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Author Q & A with Stephen Mack Jones

On July 23, 2018

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 22)

Rookie thriller/mystery writer Stephen Mack Jones saw his first novel published at age 63–but his fans would likely say it’s a “crime” he didn’t get into this business sooner.

Following the debut release of August Snow in February, readers are already awaiting Lives Laid Away, the second of what is becoming a hit series, set to be on bookshelves in early January.

Born in Lansing, Michigan, Jones now lives in Farmington Hills, outside of Detroit, and it is here that the action of August Snow–and there’s plenty of it–brews in his beloved home state.

His first book introduces readers to the tough guy persona of ex-cop August Snow, who was forced off the city’s police squad, award a $12 million settlement for his trouble, and soon found himself dragged into the biggest case of his career. The story in influenced in prat on a corruption scandal involving Detroit’s mayor a decade ago and is informed by urban standoffs around the country in recent years between protesters and heavily-armed police. In the process, Jones give the embattled city of Detroit a fair shake, as locals can appreciate his many detailed images of the city.

Jones is a published poet, an award-winning playwright, a recipient of the Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellowship. He worked in advertising and marketing for several years before turning his attention to full-time fiction writing.

Please tell me about yourself.

Stephen Mack Jones

In some ways, I’m the product of a home like August was raised in. My father was a hard-working blue-collar man who’d quit school in the 10th grade so he could work and contribute to his family–his mom and dad, brothers and sister. He never graduated from high school, but he was always a reader–everything for Carl Sandburg to Langston Hughes, to Shakespeare, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Studs Turkel.

My mom had a bit of college and a love opera. She had a beautiful voice! She’d sing arias from Turandot, Carmen, or Tosca while ironing my dad’s work blues of cooking the Sunday beef roast. Both of my parents made sure my brother and I took reading and education seriously. In fact, they saw no difference between the two.

So, like August, I’ve had heroes in my life–my mom and dad–who lived everyday, quietly heroic lives in order to raise children above their own origin stories.

As to charting my so-called “career path,” let’s just say you could probably give a 2-year-old a fistful of candy, a crayon, and a blank sheet of paper, and they’d ending up charting my career path with 99 percent accuracy! Thirty years in advertising and marketing communications with stops at play-writing, poetry, selling Buicks, and making sandwiches.

Your talent for writing is quite diverse. After your success with poetry and screenplays, what caught your interest in writing crime novels?

I’ve always loved reading mysteries and science fiction. Between Dashiell Hammett, Agatha Christie, and Ray Bradbury there were the poets–Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Nikki Giovanni. Poetry is where I learned–and continue to learn–how words carry their own special weight and possess their own unique colors.

But I always come back to mysteries and thrillers. To be able to actively engage someone’s imagination, work their emotions and increase their heart rate through a puzzle constructed from words. It’s also the ideal genre to occasionally have important sociopolitical commentary fly in under the radar.

August Snow tells the story of a young man who grows up in Detroit’s Mexicantown, goes on to become a cop, and finds himself without a job after exposing the corruption of his own mayor. He sues the city and wins a $12 million wrongful termination settlement that sets him up financially for life–but distances him from many of his “friends.” He sets out to start a new life in his own neighborhood, and that’s when things get interesting! As your debut novel, how did you go about formulating the full plot of August Snow and developing its many colorful characters?

I never tell myself, “I’m going to write a book today!” That sounds scaring and daunting, doesn’t it? What I do in telling a story is what I used to do when my son was young, and, at bedtime, he’d want me to tell him a story. But not a story from a book. A story from me!

Well, my son is 21 now and me making up stories for him at bedtime would just be damned weird, right? So, I tell myself stories–1,200 to 1,400 words at a time. The length of a chapter. And it has to keep me entertained and informed.

This is why my characters have to surprise, move, and intrigue me. They have to fascinate me from the color of their eyes to the clothes they choose to wear to the cadence of their speech. A few of the characters in both August Snow and the new book Lives Laid Away I’ve known. Most others are characters I’d like to know. The others just give me the heebie-jeebies!

Snow is a man of contrasts–a smart, tough rebel with a decided attitude, a softie for kids and the elderly, a man on a mission to improve his old neighborhood–who embodies a sort of hero for his city. Even his name, August Snow, is intriguing, striking an image of opposites–very hot and very cold. Is there a hidden message in his name?

Ya know, I hate to admit it, but I’m the last guy in the room who actually go the contrast of his name! My read my fourth draft of August Snow and said, “He’s the perfect reflection of his name! Emotionally, he can run hot–like the month of August, or cold–like snow!”

Or course, having a man’s stupid pride, I said, “Yeah–just like I planned it, babe.” But the truth was, inside I was saying to myself, “Holy cow! How’d I miss that?”

Your affection for Detroit and your home state of Michigan comes through in August Snow, with vivid descriptions of and references to real places and events, all while exposing its hardships alongside its charms. Tell me about why it was important to you to show Detroit, which has endured its share of hard times over the past few decades, in a realistic balance.

For years, any time Detroit was referenced in the news media or through movies and TV shows, there was a quick, stereotype shorthand that was used: flying sparks from auto assembly lines, boarded-up buildings and burnt-out houses, decaying neighborhoods. “Ruin porn.”

And while those things still exist, you rarely see the other side of the story: New apartments and condos to accommodate young professionals in information technology or marketing. Successful start-ups from people who’d lost faith in the city five years earlier. High-end fashion boutiques. Theater and live music options. Restaurants for whatever tastes you have–Mexican, Vietnamese, Brazilian, Italian, French, Greek, Thai, Nigerian, Mediterranean, or just good old Southern home cooking.

And it’s a city that supports its artists. Just ask anybody–like me–who’s won a Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship. So, it’s important to me to give readers not only the varied look and feel of the city, but the aromas and textures of a city that’s forever tied to its socioeconomic and racial past while actively reinventing itself for the future.

Please tell me about Lives Laid Away, set for release in January.

A young, anonymous Hispanic woman dressed as Queen Marie Antoinette is dredged from the Detroit River. Another, dressed like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, is pulled from the nearby Rouge River. Both undocumented, both subjected to unspeakable cruelties and torture. And more young women are going missing–many from August Snow’s Mexicantown neighborhood.

The Detroit police are undermanned and overwhelmed, and August’s neighbors and local business owners are growing more fearful every day. August takes it upon himself to find out what’s going on and he gets pulled into the dangerous world of human trafficking and treacherous secrets–and potentially illegal operations among the DEA, FBI, and ICE. Getting information that will help him understand and end the kidnappings and murders will also force August to contact men he put in prison five years earlier as a Detroit cop: Legendary Detroit criminal kingpin Marcus “Duke” Ducane and his monstrously large and psychotic bodyguards, The Compton Twins.

I’ve read that the movie rights to August Snow have been negotiated. Will we be seeing it on the big screen at some point?

I can’t really say much until it’s officially announced by the production company, but, let’s just say yes–there’s a very good chance you’ll see August Snow on the big or small screen in the near future.

