Tag: Jana Hoops (Page 10 of 13)

Author Q & A with Rick Bragg

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On May 2, 2018

In Southern Cooking, Southern Culture

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 29)

With equal parts love and humor—not to mention brutal honesty—Southern storyteller extraordinaire Rick Bragg tackles a topic he admits he never thought he’d have the courage to swallow: food. And good Southern cooking.

Fortunately for his readers, the release of his latest volume, The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma’s Table, (Knopf) has proven that old-fashioned Southern fare is indeed in good hands.

“I’m not a cook,” the Possum Trot, Alabama, native is quick to say, but in this 490-page “food memoir,” he lets the stories of “his people” and their hilarious and sometimes heart-wrenching circumstances do the stewing and stirring.

best cook in the worldBut mostly, it’s a tribute to his mother, 81-year-old Margaret Bragg, whose skills in the kitchen, he says, are still unmatched. This is a woman who never—not once—used a cookbook, a written recipe, a measuring cup or even a set of measuring spoons to put a meal on the table. Her skills came from oral recipes and techniques that go back generations—some even to pre-Civil War days.

Included are recipes for 74 Southern “soul food” dishes he says it took all of a year to convert into written form under his mother’s guidance.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and a journalism professor at the University of Alabama, Bragg is a former New York Times reporter and the recipient of a Nieman Fellowship from Harvard University. A regular contributor to Garden and Gun, his previous books include All Over But the Shoutin’, Ava’s Man, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story, and My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South, among others.

Your new book is a “food memoir” and tribute to your mother, Margaret Bragg, who never used a recipe or owned a cookbook. Since you admit you are not a cook yourself, how did you get the idea to write this book, and why was it so important to you?

One of the reasons I did the book was because my mom had a heart attack, then developed cancer and had two years of chemo. When she first got sick about five years ago, her kitchen was just different when she was gone. When she’s home, the kitchen usually smells like bacon grease and that wonderful Red Diamond coffee. When she was gone it smelled more like lemon dishwashing detergent. Even the cold cast-iron skillets had a different smell.

I had tried before to cook her pinto beans and ham bone, and her beef short ribs, but it didn’t taste like hers. She never, never let us boys (Rick and his two brothers) in her kitchen when we were growing up. We’d have coal dust on us, or a live frog in a front pocket of our overalls. None of us learned any cooking from her.

I asked her where the recipe was written down for beef short ribs and she said, “I’ve never written down any recipe,” and I knew that. I’ve never seen her standing over a written recipe.

I love writing about food, something I do quite a bit, and every part of this book was always about the stories of people with my blood.

All of the recipes in this book come from stories—stories about fist fights or leaving a landlord in the middle of the night—because that’s how we live around here. And you would just remember the food that was there when it happened. The story about the time Sis, my mother’s father’s cousin, shot her husband in the teeth, and what that had to do with her chicken and dressing, is pure “writer’s platinum.”

I just thought I’d like to write these things down. I thought, “Why not? Do a book about food, and set recipes in it.”

Because your mom never uses measuring cups or spoons, you literally had to convince her to come up with the recipes included in the book. Was that a hard sell, since she says in the book, “A person can’t cook from a book”? And it must have been time-consuming creating recipes for so many dishes she knew by heart. How did you go about it?

There are two leather chairs in my momma’s living room. She sat in the one on the left and I sat in the one on the right. I leaned close to her to talk about how much of what would go into the recipes, and it took For. Ever.

To her, there is no “half cup of flour.” She would say “just get a good handful” or “a real good handful.” A tablespoon to her means the big spoon in the kitchen drawer. Or she would say use a “smidgeon” or—my favorite—“some.” It really didn’t matter the quantity of ingredients in the recipes. It’s the process. You have to leave a lot of it to common sense.

It took, probably, a solid year.

I’ve been asked if we tested the recipes in the book. My ambition was to share some of the stories of the food, and some recipes, as best I can. That, and not poison anybody.

This book is not about your typical “cookbook” type of food—there are no restraints on the use of fat (often in the form of lard), or sugar, eggs, meats or other rich ingredients that have lost some favor over the past few decades. What kind of readers and cooks do you hope will be drawn to this book?

First of all, it’s not a cookbook. If people are buying it just as a cookbook, that’s not the point. What I hope happens is that people will enjoy the true narrative, the history.

I’m not a cook and I’m not a cookbook writer. This was a chance to write about where the food came from. I hope that what people in the Upper East Side (of Manhattan), London, Connecticut and everywhere else will enjoy is the narratives, and see the value of the food.

Your mom insists she is a “cook”—not a chef. Please explain what that boils down to.

A chef expects to be called “chef,” and his underlings have to refer to him as such. A cook doesn’t care what you call him or her. It’s not about pride, but pretentiousness.

There is a great deal of family history in The Best Cook in the World—not only unique, but humorous! Tell me about the process of putting these stories together.

We didn’t have to cobble the stories together. A lot of times the food would spark the story, like the chicken and dressing story. There were recipes I wanted to put in there, but I just didn’t have a good story—like peanut butter pie, fresh garden vegetables and Aunt Juanita’s peanut butter cookies. Now, commodity cheese, I have a great story. Or Ava’s tornado story—I’ve wanted to include that story somewhere for 15 years, and this was my chance.

Among the recipes that are included, what are some of your favorites—and have you, or will you—cook them yourself?

Rick Bragg

Rick Bragg

I can cook a mean biscuit, but I usually won’t if I can get some good store-bought ones. I make red eye gravy with ham and grits—the good kind. A chocolate pie sounds like something I could do.

I don’t have the patience my momma has, and I can’t make any of it taste like she does.

One of my favorite things she made us was fried pies—but she recently told my brother Sam and me that she never made that. She had forgotten. That was the reason to do this book.

Rick Bragg will beat Lemuria on Friday, May 4, at 5:00 to sign and read from The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma’s Table. The Best Cook in the World is a 2018 selection for Lemuria’s First Edition Club for Nonfiction.

Author Q & A with Charles Frazier

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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

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?

varinaI 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

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.

Author Q & A with Brian Castner

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On April 18, 2018

In Adventure, History, Nonfiction

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

For a man who never intended to be a writer and admits that he “stumbled into it,” Brian Castner’s work has landed on solid footing thus far.

disappointment riverHis newest book, Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage, follows his own bold journey to retrace a 1789 expedition whose leader had hoped would finally unlock a North American passage to Asia–and change world trade forever.

Castner’s original goal of becoming an engineer got sidetracked years ago, and after a successful Air Force career that found him detonating bombs on a regular basis, the Iraq War veteran returned home to find that writing would become his tool to work through lingering stress from his military years.

His previous books include the memoir The Long Walk in 2012 (a New York Times Editor’s Pick that was adapted into an opera); and the nonfiction All the Ways We Kill and Die in 2016. His journalism and essays have appeared in Esquire, Wired, VICE, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and others.

How did your engineering background lead you, in a roundabout way, into your writing career?

