Tag: Author Interview (Page 6 of 14)

Author Q & A with Snowden Wright

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On February 3, 2019

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

Tell me about your life as a child in Mississippi.

Snowden Wright

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then I remembered my multiplication tables.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why did you return to Mississippi to write this book?

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

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

Do you have another book in the works?

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

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

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

Author Q & A with Chris Cander

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On January 27, 2019

In Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger (January 27). Click here to read this interview on the Clarion-Ledger’s website

For those of us who continue to promise ourselves we’re finally going to make a clean sweep and part with material objects we’ve long held onto for their sentimental value–but from which we really draw little joy–Chris Cander starts 2019 with The Weight of a Piano (Knopf), a gentle push to examine when it’s time to let go.

In this fictional tale, two women–years and miles apart–unknowingly share such an attachment to the same antique German-made Blüthner piano. The novel “plays out” the story of how the women came to love the same lovingly handcrafted piano while in the midst of very different relationships and life circumstances–and why examining what your heart is really telling you is what matters most.

The author of the previous novels Whisper Hollow and 11 Stories, Cander has also dedicated her talents to encourage children to discover the power of reading and writing, through her work as a writer-in-residence for the Houston-based Writers in the Schools program, and her support of Little Free Libraries in her area. She also writes children’s books and screenplays.

A member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, the Author’s Guild, the Writers’ League of Texas, PEN, and MENSA, Candor lives with her husband and children in Houston, Texas.

The plot of The Weight of a Piano is filled with nuances that point to the eventual and unexpected fate of a piano, which has a long and interesting history. Did the idea for this story come from your own musical interests or talents?

Actually, the idea of centering the story on a piano didn’t come from a musical perspective at all. Not long after I lost both my grandmothers, I overheard a woman talking about finally letting go of a piano her father had given her when she was a child. She’d been taking lessons for a few months when he suddenly died, and afterward, it became a symbol of her grief–and of him. She didn’t play it, but also couldn’t get rid of it. It struck me how heavy certain possessions with provenance can be, and I knew then that I wanted to unpack that idea in a novel.

The title of the book is a clever take on the actual heaviness of a piano as measured in pounds, contrasted with the emotional weight, which the characters find themselves bearing. How did you come up with this theme?

Chris Cander

I can remember when I was in college, and everything I owned fit into my car. Now I look around my house and wonder, how did I end up with all this stuff? In addition to the typical possessions of an American family of four, I’ve inherited treasures from a large number of artists and collectors: the cedar chest my grandfather made, the chair that had belonged to my mother-in-law, artwork painted by friends, trinkets given to me by my children, and much, much more.

It can be both a blessing and a burden to own so much. It’s one thing to keep an out-of-style heirloom quilt or a broken watch that belonged to a grandparent, but it was fascinating to me to imagine what it would be like to carry an unwanted, 560-pound object through life. How does that kind of albatross affect someone? And what will she do to get out from underneath it?

There are many hints in the book of the meaning of the piano to its former and present owners. What does this story say for all of us about the meaning we place on objects?

You’ve heard the adage: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” I’m fascinated by the different relationships we can have to things. From the minimalist movement to hoarding and everything in between, we–and here I’m speaking of a certain swath of contemporary American culture–seem particularly concerned with what and how much we own. Does it spark joy? has become an easy qualifier for what we decide to keep.

But some objects come into our lives freighted by so much more than joy. The stories that come with them–including the ones we tell ourselves–can trick us into thinking something ordinary is extraordinary, imbued with a sentimental value far greater than its actual worth. We all react to these physical things differently.

Tell me about your writing process. Do you create much of the plot first, and then develop the characters, or is it always different?

Typically, ideas are carried into my imagination on the shoulders of their protagonists, though as I mentioned, this novel was inspired by an event–that of a girl being given a piano by her father, who then dies shortly thereafter. But even the most compelling events don’t carry a story forward; it’s how the people who endure these events react to them, revealing their unique qualities and, hopefully, something about human nature in general.

Do you have another book in the works yet?

Happily, yes. I’m about halfway through a novel titled Zephyr, which explores the unseen forces that affect and connect us all.

Chris Cander will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, January 30, at 5:00 p.m. to sign copies of The Weight of a Piano. She will be in conversation with Knopf editor Gary Fisketjon at 5:30 p.m. The Weight of a Piano is Lemuria’s January 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Hank Burdine

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On January 20, 2019

In Southern Culture

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 20)

A Greenville native who strayed from his beloved Mississippi Delta to do a “walkabout” with his family in Colorado and Florida for a while, Hank Burdine has said since his return that he “really doesn’t care” if he “ever leaves the state lines of Mississippi again.”

The gentleman farmer, road builder, and author, who has gained a reputation as “the historian of the Delta,” has bestowed upon his fellow Deltans–and the rest of the world–a gift of memories and stories that may otherwise have been lost, with his newest book, Dust in the Road: Recollections of a Delta Boy (Coopwood Publishing Group).

The compilation of 60 essays about the people, places, foods, and culture of this enigmatic Mississippi region was gleaned from columns Burdine has contributed to issues of Delta Magazine since its beginning in 2003.

He has authored Mississippi Delta, The Flood of 2011 and was a contributor to The Delta: Landscapes, Legends, and Legacies of Mississippi’s Most Storied Region. He also co-authored, with Melody Golding, Panther Tract: Wild Boar Hunting in the Mississippi Delta.

Hank Burdine

Today Burdine lives on his farm in Chatham (near Greenville), where he hunts, writes, keeps an eye out for good stories, and, as author Richard Grant (Dispatches from Pluto) put it in his epilogue to Dust in the Road, is said to be “good at solving problems” for friends and neighbors.

And, as wild as some of his tales may seem, he emphasizes their authenticity.
“Many times,” Burdine said, “I have heard others say, ‘How do y’all make those stories up?’ Well, we don’t make them up, these things actually happened and are real!”

Below he discusses his book and his love for his home–the Mississippi Delta.

Tell me about your new book Dust in the Road: Recollections of a Delta Boy, and the stories you reveal in it.

I first started writing for Delta Magazine after I read the very first copy with Lee and Pup McCarty on the cover. While living in Florida, I contacted Delta Magazine and submitted a Final Word column titled ‘Mississippi will always be home.” Senior editor Melissa Townsend asked me to write an article and … it was published. The next month she contacted me and said, “Okay, what do you have for us this issue?” And, it has been like that ever since for over 68 articles.