Is there a new direction or genre you’d like to take your writing, and/or do you have other works in progress already? Poetry? More screenplays?

Right now, I’m just having fun telling stores about he life and times of August Snow! I’ve truly been blessed by the success of the book has enjoyed, including four award nominations: the Hammett Award, the Nero Award, Shamus Award, and the Strand Magazine Critics Award.

And to be honest, I didn’t get this far with the book on my own; my family has my back as does Stephany Evans, my literary agent, and the really fantastic people at Soho Press.

At this point, I hate to do this, but I have to excuse myself and get back to work–the third August Snow is calling!

Stephen Mack Jones will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 18 as a participant in the “Life’s Great Mysteries” mystery panel at 12:00 p.m. in the State Capitol Room 201 H.

‘Clock Dance’ by Anne Tyler is one of her best books yet

By Guest Author

On July 17, 2018

In Fiction

By Valerie Walley. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 15)

Clock Dance is Tyler’s 21st novel, her 20th to be published by Alfred A. Knopf (Hogarth published Vinegar Girl, loosely based on The Taming of the Shrew, for their reimagined Shakespeare series). This is one of Tyler’s best books yet! If you’ve never read an Anne Tyler work, Clock Dance is a good place to begin, and, if you have read one of her many novels, you will be charmed and delighted as ever.

As the type of character only Anne Tyler can conjure and bring into being, Willa Drake, the protagonist of Clock Dance, is the source of pure reading entertainment…along with all the other characters in the novel. Willa has led a relatively sheltered life by falling into life events that have defined her course, putting up little resistance even though secretly harboring plenty of opinions.

We see her as a young girl reacting to her mother’s sudden disappearance, then flashing ahead ten years to her approaching marriage, then ten years later as a young widow, then another ten years on as a remarried woman living in a golfing community in Tucson (she couldn’t care less about golfing).

When Clock Dance gets underway, Willa is summoned to Baltimore from her home in Arizona to help take care of her son’s ex-girlfriend who’s been shot, the ex-girlfriend’s young daughter, and their dog, Airplane. The story takes off from there as we are introduced to and taken in by all the quirky neighbors in this community. You find yourself asking again and again, “Why would anyone do such a thing?” while also being absolutely riveted and entertained by what happens next. Ultimately, everyone falls in love with Willa. Not to give anything away, but Willa does more than accept this turn in her life.

I have been a fan of Anne Tyler’s since I discovered her work in 1980 when I read Morgan’s Passing. I quickly went back and read her previous novels, and then, in 1982, her breakout novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, was published. Clock Dance is reminiscent of some of my favorites – Dinner, but also Earthly Possessions, The Accidental Tourist (made into the blockbuster movie), Back When We Were Grownups, and Breathing Lessons (which won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction).

If Morning Ever Comes, her first novel, was published in 1964, shortly after her graduation from Duke, where she was a student of Reynolds Price. Anne Tyler has said that one of her–if not her–favorite writers is Eudora Welty. She has always cited the literary influence and appreciation of Eudora Welty in her work. She paid a visit to Jackson which she published as “A Visit with Eudora Welty” in the New York Times Book Review in 1980.

Now is a great time to celebrate Anne Tyler’s work. Vintage is reissuing her paperbacks in stunning new packages, so you can find these classic novels on bookstore shelves waiting to be rediscovered.

Every time I read one of Tyler’s novels, I always think back to an essay of hers, “Still Just Writing.” When her daughters were little, various moms at the schoolyard would ask her if she’d found work yet, or was she still just writing? And Tyler’s reply was “still just writing.” And, all these many years later, her readers could not be more thankful that she is.

Valerie Walley is a bookseller and Ridgeland resident.

Anne Tyler’s novel Clock Dance is Lemuria’s July 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Isabelle Armand

By Guest Author

On July 16, 2018

In Civil Rights, Photography

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 15)

New York City photographer Isabelle Armand said she was “instantly inspired” to tell the stories of the wrongful convictions, incarcerations, and eventual exonerations of two rural Mississippi men when she first read about their cases more than five years ago.

In her new book, Levon and Kennedy: Mississippi Innocence Project (PowerHouse Books), Armand has visually documented the everyday lives of Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer over a five-year period after their release from the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. The black and white images of the men and their families, captured in and around their homes in the small rural Mississippi town of Brooksville, includes quotations that convey their thoughts and feelings of regret and joy about the miscarriage of justice and the eventual outcome of their cases.

The men had been charged in separate murder cases committed 18 months apart in the early 1990s. Brooks was sentenced to life and was imprisoned 18 years; Brewer received a death sentence and served 15 years.

It was through the diligent work of The Innocence Project, along with DNA testing, that Brewere and Brooks were cleared of all charges and freed in 2008.

Armand’s book includes text by Tucker Carrington, director of the George C. Cochran Innocence Project at the University of Mississippi School of Law, who, with Washington Post reporter Radley Balko, co-authored the book The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, also related to the cases of Brewer and Brooks.

Armand acknowledges the support of artist Olivier Renaud-Clement, the Shoen Foundation, PowerHouse Books, and Meridian Printing for the production of her book.

Her distinctive photography works can be found in private and museum collections, and have been exhibited in the United States. They have also been featured in national and international publications.

Tell me about your background, and how you became interested in photography.

I was born and raised in Paris. My mother was a Vogue editor and worked with amazing photographers such as Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin. We had many photography books of the masters. I was always around photography and got the best possible education. I was especially drawn to the works of Walker Evans, Dorthea Lange, Brassai, Cartier-Bresson, Roy DeCarava, Edward Curtis, who documented people and places. They were storytellers of life. But at first, I followed in my mother’s steps and worked as a stylist there, and here.

I left France at 20 to come to New York, which I still love some 30 years later.

Do you have family or other connections to Mississippi?

A lifelong inspiration would be my only connection to Mississippi. I grew up fascinated with the U.S.; at first, it was through cinema. The West, New York, and the South seemed mythical places.

In Paris, I was around Blues musicians, and our idols were Robert Johnson, Little Walter, Muddy Waters, and the like. Mississippi captured my imagination, a fundamental American culture was born there, and I find the place incredibly rich and deeply textured.

How did you hear about the cases of Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer? When and why did you decide to become involved in them?

I came across an article about the cases’ forensics in 2012. It was a troubling account of a flawed and corrupt process, when reality goes beyond fiction. It triggered many questions; how, why, and where could this happen? I was instantly inspired to tell their story in photographs. I waited for several months, but the story stayed with me. Finally, I contacted Tucker Carrington, and suggested a photographic documentary around Levon’s and Kennedy’s experiences.

When did you begin photographing the images in this book, and how long did it take?

I began to photograph Levon and Kennedy and their families in June 2013. The last images and interviews were done in July 2017. I would go each year to spend time with them, take pictures, and collect interviews. With printing, editing both the images and the interviews, it took five years.

What were your goals (artistic and otherwise) for this project, as far as what you wanted to capture, how you envisioned the large photo collection would be organized, etc.?