Brian Castner

Brian Castner

I grew up in Buffalo, New York, went to Marquette University in Milwaukee, and majored in electrical engineering. I was never a good engineer, though. I got good grades, but I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t think like other engineers. But the engineering degree was a means to an end, because I had an ROTC scholarship, and wanted to get into the Air Force to be an astronaut. I’ve always wanted to explore–the further out, the better! Obviously, that didn’t work out, but writing has let me travel the world.

I’ve always liked to read, and as a kid I wrote a lot, in middle school and high school. Even in college, I tried to escape engineering a bit, and studied a semester in Oxford, reading philosophy, history, and English. I even took a playwriting class. But I never considered a career in writing. I didn’t think it was a job that contemporary adults really did. I didn’t know any authors until I became one. I stumbled into it.

You served three tours of duty in the Middle East, working as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer (a bomb squad tech) in the Air Force and winning a Bronze Star. When you returned home, you spent a good while readjusting to civilian life, and fed your adventurous side by working as a river guide. When you decided to retrace Alexander Mackenzie’s 1,100-mile exploration in 1789 of a river he hoped would finally uncover the “Northwest Passage” in northern Canada, how did your family (your wife and four sons) react, and why was it so important to you to make this dangerous journey?

I did struggle returning home, a story I tell in The Long Walk. River guiding really helped me find peace in the tumult–when you are in the middle of the rapid, you have to be totally present, to think about nothing but your line–that is, your safest path through the water–and the water itself. I have a calm feeling in the whitewater and it gave me a safe way to chill out and readjust to home life.

For this trip, I don’t have a good answer to what drove me. I find it to be an urge, a base instinct. I had always wanted to take a long journey like this, walking or canoeing, months in the wilderness. When I came upon Mackenzie’s story, I was entranced by the narrative, but also by the possibility of taking the journey myself, to write a better book. It fulfilled a long-held desire, and that it was Mackenzie’s journey I was retracing is a matter of scholarly research and serendipity.

A few of my four sons wanted to come with me; my wife put the kibosh on that. I also invited her along, for at least a section, but she smartly demurred. They know me, know why this trip excited me. And the good news is that as I get older, the fernweh [wanderlust] seems to be fading. At least a bit.

Disappointment River alternates between the detailed stories of your journey and that of Alexander Mackenzie, a fur trader who knew that his success in finding a Northwest Passage–a trade route through North America that would provide a direct channel to the East–would not only secure his place in history, but would ensure his fortune as well. Why did you decide to tell both stories?

Because these are the kinds of stories I most like to read, a blending of forgotten history and travelogue. But also, one story didn’t make sense without the other. On the one hand, I’ve had enough internal voyages of discovery. I didn’t need to take a long canoe trip to find myself. I needed an external goal and finish line, and retracing Mackenzie’s path provided that. At the same time, if I just told Mackenzie’s story, I think most readers would have an obvious question: I wonder what this land is like now? That Mackenzie encountered fierce pack ice at the end of his journey, and I suspected I would find open ocean, lent another bit of symmetry to the trip.

On your own journey, you worked out a plan that allowed four of your friends to jump in and accompany you, one at a time, via small airports along the way. Their travel schedules dictated that you were allowed little time to rest along the way. Tell me how having these friends join you–and the schedule you were forced to keep–influenced your trip.

As I write in the book, I had no interest in doing a psychological experiment on myself, to see if I could do the trip by myself; it was always about finding the right people to go with me. At first, I hoped to get one friend to do the whole trip, but no one had the time. Doing four friends, and rotating the flights, was a matter of necessity. I think it had benefits in the book, though–a variety of characters for the reader to get to know.

The tight schedule did produce some anxiety, but…pretty early on in the trip, you realize how small and powerless you are against the might of the river. So, I worried before the trip, but during it, you simply make the best time you can and realize how much is out of your control. The cold, wet, heat, thunderstorms, bugs, and hunger drove us as much as a schedule. I wanted to finish the trip, succeed, and get home to my kids.

In the book, you speak often of the difficulties you faced–several serious run-ins with storms and high winds, high waves, and, at times, even hunger. You often mentioned the stress, exertion, filth, heat, and mosquitoes–and how it took a toll on your mind and body. Did you expect it to be this difficult? Of what were you most fearful? What did you miss the most?

I expected it to be physically taxing, and I knew how to patiently endure the weather and hunger. But I wasn’t good at predicting how mentally challenging the monotony was. I didn’t know I would be so bored, for such long stretches–the view never changing, the sun never changing, the food never changing, nothing more to talk about, just paddling through a constant now. That tedium was the biggest challenge.

My biggest fear was not bears or weather or waves, honestly. It was getting injured or sick. I had a big med kit with a lot of drugs, like cipro, but fortunately, I never needed it.

I missed a lot of things on the river, especially my kids. But all the modern conveniences, the thing I missed most was darkness. The ability to draw the blinds and make a dark bedroom. It felt so good to sleep in darkness.

As you traveled north, you were able to get a sense of the cultures and lives of the people in these tiny villages. What did you discover about their hopes and fears?

I had read a lot on the struggles in northern indigenous Canada: poverty, alcoholism, suicide. But I was unprepared for the reality of it, the casual public intoxication at all hours, the pervasive want. Of course, I met wonderful generous people, who took me into their homes and told me stories of living on the land in the traditional way. But they talked about the alcohol and poverty, too, all the time. I didn’t have to bring it up–there is no way to avoid it. There is just a pervasive hopelessness–the traditional ways are hard. Please rid yourself of any romance now–living off the land is hard and dangerous work, a hard life. No wonder the young people are not clamoring to take it up, not when they know all about modern life on satellite TV. But what replaces it, in these tiny villages in the North? The pipeline? Tourism? There is not much answer now.

For reasons I’ll let readers discover, Mackenzie believed for the rest of his life that his voyage to find the Northwest Passage was a “spectacular failure”–but he could never know the truth. His book about it became a worldwide bestseller, and he received much affirmation. What do you think his greatest achievement was?

I think his greatest…achievement is that he never lost a man or woman on his expeditions. This was hardly an assured thing. Voyagers died in the rapids all the time. Attack by the indigenous tribes was a real threat–the next expedition to follow Mackenzie down his river, in 1799, was ambushed and wiped out. John Franklin followed Mackenzie’s route in 1819, and his party resorted to cannibalism. Despite the hazards of the whitewater, violence, and starvation, not a single person died on his great journeys in 1789 and 1793. In retrospect, that is remarkable.

What did this experience help you learn about yourself? Would you do it again?

After this trip, I feel like I have nothing left to prove. Even to myself. Maybe especially to myself. That might sound funny, since I have survived other crucibles that are supposed to impart that feeling–in EOD school, 30 of us started and only three finished. But I had never taken a long wilderness journey like this before. And I feel like I’m good now–if I never hike the Appalachian Trail, I’m fine.

I wouldn’t do a trip like this again, not without my wife and some of my children. There is nothing hiding behind the next spruce tree that is more important than them.

Do you have another book or idea in thew works at this time?

I have started my next book, and it will be published again by Doubleday. But I hesitate to say too much, lest the ideas and inspiration slip away into the ether. I can say this, though: it is nonfiction, history, a story of the North, and I do have to take a backpacking trip into the mountains. Yes, my sons go, too!

