Southern Register Fall 2008

the THE NEWSLETTER OF THE

CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SOUTHERN CULTURE • FALL 2008

THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI

From North to South and Back Again: Race, Religion, Reconciliation

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eetings with Nobel Peace Prize winner John Hume and with Judge Ronnie Palley of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission were highlights of a study abroad trip on the theme of Race, Religion, and Reconciliation, sponsored by the Trent Lott Leadership Institute in the summer of 2008. Center faculty member Charles Reagan Wilson, Kelly Gene Cook Sr. Professor of History and Professor of Southern Studies, and Southern Studies graduate student Rebecca Batey were among three faculty members and 18 graduate students who participated in the intensive monthlong trip. The project involved students from the University of Mississippi, the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa. Among the planners of the trip were Robert Haws, chair of the department of Public Policy Leadership, and Ruth Maron, from the Study Abroad Office. Lott Institute director Billy Gottshall accompanied the group for the Northern Ireland part of the journey. The purpose of the program was to provide a select number of graduate students the opportunity to consider the reconciliation process at close hand, comparing the American South, Northern Ireland, and South Africa, three societies that have had traumatic

Charles Reagan Wilson (left) and Rebecca Batey in South Africa

histories of racial and religious division but now are attempting to build multicultural societies. Students explored theoretical models of reconciliation that might be used in different places trying to overcome the burdens of the past after open conflict among groups has ended. Students read comparative studies of these societies to prepare for the trip, focused on such issues as the politics of cultural memory, public religion, economic development, the role of race and gender in leadership, and societal posttraumatic stress. The trip began in early July as all

participants met in Washington, D.C., hearing from political and public policy officials and taking part in activities for Independence Day. After discussions and visits to museums and community centers in Memphis, Jackson, and the Mississippi Delta, the group departed for Belfast in time to see the Orange Order parades that were once a flashpoint for violence between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. The troubles between these groups ended a decade ago, and the group met people continued on page 36

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Mississippi: The Open Society? Published Quarterly by The Center for the Study of Southern Culture The University of Mississippi Telephone: 662-915-5993 Fax: 662-915-5814 E-mail: cssc@olemiss.edu Internet: http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/south

IN THIS ISSUE Fall 2008 1 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 5 6 7 8 9 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 26 27 31 32 33 34 36 37 40

Race, Religion, and Reconciliation Director’s Column Living Blues News In Memoriam Brown Bag Schedule: Winter 2009 Gammill Gallery Exhibition Schedule New SST Graduate Students Fall 2008 Mississippi Reads 2008 Sociology and SST Position Available Global South Faculty Group The Artists among Us 2009 F&Y Call for Papers Richard Wright Centennial Update 2009 Natchez Literary Celebration 2009 Mississippi Delta Literary Tour 2009 Oxford Conference for the Book, Creative Writing Workshop 2009 Elderhostel Program, Registration Information about OCB, Workshop Walter Anderson and World Literature 2009 OCB Registration Form Trenton Lee Stewart Selected as FifthGrade Author for Oxford Conference Friends of the Center Membership Form Reading the South: Reviews & Notes New Volumes of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Southern Foodways Alliance News Wharton Photographs to Help Gammill Clarksdale’s 2008 Tennessee Williams Festival to Be on BBC Radio Call for Papers: Tennessee Williams MIAL Celebrates Its 30th Year, Calls for Nominations, Invites New Members Notes on Contributors Southern Culture Catalog Items Address Section/Mailing List Form/ Friends Information and Form

REGISTER STAFF Editor: Ann J. Abadie Graphic Designer: Susan Bauer Lee Mailing List Manager: Mary Hartwell Howorth Editorial Assistant: Sally Cassady Lyon Lithographer: RR Donnelley Magazine Group The University complies with all applicable laws regarding affirmative action and equal opportunity in all its activities and programs and does not discriminate against anyone protected by law because of age, color, disability, national origin, race, religion, sex, or status as a veteran or disabled veteran.