The goal was to create a compelling visual essay to raise awareness about wrongful conviction. It’s a reality, which mostly remains abstract until we see it with our own eyes. I felt an intimate photo essay would bring the story of Levon and Kennedy to the forefront. We’d get to know them and their families like our own, and realize that the system can crush anyone.

I envisioned this essay pretty much like it is now. I started with retracing Levon’s and Kennedy’s childhoods, and visiting places which were meaningful to them, then and now. I’d document everyday life; family members, families’ gatherings, birthdays, July 4th, as well as their rural environment. With time, the project took a life of its own.

I love black and white film. It mutes unnecessary noise, and it sets off the essence of the subjects for me. Also, light on film is magic.

I edited as I went along, for each family, until editing for the book, when I had to look at the images in a new light. I eliminated a few photographs and created a new visual narrative. Damien Saatdjian, the graphic designer, gave it great breathing space and rhythm.

Both men and their families seem to have very forgiving spirits about their ordeals. Did that surprise you?

I knew a little about them prior to meeting them, so I wasn’t surprised. They were very angry when it happened. But spending 18 years in prison, or 10 on death row, they had to deal with it in a certain way, or it would destroy them. They had to make some peace with their situation, so they could endure and still be the men they wanted to be. Levon was thrown into a dangerous general population and chose to become a good influence. He saved lives and he was respected. Kennedy, isolated in his cell 24/7 while facing death, chose to educate himself, read, wrote, and prayed. Thinking of his ordeal every day was not an option, like he says in the book, “You’d go crazy.” Yet, he thought about it because he was trying to save himself, which he did by writing to the Innocence Project.

Besides where, how, and why this happened, my question was, “How does one and one’s family cope with wrongful conviction?” Both men and their families stick to a strong philosophy of life.

Levon and Kennedy have large families who supported them during their incarcerations, and you got to know them during the course of this project. What can you tell me about them–their thoughts on their loved ones’ false imprisonment, their attitudes about living in their rural Mississippi communities, their hopes for their own futures and that of their children and grandchildren? (It’s notable that, although many of them mentioned racial prejudice as an everyday event, most prefer to stay because of close family ties and the “peace and quiet” they enjoy.)

I interviewed everyone for the quotes you see in the book, and it depends on the individual. Most feel that the criminal justice system needs major changes. They lived through the most tragic consequences of this system, and their community still does in many ways. Levon and Kennedy’s wrongful incarceration is something they all want to put behind them, even though they have strong opinions about it.

These families have been there for generations, they are attached to their land loved ones, and most don’t want to leave. Some of the younger people are torn between the desire to go places offering more opportunities and diversity, and their love for their family and area. Every parent hopes for a better future for their children, but few think things will change in Mississippi. However, they all go about living their full lives. They ignore and rise above external pressures.

Sadly, Levon passed away this past January, after 10 years of freedom. Did he get to see this book?

Levon was the first person to receive the book right from the printer. He took it all around town, and he was proud of it.

The way the book is bound is wonderful–I love the way the book itself is the book jacket! As an artist, tell me about the decision to create this book like this, in that it makes such a strong impression before it’s even opened!

I don’t like jackets on books and I wanted the cover printed with a discreet lamination. I didn’t want any typo on the cover, either. I felt Levon and Kennedy were so powerful in this photograph that they drew you in. The book wouldn’t be what it is without the work of my lab Laumont on the book files, and the amazing printing of Meridian Printing. And again, Damien Saatdjian’s input was also invaluable to achieve the results we wanted.

Isabelle Armand will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 18 as a participant in the “Seeing the Light in Mississippi” photography panel at 4:00 p.m. at the Galloway Fellowship Center.

New ‘Charley Patton’ book is a study of the Father of the Delta Blues

By Guest Author

On July 11, 2018

In Blues

By DeMatt Harkins. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 8)

In September of 1984, Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It” topped the US singles chart, as Prince’s “Purple Rain” dominated the album chart. Meanwhile in Belgium, four recording sessions from The Great Depression were the order of the day. That month, scholars descended upon Liège University for the International Conference on Charley Patton. The occasion marked the 50th anniversary of the pivotal Mississippi Blues legend’s passing.

Charley Patton: Voice of the Mississippi Delta compiles nine presentation transcriptions from that forum. Each piece, some revised or amended, explores the man who brought us “Pony Blues,” and “High Water Everywhere,” as well as his ripple effects.

Seven years after the conference, while attending a proper headstone dedication in Holly Ridge, Mississippi, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty compared Patton’s body of work to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Significantly, Charley Patton is the earliest Delta Blues musician with a known history.

Born in Bolton, Mississippi, Charley Patton moved with his family to the atypically egalitarian Dockery Farms near Drew. In the Delta, he excelled as a prolific musician, master showman, and regional celebrity. Although only one photo exists of a sharply appointed Patton, he recorded 71 songs from 1929 to 1934.

These songs were heard and seen by the Mississippians who migrated north forging the first guard of Chicago Blues. Expats Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Elmore James would later leave their mark on yet a younger generation, domestically and abroad. The direct line of influence from Charley Patton is evident, and the impact is profound. Hence, the legion at Liège.

Robert Sacré not only organized the Conference, but also edited Charley Patton: Voice of the Mississippi Delta. The professor at the host university opens with a primer of traditional African music’s journey to the 20th century South. Arnold Shaw follows with comparisons of Patton to fellow Blues stalwarts, Bukka White, Son House, and Robert Johnson. The common thread being self-exploration. Focusing on the individual and not the collective was brand new with post-emancipation African American music.

University of Memphis’ David Evans’ piece provides a thorough Patton biography, replete with updates culled from interviews conducted since 1984. He thoughtfully surveys Patton’s life, recordings, spirituality, relationships, and identity. Evans seeks to understand how a Blues musician simultaneously stayed a juke joint draw while remaining the go-to party act for adults and children, black or white. From there a second Liège professor, Daniel Droixhe, analyzes the mechanics of the famous cannon through Patton’s chord and lyrical structure.

Pivoting to the effect of Patton’s music, noted Louisiana music author John Broven demonstrates how Delta Blues traveled south to Baton Rouge. Similarly, through 16 songs, Mike Rowe traces the progression of Blues from an acoustic Delta style to an electric Chicago style.

Having befriended Howlin’ Wolf in the late 1960s, Chicago journalist Dick Shurman recalls the last years of a musician who genuinely studied at the feet of Charley Patton. An invaluable viewpoint follows from Luther Allison. Born in Magnolia, Arkansas, he moved to Chicago at age 14, eventually joining the Chicago Blues scene, alongside Jimmy Reed, Freddie King, and Little Walter.

Providing a current assessment of Chicago music (in 1984), Living Blues magazine co-founder and editor Jim O’Neal, who is coming to this year’s Mississippi Book Festival, addressed the conference. At that time, Koko Taylor, Little Milton, and James Cotton ruled the roost. While Mississippi still influenced Chicago, O’Neal points out that it was now a two-way street of artistic inspiration.