Realizing that there was a book there of these articles, I decided to sort them out. The book just kind of fell into place. It has been such a great honor and pleasure to think of these stories, research and interview and “Dig up bones.” These stories are out there, and they just need to be pulled out and compiled and written down for posterity; if not, they will be lost forever.

The essays in your book recount much of the Delta’s past. Tell me about your research for information about those historical tales.

My research begins when an idea of a story or person comes to mind through conversation or just happenstance. Then I start calling friends and (checking out) newspapers, libraries and the internet, putting together a stack of papers from which to read and highlight until I sit down and start writing. It takes me most of a day to write an article and then another day to critique and edit what was written.

I have had some good editors at Delta Magazine to bounce off ideas. Of course, it’s a group effort, but I have been given the freedom to choose what I want to write about. It’s fun but it is damned hard work also.

The book is filled with stories of some of the region’s well-known artists, writers, musicians, and “indomitable characters.” Can you name a few among these whom you have personally known and who you believe have been particularly influential to the Delta’s culture?

The Elder Statesman of the Blues, Sam Chatmon, who “Gave Dignity to the Blues” was a dear friend of mine as was Son Thomas, Muriel Wilkins, the indomitable Duff Durrough, Eden Brent, and Jimmy Phillips. These bluesmen and blues women had a tremendous impact on the musical history and mystique of the Delta.

Literary greats Hodding Carter, Bern Keating, Julia Reed, Beverly Lowry, and Richard Grant were and are great and loving friends. Characters like Larry Pryor, Silky Sullivan, Joe Call, Hot Moore, John Ruskey and Bubba Tollison were all good friends and had an impact on my life and the stories I tell. Dinty Moore, the Doe Signa family, Anthony Herrera, Bill Beckwith and Leon Koury all were or are deep and dear friends.

What an honor it is to write for posterity the stories and lives of friends. And to be able to chronicle my son Matt’s personal odyssey on a solo canoe trip from the headwaters of the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico–wow!

Dust in the Road includes nine essays about the Delta’s unique cuisine in its section called “A Bite to Eat and Drink in the Delta.” Why was it important to include Delta food in this collection?

The deep influence of Delta inhabitants such as the Italians, Chinese, Lebanese and restaurants like Lillo’s, Lusco’s and Doe’s, How Joy, The Shady Nook, Abe’s, Josephine’s, and the Rest Haven are indelible in the Delta’s history. And now, newer places such as Dino’s, Vito’s, The Blue Biscuit, and The Onward Store have joined the charge. Stewart Robinson has started a pop-up fine dining experience in unusual places, bringing in award winning chefs from across the country. And Delta Supper Club is the place to be on given dates!

Ecotourism is now alive and well and pushing places like Clarksdale, Cleveland, Indianola and now Greenville to new and expanding plateaus. The Shackup Inn in Clarksdale and Tallahatchie Flats in Greenwood bulge at the seams with international travelers wanting to come to the Delta and experience the Blues.
With venues like the B. B. King Museum, The Grammy, Dockery Farms, Sky Lake, Blues museums and the Hot Tamale Festival, people are coming from far away to experience the Delta and to see first hand what the mystique is all about. The Delta is hot!

Tell me about how you became a storyteller.

If the Delta is anything, it is a place of stories. Those stories you heard as a child, to be embellished as you grow up and learn more about the people within them. And it is stories about the things you do that make an impact on families and friends.

If you don’t retell them, they are lost, and I have been honored to be able to write some of these stories down for future generations to enjoy and use as a reference later on. There was a lot of blood and sweat and tears and joy, triumphs and tragedies that brought this God-forsaken swamp into what it is today, and that does not need to be forgotten.

Signed copies of Dust in the Road are available at Lemuria’s online store.

Author Q & A with Preston Lauterbach

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On January 13, 2019

In Civil Rights, Southern History

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 13)

Former Memphis resident and popular historian Preston Lauterbach puts a new focus on that city’s Civil Rights-era story–including that of critical events that led to the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.–in his newest book, Bluff City: The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest Withers.

Although Withers’ story has been relatively little-known since he made his mark on photojournalism covering some significant events of that time, the bigger picture of his life included his secret undercover work for the FBI at the same time.

While describing the emotions and culture of Memphis during the 1950s and 60s, Lauterbach explains the complicated life that Withers led, and why his dual roles as journalist and spy were not necessarily a betrayal of his beliefs at the time.
Lauterbach’s narrative brings both questions and answers to the ways in which everyday citizens navigated the reality of a new era–sometimes through divergent and challenging paths.

Preston Lauterbach

A former visiting scholar at Rhodes College and a Virginia Humanities Fellow, Lauterbach earned an MFA in Southern Studies from the University at Mississippi in 2003. He calls his time at Ole Miss “by far the most important educational experience to building my career, figuring out what I’m interested in, and learning how to listen, find sources, and tell a story.”

Lauterbach’s previous books include The Chitlin’ Circuit, a Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe book of the year; and Beale Street Dynasty.  Today he calls the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia home.

I’ll start with asking the same question you began with on the flap of your book Bluff City: The Secret Life of Ernest Withers: Who was Ernest Withers?

He’s best known as a photojournalist of the civil rights movement. He worked freelance for the largest African-American newspapers, chiefly the Chicago Defender. He ended up covering the major stories in the South from the Emmett Till murder trial and Montgomery Bus Boycott in the mid-1950s, through the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis.

One of the major episodes of Withers’ career took place in Jackson. He covered the funeral of Medgar Evers in 1963. During the disturbance that broke out on Farish Street, after the funeral, Withers was beaten and arrested. He had been taking pictures of the clash between police and mourners. A police officer confiscated his film and destroyed it. He pursued a First Amendment case against the Jackson police, seemingly with tacit encouragement from the Kennedy White house, but the FBI seems to have quashed it.

How did Withers and his story come to your attention, and why did you decide to write a book about it?

I was working on a book about the history of Beale Street in Memphis when the news came out about Withers having worked for the FBI during his years covering the (civil rights) movement. The Withers studio was located on Beale during the 1950s and ’60s, and he’d been a cop on the Beale Street beat in the ’40s. He’d seen everyone from Elvis to Dr. King come through Beale, and so he emerged as the most compelling character to tell the story through.

