Jim Ewing – Lemuria Books

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

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2016 death of author Harper Lee was: Did she work on a book to follow her iconic To Kill a Mockingbird and was there an unpublished manuscript?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elvis intrigue infuses Philip Shirley’s ‘Graceland Conspiracy’ with energy

By Guest Author

On March 31, 2019

In Mystery

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 31)

What if Elvis Presley’s death didn’t occur as thought at Graceland on Aug. 16, 1977?

What if he was murdered by a rogue government agency? Or his death was faked and he’s still alive?

In a fast-paced page-turner, Philip Shirley weaves a tale of intrigue and nation-jumping that renews the debate over Elvis in the mystery novel The Graceland Conspiracy.

Shirley addresses questions and conspiracy theories that arose after the “death,” including: Why did the medical examiner’s report say Elvis was 170 pounds when there was ample film footage at the time showing him at well over 200 pounds?

“There was no shortage of theories about how Elvis might have died, or why, or who might have wanted him dead,” Shirley writes. One said flat-out that Elvis was part of a three-year undercover operation and the mob was out to get him before he could testify. “The only thing that was clear was that Elvis’ death created more conspiracy ideas than President Kennedy’s assassination.”

In Graceland, Shirley chooses the time for his novel as the lip of the millennium, in the final days of the Clinton administration, and before 9/11 in Birmingham. His protagonist, Matthew Boykin, 27, is drawn home there from a wasted life as a biker and pool hall denizen in Texas after his father dies in an unexplained car crash.

As his father is dying in the hospital, Boykin finds that he was perhaps not an “accountant” with a seemingly marginal Department of Justice branch called the National Security Enforcement Office (NSEO) years before an early retirement after Elvis’ “death.”

Boykin had left home seven years before as his father succumbed to alcoholism, raging at the world, and spending his days before a TV set with a bottle of whiskey by his chair. He only came home because a shadowy figure tracked him down in a bar and told him that his mother needed him.

Turns out, shortly before the car cash, his father had sobered up after years of trying to drown his remorse and shame over an event he witnessed that he would not name and was trying to make amends for it.

In a thriller that never slows its pace, Boykin vows to find the reason for his father’s death, the act that caused his spiraling into alcoholism, and to seek revenge in a saga that extends to Europe amid a trail of bodies. Along the way, he mends the wounds in his own life, finds love, and creates lasting friendships—ultimately, solving the mystery of Elvis’ “death.”

This is the sixth book for Shirley, who splits his time between Dauphin Island, Ala., and the Madison area, including two novels and a collection of short stories.

It’s a great read that’s sure to resurrect the Elvis debate anew.

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

Philip Shirley will be at Lemuria on Monday, April 1, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and read from The Graceland Conspiracy.

Tom Clavin’s ‘Wild Bill’ sets record straight on wild west gunfighter

By Guest Author

On March 21, 2019

In History, Western

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion Ledger Sunday print edition (March 17)

For those not especially knowledgeable about tales of the old frontier (other than movies and TV shows), Tom Clavin’s Wild Bill is full of surprises.

The first surprise in the book subtitled “The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter” is that that Wild Bill Hickok’s name wasn’t Bill.

It’s believed that the man born as James Butler Hickok often joked with his brother Lorenzo by calling each other Bill. Since he answered to it, the name stuck. It may be also that James was known as the Wild Bill and his brother was the Tame Bill.

He signed all documents J.B. Hickok throughout his life.

Whether true or apocryphal, there’s no dispute that Wild Bill was an incredible marksman. Ambidextrous, he early on carried Colt Navy .36-cal. pistols facing butt out on each hip, which he later exchanged for double-action Colt .44s filed down for quicker action. He shot with both hands simultaneously and equally accurately.

“Witnesses report seeing Hickok driving a cork through the neck of a whiskey bottle at 20 paces, splitting a bullet on the edge of dime at the same distance, and putting as many as a dozen bullet holes in a tomato can that had been tossed in the air,” Clavin reports.

This skill made him a formidable foe in a gun battle and it also tended to dissuade lawbreakers when he served as marshal for the town of Abilene, Kansas, frequently putting on shows to demonstrate his prowess.