As Evans suggests in the book’s contemporary conclusion, a lot has evolved within blues since 1984. Yet at the same time, different iterations and artists experience revivals on a cyclical basis, revealing the style’s long history. Point being, Charley Patton maintains as much relevance today as he did thirty and eighty years ago.

DeMatt Harkins of Jackson enjoys flipping pancakes and records with his wife and daughter.

Author Q & A with Jo Watson Hackl (Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe)

By Former Lemurians

On July 10, 2018

In Oz: Middle Grade

Interview by Clara Martin. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 8)

In Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe, you’ll find a ghost town in the middle of the woods in South Mississippi, a girl named Cricket, a cricket named Charlene, and a poetry-loving dog. They’ve got eleven days to find a mysterious room painted with birds, and thirteen clues will lead them there. Combine the Mississippi Wild, a Walter Anderson art mystery, and a young girl who is taking a chance on herself, and you have Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe, great for kids (and adults!) ages 8 and up. You’ll laugh, maybe cry, and have a lot of fun reading this book. In an interview with author Jo Hackl, she talks about her inspiration for this story, and what it means to be a writer for children, writing about a place like Mississippi.

Where are you from, and where do you live now?

I was born on Keesler Air Force base in Biloxi and moved to the real-life ghost town of Electric Mills when I was eleven. I now live in Greenville, South Carolina, but still have deep ties to Mississippi. Most of my extended family lives in the state and I get back whenever I can.

Do you do anything else besides writing books for young readers?

Jo Watson Hackl

My husband and I have three children who keep us very busy. I also practice corporate law (part-time), operate outdoorosity.org, a free resource about nature, and volunteer in the community. I’m working with a local school to develop a cross-curricular plan of instruction to use Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe to teach art, creative writing, geography, math, literature, science and social studies and to help the school incorporate nature into the school day. Together we’re building a flower fort, just like the one in the book, that will be used as a reading space.

In your own words, what is Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe about?

Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe is about learning to take chances on yourself. The story takes readers on an adventure with 12-year-old Cricket and her companion, a field cricket named Charlene, through an overgrown ghost town in Electric City, Mississippi, to solve a thirty-year-old clue trail in search of a secret room that may or may not exist, all to try to win back Cricket’s run-away mother.

Cricket must use her wits and just a smidgen of luck to live off the land in a Mississippi winter, survive sleet storm and snake-bite, and work to solve an increasingly baffling clue trail left by an eccentric artist with a logic all his own. Along the way, Cricket meets the reclusive last resident of the ghost town, enlists the help of a poetry-loving dog, and takes up a touch of grave-robbing. These experiences awaken Cricket to the possibility of finding strength in the most unlikely of places—within herself.

“The woods smelled like a hundred and fifty years of dark. A goose-bumpy ghost-town kind of dark.” This is Electric City, Mississippi. An abandoned electric lumber mill town, where honeysuckle vines grow around pillars that used to prop up houses, and weeds push through a sidewalk, left right in the middle of the woods, and it is where Cricket makes her makeshift home while she searches for her Mama.

You actually lived in Electric Mills, Mississippi, the inspiration for Electric City. Can you talk about what it was like to grow up in a place that was neither here nor there? A ghost town, of sorts?

Growing up in a ghost town made every day interesting. The real town still has a few houses, but I made the fictional town empty to make it better fit the story. Growing up, I loved exploring the woods, walking the old sidewalks, and searching for signs of the people who used to live there. Many of the things that people had planted in their yards–rose bushes and daylilies and privet bushes–still were there, even though the houses were missing, and I tried to imagine the houses that had once stood where toppled-over pillars and thick thorny rose vines now reigned.

Can you tell our readers what a doogaloo is?

A doogaloo is a coin that the mill used to pay its workers. I am happy to say that I have a real doogaloo from the original town and I kept it propped on my desk for inspiration as I was writing the book.

Explain how the presence of art, nature, and the creative process are intertwined in your book. Cricket says, “And if you’re going to last any time out in the woods, you’d better get comfortable with whoever it is you are.” What is your own creative writing process? How did you start writing Cricket’s story?

I absolutely believe that art, nature, and the creative process nourish each other. Writing the book, I surrounded myself with art of all kinds, visited galleries and museums, and talked to visual artists. I also spent a lot of time in nature and my home office overlooks our woods so that I can be close to nature even when I’m inside. I started writing Cricket’s story in my head back when I was a child exploring the woods. As I grew older, I knew I wanted to write and I knew I wanted to set the story in the ghost town. In a lot of ways, Cricket’s advice about the need to get comfortable with whoever it is you are applies to my writing process. I had to learn to take chances, to try things that might not work, and to write the scenes I was more than a little scared to write. I brought my whole self to the process, vulnerabilities, quirks and all, and tried to create an experience that would draw readers into Cricket’s world and make them feel like they were right there with her.

Cricket is in search of her mother by way of a “Bird Room,” and clues that lead Cricket closer to this mysterious room painted with all kinds of birds, trees, and flowers, painted by a man named “Bob.”

Please explain why you decided to use Walter Anderson and his “Little Room,” as inspiration? Do you have a favorite Walter Anderson painting? If so, please share!

I am a life-long fan of Walter Anderson’s work. He drew from direct observation of nature and his quick, efficient line-work captured the essence of whatever he was drawing or painting. As Cricket says about the fictional artist “Bob” in the book, “some pictures weren’t much more than thin pencil strokes. But they showed more than I could ever say in a lifetime about a raccoon or a dragonfly or a duck.” My favorite Walter Anderson piece is the “Little Room,” where he captured the beauty of a day on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Walter Anderson used the light from the windows to illuminate the paintings, beginning with sandhill cranes and a rooster at dawn, as the sun moved throughout the day. This was the inspiration for the “Bird Room” in my book.

Of course, writing about serious subjects doesn’t mean there cannot be humor! I loved the moments of comedy in your book, particularly the opening scene in Thelma’s. What was one of your favorite scenes to write?

Great question! One of my favorite scenes to write was at the end when, without giving anything away, Cricket finds herself in the middle of Aunt Belinda’s trailer with Aunt Belinda and her suffocating hairspray and hidden tattoo. The pastor and the entire and the whole youth group are there as Aunt Belinda tries to hide the fact that she accidentally left Cricket in Thelma’s Cash ‘n’ Carry even though she told the whole town that she suspected foul play. Let’s just say that Charlene, the cricket, plays a leading role in adding some humor to the situation.

As a writer from Mississippi, what does it mean to write about the South, the place you grew up, and incorporate art, nature and family? Why do you think young readers will enjoy Cricket’s story?

I think that Mississippians have a unique sense of connection to place. The land where I grew up is a part of me, and I wanted to share that with readers. I also wanted to combine art, nature and the importance of family, no matter who your family is. Young readers have told me that they’ve enjoyed being part of Cricket’s world, experiencing the woods, exploring the ghost town, and using their wits to solve the clue trail. One of the great things about being a writer is that, if you can figure out a way to work a really cool thing that interests you into the book, you can do it. Without giving away the clue trail, I worked a lot of really cool things that interested me into the book and I hope that readers enjoy solving the trail as much as I enjoyed creating it.