Every book I’ve done starts off one way and ends up going in all sorts of different directions once I get going, so this one isn’t strictly about Beale, but I can’t ask for a more colorful setting or more compelling cast of characters.

What are some events or themes that Withers’ body of photojournalistic work is best known for?

His work hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, and the National Civil Rights Museum. Withers boarded one of the first integrated city buses in Montgomery and photographed a young Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to make King an icon.

Withers also took some tremendous photographs of Elvis Presley. There’s still some debate about whether Elvis was racist. Withers said, emphatically, no. Withers tailed Elvis on Beale Street during the singer’s earliest days and observed how Elvis interacted with African-American people. Withers came away impressed with the respect and humility Presley carried himself with. This character trait really shows up in Withers’ pictures of Elvis with B.B. King. And by the way, it was a highly risky PR move for Elvis to pose with an African-American man on equal terms in 1956, when challenges to segregation were causing major turmoil in this country.

Do you believe Withers felt “compromised” working in his dual roles as a photojournalist and an informant for the FBI? His was a complicated situation.

I don’t believe that he felt compromised. One of the challenges of this story is seeing past the shocking headline that this civil rights icon secretly worked for the hated J. Edgar Hoover, and reading the facts.

Many of Withers’ case files have become available, thanks to Memphis reporter Marc Perrusquia, who broke the story and had the documents declassified. To me, it becomes clear that Withers had a rapport with his FBI handler, and through their relationship, Withers acted as a mediator or translator, in many cases, for the Beale Street community. He explained to the Bureau what groups like the Nation of Islam–a target of Hoover–were really up to, and successfully kept the heat off. Withers was an NAACP lifetime member and came from a long line of military veterans, and so he was against the presence of Communists in the movement, which aligned with the FBI reasons for investigating civil rights groups.

He acted also as a threat gauge, judging the likelihood of groups to engage in violence. But, you can’t get involved with the Hoover FBI without getting wrapped up in some fishy stuff, and Withers certainly did.

Explain Withers’ role in the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike and demonstration in spring 1968, and how that day’s activities compelled Martin Luther King, Jr., to return to Memphis a week later, where he was assassinated.

Withers took one of his most famous pictures on March 28, 1968, the I AM A MAN photo, that shows the striking sanitation workers displaying signs with that iconic slogan. He helped make those signs, by providing the lumber for signposts. Those posts became weapons during the march that King led that day in Memphis, in the hands of a lot of younger demonstrators.

King had never led a march that turned violent from within. He vowed to change his schedule and return to Memphis to prove that a peaceful demonstration could be held there. He needed this both for the strike and his own reputation. No one at the time knew that Withers was on the Bureau payroll, and so his involvement with the photo props that became riot weapons has eluded attention until now.

Ultimately, how do you look back on Withers’ life and career, and why do you call him a “flawed hero’?

He had a talent for getting himself into very sticky situations. Both his time as a police officer and a state liquor board member were scandal-shortened. He’s got cojones. That makes him a highly interesting figure, but also prone to trouble. His heroism is a bigger part of his life, having braved the South in the 1950s and ’60s, to show America what was happening down here. He was beaten, arrested, and threatened with death for doing his job, and he did it anyway.

What can we all learn from the tangled and intriguing story of this African American man who had a birds-eye view of some of the nation’s biggest news stories, and who some apparently viewed as a traitor on both sides?

If we’re to really get something out of history, and I think this applies to the present as well, we can’t oversimplify our understandings of each other and say, well he’s black, therefore he can only be pro-civil rights in this one acceptable manner or else he’s a scoundrel. There are good, important people who are torn between opposing forces, or, in courageously attempting to bring those forces nearer together, they risk their livelihoods, reputations, and lives. And, we can’t judge a person’s role in history entirely on what we know now.

You have authored two previous books (Beale Street Dynasty and The Chitlin’ Circuit) that are also in the narrative or historic journalism genre. What drew you to this type of writing, and do you have another book project on the horizon at this time?

I love research most of all, but research itself doesn’t pay, so writing narrative history emerged as the best way to fund my research habit. It’s still costly, but I have something to show for it.

My next project is either top secret, or I haven’t figured out yet what to do. I have a Withers figure in my life, alluded to in the introduction to Bluff City. My grandfather was involved with intelligence. He was the person I admire most and pattern myself after, and yet he’s also the biggest mystery in my life. I’ve reached a point where I need to and want to answer my questions about his role in history, and I have some ideas about where to look.

Preston Lauterbach will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, January 16, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from Bluff City. Bluff City is Lemuria’s January 2019 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Author Q & A with Mesha Maren

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On January 6, 2019

In Southern Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mesha Maren

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author Q & A with Paige Williams

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On December 30, 2018

In Adventure, Science, True Crime

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

New Yorker Magazine staff writer and Mississippi native Paige Williams makes her book debut with a fascinating tale of the divided and sometimes dangerous world of fossil hunting, as she meticulously investigates the case of a rare and immense dinosaur skeleton that found its way from Mongolia to a Manhattan auction.

The ever-present tension between scientists and fossil hunters–who are, many times, everyday people whose interest in natural science compels them to find, restore and, often sell their discoveries for profit–drives much of the narrative of The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Quest for Earth’s Ultimate Trophy.

In her book, Williams reveals the real-life story of Eric Prokopi, a Florida fossil hunter/dealer who sold the skeleton of an 8-foot tall, 24-foot long Tyrannosaurus in the Big Apple for more than $1 million–and created an international “custody battle” for the specimen, triggered by the Mongolian government.

Williams’ love of journalism came alive while she was a student at Ole Miss and a former staff writer for the Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News. She has blended her natural curiosity and love of writing to unearth unusual and unexpected stories around the globe–but she credits much of her love for writing to members of her family who were unusually good story tellers.

A National Magazine Award winner, Williams is the Laventhol/Newsday Visiting Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism; and her journalistic work has appeared multiple times in volumes of The Best American Magazine Writing and The Best American Crime Writing.

Please tell me about growing up in Mississippi and how you discovered your interest in journalism.

Paige Williams

Happy to! I was born in Oxford, grew up in Tupelo, and graduated from Ole Miss, where I majored in journalism and minored in history. During college, I worked as a reporter and editor at The Daily Mississippian, the campus newspaper, and at the Tupelo Daily Journal and–hello!–the Clarion-Ledger/Jackson Daily News. Reporting and writing for the C-L/JDN, I learned priceless lessons from colleagues such as Alan Huffman, Mary Dixon, and Dewey English, and covered a range of news.

