First Editions Club – Page 4

Tag: First Editions Club (Page 4 of 7)

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 29)

James A. McLaughlin’s Bearskin reads far better than a first novel. Its power of verse, intricately building plot, moving descriptions of land and imagination, and powerful characters destine it to be one of the summer’s best reads.

The plot centers around Rice Moore, a would-be environmental scientist who took a bad turn, becoming a drug mule for a Mexican cartel, and ending up in a prison south of the border.

After leaving prison, his life takes another bad turn when he enacts vengeance on those who killed his girlfriend. The woman had lured him into his criminal behavior and paid the ultimate price at the hands of the cartel after she became a Drug Enforcement Administration informant.

That’s a lot to pack into a novel that takes place half the continent away, a few months later, when Rice finds himself caretaker of a private preserve abutting the Shenandoah National Park in the heart of Appalachia.

But McLaughlin pulls it off, seamlessly, deftly weaving the past and the present.

Rice has taken an assumed name, Rick Morton, while laying low to avoid the drug cartel’s vengeance at the preserve, where he’s the only human in 1,000 acres or more.

Here, he finds a peace of sorts, though tormented by his brutal memories in prison, his fear of being found out, and the intrigue of meeting a woman, Sara Birkeland, an academic who was his predecessor at the preserve.

When he discovers that Birkeland left the job only after she had been raped and beaten apparently by locals who resented the land being off limits to their bear hunting, it provides more incentive for him to find and punish the perpetrators of bear poaching he had discovered on the land.

If an absorbing plot, interesting characters, and stately but alluring pacing weren’t enough, Bearskin offers immersion into a fascinating natural world where the lines between reality and myth, history and discovery, and spiritual ambiguity meet.

McLaughlin’s mastery of language brings the mountains, the hills and hollers alive. Sunshine doesn’t fall through the window of his cabin, it shouts. The trees on the hillsides don’t bend to the wind, their leaves vibrate like the land revealing itself as sentient, shaking itself from slumber.

His connection to the land and its creatures transcends all knowing, proving that the name of the mountain in Cherokee is real.

According to his website, McLaughlin, a Virginia native living in Utah, is currently working on two novels related to Bearskin and set in Virginia and the American Southwest.

If “Bearskin” is any indication, they should be eagerly awaited.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at the Clarion Ledger, is the author of seven books including his latest, Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them.

James A. McLaughlin’s novel Bearskin is Lemuria’s August 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Fiction.

McLaughlin will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 18 as a participant in the “The Rough South” Southern fiction panel panel at 12:00 p.m. at the Galloway Foundery.

‘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.

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 Jon Meacham

By Guest Author

On June 5, 2018

In Culture, Politics

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 3) and digital web edition

A Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian, biographer and frequent news commentator, Jon Meacham addresses the political and social divide America faces today by examining its “soul”—and he offers a calming reminder that, just as the nation has faced tough times in the past, it can overcome the current rancor.

In his newest title, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, Meacham reminds Americans of protectors Abraham assuredly said were on our side—he called them “the better angels of our nature”—and they have surely seen rougher times than we now experience, the author declares.

Meacham examines the people and times that facilitated turning points in American history, and he contends that “hope over fear” will, as it has in the past, guide the country through the present tumult.

Jon Meacham

Among his New York Times bestsellers is American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, for which Meacham won the Pulitzer.

A former executive editor at Random House, Meacham is a contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor at Time, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians.

He lives in Nashville with his wife and family and serves as a distinguished professor visiting professor at Vanderbilt University.

As a writer, you are known as a presidential historian. How did that role become yours, as you began to consider and write about so many American presidents?

As John Kennedy remarked, the presidency is the “vital center of action,” so the stories of the office and of the human beings who’ve held it are inherently important and typically interesting. If you live politics—and I do—then you kind of naturally gravitate upward to writing about the presidency.

Your new book takes a deep look at what you call the “soul” of America, and you define that “soul,” of a person or of a country, as being “the existence of an immanent collection of convictions, dispositions and sensitivities that shape the character and inform conduct.” This is an interesting concept that you describe as “ancient and perennial.” Could you explain it more simply, and why it is so important?
I think that’s pretty straightforward: the soul is our essence, whether we’re talking about a nation or a person. Some impulses are good; some are bad. Every moment is thus shaped by whether the better instincts triumph over the worst.