Jo Watson Hackl will be at Lemuria on Thursday, July 12, to sign and read from Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe. Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe is Lemuria’s July 2018 middle grade selection for our First Editions Club for Young Readers.

Author Q & A with Sonny Brewer about William Gay

By Guest Author

On July 9, 2018

In Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 8)

The legacy of William Gay–who became an iconic Southern Gothic writer after beginning his career as a published novelist in his late 50s–is alive and well with the posthumous release of one of his last novels, The Lost Country.

Fortunately for his fans, Gay’s longtime friend, editor, and road trip buddy, Sonny Brewer of Fairhope, Alabama, is taking the new book on tour himself.

True to Gay’s memorable style, The Lost Country is classic Gothic at its best: downtrodden characters who continue to suffer defeats, blended with a show of violence and a haunting sense of sadness as they struggle for redemption.

After the publication of his prize-winning first novel, The Long Home in 1999, Gay went on to add Provinces of Night, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, Wittgenstein’s Lolita, and Twilight to his list of successes–after spending the previous four decades as a construction worker, house painter, factory worker, and TV salesman. He died of an apparent heart attack in 2012.

Sonny Brewer

Brewer, who wrote the foreword to The Lost Country, has spent much of his career in the roles of publisher and/or editor for a newspaper and a number of magazines and other publications, including the Eastern Shore Quarterly, The Southern Bard, and the Red Bluff Review.

His the author of four novels: The Poet of Tolstoy Park, A Sound Like Thunder, Cormac, and The Widow and the Tree. He also edited the widely known Blue Moon Café anthology series.

Tell me about your relationship with William Gay and how this book tour came about.

The publisher asked me if I would tour with this book and I said yes. The main reason for the request, I think, is because I was editor-in-chief at MacAdam-Cage Publishing at the time of William’s death, and the book was under contract there. A big search found only some 250 handwritten pages from the manuscript (which had been lost). I read those pages and had to deliver the disappointing news to the publisher that about half the book was missing.

So, my early involvement with the manuscript was part of why I was asked to help the book on the road. The other part was my friendship with the author. I write about how I met William in the foreword included in The Lost Country, so I’ll leave that bit for readers who get the book.

William Gay

But, I’ll say that I was instantly drawn to him in a way that had little to do with his writing, or his looming celebrity. He was a good man. Unassuming, honest, self-effacing, funny, intelligent, generous, and on and on. What was remarkable to me was how strongly and deeply he conveyed those qualities at a glance. It’s sort of like the old saw about judging the qualities of a man from the shoes he wears–which is inaccurate, but not ridiculous. Our faces and our eyes tell the story of who we are. And William was a good story.

Why was The Lost Country said to have been “anticipated for a decade”?

William first spoke publicly of the novel’s existence long before its release here in 2018. He read from its pages at literary conferences and at bookstores. But the whole manuscript was missing, and there’s a suggestion that he simply couldn’t remember where he’d put it for safekeeping. I can believe that because I recently failed to find a screenplay I had written. I had my sister looking and a friend looking. We never found the original. But a movie producer friend has a copy on his computer. I was too embarrassed to ask him for a long time.

Gay’s writings are noted for their trademark elements that make up true Southern Gothic writings, including mostly rural and often eccentric characters whose lives are trapped in poverty, crime, violence, and hopelessness. What, in your opinion, draws readers to Southern Gothic literature?

I was recently asked why I thought 125 readers bought Fifty Shades of Gray, and I said it must be good, on some level.

I think you want to know on what level are Southern Gothic stories and novels found to be a good read, and I would say for those readers they find settings, situations, circumstances, events, and characters that stir in them emotions of fear and love, of empathy and wonder, of curiosity, and find in the whole of their reading experience a common bond of humanity that wobbles along between the ditches of a highway taking us all someplace, to the same place of truth. And the company of these others, like us, that we find in these books helps to fend off loneliness.

In The Lost Country, set in rural Tennessee in 1955, main character Billy Edgewater seems to be a magnet for attracting troubles and aligning himself with the wrong people, as if his own bad decisions are not enough to add to his despair. It seems that Gay had a a gift for creating harsh stories yet offering them in a beautifully literary form. How would you describe his work, and his writing style?

I was a used bookseller, owned a store in Fairhope called Over the Transom Books, and I had some volumes that were collectible and pricey. When I found a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird worth several thousand dollars at a yard sale, a colleague in Florida told me there’s a distinction among antiquarian booksellers between scarce and rare. A scarce book comes along once in a few years. A rare book like the one I’d lucked up on comes along once in a lifetime. William Gay’s literary talent, his work, and his writing style, and, indeed, the kind of man he was, is like that. Rare.

Tell me about Gay’s personality, what motivated him, how he became so interested in the Southern Gothic genre, etc.

William told me about a middle school English teacher who “saw something” in him and handed him a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. It was not a homework assignment. There would be no test. The book was a gift. And, by grace, something in that book plumbed the depths of his soul and discovered there a gift in him.

He told me that he read twice, before he turned 14, that 544-page book. Had he found in Eugene Gant a version of himself? Had William found in Wolfe’s dense prose writing that he believed he wanted to imitate? I don’t know. We didn’t talk about that. But William, it was apparent, did fall in love with words, their rhythm, their cadence, their flow, and had from reading an experience that electrified him and drove him to an addiction for the masterworks of Southern writers. And when he set his own pen to paper he became able to match them word for word in power and beauty.

I read to William a paragraph from his novel The Long Home and asked him about how long it took him to compose those sentences that staggered me when I first read them. He told me only as long as it took for him to write them down longhand because he had already crafted that paragraph and others during an eight-hour day hanging Sheetrock. How he didn’t cut off a finger with a hawkbill knife, I don’t know. William also said he could do that because he had a photographic memory. Which gift he also employed in the recall of long passages from his favorite books and that he could quote word-for-word. William Gay was called to be a writer, pure and simple. And, pretty as a song, he answered.

Are there other “lost” stories or novels by William Gay that are in the works for publication?

William’s home was robbed and vandalized while he was out of town doing a reading someplace. He told me his music CDs and his movie DVDs were slung out the back door and down the hill behind his place. He told me a box of his writing was stolen, and it included a completed novel manuscript on the bloody days of the Natchez Trace.

I asked him did he think we’d someday get it back as a posthumously published novel. He said no. He told me that he didn’t write sequentially, and some times forgot to number loose pages. He might write a scene from the end of a book at the beginning of a manuscript, for instance. “Nobody could put it together but me,” he said. Plus, the thief could be easier named if it comes out of hiding. I expect, too, however, there could be clemency granted the perpetrator if fans of William Gay had verdicts to cast.

Gay’s talent as a writer has been compared to that of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Cormac McCarthy. Why is that, and do you believe that is an accurate assessment of Gay’s work?

I don’t like questions about comparisons between William’s writings and these three authors. It’s not unfair to ask. But the answer is readily available to those who read the books of Faulkner, and O’Connor, and McCarthy, and William Gay, or, at least from such reading an answer is personally well-formulated. Anyone who hasn’t read these writers does not care what I have to say. Nor, in fact, do those who have enjoyed the work of these masters.