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The presidential debate has come and gone, and its success was an important moment for the University of Mississippi. Preparation was inspired, guests seemed to enjoy themselves and to leave saying positive things, the campus hosted visitors with an extraordinary range of interests and agendas, and the debate itself went off fine. The debate made me, as a Southern historian, think of James Silver. In the early 1960s Silver, the Civil War historian at the University of Mississippi, gave a famous lecture, “Mississippi: The Closed Society,” at the convention of the Southern Historical Association and later published the piece in the Journal of Southern History and as the first chapter of a book with the same title. Silver argued that at certain points in Mississippi history—the 1850s, the 1890s, and again in the 1950s—open discussion was impossible, and the people with power were able to stifle dissent and debate. However, his main idea was not what many people see in the title—that everyone’s status in Mississippi was fixed—but that the nature of life in Mississippi at certain times made it almost impossible to express discontent, to identify problems, and, since there were no publicly discussed problems, to discuss solutions. The issue that “closed” Mississippi to discussion was, of course, white supremacy, and Silver’s role was to combat both white supremacy and the general silence about it. The idea that societies were either closed or open resonated with post-McCarthy period fears about American closed-mindedness and with post-McCarthy ideals that welcoming multiple viewpoints and open discussion and debate could identify problems and solve them. Historian C. Vann Woodward and political scientist V. O Key Jr. had only a few years earlier begun writing their works describing the worst features of Southern history as those that made it impossible for open political discussion and competition to encourage coalitions among groups. For Key, the rise of single-party, whites-only politics impeded any potential for the political system to hear and respond to the concerns of the have-nots. Woodward argued that the end of fusion politics, with the rise of whites-only, Democrat-only politics in the 1890s, generated a new longing for old times not forgotten, new calls for the oppression of African Americans, and, along with Key, a damaging silence about important issues. For James Silver, as for Key and Woodward, what was best about American life was open discussion, dissent, debate, and the changes that could follow when most, or, in an ideal world, all people’s views are open for expression. What was troubling about the South was the lack of open discussion, in politics, on college campuses, in churches, almost anywhere. All of this serves as background for life in Oxford in the weeks prior to the presidential debate. I was not alone in wondering how open the University might be to the range of activities that were part of debating. The most important sign of change is the simple point that the University wanted everything having to do with a big presidential debate, from the interruptions and expense and celebrity guests to the examination and self-examination. Above all, it wanted debate—something that was not welcome in the closed society. Much of the attention has rightly concentrated on the issue of race, with virtually everyone noting the differences between the violence and hatred confronting James Meredith in 1962 and the welcoming respect Senator Barack Obama received in 2008. Connected to the topic of race, one should take note of the central issue of having political debates on campus. In previous decades, would the University of Mississippi have wanted, allowed, or courted a debate in which national politicians and the people who study and lobby them raised controversial issues? The celebration of debate seems, in itself, an important and positive thing. At the University, the range of predebate discussions was impressive. To be honest, I feared debate preparation might try to turn us all into cheerleaders for Mississippi. The University could have tried only to publicize signs of progress so much that it looked like it was covering up its ugliest sides, past and present. Or it could have turned debate preparation into a pep rally for some of the traditions of student life. Fall 2008

The Southern Register

But the University did neither. From administrators to faculty to students, alumni, and staff, the University of Mississippi did a serious job of encouraging open discussion. It hosted countless events for talks and debates about major issues—world and local hunger, health, the press, the environment, international affairs, debating in political history, gay and lesbian issues, economic and labor issues, banking, the law, Southern and national politics, race and more race. Students had access to so much serious talking, questioning, arguing, and debating that they should see that (if they did not already know it) as what a good university is always supposed to do. This predebate festival of discussion was, for the once-closed society, an important sign of opening. At the time James Silver envisioned his concept, he was dealing with censorship, strict oversight of who could speak on campus, and angry legislators who were troubled by those whom they considered outside agitators. Through changes in the legislators and administrators, and in part through the efforts of countless people at the University who sponsor and run lectures and conferences and roundtable discussions, sometimes on pressing moments of the day, sometimes on the most arcane subjects, a new era has begun. Thoughtful and interesting people to speak and debate and meet students deserve their share of credit for making the University the open place that universities should be. It may seem a long road from the first Chancellor’s Symposium on Southern History and the first Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, back in the 1970s, to the McCain-Obama debate, but those events were part of a process of opening the University up to guests who talk in intelligent ways about important topics. For its part, the Center studied the debate. Graduate students wrote papers on how the press raised and answered questions about contemporary Mississippi, documentary students filmed and photographed events related to the debate, and undergraduate students had chances (sometimes with offers of extra credit) to attend an extraordinary range of events.