In The Soul of America, you examine what you believe to be the threats of the Trump presidency, and you make the case that America will “overcome” this period, as it has during previous hard times the country’s past. What do you believe are the biggest threats America faces under the Trump administration?

We have a president who eschews the conventions of power and declines to conduct himself with the dignity and the restraint we’ve come to expect. That’s his choice; he won, so he can do as he likes. But issuing threats about the legal system, or bullying people, or insisting that he’s right all the time and that any criticism of him is “fake” has the capacity to erode trust in our already-fragile institutions.

You examine great points in American history when the country “righted” itself and pulled through difficult times, but it always came at a great price. What do you think America needs to make that happen again?

I think we need to listen to each other more and be willing to acknowledge when the other side has a point or gets something right. And we have to remember that progress and prosperity in America tend to come when we favor the free flow of people, of ideas, and of goods. Openness isn’t a weakness; historically speaking, it’s a sign and a cause of economic and cultural strength and health.

I don’t remember a time when we as Americans haven’t heard every day that we are at a point in history in which politics is more divisive than it has ever been—and that trend, if it is one, doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Is it possible for America to become unified again?

Of course, it is. We were more divided in the 1850s and fought a war in the 1860s. The Klan was a national force in the 1920s. Joe McCarthy divided us in the 1950s. And Southerners know how violent and fraught things were after the Brown decision and well into the 1960s.

Mississippi is a state that voted for Trump by a large margin in the 2016 presidential election. What would you say to those voters about their agreement with some of his policies?

There’s plenty to agree with. As with other presidents, though, there’s also plenty to be skeptical about. He’s imperfect; be honest about that and work to encourage him to reach out beyond his base of support. Because I promise you this: history rewards presidents who govern for all, not just for those who vote for him.

Why was the 1916 painting by Childe Hassam Rainy Day, Fifth Avenue chosen for the cover of this book?

Because it’s a beautiful rendering of a patriotic moment and speaks to the hope of a nation that for all its flaws remains what Lincoln called the “last, best hope.”

You write about women’s suffrage, child labor and Jim Crow laws, etc. Most decent people today realize that those laws needed to be changed. One hundred years from now what causes or existing laws do you think may meet the same fate?

It’s less about specific laws today and more about the ladders to the middle class. We’ve got to find a way for more Americans to prosper and pursue happiness without unreasonable levels of fear about the future.

Your next book will be about James and Dolley Madison. Why did you choose this couple, and why are you writing about both?

Because they were a true team serving the ideals of America at a crucial and contentious time.

John Meachem will be at Lemuria on Thursday, June 14, at 12:00 p.m. to sign and read from The Soul of America. He will also be at the Mississippi Book Festival on Saturday, August 18, in conversation with Karl Rove.

‘A Shout in the Ruins’ by Kevin Powers is an affecting novel of Southern violence

By Former Lemurians

On May 28, 2018

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

By Guy Stricklin. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 27)

In his daring second novel, A Shout in the Ruins, Kevin Powers—author of The Yellow Birds—looks piercingly at the American South whose savage history he carefully traces in places like Richmond’s Chimborazo Hospital and through characters “lined with mark after mark of whip and brine.”

Powers’ sprawling cast moves in and out of focus during a story that crisscrosses the antebellum South and its ensuing century of violence and upheaval. The story opens onto three characters each uniquely confronting a rapidly changing and wholly indifferent world: Emily Reid, the unloved and unloving daughter born in Chesterfield County in 1847; her father’s slave, Rawls, whose docked toes cannot keep his melancholic soul from wandering; and 93-year-old George Seldom, a widower losing his home in Richmond to the impending construction of the interstate highway in 1956.

Their individual lives are knit together along with numerous others in a narrative broken up by digressions of memory and shifting points of view. This dynamic approach allows motifs and whole scenes to resurface countless times. We watch houses burning, embers, ashes, bleached bones found in the ruins, a world on fire, and a world collapsed. A Shout in the Ruins is reminiscent of another recent multi-generational novel, The Son by Philipp Meyer, whose praise for Powers is quoted on this book’s jacket.

As the novel unfolds, Powers depicts the variety of ways violence—emotional, as well as physical—is enacted and endured by these characters. George’s pain is shapeless, systemic, and reflective; Rawls’ expansive, without border, hereditary; and Emily’s private, deep, a cave whose hollowing darkness she cannot or will not plumb. Pain, though, is pain and you read on hoping salvation of a kind finds its way, though it will have to be as varied as the characters themselves.