Anything I didn’t ask that you’d like to include?

It should be said, for the record, how William was utterly devoted to his kids. Laura, and Lee, and Chris and William, Jr. drew a damn fine daddy.

Sonny Brewer will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, July 10, at 5:00 to sign and discuss The Lost Country by William Gay.

Jon Meacham reviews national turmoil in ‘The Soul of America’

By Guest Author

On July 3, 2018

In Culture, History, Politics

By Andy Taggart. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 1)

Already a Pulitzer Prize-winning and presidential biographer, Jon Meacham just made an important additional contribution to the civic and cultural health of the nation.

In The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels (Random House), Meacham reminds us that intense political turmoil and dissent are not new to the American scene, and however out of sorts might seem the body politic today, we’re going to come through it just fine.

More timely encouragement can hardly be imagined.

Meacham has made much in his prior best sellers and frequent public appearances of the power of the presidency, for good and for ill. And his keen grasp of American history spread large–he’s currently a distinguished visiting professor of history at Vanderbilt University–instructs his optimism and sense of humor even in the face of what he perceives as poor leadership and bad policy decisions.

Mississippians were the beneficiaries of his good cheer at the 2016 Mississippi Book Festival held at our State Capitol, and he will be returning in August for the 2018 edition.

His newest work is a review of major times of turmoil in the nation’s history, spanning about a generation per chapter. Not surprisingly, the Civil War and its antecedents, aftermath and legacy is his starting point, but what follows might be less familiar reminders of the nation’s resiliency in the face of painful periods of political enmity.

Did you know that a group of wealthy Wall Street players in the early 1930s tried to recruit a retired general from the U.S. Marines to stage a coup against FDR?

Or that the New York Assembly refused to seat five newly elected legislators because they were members of the Socialist Party?

Do you remember ever knowing that an anarchist tried to blow up the home of the attorney general of the United States, but succeeded instead only in blasting himself into little pieces all over the AG’s front yard?

Throughout, Meacham sounds the drumbeat of the soul of America, by which he means the “collection of convictions, dispositions and sensitivities that shape [our] character and inform [our] conduct.”

While it is clear from his writings and many of his allusions that Meacham is a man of personal faith, it is not a religious reference he intends when he writes of the nation’s soul. It is, rather, his conviction, and the witness of history, that there is an inner core that has made America into America and Americans into Americans.

Meacham frankly acknowledges and clearly documents the times that our core has responded to its dark side, when the nation as a body acted primarily out of fear, anger, and or even hatred. but he also revels in the many, and more frequent, examples of how the core–the soul–of America responded to our better angels and moved forward into improved human relations and quality of life, and devotion to causes higher than self-interest.

Often, he notes, significant steps toward the light have resulted directly from the nation’s revulsion at seeing itself at its darkest.

We conducted the affairs of our nation for a century after the signing of the Declaration of Independence as if it were not imprinted on our corporate soul that all men are created equal. To our shame, and as Meacham painfully reminds us, we conducted the affairs of our state for yet another century still ignoring that soul-stirring promise of our nation’s founding.

Now, at the beginning of our third century as a state, may the soul that Jon Meacham also reminds us has responded so often and in so many ways to our better angels be the one that marks our identity as Americans and as Mississippians. And what better way to start on the path of a new century than with a new state flag?

Andy Taggart is CEO of the law firm of Taggart, Rimes and Graham, PLLC in Ridgeland and co-author of Mississippi Politics: The Struggle for Power, 1976-2008 (University Press of Mississippi 2009). His public service has included roles as chief of staff to Gov. Kirk Fordice, president of the Madison County Board of Supervisors and the chairman of the Greater Jackson Chamber Partnership.

Author Q & A with T.R. Hummer

By Guest Author

On July 2, 2018

In Poetry

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 1)

For Mississippi native T.R. Hummer, 2018 is turning out to be a year of life and death–and beyond–speaking in literary terms.

The poet, editor and essayist who grew up on a farm near Macon now has 14 books of poetry and essays to his credit–two of which he added just this year and that challenge the reader to consider, on a deeper level, what happens at death and afterward.

Hummer’s 2018 release are Eon (the third volume in his LSU Press trilogy that includes Ephemeron, 2012, and Skandalon 2014); and After the Afterlife (Acre Books), which carries his trilogy on birth, life, and death to the next “logical” step: examining what consciousness comes even after one’s demise.

His honors include a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Grant in Poetry, the Richard Wright Award for Artistic Excellence, the Hanes Poetry Prize, and the Donald Justice Award in Poetry.

Hiw work has also been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, The Literati Review, Paris Review, and Georgia Review.

Hummer holds undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Southern Mississippi; and a doctorate degree from the University of Utah.

He has also enjoyed a long career teaching poetry and creative writing at several colleges and universities throughout the country, most recently at Arizona State University.

Hummer’s lengthy involvement with literary publishing includes serving as editor of Quarterly West magazine at the University of Utah; then poetry editor of Cimarron Review at Oklahoma State University; editor-in-chief of The Kenyon Review, later of the New England Review, and then The Georgia Review.

He now lives in Cold Spring, New York, and is married to the writer Elizabeth Cody Kimmel, about whom he advises: “Look her up; her track record is very impressive.”

Please tell me about your new release Eon–a study of death, the eternal, and what lies beyond. Why this topic, and why now? How does Eon fit into the context of the trilogy that includes Ephemeron and Skandalon.

T.R. (Terry) Hummer

Well, the eternal is always timely, don’t you think? Eon, though it works just as fine as a stand-alone volume, is as you say part of a trilogy of poetry volumes written over eight years or so.

The originating impulse was the birth of my child in 2002–the turn of the millennium, and also the year in which I was 50. The arrival of that child –my second; my first was born in 1977, so there is rather a large gap between my kids, which has interesting effects on such matters as sibling rivalry–had enormous emotional repercussions for me, which I expected going in.

I fell in love with her before she was born, as one will, but as soon as she was in the world, I also felt–to my surprise–that her arrival revealed to me more than anything else ever had the certainty of my own mortality. The title poem of the first volume is about that, and the whole trilogy unfolds from there.

So, it’s a natural part of the progression for the last volume–culminating when I was 60–should take on mortality head-on. Insofar as that is possible.

The cover of the book is a stunning work of imagery by German surreal artist Michael Hutter. How does the scene of this work fit with the poetry in Eon?

All three volumes in the trilogy have cover art by Michael Hutter–partly to provide visual unity among the three, but also because there is something about his work that, to my mind at least, suits the poetry perfectly. His painting is timeless, and yet it continually alludes to, and plays games with, tradition, both in terms of technique and of subject. It’s often very witty also–certainly the cover of Ephemeron has that quality, and of Skandalon also, through in a more muted way. The cover of Eon is the most somber of the three–appropriately, given the subject.

I’ve read that you are a jazz buff, a blues fan, and a saxophonist. With its distinctive rhythm and tempo, do you think your music style has rubbed off onto your writing style?