Disappointment River is a 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Author Q & A with Chris Offutt

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On April 10, 2018

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

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

country darkAfter nearly two decades, award-winning author and screenwriter Chris Offutt of Oxford has released his long-awaited next novel–and this time it is definitive Southern Gothic, as he lays out the story of Country Dark, a rough read about the tragic lives of one family as they face a difficult life situation, and a husband and father who can’t help but take matters into his own hands.

The story chronicles the family’s life beginning in 1954, when 18-year-old Korean war veteran Tucker returns to his Kentucky home and meets Rhonda, the 14-year-old girl who agrees on that day that they should be married. It carries readers through 17 tumultuous years of poverty, prison, and the despair of dealing with the eventual reality that four of their six children struggled with severe emotional or physical disabilities.

Offutt, who grew up in a community of 200 people on dirt roads in the hills of eastern Kentucky, is himself most comfortable in rural settings.

“I tried cities–Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque–and I didn’t like them,” he said. “I now live at the end of a dirt road in Lafayette County.”

Chris Offutt

Chris Offutt

His mastery in capturing the tone, the language, and the attitudes of the hill people shows through clearly in this tale of a good man who gets pushed too far, and resorts to violence at any any cost to save his large family.

Now an associate professor of English and screenwriting at the University of Mississippi, Offutt earned a bachelor’s degree in theatre from Morehead State University; and an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa.

He has scripted five screenplays and two films, and has worked on the HBO drama True Blood and the Showtime series Weeds.

A versatile writer, Offutt’s previous books include My Father, the Pornographer in 2016, along with two other memoirs, No Heroes and The Same River Twice. Other fiction works include the novel The Good Brother and two story collections, Out of the Woods and his first book, Kentucky Straight. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Short Stories, and many other anthologies.

Your new novel, Country Dark, is a story of one man’s passion to keep his family together–a desire matched only by his willingness to eliminate any obstacle that would stand in his way. Tucker, the main character, is a complicated mix of compassion, tenderness, revenge, and violence. What was your inspiration for this character and this story?

People who live in the rural South are often portrayed negatively in the mainstream media, movies, and TV. I wanted to write a novel that showed rural people as smart, self-reliant, resourceful, loyal, and loving.

Initially, I’d planned to write a family saga of three generations. I became so enthralled by Tucker that I stuck with him for the entire book.

The story takes place in rural Kentucky from 1954 through 1971, and the characters’ lives are steeped in hardship and varying levels of despair. Why this time frame, and this place?

The book is set where I grew up. The biggest influence on me was the landscape and the adults. I wanted to examine both. Also, I was interested in writing about the “pre-technology” world of no cell phones and no computers.

People had telephone party-lines in their houses, which meant your neighbors could listen to conversations. As a result, nobody really talked personally. If you wanted to communicate with someone directly, you went to their house. In the hills, it was often shorter and easier to walk through the woods than along the roads.

When main characters Tucker and Rhonda first meet, they decide that day that they want to get married–and they go on to endure much heartbreak during their marriage. What was the glue that held them together so securely?

They met very young under difficult circumstances. They fell in love without quite meaning to–which is how most of us fall in love.

Couples of that era in the hills of Kentucky tended to stick together no matter what. Marriage is compromise and personal growth.

Rhonda and Tucker were lucky–they grew together, not apart. They accepted their difficulties and faced them head on as a team.

In the sad descriptions of Tucker and Rhonda’s disabled children, Hattie, the social worker, reminds her boss that “It’s not black and white here. It’s all gray.” Explain what she meant by that, in this family’s situation.

There is a tendency for many people to reduce everything to either/or, good/bad, black/white. It’s easy, but it’s short-sighted and wrong-headed. You see this often with politicians trying to get votes. It’s a divisive way to see the world, one that essentially translates to “us versus them.” I object to that viewpoint.

All humans are complex individuals who respond to their emotions and to a complicated world.

I’m using “black and white” as a metaphor for polar extremes. Everyone I know lives in the middle–the so-called gray area.

After writing three books of memoirs, why did readers have to wait so long for your next fictional work?

A couple of reasons. I needed to send my sons to college and had very little money when they were in high school. I worked in Hollywood to finance their education, which took me away from novels for eight years.

When they graduated from college, I moved to Mississippi and returned to fiction.

I was writing all along, but not in the sustained way that a novel requires. Right now, I have two other completed books–a collection of stories and another novel. Plus, I’m working on a new novel.

You grew up in rural Kentucky. What brought you to Oxford, and when?

I was one of those kids who couldn’t wait to leave my isolated rural environment. As a young man, I hitchhiked out of the hills and lived in several cities, where I never fit in. I then spent the next 30 years trying to get back to the country!

In 2011, I moved to Oxford to teach screenwriting and fiction writing at the University of Mississippi. I live outside of town and have never been happier or more productive.

Your work has been compared to that of the late Larry Brown of Oxford. Did you know him personally? And would you say that is an accurate description of your writing?

Yes, I knew Larry. He was very supportive of my first book, published in 1992. I used to come down and visit him. We’d go fishing and talk about books–in particular, Southern literature.

I’m not objective enough about my own work to know if our writing is similar. If it is, I’m flattered and honored by the comparison. I learned a lot from reading his books. He’s a great writer.

What’s next for your readers?

Novels and short stories. It is my sincere hope that my life is so boring and mundane that it will never again warrant a memoir! All I want to do now is make stuff up.

Chris Offutt will be at Lemuria on Thursday, April 12, at 5:00 to sign and read from Country Dark.

Author Q & A with Francisco Cantú

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On April 9, 2018

In Biography/Memoir, Culture, Nonfiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print and online editions (April 8)

When Francisco Cantú decided to join the U.S. Border Patrol as a new college graduate in 2008, he expected the work to be tough, but after four years, the realities of the job forced him to examine the morality of his duties–and a gut check told him clearly: “It’s not the work for me.”

line becomes a riverIn a memoir about his duties with the patrol, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border (Riverhead Books), Cantú recounts the physical and emotional toll the experience took on him, and his growing angst about what really happens in the desert to those who attempt to cross.

Written in three parts, the book describes his training and introduction to the brutal field work; his transfer to a desk job in the intelligence division; and his personal involvement in the case of an undocumented friend who got caught up in the legalities of crossing the border.

A former Fulbright fellow, Cantú was a recipient of a Whiting Award for emerging writers in 2017. His work has been featured on the This American Life radio/podcast and in Best American Essays, Harper’s, Guernica, Orion, and n + 1.

He received his MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona. When he’s not writing, Cantú coordinates a research fellowship that connects MFA students with advocacy groups active in environment and social justice issues in the borderlands; teaches at the University Poetry Center; and tends bar.

When you decided to pursue a career as a U.S. Border Patrol, you knew it would be a tough job–that you would be “fetching dead bodies from the desert” in 115-degree heat, and you were cautioned by one of your early trainers: “You will be tested.” What inspired you to seek employment as a border patrol agent?

Francisco Cantú

Francisco Cantú

When I first began to consider signing up for the Border Patrol, I was 22, about to graduate from college. I had become completely obsessed with the border during my studies in international relations, but began to feel that much of the book learning and policy work I had been doing was disconnected from the realities of the landscape and culture that I had known growing up. At the time, the border patrol began to seem like one of the only ways to really be out on the border day in and day out, to see the hard realities of the place.

