Clarion-Ledger – Page 8

Tag: Clarion-Ledger (Page 8 of 25)

Author Q & A with Barry Gifford

On May 19, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today Gifford lives in California.

Below, he shares comments about his newest releases.

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

Barry Gifford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barry Gifford’s ‘Southern Nights’ will keep you awake

By Guest Author

On May 13, 2019

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

By Ellis Purdie. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 12)

When asked to read Barry Gifford’s Southern Nights for review, I agreed without hesitation. Though unfamiliar with Gifford’s (many) books, I had seen the films Lost Highway and Wild at Heart, both directed by David Lynch of Twin Peaks fame and penned by Gifford.

If his novels were anything like his screenplays, I knew one thing for certain: they would not bore.

As of this review, I confirm, the three short novels in Southern Nights, comprised of Night People, Arise & Walk, and Baby Cat-Face will leave you awake at night, pulse racing, double-taking the shadows for Gifford’s people.

These novels are a howling freight train, lit up and pummeling full blast into the darkness. While reading them, I kept thinking of Flannery O’Connor, Barry Hannah, and William Gay: southern writers unafraid of depicting violence, the grotesque, the worst in the human heart.

Though the Chicago-born Gifford is not a “southern writer” proper as the three aforementioned, the setting for Southern Nights is the South, and the novels boast the wildest of Baptist preachers, unashamed deviants, drug peddlers, assassins, flying bullets, and the children who write letters to Jesus in effort to navigate such a relentless world.

At one point while reading Night People, I stopped and called a friend, saying, “If you haven’t read Barry Gifford, go grab this book right now. In the section I just finished, a woman drives over to her husband’s lover’s house, shoots them both, then drives her car into a wall of the Reach Deep Baptist Church, dying upon impact. This is the real stuff.”

In terms of plot, the novels in Southern Nights skirt an overarching narrative, focusing instead on several smaller narratives within the same setting. The last section of Night People, for example, tells the story of a young girl, Marble Lesson.

Marble’s father, Wes, is down on his luck, recently divorced, and in need of work. The story begins with Marble’s leaving New Orleans to live with her mother in Florida.

However, upon hearing of her father’s suffering without her, Marble hitches a ride with a transgender woman who, after some of the most charming dialogue I have read in some time, puts Marble on a plane back to Louisiana.

What follows is fireworks: Wes getting involved with a drug cartel, taking Marble with him to meet his new employer, an assassin showing up with ill intentions, and Marble’s encounter with said assassin that leaves him artfully dead on the floor.

In another episode in Arise & Walk, two characters wait in a hotel room for their purchased dates.

When the women arrive, the men, Wilbur “Damfino” Nougat and Gaspar DeBlieux (Gifford consistently uses the best names), quickly realize they are getting something other than what they paid for. The scene is hilarious, disturbing, and searingly original. Again, guns are involved.

These are only two narratives out of a 452-page book chock-full of thrilling madness. Interestingly, while there are stories of some length in the book, Gifford writes such that you can turn to almost any chapter and read something interesting.

The chapters feel both like the continuation of a novel as well as flash fiction pieces that stand on their own. Like flash fiction, the chapters are short, making each novel a brisk whirlwind of an experience.

These novels are haymakers: stunning, brutal, not for the faint of heart. I greatly admire Gifford’s honesty, his “going there” in these works with no fear.

After Southern Nights, I will be reading Gifford’s Sailor and Lula novels, his books of poetry, and even his nonfiction on horse-racing. Gifford has the goods, and he delivers.

Ellis Purdie is a graduate of The Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi. He lives with his family in Marshall, Texas.

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

Author Q & A with Mary Miller

By Guest Author

On May 12, 2019

In Southern Fiction

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

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

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

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

Mary Miller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harper Lee’s sequel mystery solved in Casey Cep’s ‘Furious Hours’

By Guest Author

On May 12, 2019

In Southern Fiction, Southern History, True Crime

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 12)

One of the enduring mysteries after the 2016 death of author Harper Lee was: Did she work on a book to follow her iconic To Kill a Mockingbird and was there an unpublished manuscript?