Powers writes with a sharpness that is both convincing and convicting. This is a book rooted in a South we know. The violent rending of a nation and the unspeakable cruelty of slavery reverberate throughout, but Powers moves beyond these very real acts and takes on a perspective which sees even those seminal events as echos of some more ancient transgression. Meditation might strike closest to what this novel aims toward. Quite quickly, Powers is examining not only his characters but the whole of humanity. In passages evoking Kubrick’s 2001, he describes the order of the world as repetition: violences repeated, passed down, and given to each successive generation from the very start. “The gun goes off when the line gets crossed, and the line got crossed a long time ago, when we were naked and wandered the savanna and slept beneath the baobab trees” writes Powers. Violence, as he tells it, is both personal and cosmic; intimate and elemental.

And yet throughout, punctuating this darkness, are flickers of love and goodness and kindness: a baby rescued, help given, hope trusted, and good done in spite of its seeming uselessness, its transience, and its insignificance. As with many of his characters, Powers is asking us to consider that perhaps, in spite of all the world’s violence and pain, in spite of everything, “One good thing still counts.”

A masterful novel, Kevin Power’s A Shout in the Ruins is a timely powerhouse full of seething violence and remarkable humanity.

Guy Stricklin is a bookseller and the First Editions Club supervisor here at Lemuria.

Kevin Powers’ novel A Shout in the Ruins is Lemuria’s May 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Kevin Powers

By Guest Author

On May 21, 2018

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

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

In his newest work, A Shout in the Ruins, award-winning writer Kevin Powers presents a powerful story of the brutal realities of violence and oppression in the American South during and long after the Civil War period.

Set in Powers’ hometown of Richmond, Virginia, the stories that make up A Shout in the Ruins stretch across nearly a century, from antebellum years to the 1980s. The plot during Civil War times unfolds for the partners of an ill-fated marriage between a plantation owner and the young daughter of a wounded veteran; as well as two young lovers enslaved on the plantation.

In a separate theme that runs alongside these characters is the story of George Seldom, a man in his 90s who was left orphaned by the war, and, in the 1950s, is looking back on his childhood. The strain of the destruction of his neighborhood brought on by the building of an interstate highway through Richmond prompts him to travel south in hopes of capturing glimpses of his origins.

In his search he meets Lottie, who helps him locate the house in which he grew up. The journey ultimately brings him to consider both the changes and the constancies of his long lifetime; and Lottie later reflects on her own middle age during the 1980s.

Powers’ first novel, The Yellow Birds (2012), was a National Book Award Finalist that captured both the PEN/Highway Award and the Guardian First Book Award. His first collection of poetry, Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, was published in 2014.

Kevin Powers

With a bachelor’s degree from the Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, Powers is a U.S. Army veteran who served in Iraq in 2004 and 2005.

Today, Powers lives in Austin, and admits that, on the home front, he is “an avid but mostly unsuccessful gardener. There is a pathetic-looking, but still living, gardenia in a pot on my front porch that is a testament to this fact,” he said. “I also try to spend as much time outdoors as I can. Las tyear, I bought a little 250cc Honda dirt-bike that I take up to the mountains in Colorado whenever I’m able.”

You obviously did a lot of research for A Shout in the Ruins about life in and around Richmond after the Civil War. Some of the scenes are gut-wrenching. Was there any one thing that you learned in your research that surprised you? And was anything about this book that was (as in your former book) that was inspired by your own experience of war?

Growing up in Richmond, one learns a lot about all the history that has happened in and around the city, but it was different returning to that history as an adult, having the experiences I’ve had in life, and now with children of my own that I’ll someday need to explain that difficult history to.

I suppose I knew this intellectually, but in researching the period it was shocking to recognize how the institution of slavery permeated every aspect of life, and moreover, that it could be treated so casually by those who perpetrated and depended on its existence. And so, you come to see how strategic the thinking was that allowed the standing order to remain unchanged after the war, even though it temporarily no longer had the force of law behind it.

An example of a particularly shocking moment was reading the obituary of Robert Lumpkin, whose slave jail is featured in the novel and who died in 1866. It read, “He was born and raised in this city, was 61 years of age, and was an honest man.” It’s hard to imagine a more fitting representation of the banality of evil.

