Jana Hoops – Page 9 – Lemuria Books

Tag: Jana Hoops (Page 9 of 13)

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

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

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

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

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

Sonny Brewer

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

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

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

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

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

William Gay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author Q & A with T.R. Hummer

By Guest Author

On July 2, 2018

In Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

T.R. (Terry) Hummer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Guest Author

On June 25, 2018

In Civil Rights, Photography

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

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

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

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

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

Jane Hearn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please tell me about the touring exhibition and the website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Lucas

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

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

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

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

Author Q & A with Silas House

By Guest Author

On June 18, 2018

In LGBTQIA+, Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 17)

As the nationally bestselling author of five novels who holds a coveted membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers, Silas House shares what may be his most personal story yet with the recent release of Southernmost.

His new novel chronicles the path of Asher Sharp, a Tennessee minister whose struggle with his brother’s “coming out” finally forces a decision for the small-town preacher that results in chaotic consequences for his congregation and his marriage–and threatens his relationship with son. Sharp spontaneously decides to head to Key West, the southernmost point in the country, to search for his brother and seek a long-awaited resolution.

A former commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered, House is the recipient of three honorary doctorates, and is the winner of the Nautilus Award, an E. B. White Award, the Appalachian Book of the Year, the Hobson Medal for Literature, and many other honors.

He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, and his work has appeared in the Oxford American, Narrative, Blackbird, Newsday and other publications.

Tell me, briefly, what your childhood in Appalachia was like, and how it affected your writing.

Silas House

I grew up in a really tight-knit family and we were taught to wear our Southernness–our ruralness–as a badge of honor. In many ways it was a pretty romantic childhood because I was able to roam the woods and I knew everyone in my community really well. I was always surrounded by family or people who loved me like family.

But my father was a Vietnam vet with PTSD and we were very immersed in the evangelical church, and both of those things were instrumental in shaping my worldview. Not to mention that I was a really sensitive boy who loved to read. I loved basketball, too, but my big secret was that I loved books more.

You are the recipient of many writing awards, some of which are mentioned above. What did it mean to you to be inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers last fall?

To be welcomed in amongst some of the people who influenced me the most was really humbling, and especially to know how amazing it is to be a part of such a literary tradition. I’m really proud to say I’m a Southern writer. To me that always has only a good connotation, and one reason is because I really do believe we fellowship in a different way than other regions of the country. I don’t mean to generalize, but there is a generosity and a spirit of encouragement that exists among Southern writers that is special.

You new novel, Southernmost, is set in the South, and in an essay that you wrote about this book, you state that the South is “a whole lot like the rest of the country. Injustice and intolerance exist here, and everywhere.” You go on to say that “By looking at this microcosm of America called the South with such focus, we can more clearly see our whole nation in a moment when we are in dire need of understanding one another.” Explain how this is so.

I think people think of things like homophobia, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and the like, and they think that’s more rampant in the South or among rural people. I don’t think it is. I think it’s exhibited in a different way. And this idea that country people, or Southerners, or more prejudiced lets the rest of the country off the hook.

Injustice exists everywhere in this country and I get tired of it all being blamed on us. It’s a national problem, not a regional one, and I think we’d be better served to look at it that way instead of always just shifting blame. I’ve lived in the South my whole life but the worst physical homophobia I’ve suffered has been in New York City and Chicago.

In Southernmost, main character Asher Sharp is a minister struggling to come to grips with where he stands on issues of sexuality, as a church leader, father, husband–and brother to Luke, who had come out as a gay man 10 years earlier. It seems the reactions of his wife and church members, compared with others, depict two strong reactions to a gay lifestyle: those who are either fully accepting or strongly opposed. Have you found, though, that there is somewhat of a middle ground in which many are wrestling with aligning their faith with such an acceptance?

I would say that most people are in that middle ground, and that’s one reason I wrote the book from a straight person’s point of view, instead of writing another coming out story. The main character, Asher, is often questioning just how prepared he is to be totally accepting of gay lives, although he is definitely far more evolved on the issue than his wife, who is totally opposed.

To me, he’s representative of a whole lot of people right now who want very badly to fully embrace everything about a family member, but still have that little nagging voice in the backs of their minds saying, “But what if they kiss?”

One of the things I enjoyed most was working on Asher’s interiority where he’s struggling with things like that. His mother-in-law, Zelda, is probably the best representative of that middle, though–she’s been taught to shun gay people her whole life, yet her natural inclination is to be good to everyone. And her wishy-washiness really costs her an important relationship in the book.

Tell me about your decision to write this book now. How long was it in the making, and what did you want it to convey?

I worked on this book off and on for about eight or nine years. During that time, I wrote a short middle grade novel, Same Sun Here, but for almost the last decade this has been the most important thing to me. It’s a book that I really felt compelled to write. I couldn’t stop thinking about these characters. Over that time the issue really evolved. For example, in 2015, when marriage equality passed, I had to re-write the entire book.