He also didn’t quite fit his “wild” moniker in his bearing and manner, in that he was by all accounts a cool customer. Raised in an abolitionist family in Illinois, during the Civil War, he served as a Union scout and spy, often going behind Confederate lines, and was able to coolly talk his way out of some tight binds. It was this ability to talk his way out of trouble, backed by his reputation as a crack shot, that later served him well as a lawman.

Much of what is known of Hickok through movies and Wild West shows is also probably fabricated, Clavin reveals. For example, it’s doubtful, he says, that Hickok and Calamity Jane were lovers. While they were friends, contemporary accounts seem to indicate that the somewhat dandy-ish Hickok who wore expensive clothes and bathed every day (an unheard-of practice at the time), considered her rather uncouth. She was prone to drunkenness and a prostitute who also wrangled horses, mules and cattle, usually wore men’s clothes, and was not known for her hygiene.

He also was devoted to his wife, Agnes, whom he married rather late in life (about the time he knew Jane), and she was flamboyant in a different way, as the owner of a circus and a world-renowned performer.

Calamity Jane claimed she and Hickok were lovers and had herself buried next to him at Deadwood, S.D., where he was shot dead from behind while playing what came to be called the dead man’s hand in poker: two pair, aces and eights.

What is known, according to Clavin, was that Hickok was the first fast-draw gunslinger in the Old West. His killing of a man in Springfield, Missouri, (Clavin says Independence, Missouri) July 21, 1865, by quick draw methods—rather than pacing off a duel—was widely reported and was quickly emulated across the West.

Unfortunately, because it also happened while he was quite young, it caused “shootists” who came along after to seek him out to show who was the fastest draw. He died at 39, Aug. 2, 1876, victim of a self-styled gunslinger who crept up on him.

But if a bushwhacker didn’t get him, the times would have. Hickok set the mold for gunman/lawmen who faced off in high noon style, but when he was killed, towns were shifting to “peace officers,” who arrested lawbreakers to take them before a judge, Clavin notes.

Hickok remained true to himself “while the West changed around him.”

Wild Bill is filled with the famous names of the West, such as Buffalo Bill Cody, Kit Carson, and the rest. It is a fascinating account of an incredible Western icon, diligently researched, and breath-taking in its scope.

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

Tom Clavin will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, March 27, at 5:00 to sign copies of and discuss Wild Bill. Lemuria has chosen Wild Bill as its April 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Haunting Mississippi images in Florence Mars’ ‘Mississippi Witness’

By Guest Author

On February 25, 2019

In African-American, Civil Rights, Photography, Southern History

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (February 24)

Many recall Florence Mars from her groundbreaking book Witness in Philadelphia, her personal account of the upheaval that surrounded her native Philadelphia, Mississippi, in the wake of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964.

But perhaps little known until now with the publication of Mississippi Witness: The Photographs of Florence Mars, it’s revealed that Mars was a talented photographer, as well.

James T. Campbell, a Stanford University professor, writes in an excellent introduction to the photos that Mars only started photographing her surroundings after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing separate but equal schools. Mars writes that she recognized that the world in which she was living was soon to be a thing of the past and wanted to capture it on film.

The photos, curated by Elaine Owens, recently retired from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, were mostly taken from 1954 to 1964.

Mars was not a professional photographer, though she exhibits mastery of the form in her work. Rather, she was born into relative wealth in Neshoba County, her family owning thousands of acres of land, a livestock auction, and a mercantile business in the county seat.

Like Eudora Welty, a writer who also picked up a camera and chronicled the people, places and things around her during the Depression two decades before, she applied her own knowledge and interests to her work. And, like Welty, the photos were published in definitive form only years after they were taken.

As Campbell writes, the “similarities in their circumstances and sensibilities are obvious. Single white women, they lived at once inside and outside the confines of the conservative, racist, patriarchal society. Solitary by nature, both understood the yearning for connection. Acutely observant, both saw the wonder in ordinary life, the aching beauty that survived the ugliness.”

Many of the photos are simply haunting. While most are portraits without name, background or explanation, they are environmental in that the elements of the photos tell a great deal—perhaps more than simple words can tell.