I assume the title of A Shout in the Ruins comes from chapter 10, when George and Lottie visit the cabin he was born in. Explain how the title of the book fits with that scene.

Yes, and it’s a reference to all the ruins in the book. Certainly, the cabin George and Lottie visit, but also the ruined plantation house at Beauvais, and specifically that shout when Emily is discovered hiding nearby. But in a larger sense, I hoped the title would be evocative of the urgency with which I feel it is necessary to truly and honestly reckon with our shared past. The title is also a reference to a poem I love by Louis Aragon, called “Poem to Shout in the Ruins,” which while not related to the book thematically, embodies just that kind of urgency.

I loved how you wove time and place around the character of George, who came off as the light in the story’s darkness. Who or what was your inspiration for the idea of this character?

Thank you. I must admit I didn’t begin with him in mind. He emerged through the telling of the story, and the more it developed, it became clear to me that part of the process was looking for a character who could embody Virginia in all its true complexities. In my mind, George is the quintessential Virginian, to the point where I almost titled the book “The Virginian” after him. But then I realized there were already a dozen or more books, films, and TV shows bearing that title, so I went with the one it has now.

Lottie was a very pivotal character in regard to George’s attempt at making sense of his life. After George’s death, you continued to develop her character well into the 1980s. Tell me about that.

I felt it was essential to connect this history to the present, or at the very least to a world that was recognizable to me. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t treating the past as something quarantined, something disconnected from life in contemporary America.

Lottie allowed me to do that, but also having attempted to face and address the past as honestly as I could, I wanted to see what remained. What hope could there be for us, what love, what compassion? Would it be naive to think that these aspects of life were truly possible given the burdens of history that we carry into the present moment? I could see how a reader might conclude her story is tangential, but for me she is thematically fundamental to the book.

Her brief time with Billy allowed me to ask all those questions with a new perspective. I don’t presume to have the answers to our country’s awful legacy of suffering and violence, but it does seem to me that a new level of honesty will be a prerequisite to finding them. that level of honesty is present in the relationship between Lottie and Billy, and aspirational for me as an ordinary man in the world. I genuinely feel like an optimist at heart and telling Lottie’s story allowed me to put that optimism to the test.

The book ends in 1906 with George and Emily meeting by happenstance on a park bench, but not knowing one another. Emily was talking to herself out loud about love being “the only miracle.” Explain why you chose to end the book this way.

I wanted to leave the reader with a question. So, having read everything that comes before that encounter, I hope readers will ask themselves if she’s telling the truth.

I noticed a lot of references to the color yellow in this book. Does it have anything to do with your first novel The Yellow Birds?

It may just be a tic! I’m not sure. In The Yellow Birds, I wanted that connotation of cowardice to be present, but I didn’t realize it had bled into the new book. I’ll have to think more about that.

According to some reviews of your work that I’ve read, your writing compares to that of Faulkner. What do you say?

It’s certainly not a claim I would be prepared to make about my own work, but I am flattered that others have made it. For many writers from the South, his books are touchstones, and that is definitely true for me.

Can you share any ideas you may be exploring for an upcoming work?

Nothing has cohered yet, but my recent reading has tended toward the spiritual: Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, C.S. Lewis, and others.

My own spiritual life is characterized primarily by doubt and confusion, but whenever I’ve had those feelings about a subject in the past, I’ve tended to write about it, to see if there’s a way that I can crack the code or at the very least throw words at the mystery in a way that might be interesting to myself and others. So, I’ll either do that or write a love story. I can’t say for sure at the moment.

Kevin Powers will be at Lemuria tomorrow, May 22, at 5:00 to sign and read from A Shout in the Ruins. A Shout in the Ruins has been selected our May 2018 selection for Lemuria’s First Editions Club for Fiction.

The Past is Female, Too: ‘Varina’ by Charles Frazier

By Hillary

On April 26, 2018

In Fiction, Historical Fiction, Southern Fiction

varina I know that Charles Frazier is most known for his novel, Cold Mountain, but I must admit…I haven’t read it. So, I’m going into his writing with no preconceived notions of any past greatness to compare it to. When we received advanced copies of Varina and I learned that Frazier would be joining us for a signing and reading at The Eudora Welty House, I figured this would be the best time to start my Charles Frazier reading journey.