So now it is set mostly during the summers of 2015 and 2016. It’s about as contemporary as you can get in a novel. And in a way I think the book is far more relevant now than when I was writing it. Since the election a lot of Americans have had to think about how fundamentally they disagree with the very people they love the most. LGBTQ people have been dealing with that issue forever. And that’s one of the themes in the book, the ability to love one another despite strongly disagreeing.

Growing up as a gay person, your Pentecostal parents accepted your sexuality even though it was opposed to their church’s teaching. Did that surprise you–and would you explain how this spiritual influence affected you?

Well, that was a very long process. It was about 10 years after I came out before my parents and I were on the same page. I really admire their ability to grow and think outside the box of their own church on this issue. To me, it’s a real testament to someone’s character when they’re able to do that kind of self-examination and question themselves on whether they believe something in their hearts or if they just believe something because they’ve been taught that by others their whole lives.

Water seems to be a theme in Southernmost, with destructive flooding, rain, the Gulf of Mexico, and the ocean off the Florida Keys serving as important elements to the story. Is there a symbolism here that you could explain?

I never really think about symbolism when I’m writing at all. To me, that has to be something that is completely organic. So, when a novel is finished, those symbols and metaphors start to show themselves and water is definitely omnipresent in the book. I think the main reason is because water is absolutely the essence of life. If any tangible thing on earth could represent the Divine, I guess water would be the best. And that goes hand in hand with these characters who are all thinking about the Divine in one way or another, either struggling against belief or doubt.

Is there anything else you’d like to include, about the book or your own personal life?

One thing I love about the book is that I got to capture the act of driving across the South. One of my favorite sections in the book is when Asher and (his son) Justin are driving from Tennessee to Florida. I made that drive a couple times while writing and I was so happy to preserve so many of the church signs and roadside stands selling peaches and watermelons, and even people I saw along the way–the homeless man holding a ‘hungry” sign, the Cherokee woman being harassed as she walked into a truck stop, the children catching a fish on the pier, a wealth of friendly cashiers. I love driving in the South in the summertime; it’s like a meditation. To me, that’s when I love it the most.

Are you already working on another writing project at this time?

I always have a few projects going at once. Right now, I’m toying with the idea of a big family epic, which I’ve always wanted to write, and I’m trying to wrangle a play about Mary Todd Lincoln.

Silas House will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, June 19, at 5:00, to sign and read from Southermost.

Author Q & A with Andrew Lawler

By Guest Author

On June 12, 2018

In History, Nonfiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 10)

Author and journalist Andrew Lawler admits that, from the beginning, he was warned.

Because he had grown up immersed in the story of the lost colony of Roanoke, he expected immunity to the possibility he would get “sucked in,” as a friend put it, to the mystery of what happened to the 115 men, women, and children who landed on Roanoke Island off the coast of what is now North Carolina, in 1587.

Although the settlers were on a mission to establish the first English colony in the New World, they disappeared without a trace while their leader was away on a six-month resupply trip that had stretched into three years. They left only one clue–a “secret token” carved on a tree.

The question of their fate still haunts historians and archaeologists, and Lawler’s own literal journey to examine the ominous expedition resulted in his new book, The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. What he found, he concludes, offers fresh understanding as to why this mystery is relevant in today’s America.

Lawler is also the author of Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? and is a contributing writer for Science magazine and a contributing editor for Archaeology magazine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, and other publications.

When did you first develop an interest in the lost colony of Roanoke?

Let’s just say that I had no choice. As a child growing up in southeastern Virginia, not far from Jamestown, there was no escaping history. Figures like John Smith and Thomas Jefferson were regularly mentioned at the dinner table.

On our annual beach trip, my family went to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This was back in the days when the only nightly entertainment was bingo and a dance hall. The third option was to see The Lost Colony, the three-plus-hour outdoor drama in the buggy woods of nearby Roanoke Island. We sat on hard wooden benches amid the mosquitoes as the organ blared, Indians danced, and sweating English soldiers marched around in breastplates.

It is one of the longest-running plays in American history, and it certainly seemed never-ending to me as a child. Written in the 1930s and performed ever since, it told teh story of the three voyages to the Outer Banks by the English in the 1580s, culminating in the arrival of the final group that today we call the “Lost Colonists.”

There was just enough action to keep a kid interested–plenty of sword fights, fireworks, and firearms going off. But what really fascinated me was the end, when all the settlers go marching off into the woods, hungry and ragged but singing bravely. Then it was our turn, as the audience filed out down the dark path to the parking lot. This was the very place where the Roanoke colonists vanished, and when I was small, that visceral quality of getting lost here struck me with terror. I was relieved to crawl into the back of the station wagon.

As a teenager, fascination replaced the terror. I devoured everything I could find about the colony, reading first-hand accounts and poring over John White’s beautiful watercolors of the Native Americans. But since there was no new evidence to solve the mystery, there seemed nothing fresh to say. Then a few years ago I ran into a British archaeologist while covering a conference at (The University of) Oxford for a magazine. When he told me that he was digging on Hatteras Island, I knew immediately what he was after. Then I found out another team was hard at work digging at another site where the colonists may have gone. Finally, there were new clues emerging. It was a chance to see a childhood mystery solved. Once again, I was hooked.

