of his best work at a relaxed pace.

Southern Nights offers up a Southern Gothic trilogy while Sailor and Lula: Expanded Edition places all eight installments of this couple’s romance and adventures in one laid-back volume.

“My sense of narrative really came from watching late night black and white films on television and growing up in hotels, mostly among adults,” Gifford said. “I was able to listen to all of their stories, make up my own and absorb a variety of dialects. Moving around added to the mix. Being in the company of my father’s friends, most of whom had dubious occupations, served to supply the intrigue.”

His works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, La Nouvelle Revue Française, El País, La Republica, Rolling Stone, Film Comment, El Universal, and the New York Times. He has received awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, the Writers Guild of America, and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation.

His film credits include Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango, Lost Highway, City of Ghosts, Ball Lightning, and The Phantom Father. He has also written librettos for operas composed by Toru Takemitsu, Ichiro Nodaira, and Olga Neuwirth.

Today Gifford lives in California.

Below, he shares comments about his newest releases.

Tell me about your dichotomous growing-up years [living in both the “Deep South” (and including here in Jackson) and in the “Far North,” a.k.a. Chicago] and how this has influenced your writing through the decades.

Barry Gifford

I was born in Chicago and moved to Key West, Fla., with my mother before I was a year old. She had health problems and was advised to live in milder climate. My father kept an apartment in the Hotel Nacional in Havana, so we visited him there.

Later I spent time in Tampa with an uncle who lived there; then my mother, after she divorced my father, had boyfriends in New Orleans and Jackson, so we spent time there and in Chicago, where I went to high school.

We lived mostly in hotels, including the old Heidelberg Hotel in Jackson.

Your recently released Southern Nights trilogy is a package of your Southern Gothic novels Night People, Arise and Walk, and Baby Cat-Face–packed with humor and drama lived out in a strange and straightforward sense of reality. When were each of these novels originally published, and how do their stories still apply to American culture today?

The Southern Nights trilogy was published as separate novels during the 1990s. They deal in an often satirical but deadly serious way with racism and fundamentalist religion. They’re tough, funny, and often violent, just like America.

Sailor and Lula: Expanded Edition is your newest release and contains every Sailor and Lula novel in the collection, including the eighth and last one, The Up-Down. How can you explain the enduring likability of these characters, despite their flaws, among your readers?

Sailor and Lula have been described as the Romeo and Juliet of the Deep South. I hope people keep reading about them as long as they keep reading Shakespeare.

You’ve had a long and incredibly successful career as a writer in several different genres (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, screen writing) and have developed a loyal following through the years. What do you think has continued to draw readers to your work?

I write in different forms about what interests me and never talk down to the reader. I like to think that, once in a while, I come close to telling the truth.

What can readers expect to see in future Barry Gifford works?

It’s possible that Sailor and Lula may be appearing soon in a TV series, with which I may have something to do. And I’ve got a novel-in-progress about Cassie Angola, a young African-American woman who appears as a little girl in the last of the Sailor and Lula novels, The Up-Down. Ask me this question again after I finish it!

I see that your current book tour includes just a handful of cities. I know you spent some of your childhood in Jackson, but you spent parts of your childhood in lots of places! How did Jackson make that limited list?

I’ve known (Lemuria Book store owner) John Evans for close to 30 years, and . . . for me, he represents the best of Jackson. Lemuria Books is a treasure.

Barry Gifford will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, May 22, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Southern Nights and Sailor and Lula: Expanded Edition.

Author Q & A with Mary Miller

By Guest Author

On May 12, 2019

In Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 12)

Oxford’s Mary Miller highlights a Mississippi coastal town with a thoughtful tale of a middle-aged man facing an uncertain and lonely future–until he adopts a dog on a whim and one thing leads to another.

Her new novel, Biloxi, focuses with compassion, humor and hope on Louis McDonald, Jr., a man who has made his share of mistakes and truly needs a fresh start. The plot is part unconventional, part relatable–and all-around encouraging.
Miller also authored two short story collections, Big World and Always Happy Hour, and her debut novel, The Last Days of California. She is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and a former John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at Ole Miss.

In brief, Biloxi is the story of a 63-year-old man, Louis McDonald, Jr., facing his share of insecurities and mistakes (most of which are of his own doing), and who finds a new lease on life when he adopts a dog. As an accomplished young woman, did you find it hard to put yourself in his place, in this story told in first person?

Mary Miller

Thank you for the compliment! Though Louis is different from me in many ways–marital status, politics, gender, age–I understand him pretty well. He’s lonely. Life hasn’t turned out as he planned. He wants to connect with people, but he’s afraid of being hurt or rejected. All of these are human experiences, and there aren’t many among us who haven’t encountered each of them at some point in our lives. In other words, Louis is “everyman,” though he’s certainly more curmudgeonly than most.