I joined hoping to be a “force for good” within the agency, imagining I might spend several years in the patrol and then become a policy maker or immigration lawyer equipped with insights that had eluded everyone else. I knew I’d see awful things, but I imagined that I’d be able to just be an observer, not a participant, that my sense of morals and ethics would withstand the numbing forces of the institution. It was incredibly naïve.

Understandably, when your Mexican-American mother heard of your plans to work as a border patrol agent, she feared for you life and your psyche, worried that it would change you in hard ways. Throughout the book, there are episodes of her offering advice and reflections about your work. Looking back, do you see some wisdom in her words now that you didn’t see then?

From the very beginning, my mother sensed the risk I was running of becoming lost. She had spent her career working for the federal government and warned me how it is impossible to step into an institution without it repurposing your energy towards its own ends. I wish I’d listened to her more–like many young adults I thought of myself as infallible.

My mother was the only person in my life that was still holding me accountable, reminding me of the reasons I had given for joining. She was one of the only tethers connecting me to who I was outside of the job. I don’t know if I would have come out of it in the same way without her.

Your book is filled with references to frequent disturbing dreams that haunted your nights. You also suffered from teeth grinding and lack of sleep during your stint as an agent. What did you make of these episodes?

At the time, I pushed them away. But looking back on it, these dreams were the only thing in my life, other than my mother, reaching out to tell me that something was wrong, that I was not alright. It’s alarming to think of how plainly violence and dehumanization was manifest in my dreams and how it correlated with becoming numb to it through my work. I would dream, for example, of dead bodies, of people I had arrested returning to me. I once dreamed that I was in the desert surrounded by people without faces. The longer I ignored the dreams, the more jarring they became. I realize now my nightmares were alarm bells, calling me back to my sense of humanity, calling my attention to something that had been violated.

Your days as an agent were filled with encounters with immigrants headed north, determined to enter the U.S. at almost any cost. Some were drug dealers or worse, but most were just looking for honest work. You admit there were times you would work with desperate people at points along the way, often in miserable circumstances, and you would soon forget their names. Did you feel like you became desensitized to the violence and despair of many of these people?

Absolutely. The normalization of violence is a central theme of this book. That moment you mention, when I realized I had forgotten the names of a pregnant woman and her husband that I’d arrested only hours before, is one of those moments I think of all the time, because I think that’s the first step in dehumanizing someone–forgetting their name, the thing that makes them an individual. It’s a small form of violence, and, looking at that–all the big and small ways we become desensitized to violence and despair–that was one of the principal things that led me to write after I left the job.

It felt like one of the only ways to truly grapple with what I’d been part of. I became interested not only in interrogating the ways I had normalized violence in my own life, but in examining how this also happens on a much broader level, how entire societies and populations normalize violence, especially in the borderlands.

The book includes a great deal of the history of the border situation, along with reflective pieces by other writers whose point of view you deemed relevant. How did you choose these pieces, and why did you add them?

Early drafts of the manuscript included some history of the border, but I was actually given permission by my editor to include even more outside research, to really look at how this border came to be what it is. That was exciting to me–it opened the door for me to include different kinds of work that had influenced my thinking about this place: writing from Mexican poet Sara Uribe, novelist and essayist Cristina Rivera Garza, as well as citations from primary documents like the U.S. Boundary Commission Reports from the 1800s.

The purpose of including such a wide spectrum of research was to encourage an interrogation of borders: most people who don’t live near one would probably tend to think of the border as a political or physical line separating two countries. But part of living in the borderlands is being constantly presented with different manifestations of the border and seeing all the different ways it is thrust into people’s lives.

Why did you ultimately quit your job as a border patrol agent?

I accepted a Fulbright Fellowship to study abroad. There were several reasons I applied for it, and one of them, I’m sure, was to subconsciously provide myself with a way out of the job that didn’t represent a defeat, that represented a path ahead. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see that I had finally started to break down.

Once I left the Border Patrol, I realized that I didn’t get any of the answers I had joined looking for–I only came away with more questions, and the border only seemed more overwhelming and incomprehensible. My turn toward writing was a way of accepting that, of surrendering to the act of asking questions that might not have an answer.

The final third of the book is devoted to the story of José, a friend you met after your border patrol years who became trapped in Mexico after returning to his native home to visit his dying mother. José comments at length about the difficulties of trying to cross the border to return to his family, and he places much blame on the Mexican government for its corruption and lack of aid and support for its own people; while chastising America for its seeming inhumanity in attempting to turn them away. Do you have a sense of what could or should be done to resolve, or at least ease, the crisis?

I remember José explaining to me that as a father there is literally nothing that he wouldn’t endure to reunite with his children. It’s hard to really grasp the significance of somebody saying, “It doesn’t matter how hellacious an obstacle is, I will overcome it to be with my family.”

José explained to me that he respects the laws of the U.S., but his family values supersede those laws. Our rhetoric encourages us to think of people like José as criminals, but under those terms, it’s impossible for me to look at his actions as criminal. I think most of us would do the same in his situation.

I think we have to end the de facto policy of “enforcement through deterrence,” which is something you don’t hear our policy makers talk about in any of their discussions about immigration reform. By heavily enforcing the easy-to-cross portions of the border near towns and cities, we’ve been pushing migrants to cross int he most remote and deadly parts of the desert, weaponizing the landscape.

Hundreds of deaths occur there each year, and those are just the ones that get reported. Around 6,000 and 7,000 migrants have lost their lives since the year 2000. Even last year, the administration bragged that crossings were down to their lowest level in more than 14 years, but what you didn’t hear is that migrant deaths actually went up from the year before, not down. So even though less people are crossing the border, the crossing is becoming more deadly.

I see this as a complete humanitarian crisis taking place on American soil, and I don’t see our country acknowledging these deaths in the way we should. We don’t read their names, we don’t memorialize them, we don’t mourn their deaths. That’s unacceptable. We have to understand these numbers, first and foremost, as representing individual people, individual lives.

Francisco Cantú will be at Lemuria  tonight, Monday, April 9, at 5:00 to sign and read from The Line Becomes a River. This book is a 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Author Q & A with Robert Gordon

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On March 26, 2018

In Blues, Music, Southern Culture

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

Memphis’s Grammy and Emmy award-winning author and filmmaker Robert Gordon highlights his city’s lesser known artists who he proudly emphasizes brought “something different” to the Memphis music scene through their authenticity and uncommon styles.

memphis rent partyMemphis Rent Party: The Blues, Rock & Soul in Music’s Hometown is a collection of 20 profiles and stories composed throughout his career of more than four decades of passionate writing about the music of his beloved Memphis.

Gordon’s previous books, all about the American South, and its music, art, and politics, include It Came from Memphis, Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters, and Respect Yourself. His work on Keep an Eye on the Sky was selected as a Grammy winner.

His film work includes the documentaries Johnny Cash’s America and William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton. His Best of Enemies was shortlisted for an Oscar and won an Emmy.