Set in the Civil War era with a strong, female protagonist, Frazier’s new novel is mostly narrated by Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis. Married at 17 to a man nearly 20 years her senior, Varina is thrust into political life during the brutality of the Civil War. She suffers the loss of several children and then decides to rescue a black child named Jimmie to raise as her own.

When we first meet Varina, she is much older and reflecting back on her life with the now-grown James (Jimmie) after years apart. Once Lee has surrendered, she is fleeing with her still surviving children, a young black boy named James, and a black woman through an almost lawless land. They find danger on their journey, and narrowly escape a few captures by Federal soldiers while trying to start a new life for themselves. There are a lot of historical figures whom she encounters along the way. Some may find this a bit much, but it turns out (because I did a little research on my own) that Varina was just that connected in her real life. Ultimately, this is a story, written in Frazier’s beautiful prose, of Varina pulling herself together, and those closest to her, after the devastation of the Civil War.

Frazier has done a fantastic job of depicting the damage done to the landscape and people of the south during this time. He has also given us a story of a strong female historical figure, forced to marry young, and shows her feelings of culpability for her actions and the actions of her husband concerning slavery. He has taken someone who is on the “wrong” side and made one feel empathy and sorrow towards their troubles. He has shown the horrors in both the North and the South during the time following the war in great detail. I know this is a historical novel, but Frazier did his research, and as far as I can tell Varina was exactly the woman he has produced in real life; a very intelligent, kind, hard working woman who was able to face anything head on in her life.

I really enjoyed this read. In fact, it reminded me of a non-fiction book, Trials of the Earth, which I read and loved a couple of years ago, about Mary Mann Hamilton and her life in the Mississippi Delta. If you’re looking for tales of strong Southern women surviving in a harsh landscape, these books are are for you.

Charles Frazier will be at the Eudora Welty House today, Thursday, April 26, at 5:00 to sign and read from Varina, Lemuria’s April 2018 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Charles Frazier

By Guest Author

On April 24, 2018

In Fiction, Historical Fiction, Southern Fiction

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

Amidst a timely controversy about the relevance of Confederate monuments scattered across the South and a national discussion about race, Charles Frazier’s newest novel examines the role of Varina Davis, wife of the Confederacy’s only president, Jefferson Davis, and her influence on history.
In Varina, a work of historical fiction, Frazier places the former first lady of what he refers to as the “imaginary country” at a health resort in Saratoga Springs, New York. The year in 1906, and the story begins just weeks before her death at age 80, when she gets a surprise visit from a middle-aged African-American man she doesn’t recognize.

The stranger turns out to be the young boy she took in off the streets of Richmond 40 years ago, who is searching for clues about his own identity. As she recounts her story of the war years and beyond, he begins to clarify his personal history.

Charles Frazier

Frazier, who won the National Book Award for his internationally bestselling debut novel Cold Mountain in 1997, has said that he believes events of the past few years have left America still searching for a resolution to issues concerning race and slavery.

Frazier’s other novels include Thirteen Moons and Nightwoods. A native of North Carolina, he still makes his home there.

Why did you choose Varina Davis to write about now–was it influenced by the efforts of some today to remove statues of Confederate leaders, including her husband Jefferson David, president of the Confederacy?

varina I was interested in the fact that she left Mississippi shortly after Jefferson Davis died and moved to New York City to become a newspaper writer when she was over 60 years old. I found out that she had lived in London for some time, alone. As she grew older, she stayed engaged with the world around her and her opinions continued to evolve. At a time in life when most people start slowing down, she was digging her heels in, thinking mostly about her work, writing.

The novel is crafted around the conversations of an aging Varina with a man she had apparently rescued as a child–a man she had not seen in 40 years. He has come to her for answers about his own identity, and she provides clues as she tells her story. At the time he visits, she is 80 years old and has been earning her living by writing for publications in New York City. Tell me about their relationship.

It’s not certain that she rescued him. The story that (Varina’s friend) Mary Chesnut told was that Varina was riding through Richmond in a carriage and she witnessed the boy being mistreated and took him in; there is another story that there was a group of boys, including her sons, running around Richmond and they brought him home with them.

The (recorded) history of that child ends in 1865. I elevated him to a grown-up. I wanted it to feel to her like a child had returned. (All four of her sons had died young.) He had always wanted to know his story, so different from hers in that she had benefited from slavery her whole life.