Where did the journalism spark originate? I’m not really sure. My mother is and was a devoted newspaper reader, and I grew up watching her read the paper. During college I came across “journalism” as a major in the course catalog and liked the sound of it. I knew zero journalists, but I signed up and loved it, particularly because one of my teachers was the amazing Tommy Miller, who’d been an editor at the Houston Chronicle.

But I equally credit the storytellers in my family–in Tupelo, Smithville, Ingomar, and the Delta–for a lifetime of filling my ear with the sound of their hilarious, absurd, heartbreaking stories. It’s also not a coincidence that I spent a lot of my childhood in the school library and the public library, which had a powerfully positive effect on me. I still remember the delicious smell of the Lee County Library.

At what point did you realize your own interest in writing and that this would be your career path?

Once I discovered journalism at Ole Miss, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. I had no real concept of what life as a journalist might look like, or even how much it paid–it never occurred to me to ask.

I knew only that journalism would make for an interesting life and contribute to the world in some meaningful way. It also meant that I got to write for a living. The writing felt like a natural extension of the reading and storytelling background I just mentioned. I should add that I’m by no means the best storyteller in my family; I’ve got relatives who could keep you entertained for days.

An early boyfriend–a reporter I met while working in Jackson, as it happens–was the first to tell me, “You’re a writer!” The idea thrilled me, but I didn’t quite know what he meant, or what to make of it.

In journalism, I often felt confused by what others saw as a necessary division between reporting and writing, when really the two are intertwined. Editors seemed to think you had to be good at either one or the other. One editor told me, in a moment that she surely saw as supportive rather than destructive, “We know you like to dig, but just write–just write!” I wanted to marry the two, and to find a home at a place that supported the sort of immersive journalism that appealed to me.

Tell me about your interest in narrative journalism–that is, writing about real-life investigations you’ve uncovered.

A wide range of things interest me, but I’m often drawn to stories about wrongdoing, and about abuse of power and privilege involving flawed characters or problematic systems. One piece involved the problem of judicial override in Alabama–wherein, in capital cases, a judge can unilaterally sentence a criminal defendant to death, even when a jury unanimously votes for life.

I’m also interested in unexpected relationships, and so I enjoyed reporting and writing a piece about the brilliant self-taught Southern artist Thornton Dial and his charismatic patron. Another involved a onetime movie star’s decision to remove a vintage Tlingit totem pole from a ghost village in Alaska and erect it in his backyard in Beverly Hills–a story that was really about respect, or in this case, lack thereof, for other cultures.

Now that the book is done, I’m looking forward to getting back to a life devoted primarily to those kinds of stories.

How would you explain the world’s longtime obsession with dinosaurs among both children and adults?

The big ones were really big; the ferocious ones were really ferocious, and, other than birds, they’re all gone. The extinction of the terrestrial dinosaurs is almost unthinkable: these fascinating, diverse animals were wildly successful creatures for hundreds of millions of years–until they weren’t.

In The Dinosaur Artist, you make a very clear case for the reasons commercial dealers in dinosaur remains are at odds with paleontologists. Can you condense that debate, and tell us why you say paleontology became “perhaps the only discipline with a commercial aspect that simultaneously infuriates scientists and claims a legitimate role in the pantheon of discovery”?

The science of paleontology wouldn’t exist without non-scientist hunters–ordinary people who bother to notice fossils, which are all around us, and wonder what they are, and when and how the corresponding animals lived at one point on this planet.

The science is a relatively young one, but humankind’s questions about the natural world are ancient ones: why are shark teeth found on mountain tops? What force of nature could coil a stone? Natural history museums are filled with the finds of ordinary people who simply pursued their curiosity about the world around them–explained, of course, by the scientists who study fossils in order to understand the history of life on earth. Naturally, paleontologists want to preserve fossils, which are fundamental to their work; commercial hunters sell their finds, which a scientist would never do, and believe they’re salvaging materials that would otherwise weather away.

The tension over who should have the right to collect fossils, and whether fossils should ever be sold, divides the scientific and commercial communities to an extent that should be resolvable, considering that both sides love the same objects, whether dinosaur bones or fossil dragonflies or prehistoric flowers.

Your book is no doubt an introduction for most readers to the world of fossil hunting, collecting, and selling–through the real-life story of Eric Prokopi, a 38-year-old Florida man who had built a successful business in the trade. It would be the skeleton Prokopi brought to market in a 2012 Manhattan display–of a valuable T. bataar (closely akin to T. rex)–that would be his downfall. Although an auction for the specimen would bring more than $1 million, it was soon discovered that the fossil had been stolen from Mongolia, and Prokopi’s world began to unravel. How did you find out about this story, and why did you decide to write a book about it?

I had been thinking about a book on the fossil world, and dinosaur poaching, for years by the time the Prokopi case came along. The commercial aspect of fossils had come to my attention in the summer of 2009–in Tupelo, as it happens. I happened to be home, and was sitting in a coffee shop, reading the newspaper, when I saw a news brief about a convicted dinosaur thief in Montana, who was about to be sentenced to prison. I looked into his case, and while I lost interest in that particular situation, I kept learning about the larger fossil world, the rich history of natural history, and the tension between scientists and ordinary people who love nothing more than walking around and looking for bits of natural history to collect and study.

In early 2013, I wrote a story about the Prokopi case. When Prokopi was sentenced to prison, in 2014, it became clear that the story as it continued to unfold went far enough to support a book-length work. As the reporting continued, it became clear that forces beyond science and commerce were at work in this particular case. Those forces involved the fall of the Soviet Union, the unlikely rise of democracy in post-communist Mongolia, and the United States’s fascinating and increasingly important and strategic diplomatic relationship with Mongolia, which is landlocked between Russia and China. Crazily enough, that long history related to this dinosaur case.

The details and the depth of research for this book are amazing, as you expand the story into much further investigation of the fossil trade as a whole. What do ordinary people need to know about what’s happening with this relatively new business, and why is it important that we understand what’s going on?

Thank you! You may have noticed the 80-something pages of chapter notes. Those aren’t just reference materials; they’re mini-stories in themselves, and they’re the one place in the book where I allowed myself to use the first person rather than inserting myself into the main narrative.