Casey Cep in Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee does an admirable job in solving the mystery—in more ways that one.

Foremost, she solves the mystery of the much rumored book that Lee was reportedly working on through painstaking journalism, tracking down sources, doing interviews, resurrecting lost notes and compiling a fascinating picture of Lee’s life post-Mockingbird.

But she also resurrects the tale itself, the story that Lee referred to as “The Reverend,” producing a book within a book by writing herself the book that Lee couldn’t find a way to piece together.

Cep recounts that Lee spent three years trying to write “The Reverend,” going about it the same way that she had helped childhood friend Truman Capote compile his book In Cold Blood.

Just as Lee and Capote spent months in Kansas doing interviews and watching the murder trial that resulted in the “nonfiction novel” Capote wrote to great acclaim, Cep writes, Lee attempted to recreate the feat alone in Alexander City, Ala.

Lee’s case of suspicious deaths revolved around the Rev. Willie Maxwell, beginning with his wife Mary Lou found dead in her car Aug. 3, 1970. While investigators couldn’t prove a murder, they found that “his private life bore little resemblance to the one his parishioners thought he was living, and no resemblance at all to those he extolled in his sermons.”

He was acquitted at trial, based on the possibly perjured testimony of his neighbour, Dorcas Anderson, whom 15 months after the death, he married.

She was 27 to his 46 and, conveniently, and suspiciously also, a new widow.

It was a trend. Then, his brother died and, like Mary Lou before him, Maxwell had taken out several life insurance policies on him, totaling $100,000 (about $500,000 today).

On Sept. 20, 1972, Dorcas was found dead—with 17 life insurance policies the Reverend had on her.

He married wife number three in November, 1974, with Ophelia Burns. Shortly after, a nephew died.

All were under suspicious circumstances that neither police nor insurance investigators could prove were the product of a crime.

The community began to view the black preacher as a hoodoo conjurer. After his first wife’s death, “a lot of people were convinced that he had used voodoo to fix the jury … and charm a younger woman” into marrying him, but “as time passed and more people died, the stories about the reverend grew stronger, stranger, and, if possible, more sinister.”

It was said “he hung white chickens upside down from the pecan trees outside his house to keep away unwanted spirits and painted blood on his doorsteps to keep away the authorities. … Drive by his front door, and the headlights on any car would go dark. Say a cross word against him, and he would lay a trick on you.”

One could certainly see how this Southern gothic tale would be enticing for the creator of such characters as Scout, Atticus—and the scary Boo Radley.

But Cep posits that in “The Reverend” Lee believed she would redeem herself as a story teller of the “true” South—where the status of race relations was more complex and nuanced than black and white, as in the morality tale of Mockingbird.

“Mockingbird had been read as a clarion call for civil rights, but Lee’s views were more complicated than any editor wanted to put into print,” Cep writes, as demonstrated by Go Set a Watchman, the original text for Mockingbird.

When Maxwell was brought to trial a final time, in 1977, with the suspicious death of Maxwell’s adopted daughter, Lee was there to watch it, and she found the medium for writing a book that would parallel Mockingbird, but present it in a more complex manner.

It had a black hero, who was also a vigilante operating outside the law; a black villain, who while masquerading as a preacher was also believed to be evil incarnate; a white crusading attorney, who was also profiting off of black death; crimes that looked like murder but were treated more like fraud, and “white and black lives that existed almost side by side in small Southern towns but were worlds apart.”

How and why “The Reverend” never came to print is a separate story, believably related.

In Furious, Lee’s admirers will discover a new perspective on the reclusive author while also catching an enticing glimpse of the “lost” book that could or would have been a more modern sequel of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Casey Cep will be at Lemuria on Monday, May 13, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. Lemuria has selected Furious Hours as its May 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Margaret McMullan’s ‘Where the Angels Lived’ is a mesmerizing account of a family’s fractured history

By Guest Author

On May 6, 2019

In Biography/Memoir, History, War

By Ellen Ann Fentress. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 5)

Her grandfather, a Catholic University history professor, said he was the last of his accomplished Viennese family. He wasn’t, Mississippi author Margaret McMullan found out in an on-the-ground hunt that took her to Hungary, Austria, and Israel to learn the truth.