Varina was a remarkably strong and independent woman, well-educated and ahead of her time in her thinking about political and social issues. She married Jefferson Davis when she was 18 and he was 37. How would you describe their marriage relationship, with its many moves, the tumultuous time in the country, and the deaths of their four sons at a young age?

There were lots of separations–sometimes because of his work and sometimes because they were not getting along. They quarreled over his will that left her totally dependent on his brother. There were some rocky periods, for sure, but divorce was out of the question.

When Jefferson Davis learned that he had been appointed president of the Confederacy, he and Varina took the news with a sense of dread. Why was that?

He was appointed and inaugurated (as provisional president) in Montgomery, Alabama (on Feb. 18, 1861), and was inaugurated again in Richmond (on Feb. 22, 1862) after he was actually elected to the post (in November 1861).

Varina had expected him to be named the president and didn’t feel like he had the temperament for the job. She told (her friend) Mary Chesnut that he would be president and that “it will be a disaster.” They had just settled back in at their home at David Bend (near Vicksburg) when word came. Both were depressed about it.

Tell me about Varina’s role as the Confederacy’s only first lady, especially considering that she didn’t agree with her husband on everything politically, and this was a job she never asked for.

Varina Davis

She performed a lot of the conventional duties of a first lady, but was constantly criticized by people in Richmond for being too opinionated, too sharp-witted. Many looked on her as being too Western and crude. Mississippi was still a frontier area when she was growing up there, and it bothered some people who thought that she was not as polished.

Other characters in the book reveal much about Varina. Tell me about Mary Chesnut and her relationship with Varina. Also, who is the mysterious character of Laura, who befriended Varina when they were both guests at the health spa in Saratoga Springs?

Many Chesnut and Varina were friends in the real world. They met in Washington when each was 18 and their husbands were members of Congress.

Mary was from South Carolina. She was well educated in Charleston and was known for being smart and quick-witted. Mary’s husband had important positions in the Confederate government (as an aide to the president and a brigadier general in the Confederate Army). The diaries she wrote during the Civil War were later published and they provided a great deal of firsthand information about that period.

For Laura’s character, I pictured someone with lots of problems whose rich parents sent away to get better. At the end of the book, they are trying expensive new medical treatments for her. Also, Varina had lost so many of her own children, and, in Laura, she finds someone to take care of.

The use of mixing wine with morphine, or taking opium or laudanum seemed to be a common practice as a way to relax and forget life’s problems, and we see Varina using it fairly often. How common was this?

You didn’t need a prescription for laudanum (or tincture of opium)–it was the type of thing you could get at traveling medicine shows. It was used for practically anything, especially for women, from mild depression after childbirth, to husbands saying their wives were too high strung or high-spirited. I don’t know if Varina was a big (user), but I do know Mary Chesnut was. I expect some periods of Varina’s life could be explained by her use of it. For example, the way she suddenly left during her husband’s inauguration in Montgomery, with no explanation.

Please tell me how you hope Varina will address your concerns about some of the unrest about race that we still see lingering in our country, with the removal of Confederate statues and the division we continue to hear in the national rhetoric.

I think of historical fiction as a conversation between the present and the past, and Varina Davis’s life offered me a complex entry point into that dialogue. That war and its cause–the ownership of human beings–live so deep in our nation’s history and identity that we still haven’t found a way to reconcile and move forward. And it’s important to remember that most of those monuments didn’t spring up right after 1865, but are largely a product of the Jim Crow South. Their continued presence indicates how much the issues of the Civil War are like the armature inside a sculpture–baked into the framework of our country and our culture.

Do you have other writings in the works at this time, or ideas for your next project?

I’ve got a couple ideas in the works and will decide which one to pursue this summer.

This interview has also been posted on the Clarion-Ledger’s website.

Charles Frazier will be at the Eudora Welty House on Thursday, April 26, at 5:00 to sign and read from Varina, Lemuria’s April 2018 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Charles Frazier’s ‘Varina’ is an immersion in the Civil War South

By Guest Author

On April 16, 2018

In Civil War, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Southern Fiction

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 15)

As historical fiction, Charles Frazier’s Varina can be seen as an imagined memoir of the widow of Confederate President Jefferson Davis—but only barely.

varina It draws heavily from the verified facts about the former Varina Howell of Natchez, but is seamlessly layered with the insightful thoughts and personality of a woman from an attractive belle to an arch and wise matron in her later years. It’s truly a fascinating journey.