Living Blues News The Seventh Annual Blues Symposium, to be held February 26–28, 2009, at the University of Mississippi, is entitled “Documenting the Blues.” Noted musicologist David Evans will deliver the keynote lecture focusing on his extensive fieldwork with blues musicians. Panel discussions will focus on field recording and blues record labels and feature George Mitchell, Art Rosenbaum, Jim O’Neal, and others. Most notably, on Friday, February 27, Living Blues and the Blues Archive will receive a Blues Trail Marker from the Mississippi Blues Commission recognizing the magazine’s nearly 40-year history of documenting blues music culture. Later that evening, the University hosts Mavis Staples at the Gertrude Castellow Ford Center. The Symposium will also include live blues music on the Oxford Square and a welcome reception by the Highway 61 radio program. Additional details on the Blues Symposium will be announced in the next of Living Blues magazine as well as on our Web site, www.livingblues.com.

The current issue of Living Blues highlights the Carolina Chocolate Drops, three young musicians playing traditional string band music. The band recently played Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium and took part in Marty Stuart’s 50th birthday celebration at the Grand Ole Opry. Additionally, Chicago bluesman Little Arthur Duncan details his life in the Chicago blues scene, and over a dozen blues artists, including Swamp Dogg and Honeyboy Edwards, share their thoughts on the current presidential race with our readers. A one-year subscription to Living Blues is $25.95, and blues fans can subscribe online at www.livingblues.com. A complimentary issue of Living Blues is also available to readers of the Southern Register upon request. Simply e-mail info@livingblues and request a sample issue of the world’s most authoritative blues magazine.

In Memoriam Martha Glenn Stephens Cofield Oxford, Mississippi November 23, 1935–September 29, 2008 Charles E. “Chuck” Noyes Oxford, Mississippi July 19, 1917–August 30, 2008

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The Southern Register

Fall 2008

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Center for the January 21 “South Apopka: A Community Portrait: A Gammill Gallery Talk” Bob Michaels, Documentary Photographer Apopka, Florida 28 “Oxford Film Festival: The Previews” Michelle Emmanuel, Molly Ferguson, and Micah Ginn, Coordinators Oxford Film Festival February 4 “University Media Production Film Projects” Rebecca Batey, Eric Feldman, and Ferriday Mansel Southern Studies Graduate Students 11 “USpeak: Giving Voice to College Students Artair Rogers, Undergraduate Coordinator of USpeak

Study of Southern Culture The University of Mississippi

Brown Bag Lunch and Lecture Series January, February, and March 2009 The Brown Bag Luncheon Series takes place each Wednesday at noon in the Barnard Observatory Lecture Hall during the regular academic year.

18 “One Mississippi: Bringing College Students Together” Melissa Cole, Undergraduate Convener of One Mississippi 25 “Documenting the Blues at Ole Miss” Greg Johnson, Blues Archivist, Special Collections/Williams Library Scott Barretta, Host, Highway 61 Blues Radio Mark Camarrigg, Managing Editor Living Blues Magazine

March 4 “Football Flashbacks: Classic Film Footage from the Ole Miss Archives” Micah Ginn, Producer Director, University Media Production Joe York, Filmmaker, University Media Production 11 “The Second Strange Career of Jim Crow” Will Hustwit, Instructor Department of History

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The University received so much good publicity that a little temperance might be in order. We at the University of Mississippi can certainly do far more than we do to use the power of university life to address the biggest problems in Mississippi and beyond. We can do even more to encourage discussion and welcome dissent and controversy, and we can do more to connect local issues and our own field of Southern Studies to issues throughout the world. We can also try to ask a broader range of questions than those raised by mid-20th-century white liberals like Silver and Woodward. All those are ongoing projects, often addressed by day-to-day hard work. But putting temperance aside, let’s be happy about this point: if the University’s role in the presidential debate showed something important, it is that, if we use James Silver’s definition, Mississippi is no longer a closed society. Ted Ownby Page 4