The best word to describe Louis’s life–as a man who lives alone and is recently divorced with no real friends and a daughter and granddaughter he avoids–is “boring.” How does adopting a dog begin to change that in no time flat?

You’re right. Reading about a person alone in a house with his own thoughts is boring. When writing, the best thing you can do is give your narrator someone with whom to interact. This is writing 101.

Layla, the dog, gets Louis out into the world. He has to buy her a bed and food and toys; he wants to socialize her, so he takes her to the dog park. Early on, he thinks, “I also felt a strange need to entertain her, be interesting. Lucky for her I was an interesting man.” He comes to life with Layla around, finds himself making up songs and belting them out. He tries to teach her to catch and fetch and navigate the doggy door, and though he has little success, she’s given him renewed purpose. Layla is a reason for him to get out of bed in the morning.

Louis is not only insecure, but brutally frank as he not only ruminates about his fate to himself, but, quite often, when he ventures even the most mundane comments to people he doesn’t even know. This often results in great moments of humor for the reader (even when he’s talking to the dog). Does some of this come from your own straightforward thoughts in conversations with yourself and others in everyday life

Sure, though I’m nicer and more genial than Louis. He makes people uncomfortable a lot of the time. I hope I don’t make people uncomfortable! I do have a tendency to put my foot in my mouth, though, to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. I also talk to my dog a lot, ask her questions and bounce ideas off of her. She seems to appreciate being included.

Louis has a penchant for drinking (as is mentioned every day that passes in the Biloxi story), he doesn’t sleep well, worries about his future a great deal, and has a pattern of getting himself into awkward situations, to say the least. He comes to realize that even his father didn’t seem to care much for him. Why is it so easy to find this character as likable as we do?

I’m glad you found him likeable. Louis, with all of his flaws and self-sabotaging behavior, is pretty funny. Or it’s fun for the reader to watch him get himself into absurd situations. I don’t know if he would find himself humorous, though I think he might get a chuckle out of some of his actions in retrospect, like when he’s shoving religious pamphlets down his pants or lamenting the loss of his stolen blender.

There’s a ridiculous quality to the story, like the fact that his father’s lawyer “died after a swallowed toothpick punctured his bowels.” Even when Louis is taking himself seriously–when he’s dejected or drunk or worried–the prose and storyline work to balance it out. Or that was my goal; the reader will have to decide if I achieved it.

After everything he’s gone through in the course of just a few days, it seems that Louis’s redemption does come in the end. What’s the takeaway here?

Thank you! I don’t think in terms of the takeaway. I just tried to write a book that was true to this character and his life.

Most novels follow a pretty basic formula: put your character up a tree; throw rocks at him; bring him down. Louis is up the tree when I find him, and he’s been pelted with rocks for quite a while. And I keep chucking them. Ultimately, I’m not sure how much Louis’s life has changed by the end–it’s not like there’s any sort of formal redemption. He’s repairing his relationship with his daughter and her family, however, which is a start, and he’s got Layla by his side. Like Louis, I have my dog by my side, too.

Mary Miller will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, May 21, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Biloxi. Lemuria has selected Biloxi as its May 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Casey Cep

By Guest Author

On May 5, 2019

In Southern Fiction, Southern History, True Crime

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 5)

In her debut book, writer Casey Cep takes on the almost unbelievable 1970s crime story of an Alabama man who dubbed himself “The Reverend” and went on to commit a spree of murders so outrageous that he would meet a shocking end to his own life–and his offenses would bring Pulitzer Prize-winning author Harper Lee to a decision to write her own account of his crimes.

And although the celebrated author of To Kill a Mockingbird spent years dedicated to researching the story of “The Reverend” Willie Maxwell, Lee would never finish the book.

In Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, Cep chronicles the dual stories of Maxwell’s crimes with Lee’s unsuccessful attempt to complete her own narrative of those events, despite her obvious gift for journalism.

A Maryland native, Cep is a graduate of Harvard University and studied as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New Republic, among others.

What drew you this unique story in Furious Hours and write it as not only a chronicle of “the Reverend” and his crimes, but an inner glimpse into the life of Harper Lee?

Casey Cep

I first learned of these murders while reporting on Lee’s novel Go Set a Watchman, so in some ways my book was always going to include her. The more I learned, though, the clearer it became that she wasn’t just a coda to the story, but an integral part of it. Her own reporting had been substantial, so I wanted to honor that, but I also thought her struggles provided a useful way of thinking about the aesthetic and ethical challenges that any journalist faces when trying to write about other people’s lives, especially with true crime.