It covers her courtship as a young girl with the then-widowed Davis more than a decade her senior, from living on their plantation at Davis Bend near Vicksburg to moving to Washington, D.C., when he was first a congressman from Mississippi, then a U.S. senator, to being secretary of war, and, finally their days after the Civil War.

Davis himself does not get off lightly in her estimation. For example, she confided to one newspaper reporter after his inauguration as the Confederate leader that sometimes even she wanted to murder him. (Married folk can relate!)

But she speaks fondly of him, too, recalling his young man’s dream of being simply a country lawyer who wrote poetry; much as she wistfully recalled her own dream of being First Lady, not of the South, but residing on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., back when Davis was a U.S. senator and war hero. It seemed a likely prospect at the time.

The tale is told through her words to a black man who tracks her down as she is living out her later years in New York. The man, James Blake (or James Brooks), was known as Jimmie Limber when she and Davis took him in as a child from the streets of Washington and raised him, until they were split apart by the war.

As oddly as it might sound to the uninitiated, the story of a black child being raised side by side with their other children is true—at least, for a short time until the war intervened.

Some of the most gripping of the narrative (a la Gone with the Wind) involves Varina and Blake’s flight for Havana and hoped-for sanctuary in an arduous journey that ended on the Florida-Georgia border as their world came crashing down.

Frazier, known for his masterful work Cold Mountain, draws the reader in with broad strokes of often quite profound observation, along with period details, powerful accounts of the hard life of citizens after Sherman’s march, and thoughtful reflection.

For example, how she came about understanding the complex nature of slavery as a child amazed her, how even slight gradations of skin color could be so determinant. It boiled down to the sense “that a strong line cut through all the people she knew and everybody who existed,” one that “traced divisions clear and precise as the sweeping shadow of a sundial.”

And it was firmly enforced, in society, in public, in private, in homes and churches, a biblical injunction (Luke 12:47): “He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.”

The South and all in it were beaten down by it, wholly, individually, even the land itself “defaced and haunted with countless places where blood … would keep seeping up for generations to come.”

It makes one wonder, have the scars ever healed?

Frazier has produced a time machine where the reader is immersed in the Civil War era, pondering through the eyes of Varina Howell Davis the complexities, mysteries, brutalities and banalities of days long gone.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at the Clarion Ledger, is the author of seven books including his latest, Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them.

Charles Frazier will be at the Eudora Welty House on Thursday, April 26, to sign and read from Varina, Lemuria’s April 2018 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Michael Farris Smith

By Guest Author

On March 21, 2018

In Southern Fiction

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

Oxford resident Michael Farris Smith has come out swinging with his latest fictional work, The Fighter (Little, Brown), treating readers to a rough-and-tumble saga of good intentions gone wrong for a main character whose already hard life has suddenly fallen onto even harder times.

Smith’s previous novels, which have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire, Southern Living, Book Riot, and many others, include Desperation Road, Rivers, and The Hands of Strangers.

He has been awarded the Mississippi Author Award for Fiction and the Transatlantic Review Award for Fiction, and his essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Bitter Southerner, Writer’s Bone, and more.

The wide appeal of Smith’s work has seen Desperation Road longlisted for the UK’s Gold Dagger Award for Best Novel, and it is now a finalist for France’s Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle, a French literary prize awarded by readers of Elle magazine.

International promos for Smith’s books have recently taken him to Australia, and, after a whirlwind Mississippi tour March 20-26 for the release of The Fighter (with stops in Oxford, Greenwood, Jackson, Pass Christian, McComb, and Columbus), Smith will head to France in early April.

Michael Farris Smith

“It’s busy, but very interesting to see my work being so well-received both at home and in other countries,” he said.

The son of a Baptist minister and a graduate of Mississippi State University, Smith began writing while at the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. His family relocated to Oxford from Columbus last summer.

The Fighter is your fourth novel, and it touches readers with the same eloquent writing style as your previous works, even as it again introduces us to characters who find themselves in desperate situations, facing heartbreak, brokenness, and regret–wand who are longing for a second chance. In other words, real people facing tough problems, whose hopes have worn thin. When you are developing characters and plots, where do you think these moving stories and characters come from?