McMullan’s grandfather Friedrich Engel, who fled Vienna in 1939, was actually part of a renown—and at the time quite alive— Hungarian Jewish family. The Engel de Janosi clan had presided over their corner of Hungary as an economic and civic power, thanks to flourishing wood and coal enterprises that employed thousands. Emperor Franz-Joseph I of the Austro-Hungarian empire granted nobility to patriarch Adolf Engel and his descendants in 1886 in “recognition of economic virtues.” The family lived in palaces.

And yet. As Hungary and the citizens of the Engels’ town of Pecs, Hungary were overrun by Nazi forces in 1944, a century of prominence, good works and assumed assimilation weren’t enough for the Engels. The scion of the Pecs branch of the family—McMullan’s grandfather’s first cousin Richard Engel—died at the Mauthausen concentration camp after being rounded up along with other town Jews in March 1944. The story of Richard’s descent from respected, wealthy World War I war hero and city civic leader to being marched off as townspeople watched is the spellbinding story that McMullan tells in Where the Angels Lived: One Family’s Story of Exile, Loss and Return.

McMullan has crafted a mesmerizing account not solely of the downfall of her prominent cousin Richard Engel, but also of the shocking transformation of a Hungarian town. Interestingly, residents are now more eager to demonize the past Soviet occupation than to explore any town Nazi complicity in 1944.

McMullan’s has done more than tell this story masterfully. To relay an account of Richard Engel, it was up to her to uncover it. “What is not discovered, what is not saved is lost and forgotten,” she writes. “History is so often written and manipulated by winners. History can’t be written by the dead.”

McMullan came to her project when, out of curiosity, she typed in her family’s Engel de Janosi name at the Yad Vashem Holocaust archive in Jerusalem, when visiting with a writers’ group. The name Richard Engel de Janosi of Pecs, Hungary appeared. The archivist handed McMullan a form called the Page of Testimony. “No one has ever asked about this man, your relative, Richard,” the archivist tells her. “You are responsible now. You must remember him in order to honor him.”

Where the Angels Lived tracks McMullan’s steps from learning of the extensive family history hidden by her grandfather up through her eventual excavation of Richard Engel’s life. Her search benefited from extraordinary persistence and also the serendipity of meeting key people with information to share.

Of course, the memoir’s inevitable look at the gradual nature of totalitarianism’s growth resonates today, as both the U.S. and Hungary experience right-wing resurgences.

To research Richard Engel, McMullan applied to teach at the University of Pecs, which was seeking a lecturer in American literature through the Fulbright academic exchange program. She moves there for a university term in 2010 with her husband Patrick and their eighth-grade son James.

McMullan persists and builds a sense of her cousin Richard through her research. Even the holes in his portrait make him more universal, she reflects. “Maybe I can see Richard more accurately than I can see any other human being,” she writes. Her quest deepened her sense of her own Engels legacy as well. “I feel them at my side as I walk. All this time, they were never very far away.”

Ellen Ann Fentress is a writer, filmmaker and teacher in Jackson.

Margaret McMullan will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “Memoir” panel at 1:30 p.m. at the Galloway Fellowship Center.

Author Q & A with Casey Cep

By Guest Author

On May 5, 2019

In Southern Fiction, Southern History, True Crime

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

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

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

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

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

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

Casey Cep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wisdom of southern womanhood in Helen Ellis’s ‘Southern Lady Code’ sparkles with humor, savvy, sound advice

By Guest Author

On April 30, 2019

In Essays, Humor, Southern Culture

By Emily Gatlin. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 28)

The ways of Southern women are shining front and center recently, thanks to the recent success of Garden & Gun guides and most notably, Reese Witherspoon’s Whiskey in a Teacup, which takes everything our mamas taught us as we rolled our eyes at her, and packages it with glossy photos of unattainable wallpaper goals in a sleek pink coffee table book. Basically.