Born and raised in Memphis, he still calls the city his home and touts: “I drink my whiskey neat.”

Memphis Rent Party: The Blues, Rock & Soul in Music’s Hometown is a collection of essays about Memphis artists and producers who  you believed best convey the spirit of Memphis. What exactly is a rent party?

When I was studying the Harlem Renaissance about 40 years ago, I learned about rent parties, where people who couldn’t make the rent would throw a party, charge admission, sell booze, and get by another month. I loved the idea of friends helping friends by having fun together. And it occurred to me then, way back, that “Rent Party” would be a great name for a collection of stories. The work is already done, you’re throwing a few stories together to get a book deal. But it turned out, when I had the opportunity, I took it much further, interconnecting the stories with new text, digging up old unpublishable pieces, and generally putting in a full book’s effort. The result, Memphis Rent Party, is a lot of fun–like a rent party should be, but it was a lot more work than I anticipated.

And by “unpublishable” I mean, for example, I wrote a piece about the mother of jazz greats Phineas and Calvin Newborn. It’s hard enough to get a piece of either of them published, but on their mom? No way. So, I wrote that for myself, put it in a drawer, and moved on. I dug it out for this, because I could finally get it out.

How did you choose these particular stories?

I didn’t set out with a particular goal, but one formed as I got into the material. I saw a unifying theme, a sense of individuality that is epitomized by Sam Phillips and by what Sam sought.
Elvis would have been singing Perry Como-style ballads and become a forgotten minor entertainer if it hadn’t been for Sam. Sam affirmed for him that the wild streak in him, the uniquely Elvis part of Elvis, was OK to reveal, was something to pursue.

That’s the spirit that unifies the book. These are individuals who have created their own characters, forged new paths. These are not followers, they’re people cutting their own path–and very often, that path becomes a major highway that lots of people follow.

What was it that attracted you to this music at a young age–music that was so unlike your growing up years, at a time when you described your teenage self as a “rebellious outsider” and as a “seeker.”

Robert Gordon

Robert Gordon

This music hit harder and deeper than anything I’d ever heard. It didn’t say, “I’m hear to rock you.” It didn’t say, “Let’s be entertained.” Though all music is just a combination of notes, the delivery of this music felt different. It had history, meaning, and heft. I wanted to understand it in a way that Molly Hachet, Kiss, and later, Boston–pop groups of the time–offered no deeper meanings.

One of your earliest (if not your first) face-to-face encounters with a music legend was with Furry Lewis, a solo blues artist from Memphis who was “about 80 years old,” when he opened for a Rolling Stones concert in Memphis in 1975. What “bonded” you with Furry almost immediately?

I think the bond was me to Furry, and Furry–initially, anyway–saw me as just another curious person knocking on his door and shelling out a couple bucks. But he did soon recognize me, because I returned often. His duplex was a place different from anyplace I knew, and being there, being with him, observing his environment and his friends–it all posed many questions to me, made me curious, opened up avenues to explore.

You began your writing career in the mid-80s when you began feeding now-defunct magazines stories about musical talents that weren’t first tier stars, but those who offered listeners “something different.” You say that theirs was a “shadow influence.” Describe what that means.

The most clear sense of shadow influence is that many pop hits were built on, of simply copies of, previous blues, soul, or other songs. The Stones cut Robert Johnson songs, and Fred McDowell and the Rev. Robert Wilkins. The Stones were influenced by artists that many of their fans would never realize. All of pop music was. That day in 1975, when I heard Furry open for the Stones, he was immediately more interesting than they were. Nowhere near as huge–in sound, popularity, onslaught, or in any way–but imbued with more than the Stones could hope for. That was in part because he was a living relic of a previous time, but also because I think fewer notes say way more than many notes. In music, in cinema, in writing, it’s about the space, the air, the room you leave, nor the room you take up.

In the book’s preface, you predict that 100 years from now, the music of these marginalized artists “will still be popularly unpopular–will still be hip.” Explain why you believe that.

History has shown it to be. Popular music doesn’t remain popular. It catches a sense of time, then moves on. The Romantics or the Cars scream “1980s,” but they don’t have much power other than that now. They evoke a time. These marginalized artists also evoke a time, but more than that, they tell a story. A personal story, a universal story, a news story of the day–their songs and lives and art.

OK, I’m interrupting myself, because here’s the key: individuality. The credo of godhead Sam Phillips. “Give me something different.” Pop artists capture their times, sound like anyone in those times could. These more marginalized artist sound only like themselves. Individuality lives on, popularity fades with the times.

What is the book about the overall message of Memphis Rent Party?

It’s about flouting the trends to become a unique individual. It’s the Sam Phillips mindset applied to people Sam never encountered. He encountered Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King and Jerry Lee and Johnny Cash and Elvis, and for all of them, he shifted them away from their pop dreams to finding their own artist.

By expressing themselves, these people created new paths, new styles, new trends. And the same is true about the people in the book. They’re all sui generis–they created their own thing. Sam once said, Nashville has a follower’s mentality. That’s why he stayed in Memphis.

An accompanying LP will be released by Fat Possum Records, with the artists on the soundtrack among those featured in the book. What kind of music will the soundtrack have?

This soundtrack, like the Memphis and Mississippi artists it covers, is all over the place. There’s blues, jazz, country, rock and roll. There’s everything but gospel, but there’s definitely the gospel of rock and roll.

Do you have potential projects that you want readers to know about?

I work on a lot of projects at once. In this kind of work, you have to. I’m hoping to announce a new feature doc, music-oriented, real soon. I’ve got several feature docs in the works. I’m shooting in North Carolina for two weeks in April for the second half of a documentary with a UK artist, Bill Drummond. We shot the first half in Kolkata, India. He’ll do his thing in the two places and, I think, the different reactions he gets will reveal a lot about the world we live in today.

Robert Gordon will be at Lemuria on Monday, March 26, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from Memphis Rent Party.

Author Q & A with Michael Farris Smith

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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

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?

fighterYou 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.

Author Q & A with Jonathan Miles

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On March 19, 2018

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 4)

Jonathan Miles

Jonathan Miles

A former Oxford resident and author of two acclaimed novels, Jonathan Miles returns with his latest tale, Anatomy of a Miracle, an ambitious story of an Army veteran who comes back to his hometown of Biloxi a paraplegic–until his world is turned upside down one day when he inexplicably stands up from his wheelchair and walks.

An Ohio native who wound up in Oxford as a teenager, Miles began his career as a journalist for the Oxford Eagle newspaper and later became a columnist for the New York Times. His novels include Dear American Airlines and Want Not, and he also authored a book on fish and game cooking, The Wild Chef.

Miels said he “spent years living in a tiny cabin in the woods near Abbeville until I married a Coast girl–she’s a Ladner, so the Coastiest of Coast girls–and got civilized.”

He and his family now live in rural New Jersey, “a little up from Princeton,” he said, adding, “my wife and children spend much of the summers in Mississippi, and this seems to have immunized my kids from acquiring New Jersey accents.”

Tell me what brought you to live in Oxford in the first place, and when.