None of this should feel daunting. At the heart of this story, which spans millennia and continents, are people. They’re collectors and gravediggers and plumbers and teachers and scientists who share an obsession with nature and natural history. As much as anything, it’s a book about the darker side of pursuing one’s passions, and, in Prokopi’s case, about catastrophic life choices that affected his finances, marriage, and freedom.

The Dinosaur Artist by Paige Williams is Lemuria’s December 2018 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction. Signed copies are available in our online store.

Author Q & A with Sheree Rose Kelley

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On December 23, 2018

In Southern Cooking

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

Among the many roles that Nashville’s Sheree Rose Kelley holds, her most cherished is home baking–an art she not only believes in doing, but in sharing.

Her debut cookbook, Breads & Spreads is the first in a series she has planned with The Nautilus Publishing Co. in Oxford to “spread” the word that she feels compelled to share her kitchen skills and talents learned from the “endless line of great cooks and bakers” in her own family.

Not only does the book embrace Kelley’s rural roots of growing up in Giles County, Tennessee (encouraged by the bounty of her father’s large summer garden each year), but it enthusiastically reveals her love of the city (sparked by “sampling new restaurants and shopping for exotic ingredients”).

And when she’s not baking rolls, cakes, or biscuits, she’s fulfilling her duties as CEO of Belle Meade Winery, situated on the estate of Belle Meade Plantation in Nashville, where her husband Alton serves as executive director. At the winery she conducts culinary tours, gives cooking lessons and supervises daily wine tastings and special private events, including weddings, on the property.

When Kelley decided she was ready to take on the task of creating a book to share her family recipes, she turned to new acquaintance Roben Mounger for assistance.
“Sheree’s husband Alton introduced us,” Mounger said. “She was familiar with my blog, Ms. Cook’s Table. One day she called to ask for my help with her cookbook idea. She requested that I hold her accountable for the work to be done. For over a year, I tested and refined recipe directions and edited content.”

Mounger’s own interest in food writing had been spurred by another cookbook more than a decade ago.

“Since reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (a non-fiction work that examines one family’s story of learning to eat only locally-grown food for a year) by Barbara Kingsolver in 2007, I have been committed to documenting family stories and tales of seasonal eating, by way of a blog, newspaper column and area magazines,” Mounger said. “Breads & Spreads is the second cookbook project tied to historic Tennessee landmarks which I helped to supervise.”

Mounger said working on Breads & Spreads was more than merely a job.

“For me, working with Sheree was a dream of an assignment,” she said.

The result is a book filled with heartwarming stories, numerous family pictures and a gallery of fantastic food shots of her recipes for breads, biscuits, rolls, cornbread, appetizers and “specialty foods,” not to mention an entire chapter called ‘Spreads and Gravies’!

“Sheree has an adventure-ready spirit when it comes to learning,” Mounger said. “She has taken cooking classes in . . . France, England, Italy, Ireland, and Spain, and she says, ‘So far so good,’ with a twinkle in her eye for the other countries on her short list.”

Below Kelley discusses Breads & Spreads and her own passion for cooking.

Please tell me about the “long line of good cooks” in your family, and how they inspired you to take an interest in cooking at a very early age.

Sheree Rose Kelley

Not everyone has grandparents live into their 90s. I have been blessed to know and learn from the best. Honestly, I didn’t have a choice–it was a way of life. We grew and ate everything from the farm. It came naturally for me. I didn’t know any other way.

Learning to make cornbread and biscuits was so satisfying; those were the staples of every meal. Even as a child I was looking for new recipes to prepare, knowing I could always go back to my firsthand knowledge.

I watched Mama make Hushpuppies a million times for the many “fish suppers,” as Grandmommie would call them. She never had a recipe and when I added this to my book, I had to develop it–and they are mouthwatering!

The satisfaction in knowing how to prepare something and have it look appealing and taste good was exciting!

Tell me about Belle Meade Winery and your cooking classes there.

I first started in the gift shop branding foods for the Belle Meade line. We began to look for additional revenue streams for the site. Alton, my husband and executive director of Belle Meade Plantation, and I started the Belle Meade Winery in November 2009. After we got the winery on its feet I began developing recipes using our wines. The baking classes started shortly afterward.

The class begins with a guided hospitality tour of the mansion and then to the original working kitchen where I teach biscuit baking and ends in the winery for a wine tasting. It was a natural fit to combine the food and wine. Each guest has an opportunity to purchase the tools I use for the class, as well as any new kitchen items on the market.

Before you went to work at Belle Meade, your success with Pampered Chef was phenomenal! Did this come as a surprise to you at the time? Was it hard to give it up?

My love of selling comes naturally. Even as a little girl I would sell cards and stationary in my Mama’s beauty shop. When the opportunity for my two loves–cooking and selling–came together with Pampered Chef, I was in “hog heaven.” I earned my first trip without knowing I achieved it. I received a call from the home office to tell me I was on track and I just kept doing what I was doing and before I knew it, I was on my way to Disney World with the whole family. I had enthusiasm for the product and it shined through to each of my customers.

I really haven’t given it up–I’m selling and teaching in a different format.

Please tell me about the wonderful cover and unique binding of this book.

On a trip to England, I picked up a cookbook that was very appealing from the cover. As I examined the book, I discovered the Swiss binding (which allows the spine of the book to lay flat). As for my cover, that was the hardest decision I had to make. Would it be formal, casual, my picture on the front–or not, whatever, it had to be appealing and certainly speak to the title of the book.

Breads & Spreads is the first in a series of cookbooks you’ve planned in order to share more of your family secrets in a variety of different foods. Tell me about the series, and why you chose to start with a book on baking.

Making biscuits was the basis for the cookbook. My claim to fame is winning First Place in the 4-H Bread Baking Contest in the fourth grade for my homemade biscuits. Each meal begins with bread so why not start a series of cookbooks with the same?

My next book will be called “Summer.” My Daddy said this past summer was his final garden. I asked that he please plant one more, so I could have it photographed from the time he turns it in the early spring to harvest. All my favorite summer recipes will come alive. He has agreed!

Your faith has obviously played an important role in your life. Tell me how this has guided your career decisions.

The scripture verse of Hebrews 13:2 says, “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.”

Hospitality was a part of me before I even knew what it meant, and it has been a guiding principle in my life.

Signed copies of Breads & Spreads are available at our Lemuria’s online store.