It seems, from some things mentioned in your book, that you took somewhat of a literary risk by writing The Secret Token. Did you ever doubt that you were doing the right thing?

Andrew Lawler

At first, I was plain embarrassed. I’d spent more than a decade covering the devastating cultural heritage tragedy still unfolding in the Middle East–the looting of the Iraq Museum, the Taliban efforts to wreck Afghan statues, and the ongoing destruction of ancient sites in Syria. Writing about a few dead Elizabethans seemed almost absurdly irrelevant. And when I brought up the “Lost Colony,” more than one historian smirked. It was all so wrapped up in cheesy pop culture, and most serious academics gave the entire episode a wide berth.

I thought I would just do a quick online story, but then it turned into a full-fledged magazine story. Then I realized that I was amassing so much material that it had to be a book. I’ve learned that when I have sinking feeling in my gut–the “Oh, no, anything but that” feeling, then I have hit on the story that I have to tell.

There are many theories about the fate of the English colonists who were never found. In your opinion, which one is the most outlandish? Most reasonable?

My personal favorite is that the colonists turned into zombies that are still out there in those spooky Roanoke woods. Alien abduction is another. Of course, there are can’t -be-proven theories–that they sailed away on their small ship and drowned. We know now that a severe drought afflicted that time period, and some argued they starved to death. But when you look at later “lost” Europeans, most of them simply deserted to or were captured by Native Americans. As Benjamin Franklin noted, few wanted to return, even if they were taken by force. This was what I call colonial America’s dirty little secret.

So, it seems pretty obvious that if you are hungry and don’t know how to survive in a strange environment, you will find people who know what they are doing–and in this case, that was the local Native American population. Eastern North Carolina was filled with thousands of people who thrived in villages and towns, planting crops while also gathering plants and hunting animals. The English didn’t land in a wilderness. So, most historians who have studied the Roanoke voyages agree they did what most of us likely would do–hang out with the people who could make sure you were fed, kept warm, and protected from enemies. In return, they had skills the Indians wanted, like how to make metal implements.

You traveled to Portugal to research the life of the pilot Fernandes. What was the most important thing you learned on this trip, and did you travel to other places for research?

This was a crazy effort to track down a bizarre rumor. The private papers of the Roanoke navigator Simao Fernandes were said to have surfaced in Portugal. A couple of American historians had tried and failed to verify the story, which promised to rewrite our entire understanding of the voyages, and I couldn’t resist the challenge. After running around Portugal and Spain pursuing every lead, I came up empty-handed. But as was always the case with following what seemed a dead end in this tale, I stumbled into something unexpected and important.

In this case, I found that Fernandes was not the villain he was portrayed to be, and that, in fact, he was quite possibly the real mind behind the entire project. He knew and understood the emerging global economy better than any Englishman of his day. And since Roanoke laid the foundation for Jamestown and all other English efforts that followed, you could say this obscure Portuguese pirate played a central role in launching both the United States and the British Empire.

You wrote that “In a nation fractured by views on race, gender, and immigration, we are still struggling with what it means to be American.” Explain in what ways gender issues are tied to this story.

A woman writer named Eliza Lanesford Cushing coined the term “Lost Colony” and made Virginia Dare a folk sensation in the 1830s. This was a moment when women’s magazines first appeared, and women writers like Cushing finally had outlets for their work. But American history at that time was exclusively about men, Betsy Ross being the exception proving the rule. Women were portrayed as bit players in Jamestown and Plymouth when they appeared at all. Men got the credit for “taming the wilderness.”

All we know about Virginia Dare was her name and when she was born and baptized, but her status as the first English child born in the Americas gave women a stake in the origin story of the United States. The Virginia Dare stories, though almost wholly fabricated, became wildly popular among women in the 19th century. They finally could see themselves in the drama that led to the nation’s founding.

Is there any hard evidence that the English settlers “chose” to adopt the Native American lifestyle, as some have suggested?

If they wanted to live, the settlers had to become Native Americans. When Europeans first arrived on the North American coast, they didn’t have the skills to survive, even when their ships regularly brought supplies. They depended on trading their goods with the locals for food. Without the indigenous peoples, all the early European settlements almost certainly would have failed.

Finding hard evidence for Lost Colony assimilation, however, is tricky. If they became Native American, would Jamestown settlers 20 years later have recognized them? Probably not. There certainly are hints that when John White came back in 1590, three years after leaving for England to get supplies, he was watched by people–perhaps including assimilated Lost Colonists who dreaded boarding a cramped and stinking ship for a long passage back to gloomy and plague-ridden London. But I pieced together circumstantial bits of evidence to make a what I think is a compelling case that the Elizabethans became Algonquian speakers–and that their most likely descendants ended up in a most surprising place.

Why is the story of the Lost Colony relevant today?