Short answer: blues, 1989. The longer one: I came to Oxford as a blues-obsessed 18-year-old, having stumbled upon Living Blues magazine in a record shop and noting it was published by Ole Miss.

But after a few years of guitars and harmonicas another stumble happened: I wandered into a writing class (at the University of Mississippi) taught by Barry Hannah and frankly got my ears blown back. Barry resurrected a childhood ambition to write, and soon after, Larry Brown took me under his wing and kept me there until his death. At the time, I didn’t realize I was getting an education from Larry, because most of the time we were laughing and cutting up, but in retrospect I’d put all those years spent riding backroads and talking books and writing up against any Ivy League MFA program.

One of the things I’m most proud of in life is that Larry’s daughter Leanne named a son Larry Miles. That little boy has no choice but to become a novelist.

Anatomy of a Miracle tells the story of a paralyzed Biloxi Army veteran’s miraculous recovery, and the many ways this event changes his life forever. What inspired the story?

anatomy of a miracleIt began with a simple what-if question: What if a miraculous-seeming event happened today, in America? An event that defied all explanation? What would it look like–in the press, on social media? What kinds of cultural fault lines would it cause to rumble? And what effects–aside from the physical recovery–would this event have on the lives of those it touched? It was a spiral of questions.

Main character Cameron Harris’s story of healing spawns many side plots, including the tireless pursuit of his doctor to find out how this could be medically possible; the effect his healing has on the convenience store at whose front sidewalk Cameron realizes he can suddenly rise from his wheelchair and walk; a Vatican investigation of whether this event qualifies as a miracle; and the back story on what really happened in Afghanistan that left him paralyzed. Was it difficult working with so many characters and subplots?

I wanted to depict the effects of Cameron’s recovery as broadly as possible–to map the reverberations as they went shaking through the local community, the country, and in some ways, the world. In real life, I knew, Cameron’s story would be claimed by many different people, tweaking and twisting it to fit their own desires and worldviews, and part of Cameron’s struggle in the novel is to reclaim that story–with all its complexities–for himself.

As for any difficulty with writing it that way: very little, to be honest, I felt like I had this buffet of intriguing characters, from the convenience store owners to the Roman investigator to the VA physician who’s the uneasy daughter of a fabulizing Delta novelist. I just grazed on this buffet of characters and storylines.

Cameron’s sister Tonya is a strong force in his life, after his parents died and he suffered life-changing injuries in Afghanistan. She’s an interesting character who regularly adds humor to the story. Please tell me about her.

Tayna Harris is, to my way of thinking, one of the strongest people in the book. When Cameron recovers, it’s after four years in her care; and you could argue that, because of the way she parented him after their father abandoned them and their mother died, she’s really been his lifelong caretaker. Aside from jobs at Dollar General and Waffle House, taking care of her little brother has been her primary occupation–which means that Cameron’s recovery upturns her life just as radically as it upturns his. But she deals with life differently than Cameron does. He mulls. She cracks jokes. She meets life’s absurdities on their level.

A question that runs throughout the story is Cameron’s longing to know why such an extraordinary miracle happened to him. It’s interesting that Cameron’s healing changes his life to such an extent that he finally confesses to his sister that he doesn’t know who he is anymore. In what ways did he find that to be true?

For Cameron, the mystery of his physical recovery is compounded by the mystery of why it happened to him. He didn’t explicitly ask for it, through prayer or other means; he didn’t strive toward it by taking care of his own physical and mental well-being–for instance, he filled most days with beer drinking and video games–and, deep down, he doesn’t even think he deserved it.

What his recovery ultimately forces is a very hard look in the mirror, provoked in part by so many other people digging into his life to determine for themselves why Cameron was on the receiving end of a possible miracle. Cameron is a mystery to them as well as to himself, and part of his quest to understands his recovery is finally coming to grips with who he is.

The fact that Cameron and his sister Tanya were offered–and accepted–an opportunity to star in a reality show, Miracle Man, about their lives since Cameron’s healing, was an interesting subplot, but his feelings about that project seemed to change quickly after he heard of the shooting death of his neighbor’s grandson. How did that alter his attitude about that show?

It struck me early on that, in the wake of press attention to the recovery, of course reality-television would come calling. In our current media climate, that’s as certain as the sun rising. Reality-television is also, of course, not anything like reality; it’s as scripted as a novel.

Cameron is willing to go along with the lie until seeing himself through his neighbor’s eyes in the wake of a pointless tragedy, and viewing his senseless fortune as the flip side to that senseless misfortune. As well, Cameron buckles under the responsibilities of his new life at that moment: the neighbor had asked him to pray for her grandson, and he’d let her down. He realizes he can no longer stand being a vessel for faith, either onscreen or off. It breaks him, and ultimately causes all hell to snap loose.

Anatomy of a Miracle is your third book. Do you have other projects on the horizon?

This was my first fiction set in Mississippi, after one novel set in New York and the other set in a terminal at Chicago O’Hare airport. There’s another novel in the works, and the characters have already landed in Mississippi for a while–this time the 1930s Delta.

Sometimes being a novelist is like being a travel agent. You book travel for your characters with promises of a time they won’t forget. Though being a novelist is better because you get to come along with them.

Jonathan Miles will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, March 20, to sign and read from Anatomy of a Miracle. This book was chosen as one of our two March 2018 selections for Lemuria’s First Editions Club for Fiction.

Author Q & A with Malcolm White

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On March 12, 2018

In Southern Culture

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 11)

While Malcolm White describes Hal & Mal’s as “a place where art is made, music plays, and folks gather to share community, and celebrate t he very best of Mississippi’s creative spirit,” a good friend puts it another way, calling it simply “the most talked-about upscale honky-tonk in all of Mississippi.”

artful evolutionWhite’s salute to the more than three decades of success at the iconic establishment he and big brother Hal opened in 1985 is The Artful Evolution of Hal & Mal’s–a 130-page tribute filled with brief, but loaded, character essays of milestones, food profiles, character sketches, ghost stories, musical acts, and an inside look at the chaotic debut of the now-legendary Hal’s St. Paddy’s Day Parade–along with many, many glimpses of heartfelt family history.

The stories are brought to life in the University Press of Mississippi publication with distinctive watercolors rendered by Jackson native Ginger Williams Cook, who said her mission was to create “a sense of place and connection” to the restaurant’s and family’s “storied past and present.” Describing Cook as a “stunning artist,” White said her contributions to the book “made it the artful project that it is.”

Opening in what Robert St. John describes in the book’s foreword as “a B-location on South Commerce Street inside an old warehouse next to the railroad tracks,” the eatery and arts galleria has thrived, earning itself a spot in the elite category of what St. John calls Jackson’s “classic” restaurants.

It was the childhoods on the Gulf coast, combined with years of working in iconic kitchens in New Orleans, that would bring White and brother Hal to a shared dream of opening their own place someday. That “someday” has become nearly 35 years of family and friends serving up not onky regional food favorites with “a nod toward the Gulf of Mexico,” but a healthy helping of live blues, jazz, and rock music, sprinkled throughout with original works of art.

Malcolm White

Malcolm White

White, now on his second stint as executive director of the Mississippi Arts Commission (with a turn at leading the state’s Tourism Division in between), is involved with South Arts, the Mississippi Blues and Country Music Trails and Downtown Jackson Partners.