But as a whole, Southern women aren’t biscuits and sweet tea, and we’re certainly not M’Lynn Eatenton or Mrs. Gump, although we do tip our big floppy hats to Californian Sally Field for her performances and pseudo-passable accent attempts.

No, our blood even has its own special genetic code, forged by generations of literal sweating. The oppressive humidity we, as Southern women, curse every year like we aren’t expecting it, is its own Fountain of Youth. Our dewy glow springs eternal. We are witches who do not age. And when we do, Botox and fillers seem to magically do what they are supposed to.

We’re much more complex—always nice (even when we must call on our better angels to be so), and tiptoe a tightrope between being passive aggressive and genuine. For example: A woman at the grocery store is wearing bright pink lipstick, a strapless romper and flip flops with a French pedicure. Instead of saying, “She’s tacky,” we’d say my personal go-to, “Look what she likes!” Feel free to borrow that one.

This is what bestselling author and Alabama native Helen Ellis calls “Southern Lady Code,” which is also the name of her new book. It’s a technique by which, if you don’t have something nice to say, you say something not so nice in a nice way. It’s all about phrasing with us. Think of “investment pieces” you have in your wardrobe. That’s Southern Lady Code for “The Oscar De La Renta cocktail dress hanging in the back of your closet that costs more than a Henredon bed, but you’ll wear it for decades!” Which is half true—you’ll realize you’ve been clinging to a size 4 dress that you haven’t been able to wear since 1986 and give it to your daughter when you’re downsizing at 70. (Thanks, Mom!)

“Wheelhouse” is Southern Lady Code for “comfort zone.” If a friend, and even a close one who should know better, were to ask, “Would you like to go mud riding with us at Sardis Lake?” you would say, “No, thank you. That is not really in my wheelhouse. Would you like for me to pack you a picnic basket with cold salads and fruit?”

Fresh off the heels of American Housewife, Ellis’s brilliant collection of short stories, she takes a turn here at an essay collection, explaining Southern Lady Code to the masses, as she gives glimpses of her life as a Southerner who has called New York City home for the majority of her adult life. Bless her heart, she married into it.

Her deadpan humor is razor sharp and laugh out loud funny, a rare pearl in the canon of “Southern”-themed books and essays that too often read like tea that’s been steeped too long. She’s the guest at the dinner party you really don’t want to attend, but go anyway in hopes that you’ll be seated near her. (A Southern word of advice from Ellis about dinner parties: Be the first guest to arrive and the first to leave. Sound.)

Ellis’s essay collection covers everything from manners to monograms, a man who fakes his death at her eighth grade birthday party, and when she turned herself into a dominatrix version of Donna Reed to save her marriage.

Southern Lady Code is one you’re going to buy for yourself and share the joy with every woman you know.

Emily Gatlin is the Digital Editor of the Wonderlust travel website and the author of The Unknown Hendrix and 101 Greatest American Rock Songs and the Stories Behind Them. She lives in Oxford, Miss.

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

By Guest Author

On April 28, 2019

In Civil Rights, Photography, Southern Culture, Southern History

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

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

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

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

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

James Campbell and Elaine Owens, courtesy of the Greenwood Commonwealth

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

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

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

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

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

Explain why your book is titled Mississippi Witness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Science, loss, ghosts, and wonder haunt Nell Freudenberger’s ‘Lost and Wanted’

By Former Lemurians

On April 22, 2019

In Fiction

By Trianne Harabedian. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 21)

Where do people go when they die? Can they communicate with us from this place? And how can we, as those still here, fill the void they leave behind? These are the questions Nell Freudenberger asks in her latest novel, Lost and Wanted. A compelling work that pairs science with loss, Lost and Wanted is the story of people left behind.