There are moments in the life of our nation when what it means to be American becomes hotly contested. This was true in the 1830s, when an influx of German and Irish shook up the majority Anglo-Americans. Certainly, during and after the Civil War we differed on whether African Americans could or should be full citizens.

A century ago, we decided women should be able to vote, though at the same time we didn’t generally considers of Italians or Jews to be “white.” In each of these periods, the story of the Lost Colony served as a fable reflecting these tensions. So it is today, with groups like Vdare Foundation warning whites about the dangers of being outnumbered by non-European immigrants. So, I can’t think of a more relevant story in today’s climate.

Do you have ideas in the works for an upcoming book?

I’m drawn to the ancient tales that seem to define how we see the world today. Right now, I’m spending time in the Middle East exploring the source of religious tension there. Few places on Earth are so driven by old stories, particularly those that many see as God-given.

Andrew Lawler will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, June 13, to sign and read from The Secret Token. The Secret Token is Lemuria’s July 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

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.

Author Q & A with Joseph Crespino

By Guest Author

On June 4, 2018

In Southern Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (May 27)

A native of Macon, political historian Joseph Crespino has enjoyed a successful career as a writer whose books help to explain and interpret some of the most pivotal times and people of the American South, especially within the context of politics.

His most recent work, Atticus Finch, the Biography: Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of an American Icon, gives a thought-provoking case for the mostly understood assumption that the character of Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman is, indeed, her father, A.C. Lee.

Crespino ties up the details most readers have only speculated on about the Finch-Lee comparisons, and examines the truths about the real man, A.C.

A professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta, Crespino went on to earn a master’s degree from the University of Mississippi and a doctorate from Stanford University.

His other books include the political biography Strom Thurmond’s America and In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevoultion, which earned the nonfiction prize given by the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, among other awards.

He talks about his Mississippi heritage.

Joe Crespino

“I’m from Noxubee County, where my mother’s side of the family has lived since the 1830s. My dad was from the Delta–he grew up in Benoit–and my parents met at Ole Miss, where my dad played on some of the best of Johnny Vaught’s legendary teams before going on to play in the NFL for eight seasons. My parents moved to Macon after my dad retired, and that’s where I was born and grew up.

“After graduating from college, I taught at Gentry High School in Indianola for two years as part of the Mississippi Teacher Corps and earned my master’s degree in secondary school education as part of that program. My wife, Caroline Herring Crespino, is from Canton.

Describe the character Atticus Finch in your own words.

Atticus Finch is a fictional character that should be understood in the full context of Harper Lee’s creative efforts–not merely as the upright, civic-minded figure who vigorously defends a wrongly accused black man in the 1930s, but also as a character in the 1950s South who is embittered over the changes being demanded by the modern civil rights movement. Exclusive sources that I gained access to in writing this book make clear that Harper Lee always imagined these two seemingly contradictory figures as different aspects of the same character, seen at different times, and through different lenses.

Summarize the real A.C. Lee for us, based only on his writing and actions.

Like Atticus Finch, A.C. Lee was a lawyer and state legislator from a small town in south Alabama. Unlike Atticus, A.C. was also the co-owner and editor of a small-town newspaper, the Monroe Journal, for nearly 18 years. I’ve read every one of the editorials he wrote over those years, and, through them, I’ve reconstructed A.C. Lee’s political worldview. Clearly, he was the inspiration both for the idealistic figure in To Kill a Mockingbird as well as the reactionary figure in Go Set a Watchman.

In your opinion, was A.C. Lee typical of the “educated” white Southern Christians of the time, torn between doing what he knows is right and trying to survive in a racist society?

Well, first off, A.C. Lee wasn’t well-educated, at least not in terms of formal schooling. He was born in 1880, and the highest grade he ever completed was eighth grade, although he was Lincoln-esque in his habits of reading and self-education.

Second, the typical white Southern Christian of the time was not “torn” in the way you describe–and neither was A.C. Lee–so, in that sense, he was typical. Lee had no trouble surviving in the racist society because he was white. I found no evidence that he had any doubts about the rightness of his racist, paternalistic view of blacks. That’s not to say that Lee wasn’t a moral person in many respects, but it’s wrong to assume that white Southern Christians of an earlier era had some moral sensibility in regard to race that they couldn’t act on without threatening their standing in society. It makes it sound like they were among the victims of the Jim Crow South, when, in fact, they were the chief defenders of it. One way A.C. Lee wasn’t typical was as a Christian. He was much more devout and sincere than any of the typical Christians I know, and count me among those typical Christians. He was a pillar of the Methodist Church in Monroeville. But, as was the case with all but a tiny minority of white Christians of his era, his religious faith was in no way in tension with his racial views. One of the most poignant stories in the book is how in the early 1950s, as chairman of the pastoral relations committee of the Monroeville Methodist Church, Lee engineered the ouster of a young minister, Ray Whatley, who spoke too frankly about racial issues. Whatley was reassigned to a pulpit in Montgomery, right before the black community there started a boycott to protest segregation on city buses. Whatley volunteered to serve as president of the local Council on Human Relations. His vice-president was a young black minister new to town himself whose name was Martin Luther King Jr.