Exhibition Schedule October 20, 2008–January 16, 2009 Panny Mayfield Juke Joints January 21–March 26, 2009 Bob Michaels South Apopka: A Community Portrait The Gammill Gallery, located in Barnard Observatory, is open Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m., except for University holidays. Telephone: 662-915-5993. Fall 2008

The Southern Register

David Wharton

New Southern Studies Graduate students pictured at Barnard Observatory in August 2008 are, left to right, front row: Blount Montgomery (undergraduate degree, University of the South), Callie Flowers (University of the South), Duvall Osteen (Rhodes College), I’Nasah Crockett (Sarah Lawrence College); middle row: Melanie Young (University of Southern Mississippi), Ferriday Mansel (University of Mississippi), Alan Pike (University of North Carolina), Andrew Abernathy (University of Mississippi); top row: Bob Hodges (University of Georgia), Aaron Rollins (University of Mississippi), Miles Laseter (Jacksonville State University).

Mississippians are celebrating Richard Wright’s centennial year by reading and discussing his story collection Uncle Tom’s Children. For details, see www. mississippireads. org or e-mail mississippireads@gmail.com.

The Southern Register

Fall 2008

The Department of Sociology and Anthropology (www.olemiss.edu/ depts/soc_anth/) and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture (www. olemiss.edu/depts/south/) at the University of Mississippi invite applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Sociology with a joint appointment as James M. and Madeleine M. McMullan Assistant Professor in Southern Studies starting in 2009. We seek a sociologist of proven teaching and research ability in the areas of race and ethnicity whose work has relevance for understanding the experiences of minority groups in the contemporary U.S. South, and possibly the broader “global South.” We are particularly interested in candidates whose work focuses on the African American context. Both the Sociology program and the Southern Studies program offer B.A. and M.A. degrees. While tenure and promotion reside in Sociology and Anthropology, teaching and service responsibilities will be divided between the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Ph.D. (or ABD status) is required at the time of application. Candidates should have an active program of scholarly research, an interdisciplinary perspective, and a strong commitment to excellence in the classroom. Interested candidates should apply online at https:// jobs.olemiss.edu by submitting their curriculum vitae, letter of interest, one-page statement of teaching philosophy, evidence of teaching effectiveness, and outline of research program. Use the appropriate links to attach these materials to the online application. Three confidential letters of recommendation should be mailed to Professor Kirsten Dellinger c/o The Department of Human Resources, Paul B. Johnson Commons, P.O. Box 1848, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677. The position will be open until filled or until an adequate applicant pool is established. Women and minorities are especially encouraged to apply. The University of Mississippi is an EEO/AA/Title VI/ Title IX/Section 504/ADA/ ADEA employer. Page 5

Global South Faculty Group David Wharton

In August of 2005 a small group of faculty formed an interdisciplinary working group around the topic of the Global South. Sponsored by the University’s Office of Research, the working group met regularly to discuss readings that situated the American South relative to other locations in the hemisphere and around the world. That group has now expanded its membership to 25 professors who represent the Croft Institute for International Studies; the Trent Lott Leadership Institute; the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation; the departments of African American Studies, English, Gender Studies, History, Modern Languages, Music, Philosophy and Religion, Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology,

From left, George Dor, Bashir Salu, Walter Mignolo

David Wharton

From left, Katie McKee, Caroline Levander, Annette Trefzer

and Southern Studies; and the schools of Education, Journalism, and Social Work. Additional sponsors include the College of Liberal Arts and the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs. The working group has embarked on an 18-month series of lectures and workshops that will treat three broad themes: “The Global South: Literary, Cultural, and Theoretical Study,” “The Global South: Immigration, Religion, and Transnationalism,” and “The Global South: Movement, Migration, and African Diasporas.” The first of these meetings, focused on literary, culPage 6