Author Q & A with Timothy Pakron

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On December 9, 2018

In Southern Cooking

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

Mississippi native and vegan enthusiast Timothy Pakron has combined his passions as an artist, photographer and recipe developer into a debut cookbook like no other.
Mississippi Vegan: Recipes and Stories from a Southern Boy’s Heart was written, he says, “in a rather unconventional way.”

Instead of hiring a photographer, food stylist, and “a team of people” to help, Pakron shot all of the photos himself, wrote all the text, and invited friends from all over the world to come to his Mississippi Gulf Coast home to help him “cook, document, and style the food” that became the recipes in his book.
And the research, he notes, was constant: he made countless phone calls to his mother.

With the majority of the recipes in Mississippi Vegan being dishes he said he could only “remember in my mind,” that communication was a necessity–although many others were “picked and pulled” from lessons he’s since learned on his own, adding fresh, original dishes to his family recipes.

As one who was always been drawn to the idea of a vegan diet, Pakron not only loves the food but has embraced “vegan” as a lifestyle that he wants to share enthusiastically.

Pakron’s biggest hope is that readers understand Mississippi Vegan as a concept, not a specific location.

“It’s a constant celebration of delicious food, memories, and pride in growing and sourcing local produce,” he states in the book’s introduction. “It’s an exploration of nature and a constant search for beauty that exists in this world.”

Today Pakron lives in New Orleans, where he is refining his blog and weighing a variety of options for his next creative step.

Please tell me about your education and culinary training, your career, and what eventually brought you to New York City.

Timothy Pakron

When I was young, I would always watch my Mama cook in the kitchen. When I was a teenager, she taught me how to make gumbo. Later on, I went to College of Charleston in Charleston, S.C., where I majored in studio art, which included printmaking, painting, sculpture, and photography. Upon graduating, I began showing my art in galleries while also working a multitude of different jobs.

I moved to New York in my mid-20s to pursue my career as an artist. Eventually, I felt dissatisfied and begin focusing on food styling, food photography, and recipe development. By working as a server in three different vegan restaurants and hosting pop-up events where I was cooking all of the food, I gained a lot of experience in the food and beverage world.

Explain what it means to follow a vegan diet, and why adopting it was so important to you.

Following a vegan diet celebrates the abundance of plants and mushrooms. As long as the ingredient is a plant or a mushroom–fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, grains, legumes, shiitakes, criminis, etc.–then it is vegan. If the recipe is an animal product or is an animal by-product, it is not vegan. Eating a vegan diet is important to me because I could not and will not harm animals in any way. Eating plant-based is also healthy and beneficial to the environment, as it is more sustainable than factory farming animals.

Specifically, how do you define “Mississippi Vegan”?

“Mississippi Vegan” is a concept that merges my past and my present. It is a celebration of the abundance of edible plants and mushrooms, creativity, delicious recipes, beautiful photography, and laughter. “Mississippi Vegan” focuses on what vegans do eat instead of focusing on what vegans do not eat. “Mississippi Vegan” is love.

You were living and working in New York City when you decided to create this book, and you realized that the only way you could write it would be to move back to Mississippi. Why was that a necessary part of the project for you, and why did you say that writing this book in Mississippi was “incredibly emotional” for you?

It was necessary because the whole premise of the book was to show people the undercurrent of veganism that exists within the food from my home state–in particular, the region I was raised, the Gulf Coast.

It was incredibly emotional to me because I wrote a book about recipes from my childhood which brought back many memories. I also had not lived in Mississippi for over a decade, so to be back home and pursue such a large creative endeavor in my home state was overwhelming while also beautiful at the same time.

In the book, you describe yourself as a recipe developer, a photographer, and an artist. What role did each of these play in the creation of “Mississippi Vegan”?

Well, for many cookbooks the author will hire a food stylist and a food photographer to shoot their book. Some authors will even hire a ghostwriter to help them with the written material. I did not. I styled and shot everything myself. I wrote every word. I also created all of the recipes or made veganized translations of all of the recipes myself. It was a true labor of love and is 100 percent authentic.

How do you go about creating a new recipe–what are some of the standards or requirements that a recipe must meet to earn the Timothy Pakron seal of approval?

With all of my recipes, I like to push people a little bit, whether it be with new ingredients or using ingredients in a different way. I also want to make sure everything is super flavorful. When I can re-create a traditional recipe that reminds me of my past while also veganizing it, that’s what gets me the most excited!

This book is unique in many ways, including the fact that you did all the photography yourself. Tell me about that process.

It was overwhelming, exciting, fun, and stressful. What most people probably think is that the process was effortless, because the reader sees all of the perfectly composed images laid out beautifully in a book. In fact, there were some recipes I shot over and over and again and I couldn’t get the perfect shot. Some of the images just weren’t good enough!

The other issue I ran into was the fact that I was photographing Southern food, which is inherently not very pretty. Cheese straws, mashed potatoes, gumbo, and Salisbury steak, albeit delicious, are kind of ugly! Now that the project is over, I can honestly say that I am so very proud because I did everything for the book. It truly is my baby.

While “going vegan” seems to be growing in popularity today, some are skeptical for a variety of reasons, including how all nutritional needs are met, especially when it comes to sources of protein. How would you counter that argument?

The whole protein concern is honestly antiquated. I’ve created a career on celebrating vegan food, and if you get one look at me you will quickly notice that I do not look protein deficient! The fact of the matter is that all plants have protein, some more than others, and there is plenty of high-quality protein in things like legumes, nuts, seeds, peanuts, greens, root vegetables, and even things like fruit.

When it comes to vitamins and minerals, plants and mushrooms are amazing sources of both. I invite people to do their own research from reputable sources, not hearsay. There are plenty of books, articles, and documentaries on the topic.

You mention in the book that there will no doubt be new adventures and chapters in your life that will see you moving away from Mississippi once again. Can you share other ideas or projects you’d like to explore? And do you foresee new books as a result?

Well, a few months after I finished my book, I decided to move to New Orleans to start a new chapter in my life. And I love it here! This year I am really focusing on my blog, making sure to consistently post recipes. I could see myself writing another book, but I need a break first! If I had to mention anything, I wouldn’t be surprised if I had a streaming TV show of some kind in the future. We shall see!

Author Q & A with Kiese Laymon

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On December 2, 2018

In Biography/Memoir

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

Growing up in Jackson, Kiese Laymon learned early on that he would have to learn how to fight many battles, as he experienced the weight of emotional pain, violence, racism, addictions, confusion–and a lifetime struggle with the bathroom scales.