Lee, who grew up known by her first name, Nelle, has said that she never felt like she fit in during her school years. Why was that?

Right, Nelle is Ellen backward, which her parents chose to honor her maternal grandmother. Stories about Lee as a young girl map onto her beloved heroine, so if you think about how Maycomb reacted to Scout Finch, then you get a sense of how Monroeville reacted to her: no one knew quite what to do with the clever tomboy who wore overalls and liked playing with the boys. Even when she went off to college, Lee stood out: quoting obscure English poets, wearing blue jeans, smoking, and swearing with gusto. From her letters, though, we know it was a bit of a two-way street: she was odd, but not an outcast; her distance from her peers was as much her own doing as theirs.

Lee longed to be a writer and envied her contemporaries whose personalities allowed them to blossom and share their talents, but there were times she found herself unable to write because she was between “perfectionism and despair.” How did this affect her writing?

I think perfectionism can make it hard to finish something and despair can make it hard to start, so if you are a writer who seesaws between the two, it can be paralyzing. Lee could spend an entire day on a single page but also impulsively toss out whole manuscripts, and because she valorized suffering as necessary for artistry, her struggles were self-reinforcing.

But she wasn’t like that when she wasn’t trying to write, and I found it moving when her friends would share memories of how charming she was, and how raucously funny she could be. Harper Lee would hold court with stories about her neighbors in Monroeville and her neighborhood in Manhattan that were like something out of Chaucer or Dickens, and you just wish she could’ve written them down as easily as she told them around the dinner table.

As Lee took an interest in the massive story of “the Reverend” and decided to write a book about it, it turned out that she was a keen investigative reporter, a task she obviously loved and was good at. It seems that she felt a sense of energy and pride as she worked on this crime story–but the book was never completed. Why?

You’re right that she was an incredible reporter. People she interviewed in Kansas while helping Truman Capote with In Cold Blood and people she interviewed in Alabama while working on “The Reverend” say she was the most interesting, inquisitive person they ever met.

She could put any source at ease, and she had the kind of patience it takes to get people to tell you their secrets. She was energized by the social aspects of reporting, but of course the hard part about writing a book is that at some point you have to actually write it, and she really struggled with that solitary work. She was also living in the shadow of her own bestselling, prize-winning masterpiece, so on top of everything else, she was facing sky-high expectations, from herself and from the world.

Your research for Furious Hours is impressive, as you give readers an inside look into decades-old crimes and their outcomes; as well as information about Lee that many have never heard. How did you approach the research and organization of this book?

Early on, I did what I always do when I’m starting something new: I read everything I could get my hands on. Not just about Harper Lee, but also voodoo, murder, the insanity defense, sharecropping, dams, revivals, insurance fraud, courthouses, and on and on and on. After that, I started tracking down leads about the original crimes, and then doing the same thing for Lee. I always knew the structure–the Reverend, the Lawyer, and the Writer–so I would just file what I found into folders and then organize the folders, and every day I’d hope to find some new document or convince someone new to talk with me. But at some point, you have to accept that some things are lost to time and some people just won’t talk with you, so you say a prayer, and start writing.

You say in the book that Lee “was so elusive that even her mysteries have mysteries.” Please explain.

I wrote that line when I was particularly struck by the incongruity between the tremendous interest in Lee and the paucity of information about her. She was always private, and she remained that way despite having written one of the world’s most popular novels. After years of reporting, and even getting to interview some of those who knew her best, there was still just so much more I wanted to know. I realize that everyone’s inner lives are somewhat mysterious–even those closest to us, like our siblings or our parents–so of course the mind and heart of an artist like Harper Lee will always remain a little elusive.

Casey Cep will at Lemuria on Monday, May 13, at 5:00 to sign copies of and discuss Furious Hours. Lemuria has selected Furious Hours its May 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Author Q & A with James T. Campbell and Elaine Owens

By Guest Author

On April 28, 2019

In Civil Rights, Photography, Southern Culture, Southern History

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

It was the teamwork of Stanford professor James T. Campbell and Elaine Owens, the former head curator of photographs at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, that resulted in the publication of a significant photography collection that was almost swept aside by history.

Mississippi Witness: The Photographs of Florence Mars (University Press of Mississippi) showcases images taken in and around Neshoba County in the 1950s and ’60s by civil rights activist Florence Mars of Philadelphia, Miss., during a turbulent time in the state’s history. The volume is filled with stunning black and white photos and a comprehensive and informative introduction by Campbell.

Former governor William Winter, a friend of Mars, has said her pictures “spoke volumes,” and calls this book “an important volume in this period of our nation’s history.”