tural, and theoretical study, was held in Barnard Observatory on September 18–19, 2008, and featured two public lectures. The first was by Caroline Levander, professor of English and director of the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. Her topic, “From Southern to Hemispheric Southern Studies,” turned to the case study of Sutton Griggs, an African American man who lived along the U.S./Mexico border at the turn into the 20th century. The second lecture was by Walter Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature Fall 2008

and Romance Studies and Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Spanish, as well as academic director and cofounder of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University. His topic was “Why Are We Interested in the Global South?: Second Thoughts on the Geopolitics of Knowledge and Colonial Difference”; he sketched theoretical questions fundamental to seeing beyond political borders at the same time that we remain attentive to the power those borders have historically asserted. On the morning following their addresses, Levander and Mignolo met with the working group to discuss a set of selected readings and the lectures from the previous evening, as well as to share their institutional experience in creating interdisciplinary projects around global themes. The working group will convene regularly between guest lecturers to consider various collaborative projects. The next public lecture will be on February 12, 2009, and will feature Saskia Sassen, Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Her topic will be “Reassembling Territory, Authority, and Rights in Today’s Global South.” Kathryn B. McKee The Southern Register

The Artists among Us

The Southern Register

Camp Best with some of his drawings

I’Nasah Crockett

Just as the South is known for its historic outpouring of art, the Center for the Study of Southern Culture must be recognized for its students, faculty, and alumni who are also practicing artists and, in their work, have managed to find links between their field of study and their chosen form of personal expression. David Wharton, a professor of Documentary Fieldwork at the Center, claims he was born into Southern Studies without knowing it. “As child, my school-year residence was in New Jersey, just outside of New York City. That’s where my dad worked, in New York. But he had been raised in North Carolina, and had a large extended family there, and my mother, my brother, and I would go to North Carolina and stay with them in the summertime, so I was constantly comparing the differences in lifestyle, and just the way everything happened in my mind, even as a child.” Eventually he landed a position on the faculty at the Center, which gave him the opportunity to further explore one of his artistic interests: small-town and rural culture in the South. “I photograph both people living in those kinds of places and doing things,” he says. “And I also photograph what I think of as the cultural landscape, which is generally without people, per se, but those cultural landscape photographs are very much about the interaction between people and the physical place their predecessors have made, and they continue to live in, and make as they live there.” This interest is apparent in his most recent exhibition of 22 photographs, The Power of Belief: Photographs from the Religious South. Half of the 22 are about people actively involved in various forms of worship; the others, landscapes, depict the various religious themes. Wharton states, “I like to believe that the best photographs have meaning that is supported by the formal aspects of the photographs. Meaning has to do with the way people relate to the world around them, the way people relate to people around them, and [to] the physical world around them.” Camp Best, a second-year graduate

student, came to Southern Studies after a significant absence from the world of academia. Originally hailing from Jackson, he says that returning to school has been nothing but positive. “It’s been a wonderful experience for me, getting back into academia. Personally, spiritually, in every way it has reenergized me as a person. Part of it, too, is that getting away from Jackson has freed me up, and getting into academia has freed me up to open my mind again, and to start exploring new ideas.” This new sense of awareness, he says, echoes in his artwork, which consists primarily of paintings and pen-and-ink drawings. “When I got to Oxford I did not have a studio, still haven’t found a reasonable space, so I returned to drawing, and that’s what I’ve been doing recently. I’ve also gotten interested in photography, and that’s a brand new medium for me, inspired by my documentary photography class that I took in the Southern Studies Program under David Wharton. Getting behind the camera opened up a new world for me as a new creative avenue, a new vision for seeing things in a different way, and then translating what I see and what I create onto paper.” Best currently has an exhibition of his draw-