His new book, Heavy: An American Memoir (Scribner) is, literally, a long letter written directly to his mother, as he works through the complexity of his disordered childhood and its continued effects on his life today. The result is a deeply personal, and open, cry for answers as to why theirs was such a difficult relationship even as she unfailingly reassured him of her love.

A single mother who has little money but big expectations for her son, she was determined for her son, she was determined Laymon would get a good education and, in the process, develop a toughness she believed would prepare him for dealing with the curves she was certain white society would throw at him.

The book is a 2018 Kirkus Award Finalist and is shortlisted for the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction.

Kiese Laymon

Other books Laymon has authored include the novel Long Division and a collection of essays titled How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. His essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Esquire, McSweeney’s, PEN Journal, Oxford American, Ebony, Travel and Leisure, the Best American series, Paris Review, and many other publications. Another novel, And So On, is due out in 2019.

Laymon is now the Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. He previously served as an associate professor of English and Africana studies at Vassar College in New York.

Heavy: An American Memoir is a commanding title for a record of one’s life at your age. Describe how the title explains and describes your life, and why you wanted to share your personal story with the world.

The book is really about words and “heavy” is one of the most elastic words we have. It means so much. Sometimes it means intellectual depth. Sometimes it means a lot of weight.

You had a difficult childhood, growing up with a driven, abusive mother who tangled up love with frequent mistreatment–and yet, she was the one who introduced you to books and who demanded a very strict writing discipline from you. Tell me about how writing this book has been a way to sort through the confusion of those years and beyond.

The book was exactly a means of working through things I never worked through. To really remember, I needed to write to my mother since she was my first teacher and the first person to read the sentences I wrote as a child.

You write that, for generations, your family has kept secrets about abusiveness, addictions, issues with weight, and other struggles. Has your relationship with your mother improved over the years?

My mother and I are talking about things we avoided for decades. Every day is work, but we are up for it.

The entire book is written in a technique that directly addresses your mother personally, from start to finish. Why did you decide to frame the book using this unique writing style?

Again, I wanted to write a memoir that I’d never seen. I’d seen people address their children, but I’d never read an entire memoir written to one’s mother. I had to write this book to my mother if I was going to do the memoir justice.

Explain why you skipped your own high school graduation.

I wasn’t a fan of Gov. Kirk Fordice, and he was scheduled to be our graduation speaker. So, I told my friends I was skipping.

That was part of it. The other part was that I was really embarrassed for graduating close to the bottom of my class.

What is your message in this book to the white community, and is it only directed at Mississippians?

I think black Mississippians have spent lifetimes sending messages to the white community. I’m not sure I have anything more impactful to say to white folks than Faulkner, Welty, Wright, Hamer, Morrison, or Baldwin already said.

I wish they’d listen to the lessons writers and freedom fighters have been trying to send them for generations. I really wish they would listen.

You state in your book that if you ever had a child, you would want to raise him or her in Mississippi. After everything you’ve lived through here, why would you say that?

I came back to Mississippi, the culturally richest place in the world, and I needed to be closer to a lot of the people and spirits that ironically gave me a chance to leave.

Is there a new writing project in the works for you at this time, and, if so, can you share any information about it here?

I’m working on a new novel called And So On. I’m so happy to be back in Mississippi working with young writers who will become the future of American literature.

Kiese Laymon will be at Lemuria on Saturday, December 8, at 12:00 p.m. to sign copies of Heavy. Signed copies are available at our online store.

Author Q & A with Frank LaRue Owen

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On November 27, 2018

In Poetry, Zen

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

Frank LaRue Owen’s interest in poetry began to develop in his teens, and his journey to become a poet in his own right has developed alongside his spiritual growth, through years of thoughtful studies of Asian spiritual practice.

His first book of poetry, The School of Soft-Attention, was named the winner of the Homebound Publications Poetry Prize in 2017.

The book puts into words Owen’s reflections on key influences on his life, including the Ch’an/Daoist hermit-poetic tradition, Zen meditation, eco-psychology, and a practice he calls “pure land dreaming.” Shaped by Owen’s diversity of cultural experiences and the depth of his spiritual training, his poems encourage readers to “turn to a new way of seeing, a new way of paying attention to the life within and around us.”

A strategist with a metro area marketing-creative firm, Owen has also completed a second book of poetry, The Temple of Warm Harmony, set to release in fall 2019.

Please tell me about your background and how your many opportunities to experience a variety of cultures in many places has helped shape your life today.

I hail from a family with long-standing roots in Mississippi and East Texas. We’ve been educators, ministers, counselors, attorneys, oilmen, cowboys, poets, and artists.

I spent my formative years in Atlanta and Jackson, with my last year of high school spent in Chapel Hill, N.C., where I was introduced to writing through a creative writing class. That high school teacher sent me to a writer’s conference at University of North Carolina at Winston-Salem. I’ve been writing, in one form or another, ever since.

My moving around so much is largely due to my academic journey and my cultural and spiritual explorations. I spent three years in northern Wisconsin at a small environmental college called Northland College where I had an opportunity to study Asian religions, anthropology, psychology, writing, as well as environmental studies at the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute, named for Sigurd Olson, who lived from 1899 to 1982, and was a renowned author, wilderness defender, and teacher.

I attended graduate school at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo., North America’s first accredited Buddhist university, which houses not only a graduate school in mindfulness-based counseling psychology, which I graduated from, but also the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, also known as the MFA in Writing and Poetics, founded by the late Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and other poets of note, including one of my poetic mentors, the late Jack Collom.

The School of Soft-Attention, your debut book of poetry, was named the 2017 winner of the Homebound Publications Poetry Prize. Did this honor surprise you?

It was a total surprise to win. Poetry had always been more of a personal exploration, an extension of spiritual practice, and not something I sought to formally publish. I created and maintained some online poetry blogs starting around 2000, but never thought it would lead to actual publishing. In 2016, with a lot of encouragement from various quarters, I gathered up what I considered my best work and entered it in the Homebound Publications Poetry Prize for review.
I still consider myself a ‘work-in-progress’ as a poet, so it was unexpected. But it has resulted in a wonderful publishing relationship with Homebound, which is continuing beyond The School of Soft-Attention.

Which came first–the discovery of your talent for writing poetry, or your serious interest in Eastern philosophies?