This a very complicated question. The relationship between music and language is vital, and mysterious. I have spent decades trying to unpack it, and really have no even scratched the surface. However, I can say two things briefly: first, that I found music a long time before I found poetry, but that the one led me to the other; and second, that the example of many musicians whose work I admired and admire taught me how to be an artist.

Growing up in the small town of Macon, in what ways would you say your Mississippi heritage influenced your writing?

Actually, I didn’t grow up in Macon. We were 15 miles outside Macon, and in those days 15 miles was a very long way. I grew up on a farm in a very remote part of the state–far more remote in the 1950s when I was a child than now.

On the one hand, I grew up among animals and plants and all the elemental things one encounters and learns about on a farm–especially on the kind of farm that was then, not a mono-crop agribusiness outlet, but a diverse subsistence farm that was an ecosystem and, in a sense, a society. The farm turned, in the 60s, to a different model and became a different place, but I was already leaving by then. So, I received that kind of education from the people and from the creatures who surrounded me. At the same time, I grew up in Mississippi in the 50s and 60s: the bad old days of Jim Crow and the arrival full-bore of the civil rights movement. It was a quiet rural life, but we also lived in a war zone. Everything was changing, and it had to change. Everything about our old life for good reason was dying and it had to die.

None of that is easy for a young person to digest, but there it was. There is an enormous amount more to say on the subject, too much for this format. I will leave it at this: growing up white in the Jim Crow South had consequences. Growing up black there had worse ones. I have spent decades trying to sort these matters out in my own mind, and being a poet is part of the process.

You have another new book out this year: After the Afterlife, from Acre Books. Why two in one year?

It’s really an accident of publishers’ schedules. Eon was finished several years ago, but took a long time to see print. The work in After the Afterlife is newer, but Acre Books worked faster, so here they both are.

The title After the Afterlife suggests a connection, a continuity, with Eon. Is that the case?

Definitely. The newer work is different, of course, partly because After the Afterlife arrives as sort of liberation from the labor of writing a trilogy. But it all comes from one mind, and I only have two and a half ideas total, so of course it’s connected.

During your years as a professor, if there a defining lesson or message about writing poetry that you have tried to instill in your students?

I retired a couple of years ago, so my relationship with the classroom has changed, but it hasn’t vanished. The one thing I always wanted students to understand about writing–and this is true of any kind of writing, not only the writing of poetry–is that it is always all about consciousness. No matter what the overt subject of style of a poem, its subject is consciousness, and its material is consciousness. A writer creates a score for consciousness, the way a composer creates a score for orchestra or jazz band. The reader’s job is to play the instrument of consciousness in response. Reading and writing obviously are complementary in that way, and both the writer and the readers have to be, dare I say, conscious of that fact.

T.R. Hummer will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 18 as a participant in the “Waxing Poetic with the Pros” poetry panel at 9:30 a.m. in the State Capitol Room 201 A.

Lauren Groff writes elegant, graceful prose again in ‘Florida’

By Guest Author

On June 26, 2018

In Fiction

By Courtney McCreary. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 24)

“Florida in the summer is a slow hot drowning.” So begins “Yport,” the last story in Lauren Groff’s new collection.

In Florida, Groff, the New York Times-bestselling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the short story collection Delicate Edible Birds, delivers a vivid character study. Characters include a homeless TA, a woman whose anxieties have driven away her best friend, a woman caring for her mother, and a young math whiz, but the stories tend to focus on women—mothers, in particular.

The stories are set in various locales—on an island in the middle of the ocean, a hunting cabin in a swamp, a house slammed by hurricane winds, and countries like France and Brazil, but the state of Florida ties them together. Many stories focus on nature, set outside on beaches or swamps, using the Florida backdrop to strengthen the story.

The setting feels both natural and supernatural, perfect for characters fighting internal and external storms. Characters face snakes, panthers, and the lonely, swampy heat of Florida. And then there are the hurricanes. Bad things happen during hurricanes, but these bad things show there is strength in survival.

In an effort to prove herself to her a husband, the mother in “The Midnight Zone” and her two sons are left alone in a hunting camp, without a car, miles from the closest neighbor. The first day goes well, full of fun and adventures for the mother and sons, but that evening she falls from a stool and hits her head on the ground. Groff captures perfectly the quiet, uncertain panic of surviving through the night.

But not every story in the collection feels so grounded in reality. “Dogs Go Wolf” feels very much like a fairy tale. Two sisters are abandoned by first their mother, and then their caretakers, when a storm hits the tiny island where they live. The girls survive together, the older leading the younger, through every obstacle: bad weather, lack of food and water, the swampy Florida heat, wild animals, and the angry dog who hates them, but they refuse to let starve.

Of all the disasters characters face in these stories, loneliness seems to take the greatest toll. In “Ghosts and Empties” a woman explores her neighborhood, escaping from the woman she fears she has become, noting the changes of those in the houses she passes as well as in herself.

The past often bears itself in the shape of lost family members, ghosts appearing to characters alone and disconnected, forcing them to face something they’ve run away from. Jude, the central character in “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” is left behind by his mother and loses his unforgiving, snake-wrangling father to one of the snakes he captured. Jude moves away from the Florida swamp, but returns to grow old in the same home he was raised. He is lost on the lake, and there, sunbattered and dehydrated, sees his father.

In a sort of twisted Christmas Carol, the main character of “Eyewall” is visited by the absent men in her life as she is hunkered down, trying to survive the night during a devastating hurricane. It becomes apparent quickly how deeply each one has affected her.

The stories in this collection are beautiful and wild. Characters are neglected, alone in perilous situations, focused on their pasts and the anxieties of their futures, but Groff tells their stories with an elegant grace.

Courtney McCreary is the Publicity and Promotions manager at the University Press of Mississippi. She lives and writes in Jackson, Mississippi.

Signed first editions of Florida by Lauren Groff are still available at Lemuria.

Author Q & A with Jane Hearn (A Past That Won’t Rest)

By Guest Author

On June 25, 2018

In Civil Rights, Photography

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

Jane Hearn shares the remarkable legacy of photographer Jim Lucas, who began shooting scenes of 1960s civil rights activism while a college student at Millsaps, in A Past That Won’t Rest: Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi.

The University Press of Mississippi publication features more than 100 never-before-seen photographs taken by Lucas from 1964 to 1968 that focus on four Mississippi historic events, with a fifth chapter putting recent national episodes of activist violence into historical perspective. These chapters are bolstered with narratives contributed by Dr. Howard Ball, Peter Edelman, Aram Goudsouzian, Robert E. Luckett Jr., Ellen B. Meacham, and Stanley Nelson, with a foreword by Charles L. Overby.

Tragically, Lucas was killed in a car accident in 1980, while still in his mid-30s. His striking black-and-white images have been edited and restored by Hearn, who was married to Lucas at the time.

Could you share some of your background that is relevant to your relationship with photographer Jim Lucas, to put A Past That Won’t Rest into context?