I’m not sure. I guess it’s just a culmination of what I see, of what I know is out there. I wish there was no such thing as heartbreak and brokenness, but there is.

I also know I only want to write about characters who are at the end of the rope, fighting to survive emotionally, or physically, or spiritually, and maybe all of the above. I learned that from Barry Hannah and Larry Brown. The stories I write are the stories that challenge me on an emotional level and when I fell those emotions rise in me, I know I’m going in the right direction.

As the main character in The Fighter, Jack Boucher (pronounced Boo-shay) has lived a hard life–he never knew his parents, grew up in foster homes and owed what good times he had to a woman who took him in at age 12 and devoted her life to keeping him on the right track. But when the story begins with his attempts to set things straight as a worn-out fighter, gambler, and drug addict in his early 40s, things quickly unravel and his intentions are suddenly sidetracked–but why is it that we just can’t help but like this man?

fighter You win the prize for my favorite question about The Fighter so far. Maybe it’s because we are all fighters. We all have made mistakes, we have hurt people who love us, we have done things we regret and knew we were going to regret it as we were doing it, and we all fight to try and fix what we’ve done after we’ve broken it.

Jack was dealt a tough hand, and then as time wore on, he helped to dig the hole deeper and deeper. But I understand Jack. And I think it’s possible I feel more emotionally attached to him than any character I’ve written, and I don’t even know if I can put my finger on it as to why.

Jack’s last foster mother, Maryann-who became his permanent parent and the only person he believed ever loved and understood him, was his anchor, no matter how bad things were in his life. Why was it so important to him that he honor her by saving her family home and property from foreclosure?

Everybody hits rock bottom. Sometimes we recognize it. Sometimes we don’t. I think after all Jack has been through, all he’s suffered, all he’s brought on himself, he maybe finally realizes only one thing truly matters. Which we have a tendency to do when our lives break down.

For all his brokenness, Jack has his share of homegrown wisdom, a set of principles to which he has clung, and even a tenderness when it came right down to it. In the violent world in which he lived, it was fear that motivated him to live, and hope and forgiveness that often guided his dark moods. In what ways did Annette, another main character, come to see this in Jack?

I feel like Annette is a kindred spirit, and I do agree about the tenderness. She’s lost, like him. And searching, like him. But I think what separates Annette is that while Jack knows what he’s after in this moment, Annette really doesn’t. But that doesn’t keep her from looking, and she lives by her “church of coincidence” theology to keep driving her forward. She’s dedicated to it, to the signs that seem to be leading her. To what, she doesn’t know.

But she attaches this tangible thing to her own questions about who she is and what she’s doing, and she has a tremendous amount of faith. Blind faith. Which is truly the only kind. So, she is able to notice another like herself. So many of us look for signs, little hints of recognition to encourage us to keep us going through hard times. And Annette’s eyes are always wide open to such things.

Explain the symbolic message of the appearance of a hawk at different times throughout Jack’s life.

I can’t really explain a symbol, because it means one thing to me, but will mean something different to everyone else. I will say that when the hawk appeared in the sky in the opening, it just appeared and wasn’t planned. But I knew once I was finished with the passage that the hawk would find itself in the story again.

Some Native American cultures believed the hawk was responsible for transporting the soul from one world to the next, and I love that. The natural simplicity of our spirits being gathered by such beautiful creatures and carried away. I don’t know why it showed up, but I was happy to see it when it appeared in the sky above Jack. So was he.

What is next on the horizon in your writing? Have you ever considered writing a sequel to any of your books?

I was hoping to finish a new novel manuscript before the release of The Fighter, and I was able to do that. I love the story and very much enjoyed the quiet of the last few months, going to those characters each day and living in their world. And I think what it has in common with the others is that you can have a very different conversation about it. Something I’m proud of with each of my novels.

As far as sequels, it’s strange because I expected to be asked that about Rivers, but I’ve also been asked that question about Desperation Road more than I anticipated. And some readers make pretty good points about why there should be another part. But I don’t know. The ideas has a way of choosing you, and not the other way around.

Michael Farris Smith will be Lemuria on Thursday, March 22, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from The Fighter, which is one of Lemuria’s two March 2018 selections for our First Editions Club for Fiction.

Tag: First Editions Club (Page 4 of 7)

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