For example, one shows a young black girl facing the camera in a cotton field where the stalks tower over her. At her feet, dragged behind, is a cavernous cotton sack filled to near bursting by the bolls she has picked, perhaps weighing as much as herself. The expression on her face is at once sad and defiant, resigned, proud and beaten. It is the face of a child living the life of a hardworking adult, too young to be careworn, too old to be that of a child.

In another, a young black woman is washing clothes in a galvanized tub, her hands gnarled by the work, her face a portrait in stoicism, scrubbing out dirt.

Others include:

White jurors taking a break in the Emmett Till trial, which Mars attended. Their casual, exasperated looks don’t exactly telegraph a fair hearing.
A white performer in grinning black face entertaining lounging white farmers in overalls at the stockyard at Philadelphia.
A young black woman washing naked white children on a porch at the Neshoba County Fair, 1955. In the notes section at the end of the book, the authors relate that Mars had penciled a caption on the back of the print: “Certain things are taken to be self-evident.”

Mars, Campbell writes, stopped taking photos after the civil rights workers were killed, as “the tense atmosphere made photography difficult.” In its stead, Mars confided “writing took over from the photography in the middle of my life.”

Her Witness in Philadelphia was published in 1977. She died in 2006.

Mars’ photographs are as she intended, an enduring testament to a time in Mississippi long gone. Printed on heavy stock in a large format, they are a rare treasure.

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

James T. Campbell and Elaine Owens will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, February 27, at 5:00 p.m. to sign copies of and discuss Mississippi Witness.

Elliot Ackerman’s ‘Waiting for Eden’ is a tragic love and war story

By Guest Author

On October 25, 2018

In Fiction

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (October 21)

In Waiting for Eden, National Book Award finalist Elliot Ackerman offers a tragic love and war story that tugs at the heartstrings.

Eden is an Iraq War veteran who was all but killed when an improvised explosive device destroyed the Humvee in which he was riding.

Told from the vantage of his best friend who was killed in the blast, making it a ghost story of sorts, as well, we find Eden in a burn center in Texas where he has been hooked up to life support for three years.

In the blast, Eden lost all his extremities as well as his ability to talk. He has gone from the pinnacle of fitness as a Marine lance corporal weighing 220 pounds to a mere shell of a himself, weighing 70 pounds, and covered in scar tissue.

He is, we are told, the most wounded man in the history of war.

But Eden is not your average war story, or love story. As Ackerman tells it, Eden’s story is one of a young man who is caught up in the war, twisted by it even before the physical wounds, and finds that the only place he can cope or feel “normal” is in battle.

His life with his wife Mary, which began as a sweeping love story, finds her a victim, too, as is his best friend, who is waiting in a land of white light for Eden to cross over.

While it might seem counterintuitive that a narrative involving a semi-comatose man can be engrossing, Ackerman, who was nominated for the National Book Award for his critically acclaimed novel Dark at the Crossing, displays his writing craft magnificently.

Eden delves deeper and deeper into the minds and hearts of the wounded man, his best friend, and his wife. We become intimate partners in a suspenseful tale that reveals the deepest recesses of human lives, hopes, and dashed dreams.

Eden also acts as reminder of the effect of this nation’s never-ending wars, as victim counts continue to rise almost unacknowledged, with their detrimental effect on all of our lives, overtly and subtly, taking a toll that is too often brushed aside.

As Ackerman notes, the suffering of the world is in the individual, however we may wish to distance ourselves from its effects or our complicity. We are all victims and perpetrators, casualties of the wars we choose. We are all wounded.

Eden, a slender volume, is a masterful work, haunting and enduring.

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

Waiting for Eden is one of Lemuria’s November 2018 selections for its First Editions Club for Fiction. Signed first editions can be found here.

Eric Jay Dolin’s ‘Black Flags, Blue Waters’ is a fascinating voyage

By Guest Author

On October 8, 2018

In History

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (October 7)

Eric Jay Dolin’s Black Flags, Blue Waters lives up to its subtitle as “The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates” with little known facts, sweeping narratives, and gripping tales.