Harper’s two books, Mockingbird and Watchman, seem to show two different sides of Atticus Finch. Was this only her attempt to show two different sides of the South at that time?

I don’t think that she was explicitly trying to show two different sides of the South, so much as she was struggling to try to reconcile them in her own mind. It seems to me that if she had really wanted to show that other side of Atticus, then she would have come back to Go Set a Watchman and tried to make that novel work in a more successful way. Why she never did that in the 1960s, or 70s, or 80s after the incredible success of Mockingbird, and when so much political and racial struggle was still taking place, is a fascinating question. I offer some thoughts in the epilogue of the book as to why that might have been.

In a 1964 radio interview, Harper Lee discusses why she thinks the South has produced so many great writers: Western European heritage, agrarian society, etc. Do you see any correlation between this and the racism that she writes about?

Yes. In Go Set a Watchman, the character of Uncle Jack expresses lots of hoary ideas about the ethnic homogeneity of the white South as key to its distinctiveness. There’s no reason to think that Harper Lee’s views on the subject were the same as Uncle Jack’s, but clearly, she knew all those old arguments, and I suspect that, like Jean Louise in Watchman, she was trying to figure out whether there was anything to them, or whether it was all just a bunch of bunk.

It has been reported that Mockingbird is a “highly revised version”of Watchman. What is your opinion?

It’s incorrect. Documents from the files of Lee’s publisher, HarperCollins, make this clear. Harper finished a draft of Go Set a Watchman and her agent shopped it around to various New York publishers. White he did that, she started writing a new novel that used the same characters, but moved the drama back some 20 years in time to the 1930s. She and her agent discussed how she could write a bridge that could connect these separate pieces, a reference that Lee’s representatives have taken to suggest that she has plans at one point for a trilogy.

The documentary record is quite murky on that point, but what is clear is that she always imagined Watchman and Mockingbird as distinct novels that connected as part of a larger narrative arc in the lives of these characters.

What drew your special interest in Harper Lee, Mockingbird, and Atticus Finch?

Many different things. One is that I grew up in a small Southern town like the one that Harper Lee was from. Another is that for a significant part of my life, I wanted to be Atticus Finch; a lot of earnest, well-intentioned white boys like myself, who were also naïve and misguided, have chased that ghost for many decades now.

But in the last year or two, I came back to Harper Lee’s fiction because I think it has resonance for our own political moment. Harper Lee wrote her two books in the late 1950s South, at a time when right-wing, demagogic politicians–many of whom were nobodies, or political jokes in Southern politics only a few years earlier–won tremendous political power by appealing to the most base instincts of voters. I think her struggles in writing the character of Atticus Finch were part of her struggle to make sense of her father’s own conservative political heritage at a time when the conservatives had been overrun by right-wing reactionaries. Why didn’t folks like her father stand up for their principles when it really mattered?

Are you now working on a new book or other writing project?

I have at leas two other books in mind at this point. One is a history of Atlanta during the five or six years after Martin Luther King Jr. Moved back to his hometown from Montgomery. I imagine it as a book about prophets, and hometowns and unwelcomeness.

I also want to write a history of racial violence in Noxubee County, my home county.

Joe Crespino will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, June 6, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from Atticus Finch: The Biography.

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.

Author Q & A with George Malvaney

By Guest Author

On May 13, 2018

In Biography/Memoir, Southern Culture

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion–Ledger Sunday print edition (May 13) and digital web edition

George Malvaney was a high-spirited child whose teenage years (like so many) often found him engaging in reckless behavior—fighting, drinking, and once even taking a snake to school.

While he always knew his greatest love was for the outdoors—hunting, fishing, exploring and adventure-seeking—he was certain of one thing in his life: he hated school. He dropped out during his junior year at Murrah High School and predicted he was on a “a wild and reckless stretch that would end badly.” He was right—except that it wasn’t the end.

cups up The unlikely story of this Jackson native lives up to the title of his debut book, Cups Up: How I Organized a Klavern, Plotted a Coup, Survived Prison, Graduated College, Fought Polluters and Started a Business.

For a man who literally wrote the book on what not to do—and ended up not only surviving, but succeeding—he pulls off a truly hopeful tale of what it took to come out on the other side. He wrote the book, he says, to encourage and inspire others who may need a spark of hope to overcome their own challenges.

After you dropped out of Murrah High School your junior year, you joined the Navy and wound up being honorably discharged for organizing and leading a Ku Klux Klan unit on your ship. How and why were you drawn to the Klan?

That’s a good question. I get asked that a lot. I was 19 years old. At this point, 40 years later, it just doesn’t make sense to me. What would have made me do that? I don’t see why I did it. Apparently, it must have been an emotional decision. It certainly couldn’t have been logic. It was a bizarre, crazy thing. It was probably the influence of (Klan leader) Bill Wilkinson, (a friend of a friend). I did it, I own it, and I’m not proud of it.