Jane Hearn

I grew up in the Fondren neighborhood where my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father had a service station until 1960 on the corner of North State Street and Fondren Place. That’s back when Duling was our elementary school and all the kids in that neighborhood went to Bailey and Murrah. Our family all grew up in St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, so I am still quite attached to that area and love the resurgence that is happening there.

When my husband, Terry Stone, retired from state government about 10 years ago, we moved to the Lowcountry of South Carolina and have made that our new home. I had earlier retired from my interior design and furniture business, but continued my interest in arts advocacy and worked on projects at Tougaloo College where I served as a trustee. I was most proud of the Tougaloo Art Colony which I founded and ran for many years.

Jim Lucas and I me in 1973 when he returned to Jackson from his tour in the Army and I had just returned to Jackson after having worked a few years in New York City after college at Delta State. At the time, Jim was intent on pursuing a career as a film cameraman, which he had done during his deployment in Southeast Asia. AS a freelance film photographer, he shot advertising, football films, and news and documentary assignments for NBC and UPI. Eventually, he was able to break into his real love, feature films, and was becoming known for his exceptional technical skills as a camera operator and director of photography. He was on location for the 20th Century Fox film Barbarosa, starring Willie Nelson, when he was killed in an automobile accident.

You were married to Jim Lucas at the time of his death in 1980. Why did you decide to put this collection of his photographs, along with pertinent narratives, together to create A Past That Won’t Rest: Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi at this time?

This project began over five years ago with the original intent of finding a home for Jim’s extensive collection of negatives, prints, and ephemera before we moved out of state. I had kept the collection as he had stored it for over 30 years, but I felt the need to look at the images myself before I let them go. Many of the images are of high school and college life, sports, and friends, but peppered in were also newsworthy local events and images depicting historic civil rights events. Jim had always told me that there was history in his collection. I realized just how exceptional these images were and decided that it was fitting that Jim’s work should be shown to a wider audience.

I began the project with an exhibit of 35 images which previewed in June 2014 at the 50th Mississippi Freedom Summer Anniversary Conference at Tougaloo College. With support from the Mississippi Humanities Council, I was able to tour the exhibit through Mississippi for another 18 months. The book was an outgrowth of that exhibit.

Please tell me about the task that you and photojournalist Red Morgan shared in restoring these photos. Where had these photos been kept through the years, and what shape were they in? How long did this process take?

I would not have been able to do this project without Red Morgan. Red and I had only been acquaintances in high school. A mutual friend suggested I call him for help. A photojournalist and freelance photographer in Florida, Red reviewed some of Jim’s images and was excited by them. We worked together to scan, sort, edit, and produce digitalized images from over 5,000 vintage negatives. These negatives had been meticulously packaged, labeled, and documented by Jim. Our partnership in this project, along with Craig Gill and book designer Peter Halverson at the University Press of Misssissippi, has resulted in a book of 108 never-before- published photographs For all of us, this book has been a joy to produce.

Explain the process of putting this book together. How did you decide to organize it around the five narratives included? How did you choose the contributing writers? How did you narrow the selection of photographs?

As we continued to mine the collection for more photographs, we developed a website and doubled the touring exhibit. Suddenly, there were enough images for a book. The University Press of Mississippi saw the images and agreed.

The book is organized like the exhibit into four main events: the search for (civil rights workers) Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney (who were murdered in Mississippi) during Freedom Summer, 1964; the Meredith March Against Fear in 1966; the funeral of Wharlest Jackson in Natchez in 1967; and the U.S. Hearings on Poverty in Mississippi and Robert Kennedy’s subsequent trip to the Mississippi Delta in 1967.

In researching the history of these events, I was fortunate to find writers who had authored books on each. Once these scholars saw Jim’s amazing photos, they each agreed to lend their expertise with an introductory essay. Their variety of writing styles and intricate knowledge of the subject give the chapters context and lend a verbal narrative to Jim’s visual one.

The preface was written by Charles Overby, who in the mid-1960s was reporting from The Jackson Daily News while has in high school at Provine. Like Jim, Charles’ early passion and talent set him on a course for an outstanding career in journalism.

Please tell me about the touring exhibition and the website.

The early exhibit toured Mississippi in 13 venues across the state. The expanded exhibit showed last summer at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and recently at the Brown v. Board of Education Historic Site in Topeka, Kansas.

In February, it will show at the University of South Carolina at Beaufort. The book will now be a companion catalog for the exhibit which is also called “A Past That Won’t Rest.”

An interesting thing that struck me about the book was the point that Aram Goudsouzian made about Jim capturing photos of not only the leaders, the famous people, and the drama, but also the ordinary people and events–the ones who would perform everyday tasks that would ultimately contribute to changing history, as has always been the case. Why do you think this was important to Jim?

Jim had a talent for capturing the story playing in front of his camera. He had an artistic sensibility, first to recognize the “moment,” to choose his subject, then to frame it with a discernment for good composition. His images rarely needed cropping. He shot black and white with multiple cameras (lenses), used wide angle photography and lighting with technical precision. His images reveal the emotion of the moment and the dignity and humanity of his subjects.

That day (in Yazoo County) in June 1966 on the Meredith March was hot and dusty. It was tough to walk that highway, yet through Jim’s lens we see the determination and cooperation that unified marchers of all different backgrounds who came to make sure that Meredith’s march did not fail.

Could you put the historical significance of these photos into context, especially for young people?

All of these photos and the accompanying essays depict iconic stories of Mississippians and those came to Mississippi to help in the long and arduous struggle to end violence and discrimination of black citizens.

Howard Ball’s essay on the murder of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney tells not only this terrible tale of Klan brutality, but explains the origination of the Freedom Summer project. From 1964 through 1968, Jim’s lens allows us to see the palpable tension in the square in Philadelphia, the encouragement and pride of the marchers who rallied to assure that James Meredith’s march would meet its goal of registering people to vote, and the heartbreak and ultimate provocation of the black citizens in Natchez for the murder of a father of five whose truck was bombed for taking a job promotion that paid an additional 16 cents per hour. Peter Edelman and Ellen Meacham explain the fight over funding for the War on Poverty, a fight that continues today, and Robert Luckett draws a parallel to the grassroots organization against institutionalized violence of the 60s and that of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Jim Lucas

It’s rare that someone discovers his or her passion and future career at such a young age, but Jim was freelancing for The Jackson Daily News at age 14! Tell me about Jim–his talent, his drive, his personality.

Jim was a very humble person, almost shy, but never shy behind the camera or talking subjects photographic. The camera gave him entrance to all kinds of happenings and he had a curiosity and sensitivity for people and for animals. He was studied, measured, and loved the technical. Friends thought him the true camera nerd–in a good way! He had resolve from an early age to excel and make a mark. His work can now be included among other courageous and dedicated photojournalists of that era.

Signed copies of A Past That Won’t Rest: Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi are available from Lemuria.

Jane Hearn will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival Aug. 18 as a participant in the Mississippi Civil Rights panel panel at 12:00 p.m. at the C-SPAN room in Old Supreme Court Room at the State Capitol.

Tag: Clarion-Ledger (Page 16 of 25)

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