It’s a fascinating voyage into the Golden Age of Piracy that not only proves true some of the stereotypes of legend, book and film, but also debunks others and shockingly reveals the depth of early America’s connection to the outlaw seafarers.

Indeed, the contributions of pirates to colonial America, Dolin reveals, was vital to the nation’s founding.

For example, he reports that by 1684, “at least half the coins in colonial America” were Spanish pieces of eight, most of them likely from pirates. The Boston mint, established in 1652, produced the colony’s coins from silver bullion provided by pirates. And the sea-dogs provided a substantial amount of indigo, cloth and sugar that provided New England’s essential needs—avoiding the high prices, inferior goods, and taxes of imports from the mother country.

Their plunder enriched the colonies, making niceties affordable to the masses. So much so that early colonists often sided with the pirates against the Crown’s wishes, laws, and regulations.
In this early period, pirates saw their occupation as a job, not a lifestyle, providing for their families and the wealth of their communities.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that the wealth was robbed from galleons loaded with gold and silver from the New World owned by English rival Spain, or was carried to Puritan New England from merchants robbed in the Muslim world.

Piracy in New England touched and infused all classes, both good and ill. The great-grandfather of President Millard Fillmore himself was a pirate (though conscripted against his will).

The organization of pirates at sea was also endemic of the American character, practicing that new idea of democracy 100 years before the colonies rebelled from monarchy. Crews on pirate ships signed contracts that stipulated their rights, obligations, and percentage of the booty each member received. And they could elect or remove a captain by voting—an unheard-of practice at sea.

This is not to say that pirates were upstanding citizens. Indeed, Dolin reports, they were usually thugs and ne’er-do-wells who differed only from their landlubber criminal contemporaries by robbing and debauching on water.

Even so, the picture formed by Dolin offers a view unlike that popularized in swashbuckling films and novels. For example, while pirates could be—and often were—cruel, barbaric and violent, they also preferred not to fight. The threat of violence was more to their liking, raising the Jolly Roger to extort riches rather than actually risking death.

It suited the preferences of the victims, as well. A sailor on a merchant ship working for low wages was not disposed to risk life and limb for investors or potentates far away. Better to heave to and give it up, to sail another day.

Dolin goes into great detail about the pirate colonies of the Caribbean and Bahamas (reportedly hosting some 4,000 pirates and dozens of ships at a time), as well as ventures along the American Eastern Seaboard, from the early 1680s to 1726. Then the tide turned from pirates aiding colonial economic interests to more frequently harming them with predations closer to home.

He offers extensive notes and bibliography for further reading.

Arghh, maties! Thar be treasure here.

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

Eric Jay Dolin will be Lemuria tonight, Monday, October 8, at 5:00 to sign and read from Black Flags Blue Waters. Black Flags, Blue Waters is Lemuria’s September 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

‘A Spy in Canaan’ is a deep slice of civil rights era surveillance

By Guest Author

On August 28, 2018

In African-American, Civil Rights

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (August 26)

If you know of someone who still harbors any doubt that the FBI spied on leaders of the civil rights movement, just hand over a copy of investigative reporter Marc Perrusquia’s book A Spy in Canaan.

As a reporter for The Commercial Appeal, Perrusquia caught wind of a tantalizing story: that one of Memphis’ most well-known and respected Beale Street residents who had rubbed shoulders with the highest leaders of the movement was for nearly 20 years an FBI informant.

In Spy, subtitled “How The FBI Used a Famous Photographer to Infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement,” Perrusquia offers exhaustive research, including the FBI’s own secret informant files, to detail the government’s surveillance.

As Perrusquia chronicles, to most Beale Street residents, Ernest Withers was the local photographer who took photos of wedding engagements, family portraits, school and military achievements.

To leaders of the civil rights movement, Withers was equally embedded. Carrying press credentials for prominent black-oriented newspapers and magazines, he was a fixture who was there in the very beginning.

He sneaked a photo in the courtroom during the trial of Emmett Till. He covered integration riots in Little Rock and Ole Miss. He covered the assassination of Medgar Evers, whom he considered a friend. He was such a fixture that he counted among his photos candid scenes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—and was so well regarded, he was allowed into the autopsy room to take death photos after King’s assassination.