Roommates in college, Helen and Charlie were opposite forces who became incredibly close. Helen was more scientific and analytical, a quiet woman who made herself known in the academic world, while Charlie was magnetic and outgoing. She was one of those people who everyone wanted to be around. After graduation, the women drifted apart. They both had children, Helen on her own and Charlie with a husband, and they made great strides in their professions. Helen became a theoretical physicist at MIT and published accessible books about physics, and Charlie became a screenwriter in Hollywood.

The novel begins when Charlie dies. She had been diagnosed with lupus a few years earlier and the disease progressed quickly. While the unexpected news is still painful for Helen, the women had not been close in some time and had not spoken in over a year. But before Helen can process her grief, she receives a text from the last person she expected to hear from−Charlie.

A purely rational and analytical mind, Helen does not believe in ghosts. She hardly even believes in strong emotion, only allowing her grief to overtake her once in the aftermath of losing Charlie. But a cryptic text from the beyond is not something to be ignored. In the weeks that follow, her life becomes increasingly entangled with Charlie’s. She brings her son to the funeral, where she becomes reacquainted with Charlie’s family. The last time she saw Charlie’s parents, Carl and Addie, Helen was still an undergraduate student, figuring out her life and feeling like a child. And it has been seven years since she has seen her friend’s husband Terrance and daughter Simmi.

While Helen feels herself falling into old patterns, Addie begins to unexpectedly lean on her for emotional support. And just when Helen thinks she has found her footing and returned to work at MIT as usual, Terrance and Simmi need a place to live. Practical Helen offers them the unfettered use of her downstairs apartment, which leads to a friendship between Simmi and her own son, Jack, who are nearly the same age. Perhaps more significantly, it leads to a strange relationship of grief-sharing and life-sharing between Terrence and Helen. Just as she always was with Charlie, Helen is drawn into the grief and drama of this family.

Throughout the novel, Freudenberger seamlessly weaves college memories and backstories. As Helen remembers Charlie, her thoughts are a story that we follow, revealing details that had been intentionally pushed into sub consciousness. No one is as perfect as we would like to believe, but there is always room for wishing things had been different. Though Helen remains rational, she often wishes she had been closer to Charlie towards the end. That she had not let their friendship fall to the wayside of life and motherhood. The strange texts from the beyond continue to appear in Helen’s inbox, each making less sense than the last. Even while she begins to process and move on, they keep her connected to Charlie and focused on the loss that now is part of her life.

Are there ghosts? What are they like? Or maybe the better question is, how far will we go to believe we are still connected to those who have left us behind? While there might not be answers to these questions of loss and love that are posed in Lost and Wanted, Nell Freudenberger uses them to tell a story that speaks to all of us.

Trianne Harabedian is the children’s section manager at Lemuria Books. Originally from California, she holds a BFA in creative writing from Belhaven University.

Signed copies of Nell Freudenberger’s books are available at Lemuria and on its web store.

Author Q & A with Helen Ellis

By Guest Author

On April 21, 2019

In Humor, Southern Culture

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

Alabama native and author Helen Ellis has lived in New York City for more than a quarter century, but says she still wears her accent “on her sleeve,” which explains why her newest book is titled Southern Lady Code.

The premise of the 23 true essays which capture as many hilarious and often poignant episodes she’s gotten herself into, is one simple rule: “If you don’t have something nice to say, you say something not so nice in a nice way.”

Ellis also authored Eating the Cheshire Cat and American Housewife. In addition to–and often instead of–calling herself a writer, she also proudly claims the title of “housewife.”

A serious poker plays who learned the game from her father as a child, Ellis competes on the national tournament circuit. She and her husband happily reside in Manhattan.

You grew up in Tuscaloosa and, at age 22, you left for New York City in hopes of becoming a writer. Tell me about the career twists that landed you in the role of housewife–which eventually, with the help of Twitter, led to your success as a writer.

Helen Ellis

It was 1992, and I–dressed in my Talbot’s turtleneck, ankle-length wool plaid skirt, and penny loafers–walked from publishing house to publishing house, dropping my resume at reception desks like calling cards. I had the hopes of being an editorial assistant, but no publishing house called me. I walked into Talbots and got a job on the spot.