“I have lived a long and abundant life,” he said, pointing out that he has “managed to amass almost 13 years in the public arena to bookend my 30-plus years in the private sector.”

His previous book, Little Stories: A Collection of Mississippi Photos, was published in 2015.

Tell me about the condition the 1927 warehouse was in when you and Hal leased the property in 1985, and why you chose that unlikely location as the site of the restaurant you had dreamed of opening together.

The building was 95 percent abandoned and dysfunctional. There was no plumbing; it had ancient electrical capacity and was in deplorable condition. It was technically unoccupiable and cost us close to $500,000, in 1980s dollars, over the first couple of years to get it up to code.

We chose downtown Jackson because we believed in Mississippi, our home, and the predication that all centers of population revitalize, and it’s only a question of when, not if. Hal and I used to joke about if we would live to see the vision we had come to pass. I’m still hopeful.

You mention in The Artful Evolution of Hal & Mal’s that “59 percent of hospitality businesses fail within three years of their founding.” What has been the secret to Hal & Mal’s success?

I point out in the introduction of the book that our business philosophy was to include art, culture, and story in the plan and not make it an afterthought; and that we adhered to the sacred axiom that the more money you give, the more you make. And finally, we have always sought inclusion and looked for ways to serve others along the way, like Jeff Good, Robert St. John, Myrlie Evers, and William Winter.

Your book highlights memories of key events, people, and circumstances that have made up the restaurant’s success. Why was it important for you to document the journey of both your family life alongside that of the restaurant that is now an institution in downtown Jackson? 

Because the two are inseparable. Our family is the business, and the business tells much of our family story. We actually think we are more than a downtown Jackson institution, we fell we represent a regional, as well as an American enterprise story.

It’s interesting that you’ve been blessed with not only culinary skills, but a love of art and community, a strong entrepreneurial spirit, and the gift of writing. How would you say all of these skills have come to shape your vision for–and the success of–Hal & Mal’s?

The vision for Hal & Mal’s, like the book itself, was shaped over many years of pondering and preparing. Hal and I started talking about this dream when we were in our 20s and didn’t even live in Jackson. We even bought a building in downtown Hattiesburg, the Walnut Street Pharmacy, in the very early 1980s, with the idea of locating there. But fate put us a little further north after I accepted a job in 1979 to come to Jackson. Further, I started collectin ghte Hal & Mal’s decor, furniture and decorations back in the mid-1970s while living and working in both Hattiesburg and New Orleans.

Sadly, your partner and brother Hal White died in 2013, suddenly but only shortly leaving the future of the restaurant in question. Explain what happened that soon made it evident that Hal & Mal’s would survive and continue to thrive.

When Hal died in 2013, I was uncertain that we could or would carry on, but our staff and family rallied and insisted we continue. I had just accepted the job as tourism director and had made a decision that I could no longer work the hours and endure the physical demands of the restaurant and late-night music scene. But here we are, 33 years later, still serving our aunt’s gumbo and Hal’s magical soup concoctions.

You say in the book that Hal & Mal’s is, in some ways, “not just a bar and restaurant, we’re a creative outpost in downtown Jackson,” and it’s obvious that art and music have played important roles in the restaurant’s success. Could you elaborate?

Providing a place for community to gather and break bread is biblical, and paramount to the success of great places. When food and drink, arts and culture are presented side by side in a public house, community is sustained and encouraged. Hal & Mal’s is perhaps the first example of what the creative economy and creative placemaking is all about in Jackson and in Mississippi.

Certainly, there are other examples of this, but in the book and in the programming and continuation of the business, we demonstrate the “how” of such an enterprise and proposition. In many ways, we have shown by example how communities revitalize, sustain, and prosper. If that sounds boastful, then so be it.

At the end of the book you tell readers, “No one knows what the future may hold”–but what would you like to see for Hal & Mal’s going forward? How could it continue to evolve?

We will continue as long as we are able to make a small profit, add to the quality of life and see improvements in our community. We hope to purchase the building in the next few months–after 35 years of paying rent to the state–and begin a renovation of the property.

Since the Hal’s St. Paddy’s Parade and Festival is such a big event and is right around the corner (Saturday), would you also comment on how it has contributed to the evolution of Hal & Mal’s?

Sure. Most people think, mistakenly, that Hal & I started the parade together and that Hal & Mal’s was there in the beginning. Not so. I started the parade–thus the original name, “Mal’s”–in 1983 when I was booking music, producing events, and starting my own company, Malcolm White Productions. I designed the first parade to start at CS’s and end at George Street in a “pub crawl” format. However, as it began to unfold I evolved into thinking more of a traditional parade going downtown, starting at CS’s and ending at George Street.

CS’s dropped out after the first year and George Street, where I worked from 1979 to 1983, became the beginning and ending location. Later, I moved it to the Mississippi State Fairgrounds and finally to Hal & Mal’s in 1986, where it is based today. Hal didn’t join the fun until 1984–though he was living and working in Columbus–when we started the O’Tux Society, our first marching krewe. Hal then moved to Jackson in 1985 when we started Hal & Mal’s.

The parade is an important annual event for both Hal & Mal’s and the city of Jackson as well as teh state. It has an economic impact of $10 million annually on the local economy and enjoys a national reputation as one of the largest and most original St. Paddy’s parades in the country. It is generally associated with Hal & Mal’s and that helps with our brand and our iamge of a place where people meet for arts and culture, and fun and festive occasions.

Malcolm White and Ginger Williams Cook will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, March 14, at 5:00 to sign copies of The Artful Evolution of Hal & Mal’s.

Author Q & A with Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington

By

On February 28, 2018

In Civil Rights, Law, Nonfiction, Southern History

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

Nationally known reporter/blogger Radley Balko and the University of Mississippi School of Law’s Tucker Carrington, who is the founding director of the George C. Cochran Innocence Project, have devoted their careers to investigating and helping to overturn wrongful convictions for inmates who have been unjustly imprisoned in this country.

cadaver kingTheir new book, The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South, exposes their findings of how “institutional racism and junk forensic science” and the actions of Dr. Steven Hayne of Brandon and dentist Michael West of Hattiesburg teamed up to bring many false convictions against Mississippi defendants for nearly two decades. They highlight the cases of Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, who spent a combined 30 years in jail for murders they didn’t commit, before being exonerated in 2008.

The book makes the case that Mississippi’s criminal justice system deserves serious scrutiny and investigation itself if it is to fairly and accurately dispense justice and spare innocent lives.

Radley Balko

Radley Balko

Balko, a longtime opinion journalist (now for the Washington Post) and an investigative reporter, writes and edits The Watch, an opinion blog that covers civil liberties and the criminal justice system. He is also the author of the widely acclaimed Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.

Carrington is the founding director of the George C. Cochran Innocence Project and Clinic at the University of Mississippi School of Law. Its mission is to identify, investigate, and litigate actual claims of innocence by Mississippi prisoners, as well as advocate for systemic criminal justice reform.