Although little heralded in his life, Withers could arguably be called one of the great photographers of the 20th century, Perrusquia reports. He shot as many as one million photos over 60 years documenting black life in the South.

Yet, as Perrusquia conclusively details, Withers also led a double life, working for the FBI for cash, funneling photos of civil rights leaders and suspected “agitators” from 1958 to 1976. He passed on tips, car tag numbers, juicy gossip, funneling a flood of rumors, facts and falsehoods that could (and did) ruin people’s lives.

Perrusquia chronicles Withers’ activities in painstaking, deep detail, revealing a disturbing portrait of a quintessential mole in the movement.

Spy is a monumental work of investigative journalism, drawing not only from his newspaper reporting, but also with fresh facts that add a troubling perspective to the headlines of today, raising questions about the depth, longevity and resilience of the government’s focus on watching its citizens.

Not only does Perrusquia describe the FBI surveillance of the period, but examines the federal and local police programs in place that operated beyond the law, including:

COINTELPRO — A federal domestic spying program that surveilled citizens and often employed dirty tricks and misinformation to discredit citizens the FBI deemed suspect.
DETCOM — The nation’s secret program to identify and round up dissidents or people identified with suspected organizations in the event of an emergency.

It’s frightening that even with the enormous amount of data the FBI obtained just from Withers and those working with him at the time, that’s only a slice of the surveillance of U.S. citizens then and, most certainly with digital methods, now.

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

Marc Perrusquia will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “Photography and Culture” panel at 2:45 p.m. at the Galloway Foundery.

James McLaughlin’s ‘Bearskin’ makes the Appalachian Mountains come alive

By Guest Author

On August 9, 2018

In Mystery, Southern Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Deep South Dispatch’ is a behind-the-scenes look at 1960s civil rights movement

By Guest Author

On June 6, 2018

In Civil Rights, Southern History

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 22)

John N. Herbers might not be a familiar name today, but during the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, his byline blazed in The New York Times.
Herbers died last year as his book Deep South Dispatch was being edited (and ably finished by his daughter, journalist Anne Farris Rosen). But many people—especially journalists and leaders of the movement—remember him for his lucid accounts of that turbulent period when he was on the front lines and often at great danger himself.

deep south dispatch Subtitled “Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist,” Dispatch is a fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the arc of his reporting, from covering the Emmett Till trial, to the Birmingham church bombing, to marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to the Kennedy assassination. But it’s not merely a rehashing of old events.

Rather, Dispatch offers insights from a modern perspective, as well as conclusions Herbers made based on is reporting.

As Dispatch details, Herbers was not an “outside agitator,” as Mississippi politicians were wont to describe journalists back then. He was a son of the South, reared in various small towns mostly in the Memphis area, educated at Emory in Atlanta, with strong ties to Mississippi.

He began his journalism career after World War II first in Meridian, and then at the Jackson Daily News under fire-breathing publisher Fred Sullens. From there, he became bureau chief of the United Press (later United Press International) office in Jackson before going to the Times for the bulk of his writing. He was based in Atlanta, but traveled throughout the South and frequently visited his mother who lived in Crystal Springs.

Though from the South, he was at odds with the hate-filled tenor of the times. He believed his objectivity and penchant for journalism was a part of his peripatetic small-town upbringing, where “misfits” could not “escape into anonymity as they could in a city.”

Journalists, he wrote, are by nature and profession “the outlier who is always asking why.”

His love for Mississippi shines through, though, even as he was in anguish over its behavior in matters of race. Were it not for a few courageous voices against bigotry, such as Hodding Carter Sr., publisher of the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times, he wrote, “I think I would have fled Mississippi.”

Dispatch is full of names and places Mississippians remember both for good and ill. His writing is crisp and his life was Forrest Gump-like in his uncanny ability to be at signal moments. It’s encapsulated in such tales as his writing a story under a pecan tree with a manual typewriter on the top of his car at Fannie Lou Hamer’s house before going to interview powerful U.S. Sen. John O. Eastland at his plantation a few miles away.