In 1980, after your Navy experience, you fell in with Dannie Hawkins, a man you described as your “new friend and mentor,” who convinced you to join his group plotting to invade the Caribbean island of Dominica and replace the government with a right-wing, anti-Soviet regime. What was this group’s ultimate goal, and why did you decide to join their cause?

George Malvaney

There was a lot of debate as to the real reasons behind it that I was not aware of at the time. One was that they wanted to use it as a point for a cocaine smuggling ring. I never heard any of that. There must have been some ulterior motive. I was just out of the military, very patriotic, and naïve. To me it was more of an anti-Communist move to replace a government with Castro leanings to one that was more in line with American values. In hindsight, adventure and an emotional influence definitely played into it.

When the Dominican invasion plan was averted by the FBI before it ever started, you were arrested and sentenced to four years in prison, which was reduced to 18 months. Tell me about how your time in prison changed your beliefs about racial differences.

It didn’t actually change my beliefs at the time—that took years, but it started me thinking about it. When a prisoner named Leon asked me to write letters for him at the Atlanta Penitentiary, it kind of intrigued me. He was in for murder. He wanted me to write to his mother, but he didn’t want anyone to know, so he would whisper to me. He would tell me what he wanted to say, and I could feel the emotion in his voice. I couldn’t write it down the way he was saying it because he had a very limited vocabulary, but I knew what he was trying to say, so I put it in my own words.

I realized that, here’s this black guy—in for murder—and what he wanted to say was the same thing as my letters to my own family. I could see that there was good in this guy, too—lots of bad things, but, good things, too.

There were two fellow prisoners I wrote several letters for, and another I think I only wrote one letter for. The letters were very similar. Leon got a letter back from his mother and asked me to read it to him. It was clear that she was functionally illiterate herself, but I paraphrased it for him because what I knew she was trying to say.

I was in a unique situation. Here I was with black convicts opening up to me with their personal feelings. These were hard case convicts, trying to get their feelings out. It gave me a different perspective.

Tell me about how the decisions you made while in prison would change the path of your future forever.

I tell people that my time in prison was a wonderfully terrible experience that I would not ever want to repeat under any circumstances but would not trade for anything. It was one of the most valuable experiences of my life.

I was in prison because I made irrational and reckless decisions that were going to end badly. It wasn’t until my first day in federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, that it struck me. I had a four-year sentence. I asked myself a lot of questions. How was I going to spend the next four years? Do you want to spend the rest of your life in prison? How are you going to improve? I made a very concerted decision my first day in prison: I was going to keep my head held high and get through this.

I had been making bad decisions to get to the point I was in. I didn’t how and where this would lead, but I decided my life as a convict would be done when I got out. I did not want to be involved with criminal activity, ever, when I was released.

I was in prison with murderers, bank robbers, drug dealers, kidnappers. They would become my friends, the people I was hanging out with, my peers, but I did not want to be influenced by them. It was a mental challenge. I really focused on keeping a positive mental attitude that I was going to be a better person.

When I was in the penitentiary in Atlanta, I spent months in my cell all day with almost nothing to read. I was self-examining myself. I had literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours to think about it. I looked at where I had gone wrong. I knew the Klan had been a bad decision. I knew I had to get away from those people. I decided I was going to go to college and get an education because I really wanted to become something—I didn’t know what, but it would be anything but a criminal.

After your release from prison, you went on to graduate from college and build a career based on your degree in environmental studies. Why did you choose this field?

I had thought about law school. I had seen what I thought were real injustices in prison. I wanted to try and address that, to seek some prison reform. But I came to the realization that even if I got accepted to law school, the fact that I was a convicted felon meant that I may not be able to practice law.

I had another passion, and that was the outdoors. I remembered one time, as a boy, standing on the banks of the Pearl River that went through my grandfather’s land in Hopewell, south of Jackson. An industrial plant had discharged large amounts of sulfuric acid and killed thousands of fish. I recall standing there with my father and watching dead fish float down the river for hours. It made me very sympathetic to environmental causes.

Briefly explain your role in the cleanup efforts of the BP oil spill along the Gulf coast in 2010.

I was the chief operating officer for a company that was BP’s prime contractor in Mississippi. Early on in the response effort (April 2010), I was called into some meetings with Gov. (Haley) Barbour to examine initial information pertaining to the oil spill. Mississippi didn’t have a lot of expertise in large oil spills, and I kind of became the go-to guy for Gov. Barbour and his staff. There was a big push politically to use Mississippi companies and Mississippi laborers, and I was managing 4,000 people from all over, and a $400 million budget.

The well was plugged on July 15. We saw very little oil on the mainland after that, but the barrier islands had really taken the brunt of the oil, so there was a long-term cleanup. I was able to help local mayors, supervisors and local officials, and I know I made a positive difference for Mississippi.

Tell me about your support of Big House Books, and how you found out about it.