I dabbled in poetry as an art form in my teen years, and even read some of the poems of Japan’s greatest poets at that time. But I never really developed it. My involvement with Asian spiritual practice really came first, initially through my study of the Japanese martial art of Aikido starting in 1989, and then study of Zen meditation shortly after. I studied Chinese and Japanese religions academically in my undergraduate years with Thomas Kasulis, a scholar of Asian religions, but quickly realized my interest was that of practitioner and not limited to the academic.

Tell me about your journey with doña Río: who was she, and what did she teach you about life, spirituality, and, ultimately, poetry?

Her name was Darion Gracen, a psychologist, wilderness guide, and practitioner-teacher of Ch’an, or Zen, meditation. She was known by many names, “doña Río” among them, and she served as a mentor to many. Initially, I met Darion in an academic setting, but eventually I studied with her in other contexts. She would host circles of people in the mountains of Colorado where we studied an array of subjects with her rooted in meditative awareness in the natural world. Later, after she moved to the Santa Fe, New Mexico, area, I continued studying with her one-on-one for another decade. She embodied a kind of “curriculum” that combined silent illumination, or meditation from the Ch’an or Zen tradition, the practice of dreamwork, a spiritual approach to experiences in the natural world, and poetics as way to process experiences with all of the above.

Ultimately, what I learned from her was how to make one’s heart-mind an ally, how to attend to the creative process, and how one’s essential connection to the Dao, or, the sacred, transcends conditions.

You dedicate this book to Río and to your parents. Please tell me about your parents and their influence on the direction of your life and poetry.

Although rooted in the social justice tradition of United Methodism, my parents have always been very supportive of my journey of cultural investigation and spiritual inquiry, even if this took me into traditions other than their own.

In large part, I attribute to my parents my curiosity about life, my creativity, my love of nature and history, my ability to ascertain value in the world’s cultures and wisdom traditions, and my open mind. Each in their own way has been shaped by Jungian thought and a love of nature. My father continues to study Jungian psychology and the work of a Jungian named James Hollis. My mother–an artist herself–also taught me from a very young age to consult the Chinese I Ching, or “Book of Changes,” and to pay close attention to dreams as a source of life guidance and wisdom, which dovetailed nicely with my studies later in life.

Explain the term soft-attention, and its meaning in your poetry.

There is a dynamic contrast between urban modernity, with its high-velocity pace and incessant barrage of information and bad news that assaults the senses, and the natural world, which has a slower rhythm and a healing power that restores balance in a person, body and mind. The latter isn’t just a quaint idea. As clearly demonstrated in a book titled Forest Bathing by Dr. Qing Li, it is verified by vast studies by medical science.

As I say in one of my poems, it’s possible to “get too much of the world on you.” When this happens, we may find our consciousness becoming harsh, hardened, disfigured. Too much time lived in such a state is detrimental to our health, both physically and psychologically. So, the turn of phrase, “the school of soft-attention,” is a poetic way of referring to the natural world, what we call “the realm of mountains, forests, and rivers” in Daoist and Zen traditions. Time spent in this “school” invites, invokes, instills a very different quality of consciousness, one characterized by a “soft-attention.” From my point of view as a poet, poetry is about observation and perception. For me, the craft of writing poetry has become inseparable from this “soft-attention.” I essentially can’t write unless I’ve entered that level of awareness.

What do you mean when you describe yourself as a hermit-poet?

In a nutshell, it’s a solitary leaning. I require a lot of solitude, for spiritual practice, artistic practice, landscape practice. From the point of view of Buddhist practice, there are various accepted ways or paths e.g. monastic, lay-householder, etc. Though they may have had earlier training in a community context, hermits go their own way and walk a solitary path in this regard. It was the same with my teacher.

The hermit-poet is something of an archetype in the contemplative and literary traditions of China and Japan. A hermit-poet is someone who has placed contemplative practice and artistic life at the center of their existence. When most Westerners hear the word “hermit” they automatically think “recluse” or “misanthrope.” The terms are not synonymous in the Asian contemplative or literary traditions. A recluse is one who leaves the world behind, never to return. Not so with hermits in Daoist and Zen tradition, who remain in contact with society. In fact, there is an old saying from China that goes ‘the small hermit lives in the mountains; the great or accomplished hermit lives down in the town.’

Many of your poems in this book speak of the ordinary–the everyday things of life. In what ways can readers apply some of the lessons of your poetry to their own lives?

My poetry is not for everyone. There are large swaths of people in modern life–“modernistas,” my late teacher would say–who are content with their compartmentalized life, and with the distractions mainstream culture feeds them. They go to a job; they chase money, perceived social status, wealth, or fame; they go home at the end of the day and spend their nights in a TV-saturated trance.

My poetry deals with other points of focus. The mystery of dreams. The inner life. The non-obvious qualities of the places where we live. Though there are letters strung together into lines, and those lines form what appear to be “poems” on the page, I’m not certain if what I write constitutes poetry. They are snapshots of moments from the flow of existence that issue an invitation to the reader–to ponder the true nature of their life, the life of the soul.

In the end, I would be gratified if one or two of the poems stirred people to be a bit more awake to the passage of their life and to ask a few deeper questions about what matters most.

What role does music play in your life and in your writing?

Alongside time in nature, music is a key part of my life and poetry. Music figures heavily in my creative process of writing and other art-making. Likewise, when I publish poems on my website, purelandpoetry.com, each poem is presented with a specific image and soundscape, usually from the archives of ambient musicians to whom I’m connected like Forrest Fang, Roy Mattson, Steve Roach, or Byron Metcalf. Sometimes their music feels like an extension of a poem. Sometimes a poem feels like an extension of their music.

Tell me about your next book coming up.

The next book, being released in fall 2019 is entitled The Temple of Warm Harmony. In some sense, it is a continuation of the thread or emphasis of The School of Soft-Attention. However, I do take up some new themes and orientations. The Temple of Warm Harmony is divided into three sections: The World of Red Dust, Heartbreak and Armoring, and Entering the Temple of Warm Harmony.

We are living in tumultuous times, culturally, socially, and environmentally. The concept of “the world of red dust” comes from a very ancient Chinese Daoist and Ch’an, or Zen, poetic understanding of a world that has fallen out of balance. The poems in the next collection explore some of these aspects of imbalance, disharmony, and realignment with what is known in the traditions as The Way.

Frank LaRue Owen will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, November 28, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from The School of Soft-Attention.

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