Two years later, I got a job at a financial magazine with the hopes of being an editorial assistant. They hired me to drum up subscriptions. I met a young reporter, who drummed up my heart.

A year later, I got into the NYU creative writing program, temped as a secretary, and through that temp agency, landed a long-term job in the chairman’s office of Chanel. I worked four days a week and wrote three.

Scribner published my first book, Eating the Cheshire Cat, in 2000.

I married that young reporter, who became an editor, in 2001.

And then I wrote another book, and nobody published it. And then I wrote another book, and nobody published it. And then I quit my secretarial job to write full time, supported by my husband, wrote another book, and nobody published it. And then I quit writing, and nobody cared.

I settled into a happy life as a housewife. And when people asked me what I did, I didn’t say writer, I said, “Housewife.” The next question was always: “What do you do all day?” I started an anonymous twitter account called @WhatIDoAllDay.

I tweeted about housework and hosting parties and book clubs and the beauty of banality. And then I wrote a story about how a housewife cleans up murders. And then I wrote a story about a book club recruiting a new member with a sinister motive. And then I wrote about what a woman left to her own devices could ultimately do all day. I wrote what I knew. And, 16 years after my first novel, Doubleday published my short story collection, American Housewife. And three years after that, they’ve published Southern Lady Code. This time, the stories are all true.

Explain the phrase “Southern Lady Code,” and how it became the title of your newest book.

Southern Lady Code is: if you don’t have something nice to say, say something not so nice, in a nice way. Twenty-five years in Manhattan, I kept finding myself translating what I’d say to people. “She’s a character” means drunk. Or “He’s an archivist” means hoarder. Or “Bless her heart” means “What an idiot.”

I’ve been tweeting these translations for more than five years. I turned some of those tweets into a short story in “American Housewife.” My … true stories … are now this book. Each essay has a line of code. So, for example, in “Making a Marriage Magically Tidy” I write about how my husband fell in love with a “creative” woman. “Creative” is Southern Lady Code for slob.

The essays which make up Southern Lady Code are not only hilarious, but packed with meaning that makes us pause. Tell me how humor has been important in your life, and how it has become your signature writing style.

I come from a funny family. Some of the best times I’ve had have been at funerals, where relatives and friends try and outdo each other with the most outrageous memories of the deceased. With humor, you can ease pain. And with humor, you can be honest. It’s easier to get your point across when you make the person you’re pointing at laugh. Especially when you’re pointing at yourself.

Poker has been a passion of yours since childhood. Tell us about its role in your life.

There have been times when I wasn’t writing, but I’ve always played poker. Poker is a chance for me to really be myself. I can be nice, but I don’t have to play nice. I can be at the table, but I don’t have to entertain. I can confront bullies and make them back down. I can be brave. And when I lose, and I most certainly do lose, I know there’s always another game. And as with after my losses in writing, when I am lucky enough to win and get published, the success is all the sweeter.

I’ve interviewed many writers who, like you, have moved away from the South, yet no matter how much time passes, they still consider themselves to be Southerners. How would you explain that sentiment?

My roots run deep. And I wear my accent on my sleeve.

Helen Ellis will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, April 24, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Southern Lady Code.

Tag: Clarion-Ledger (Page 8 of 25)

Author Q & A with Barry Gifford

Barry Gifford’s ‘Southern Nights’ will keep you awake

Author Q & A with Mary Miller

Harper Lee’s sequel mystery solved in Casey Cep’s ‘Furious Hours’

Margaret McMullan’s ‘Where the Angels Lived’ is a mesmerizing account of a family’s fractured history

Author Q & A with Casey Cep

Wisdom of southern womanhood in Helen Ellis’s ‘Southern Lady Code’ sparkles with humor, savvy, sound advice

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

Science, loss, ghosts, and wonder haunt Nell Freudenberger’s ‘Lost and Wanted’

Author Q & A with Helen Ellis

Authors

Categories

Tags