I was at the 2016 Mississippi Book Festival and was coming out of the Authors’ Alley tent and noticed a booth that had a logo with a prisoner behind bars looking out. I saw the sign that said, “Big House Books.” They wanted to show me a loose-leaf binder filled with letters from convicts asking for book donations, but I told her I already knew what they said. I had once been locked in a hole starving for something to read. It really brought me back in time—it was an odd feeling. I dropped a $100 bill in their jar that day, and I’ve continued to support them ever since.

Please explain the title of your book.

That phrase, “cups up,” made a huge impact on me. I remember my first day in the Federal Correctional Institute in Tallahassee in July 1981. It was stifling hot. I could hear voices. They kept getting closer and closer. There was a rattling noise. I was thinking, “Why in the hell am I here? How did I get here?” They were getting closer and I was asking myself “What have I done? How am I gonna get out of here?” Then all of a sudden, a prison orderly was in front of me with a cart, and I realized I was supposed to hold my cup up for coffee. I remember having this dialogue with myself. It was a really powerful, life-changing moment.

Why did you decide to write this book, and what do you hope it will accomplish?

The Sun-Herald newspaper (in Biloxi) called me during the BP crisis. They had heard about my story and wanted to write an article about me. I did not want to do that article. I didn’t have anything to hide, but it was terrible timing. I was afraid it would all blow up in my face and distract from the BP effort.

It came out on the front page and I was just waiting for the worst—but I heard nothing but positive comments. What I heard over and over and over was “How did you go from that to leading and coordinating this massive response and dealing with the highest officials in the state?” I also heard “You need to write a book,” and I would just say that it would take a long time. But it got me thinking about it.

Part of what I wanted to do was recognize that a lot of people are having a difficult time in life, and it’s good to hear about others who have had tough times and pulled through it. I wanted to say, “Be positive, keep focused, learn what you can from it.” I wanted to give them inspiration and hope.

George Malvaney will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, May 15, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from Cups Up. Malvaney will also speak at the History is Lunch at the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium at the Two Mississippi Museums on Wednesday, May 16, at 1:00 p.m.

Author Q & A with Suzanne Stabile

By Guest Author

On May 7, 2018

In Metaphysical, Psychology, Religion

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

Most of us, Suzanne Stabile says, “have no idea” that other people don’t see things the way we do.

Not only that, but they don’t process their experiences in the same way, either. And to make things even more interesting, it turns out that some of us rely mostly on our feelings, while others are thinkers; and still others are definitely “doers.”

The implications of these truths for relationships can be devastating or magnificent–or a lot of points in between.

Fortunately, Stabile can help us figure it all out. As a highly sought-after Enneagram master teacher, she knows how to help the rest of us bridge the gaps and come together.

In fact, when it comes to coming together, she wrote the book. The Path Between Us: An Enneagram Journey to Healthy Relationships not only describes the nine personality types of this ancient approach to behavior evaluation, but reveals how each relates to the others, fostering more mature and compassionate relationships at every level.

Stabile is also the co-author of the bestseller The Road Back to You and, as an internationally recognized Enneagram master, she has spoken at more the 500 workshops at churches, colleges, and conferences around the nation.

She and her husband, the Rev. Joseph Stabile, are the founders of the Life in the Trinity Ministry in Dallas, Texas, a nonprofit, nondenominational ministry focusing on spiritual growth for adults.

What is the Enneagram, and how did you become interested in it?

The Enneagram is essentially nine ways of seeing. It is an ancient spiritual wisdom that teaches us that there are nine different ways of seeing and nine ways of experiencing the world. Additionally, there are nine ways of answering some of life’s basic questions like: “Who am I?” and “Why do I do the things I do?”

The Enneagram has an unknown origin, but has been used in all faith beliefs in one way or another for at least several hundred years and at most several thousand. The Enneagram is unique in what it offers us as we make our way from who we are to who we hope to be.

I read a book by Richard Rohr and my husband, a former Roman Catholic priest, and I started seeing Father Rohr on a regular basis and learning from his wisdom. Father Rohr was very encouraging about my interest in the Enneagram and he suggested I study without talking about the Enneagram for four or five years. I don’t think he would suggest that to everyone. That was specific to me because he knew I wanted to teach it.

Suzanne Stabile

I spent the time observing others, taking notes about how people were different from me, how they were different from each other, and only listening when others talked about the Enneagram. Without explaining it to me, Father Richard’s advice paved the way for me to gain a deeper understanding of the many facets of Enneagram wisdom.

As a result of my willingness to follow his instruction, when I began teaching, I had more than a passing knowledge of the numbers. I had embraced the depth and seemingly unending possibilities of how this ancient understanding could enhance our ability to be more compassionate with others and with ourselves. The practice of acceptance and the kindness that followed has served me well in every aspect of my life both personally and professionally.

Explain the spiritual component of the Enneagram.

My husband, Joe, and I led an institute for spiritual formation for a long time. It was a two-year program and one of the things we learned early on was that most people share in common the firs two stumbling blocks in a serious spiritual journey towards transformation. The first thing they run into is all the things they don’t like about themselves. That’s followed by the concerns and wounding they bring from family of origin. The wisdom of the Enneagram addresses both effectively.