Tucker Carrington

Tucker Carrington

Prior to coming to Ole Miss, Carrington was an E. Barrett Prettyman fellow at Georgetown Law Center, a trial and supervising attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, and a visiting clinical professor at Georgetown.

He writes frequently about criminal justice issues, including wrongful convictions and legal ethics. His work has appeared in The Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change, The Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, and the Mississippi Journal of Law.

How and why did you two come to collaborate on writing this book?

Balko: One of us called the other–we can’t remember which way that went–shortly after I had an op-ed on Haybe published in the Wall Street Journal. Tucker had just started work at the Mississippi Innocence Project in Oxford and was a little overwhelmed at what he had already seen. Over the years, we discussed these cases often as he litigated some of them and I wrote about some of them. As two of only a handful of people at the time who knew the full extent of what was going on, I think we commiserated a bit. Eventually we realized that a book was really the only way to tell this story with the thoroughness and attention to detail it deserved. By that time, we had both immersed in this stuff for nearly 10 years, so it just sort of made sense to write it together.

Carrington: We met shortly after I moved to Mississippi in 2007. It just so happened that Radley was working on the Corey Maye story (involving the 2001 shooting of Maye, a Prentiss police officer) and called me at my new office at the law school. I think he just wanted to reach out and make contact. From there our paths crossed in one way or another–in the main because he got interested in forensic science issue in the courts–and my practice began to feature exactly those types of cases. We each had ideas about recounting this decades-long episode–and we each slugged away at it separately: Radley in multiple pieces over the years, me through some law review pieces and litigating cases. Ultimately, we decided to join forces for a book.

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist recounts the stories of how Brooksville, Mississippi, residents Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks were falsely accused of murders and served a combined 30 years in prison until their release was navigated with the help of the Innocence Project. Their convictions had come largely due to policies that allowed Dr. Steven Hayne of Brandon and Dr. Michael West, a dentist from Hattiesburg, to become wealthy through a corrupt legal system. Please explain how their “partnership” developed and came to make such scenarios like this possible for so many years.

Carrington: Their partnership developed because the infrastructure and incentives were in place for it to develop. They–and others–just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Had they not, someone else would’ve filled the vacuum–maybe not in precisely the same way, but similarly, as has occurred in other jurisdictions.

Instead of a independent, salaried, fully funded medical examiner office, Mississippi mostly went without one for two decades. That was combined with an anachronistic coroner system, an effort on state and federal levels to crack down on a perceived increase in violent crime and an embrace of the death penalty, as well as a spate of new and novel forensic disciplines that gained acceptance without significant scientific inquiry and rigor.

Finally, reviewing courts found themselves constrained by cynical legislative “fixes” to the “endless” appellate process, especially for those sentenced to death. The ultimate result was a recipe and perfect storm for what came to pass in Mississippi that we recount in the book.

What are the national implications for this book? While it makes the case that “poverty and structural racism” accounted for much of Mississippi’s abuse of a system that relied on autopsies and local coroners’ reports to get away with racial injustice, Mississippi has not stood alone in such discrimination.

Balko: The problems of dubious forensics, structural racism, and the coroner system of death investigation are definitely not unique to Mississippi. And even Hayne and West occasionally testified in other states, particularly Louisiana.

I think the main difference is one of scale. For example, we note in the book that in the 1990s, Texas medical examiner Ralph Erdmann was doing an annual number of autopsies in rural counties across the state that legal experts at the time called astonishing. It became a national scandal, and Erdmann became a poster case for forensics gone amok. Erdmann was doing about 400 autopsies per year. For most of his career, Hayne did at least 1,200. Some years he topped 1,500. He admitted that at least one year, he did more than 2,000. He had a hand in 70 to 80 percent of the homicide cases in the state for nearly 20 years.

The other big differences is that in most other states, once the malfeasance was discovered, there was some effort to assess the damage done and review the cases that may have been affected. Some of those efforts were more thorough than others. But in Mississippi, state officials have refused to conduct any such review of Hayne and West cases.

Tell me about the important role that the “junk science” of bad forensics has played in the outcomes of so many jury decisions in America. It seems that this problem has, to some degree, been a constant in our country’s criminal justice process. Why is that?

Balko: It really comes down to the fundamental differences between law and science. We want to use science in the courtroom, because at times it can help us discover the truth. But science is an ongoing process. Theories can and are tweaked, revised, or even shown to be wrong. The law–and by extension our courts system–values certainty and precedent. We still haven’t quite figured out how to reconcile these differences. So, for example, we’ve delegated the important job of keeping bad or fake science out of the courtroom to judges. But judges of course are trained in legal reasoning, not in scientific analysis. So, they haven’t been very good at it.

This tension between law and science for a long time alienated much of the scientific community from the criminal justice system, creating space for fields like bite mark matching, hair fiber analysis, tool mark analysis, and others to assist police and prosecutors in solving crimes and winning convictions. These fields have the veneer of science, but were never subjected to the rigorous testing and review of the scientific method.

It wasn’t until the rise of DNA testing–which was developed in scientific labs–that we began to see that these fields weren’t nearly as accurate and foolproof as their practitioners claimed. Over the last decade or so, the scientific community has shown more interest in criminal justice and has begun subjecting some of these fields to real scientific testing. They’re finding that many of these disciplines have little to no grounding in science at all. But because our courts tend to put a premium on finality and precedent, it has been really difficult to get them to apply the lessons we’ve learned from DNA testing–that these fields aren’t scientifically reliable–to a much larger pool of cases where DNA isn’t a factor.

In his foreword to your book, author John Grisham, who serves on the board of directors of the Innocence Project in New York, laments that actual wrong conviction estimates range from 2 percen to 10 percent of the millions of cases tried each year–amounting to staggering numbers that can never be accurately determined. He said getting these people out of prison is “virtually impossible.” What do you say?

Carrington: He’s correct. In the vast majority of these types of cases, evidence that could lead to an exoneration never existed–because, for example, DNA was not collected  and/or present to begin with–the cases are old, witnesses have disappeared, forgotten their accounts, died, and so on. Also, most cases in the criminal justice system plea. And as a result, there can be very little in the way of a record, including an investigative record that would lead to new evidence of innocence.

What do you hope this book will accomplish?

Balko: Mississippi needs to conduct a thorough review of every case in which Hayne or West testified. They need to look not only for cases in which one of them gave scientifically dubious testimony, but any case in which their testimony may have nudged a jury one way or the other. Because forensic pathology can be subjective, even testimony that was within the realm of acceptable science could contribute to a wrongful conviction. Preferably, the review should be conducted by an outside entity, and should include input from forensic pathologists and scientists, not just judges and lawyers.

I’d also hope the book can serve as a warning to be skeptical of claims from forensic disciplines untested by science, particularly emerging disciplines. The courts have been far too quick to embrace new fields of “expertise,” and far too slow to correct the damage done when science later shows those fields to be fraudulent.

Carrington: I’d simply add that we also hope the books ets out what can happen when the wrong incentives are offered up in the criminal justice system. We can learn from this going forward. Or we can continue to ignore and risk finding ourselves in this predicament again at some point in the future.

Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington will be at Lemuria on Thursday, March 1, at 5:00 to sign and read from The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist. This book is a 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

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