He notes the ground-breaking reporting of Clarion Ledger reporter Jerry Mitchell that resulted in cold-case convictions of civil rights outlaws and one (of many) photographs includes him standing next to the late journalist Bill Minor of Jackson, himself worthy of note.

Dispatch is an informative, insightful, personal and telling memoir that pricks the conscience still. As he quoted Dr. King in talking about our own personal stances and how they reverberate into our culture, the greatest impediment to true justice in the world is not those oppose it, but those who are silent when they see it breached.

That’s what journalism and journalists are about, too.

Jim Ewing’s journalistic expertise as a writer and editor spans more than four decades, including The Clarion Ledger, the Jackson Daily News, and USA TODAY. A three-time winner of the J. Oliver Emmerich Award (the Mississippi Press Association’s highest honor for commentary), he has also won numerous national Best of Gannett and regional Associated Press Media Editors honors. He is the author of seven books, including his latest, Redefining Manhood.

Southern writers share secrets, stories in new anthology

By Guest Author

On May 1, 2018

In Southern Culture, Southern Fiction

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

What makes a writer a writer? Or a Southern writer, especially?
Is it that one writes and, hence, is a writer? Or lives in the South or writes about the South?

In Southern Writers on Writing, edited by Susan Cushman, the answers to these questions might not be as easy as they seem.

Fourteen women and 13 men struggle to answer the question of their calling and their responses show a nuanced look at why, and how, these authors came to be called Southern writers.

They include such well-known authors as Michael Farris Smith, Jim Dees, W. Ralph Eubanks, Harrison Scott Key, Cassandra King, and Julie Cantrell. They quote as mentors such luminaries as Rick Bragg, Willie Morris, Barry Hannah, Shelby Foote, Ellen Douglas, and Walker Percy.

But, still, the answers prove elusive. Dees says it requires “insane courage” to “take the plunge” and commit one’s innermost thoughts to an uncaring, or uncertain, universe.

Joe Formichella says: “The truth is that you write because you can’t not write.”

Patti Callahan Henry, among other reasons, says: “I write because the stories inside have to go somewhere, so why not on paper?”

Some of these writers are from the South, others just came to be here. Like Sonja Livingstone, who found Southern writers “crept up” on her, seeming familiar, drawing her to the region and lifestyle. Most of all, the way Southern writers write is alluring, unleashing inner secrets, she explains, “set out like colorful laundry flapping on a line, (that) I’d learned to keep folded and tucked away.”

Cantrell, who hails from Louisiana, confides that Southern writing taps all the senses. “When we set a story here, we not only deliver a cast of colorful characters, we share their sinful secrets while serving a mouth-watering meal…. The South offers a fantasy, a place where time slows and anxieties melt away like the ice in a glass of sugar cane rum.”

“The South is nothing less than a sanctuary for a story,” she adds. “It is the porch swing, the rocking chair, the barstool, the back pew.”

Being a Southern writer, writes Katherine Clark, is an opportunity and a burden, especially when you consider that you’re entering literary territory with nationally and internationally known explorers, such as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Conner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, James Agee, Harper Lee, and so many others.

But, as John M. Floyd points out, “Within several miles of my hometown lived men and women who were known only as Jabbo, Biddie, Pep, WeeWee, Buster, Puddin’, Doo-spat, Ham, Big ’un, Nannie, Bobo, Snooky, and Button. How could folks with those kind of names be anything but interesting?”

“Writing” is fascinating reading, and, of course, enthrallingly written, as can be expected by writers writing about writing. But it’s also an encouragement for those who have thought about writing, but haven’t done it, thinking there’s some kind of secret to it.

If there is an “inside secret” to Southerners wanting to write, maybe that’s plain, as well.

The South, writes Jennifer Horne, writes itself every day, offering up “a hunter’s stew of history and hope and horror.”

It’s all around us.

As Floyd points out: “In my travels I’ve been inside bookstores all across the nation, and I have yet to see a section labeled ‘Northern Fiction.’ Maybe that, in itself, is revealing.”

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

Susan Cushman, John Floyd, and Jim Dees will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, May 2, at 5:00 to sign and read from Southern Writers on Writing.

Tag: Jim Ewing (Page 1 of 3)

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Southern writers share secrets, stories in new anthology

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