We are each, by Enneagram number, well suited for some spiritual practices, but not for others. There is great frustration in trying to engage in a spiritual practice that isn’t suited to your number. It seems essential for those who want to know God, that they know themselves.

In your book, you explain the nine personality types: perfectionist, helper, performer, individualist, investigator, loyalist, enthusiast, challenger, and peacemaker. Why is it so important that we understand not only our own Enneagram type, but those with whom we have the closest relationships?

We all live with the idea that we are seeing the same thing and having the same experiences as those around us. We are not. Perhaps, that assumption is the greatest stumbling block for relationships. Learning how others see and process information is a game changer.

I’ve earned in recovery group settings that every expectation is resentment waiting to happen. Without an understanding of our differences, expectations are very likely. Resentment follows, and both discontentment and fragmentation are unavoidable.

The reason I teach the Enneagram is to increase compassion and civility in the world. If your only understanding is about your own number, then it limits rather than adds to our need for a more forgiving and compassionate world view. My teaching is taking a direction toward asking the question “what would be best for the common good?” We have individuated ourselves to such a degree that we’ve lost sight of the necessity for belonging to a great community, and for finding meaning in our lives by contributing to the larger community.

How is the Enneagram different from other personality tests?

In terms of other personality-typing systems, I think they’re all good and each has its place. As a spiritual wisdom tool, the Enneagram names us (according to our strengths, and at the same time provides us with information and opportunity to do something about what we’ve learned.

I have not found the online Enneagram tests to be accurate because they lack the ability to measure motive, the key factor in discerning one’s Enneagram number. That is one of the reasons I wrote the book. The Enneagram has been an oral tradition for centuries. Anyone who has the opportunity to hear the Enneagram taught orally by a qualified Enneagram master teacher will greatly benefit from that experience. The narrative approach has a lot of value because the Enneagram is deceptively simple, and nuance is very important. That nuance is best represented in stories.

What do you say to people who see Enneagram principles or conclusions in a skeptical light, or who may even have a fear that it could be dangerous in some way?

The world needs more acceptance and open-mindedness, and less suspicion and intolerance. Imagine the wars, fights, and pain that can be avoided by asking questions from a place of love and tolerance, rather than casting predetermined judgments from a place of fear and suspicion.

I am often asked, “what’s dangerous about the Enneagram?” I’ve given the question a lot of thought. As I know and understand this ancient wisdom, the only dangerous thing about the Enneagram is if it taken to be more than it is. It is literally just one spiritual wisdom tool. There are many others and they all have their own value. The Enneagram is just one, but it’s pretty great!

What if you read the book and feel like you cannot figure out where you fit among the Enneagram “numbers”?

The Path Between Us is not designed to introduce readers to the nine Enneagram types, instead it is based on the idea that the reader is already aware of his or her own Enneagram type. We can’t recommend highly enough the value of starting with my Enneagram primer, The Road Back to You that I co-authored with Ian Morgan Cron.

Another possibility would be to listen to my “Know Your Number” recordings, or even better, attending a Know Your Number workshop in person. There will be a Know Your Number workshop in Jackson in January 2019, taught by my daughter Joey. I will be there later in the month for an advanced Enneagram workshop.

Why do you believe that more and more people are becoming interested in studying the Enneagram today?

The generations that have followed the baby boomers seem to be more interested in understanding themselves individually rather than collectively. It seems that they have more space for difference and more tolerance for “the other.” The Enneagram, by its very nature, fits within that context as a way of thinking.

At this time in our culture, people don’t seem to be turning only to the church to try to understand life. It doesn’t take long on a journey towards self-knowledge to develop an interest in tools like the Enneagram that have a way of explaining how we’re like other people and how we are different.

From my perspective as a Christian, I would add that the Enneagram helps us in knowing ourselves, so that we might know God and then better understand ourselves in relation to God.

What is your hope for people who read your new book?

I actually believe we are in a relationship crisis. We are becoming more polarized as we try to navigate the episodic meaning that defines our lives both individually and collectively. And, we seem to know ourselves by what we are against instead of by what we are for. We’re more tribal than at any other time in my lifetime and as a 67-year-old that is astonishing to me.

When people are taught the Enneagram by someone who knows it well, it can change how they see the world and how they interact with those who see it differently. Once people are exposed to this ancient wisdom, they begin to respond to difference with curiosity instead of judgment. They respond to misunderstanding with compassion instead of rejection, and diversity becomes a gift instead of a stumbling block.

Suzanne Stabile will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, May 8, at 5:00 to sign and read from The Path Between Us: An Enneagram Journey to Healthy Relationships.

Tag: Jana Hoops (Page 9 of 13)

Author Q & A with Sonny Brewer about William Gay

Author Q & A with T.R. Hummer

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

Author Q & A with Silas House

Author Q & A with Andrew Lawler

Author Q & A with Jon Meacham

Author Q & A with Joseph Crespino

Author Q & A with Kevin Powers

Author Q & A with George Malvaney

Author Q & A with Suzanne Stabile

Authors

Categories

Tags