How did the idea of producing this book come about, and how did the two of you get together?

James Campbell and Elaine Owens, courtesy of the Greenwood Commonwealth

Campbell: I first learned about the photographs from Florence Mars herself. I was doing research related to the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project and naturally found my way to Neshoba County and, soon enough, to Miss Mars. I had an opportunity to interview her several times before her passing in 2006, and in one of those conversations she told me about her photos, which she had deposited at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson.

Owens: Prior to my retirement, I worked as head curator of photographs at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. That’s where I met Dr. Campbell. We agreed that Mars’s photographs should be shared with the public and a book was the best way to do that.

Tell me about Florence Mars, and the historical significance of the story behind her photographs.

Owens: The majority of the photographs were taken between 1954 and 1964. According to Mars herself, they were prompted by the landmark Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (in 1954), which signaled the end of legal segregation in the South. Her intent was to document a Jim Crow world that she knew was disappearing. She had no idea that she and her community would later be caught up in one of the most notorious events of the whole Civil Rights era.

Campbell: One thing I found interesting was that Mars made virtually no effort to publish or exhibit her photos. To the best of our knowledge, she never sold one for money. But she spent hours traveling around the countryside taking photographs, and hours more printing the images in the homemade darkroom she built in an upstairs hall of her house. They were her private devotion, her way of making sense of the world around her.

Explain why your book is titled Mississippi Witness.

Owens: Mississippi Witness is meant to echo the title of Ms. Mars’s own book, Witness in Philadelphia, which was published by LSU Press in 1977.

Campbell: The title of Mars’s book is kind of a pun. On one hand, the book is her first-person account of the events of 1964, of the murders and their aftermath in her hometown. But she was also a witness in another sense, when she agreed to testify in a federal trial that exposed local law enforcement’s brutal treatment of black citizens. She paid a real price for that decision.

Owens: Our book, Mississippi Witness, shows Ms. Mars acting as a witness in yet another sense, as a photographer.

The pictures literally “speak for themselves,” as they are presented, just one per page, on 101 of the 134 pages in the book, with no text at all. The “List of Photographs” in the back reveals that many of the subjects are unidentified; and some photos have no date listed–not even the year. Why did you decide to present the photos in this dramatic way?

Owens: We were simply trying to honor the photographer’s intent, to let the images, as you say, speak for themselves.

Campbell: We included such identifying information as we had in an appendix at the back of the book, but we decided not to have any accompanying text with the pictures themselves, nothing to pull your eye away from the image. I think it was the right decision.

As for not knowing who some of the people in the images are or when particular photos were taken: I suppose that’s true, but by the standards of a lot of documentary photography collections–the Depression-era images of the Farm Security Administration photographers, for example–what’s striking about Mars’s photos is how much we do know. She noted where many of the photos were taken and she recorded the names of at least some of the people in them. She knew a lot of these people personally–Neshoba County is not a very big place–and she routinely shared prints of the images with her subjects, which is something too few photographers think to do.

Jim, please tell me what your primary role was in the production of this book, and why this project was important to you. The history you present in the introduction is very through!

Campbell: Thank you. Mars herself used to say that in order to understand someone you needed to “know the background.” So hopefully the introduction helps people to understand a bit about who she was and how the photographs came to be. But the real value of the book is to be found in the photos themselves. They are just haunting–beautiful and heart-rending all at the same time. They capture truths about our history–not just the history of Mississippi, but American history as a whole–that we need to face squarely.

Elaine, please tell me what your primary role was in the production of this book, and why this project was important to you. You must have searched out a great many details in collecting and curating these photos!

Owens: As curator of photographs at MDAH, I’ve looked at a lot of photographs of Mississippi, but few if any collections have the depth and scope of the images in the Mars collection. We spent many hours debating which images to include in the book. We wanted images that evoked particularities of time and place, but we also wanted to show Mars’s strengths as a documentary photographer, not only her unfailing eye but also her technical skill. I just felt that these images needed to be shared. I also wanted to honor the courage of one woman who stood up to powerful forces of evil at great personal risk.

Signed copies of Mississippi Witness are still available at Lemuria’s online store.

Tag: Author Interview (Page 4 of 14)

Author Q & A with Mamta Chaudhry

Author Q & A with Chanelle Benz

Author Q & A with Tammy L. Turner

Author Q & A with Wright Thompson

Author Q & A with Michael Ford

Author Q & A with Julia Phillips

Author Q & A with Barry Gifford

Author Q & A with Mary Miller

Author Q & A with Casey Cep

Author Q & A with James T. Campbell and Elaine Owens

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