ings and photographs entitled Curious Otherness, which will be on display at Glo Design Studio in Oxford until the end of the month. Even those who are no longer directly involved with the Center recall their time there as positively affecting their art-making process. Lynn MarshallLinnemeier, an alumna of the Southern Studies Program, currently works as a professor at Agnes Scott College and as a visual artist. “Most of the stuff that I do is photo-based mixed media. And I like to look at historical figures,” she says. Her introduction to the program came back in 1989, when she was working as a field studies director for the Mississippi Self-Portrait project with Bill Ferris, the founding director of the Center. “I just fell in love with the notion of studying the South, because I’m from the South so I just find it an absolutely fascinating place, and region of the country. But regarding the Southern Studies Program, I guess what fascinated me was the research that I did while I was there.” Although she is no longer a student (MA, 2006), research still plays a major role in Marshall-Linnemeier’s artistic process. She’s currently spending time traveling between New Orleans and Savannah, Georgia, gathering information for her latest project, a study of fortune tellers. “I want to do a series of quilts on them. I find it fascinating that these women are passing down some of these traditions that they’ve been introduced to.” Even when she’s not working on an art project, it’s safe to say that her experiences at the Center left her with a whetted appetite for gathering information. “I still continue to do that, I like to research things. I love archives; I’m always in somebody’s archives digging around for photographs. I like to be able to give people some historical background whenever I talk about pieces, so that’s when the research comes in.” I’Nasah Crockett

For samples of David Wharton’s photographs, see page 31 of this issue of the Register and/or the Center’s Web site. For samples of Lynn MarshallLinnemeier’s work, see http://home.earthlink.net/~lynnlinn/. Fall 2008

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no. six OXFORDFILMFEST.COM

OXFORD

58 THRU

2009

Call for Papers Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha “Faulkner and Mystery” July 19–23, 2009

Throughout his writing career, William Faulkner demonstrated a deep interest if not in what is normally regarded as detective fiction, then in its thematic and formal staple: the process of detection. Characteristically, he compounded the usual attributes of the mode: incessant qualification and complication, conflicting yet always compelling speculation, late revelation, along with a readiness— perhaps the most distinctive Faulknerian touch—to leave matters unresolved. It is as if there were no solution that could possibly match the game of detection itself, as if mystery were not something to be explained but to be preserved as the basis of significant thought. The 36th annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference will examine “mystery” in Faulkner’s fiction as a prominent thematic element and formal strategy. The approach is relevant to his passion for modernist experiment, his concern with the processes of knowing, and his expansion of the popular fictional and cinematic practices of his time. Here are some of the questions and issues that might be considered: How does Faulkner handle mystery in those texts—Sanctuary, Knight’s Gambit, and Intruder in the Dust—in which he seems to be relying on standard strategies? How does the mystery that remains in a specific Faulkner text illuminate the action that somehow works to keep that mystery hidden? What is the effect of mystery on the thematic statement—social, racial, economical, sexual, historical, colonial—that the text engages? Does Faulkner refuse commitment by refusing resolution—and if not, what form does commitment take? Is there a melding of period definition in mystery: modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism—or the emergence of a new definition? What bearing does the idea of mystery have on Faulkner’s work as a screenwriter? We are inviting 40-minute plenary papers and 20-minute panel papers. Plenary papers consist of approximately 5,000 words and will appear in the conference volume published by the University Press of Mississippi. Panel papers consist of approximately 2,500 words and will be considered by the conference program committee for possible expansion and inclusion in the published volume. For plenary papers the 15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style should be used as a guide in preparing manuscripts. Three copies of manuscripts (hard copy only) must be submitted by January 31, 2009. Authors whose papers are selected will receive (1) a waiver of the conference registration fee and (2) lodging at the Inn at Ole Miss from Saturday, July 18, through Thursday, July 23. For short papers, two-page abstracts must be submitted by January 31, 2009, either through e-mail attachment or hard copy. Authors whose papers are selected will receive a reduction of the registration fee to $100. All manuscripts and inquiries should be addressed to Donald Kartiganer, Department of English, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677– 1848. Telephone: 662-915-5793; e-mail: dkartiga@olemiss.edu. Decisions for all papers will be made by March 1, 2009.

This project partially funded by a grant from the Oxford Tourism Council

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Fall 2008

The Southern Register

Richard Wright Centennial Update

The Southern Register

Claudius Claiborne

September 4, 2008, Richard Wright’s 100th birthday, began with early morning radio broadcasts. On National Public Radio, Garrison Keller made remarks about Wright’s importance, on The Writer’s Almanac. Patrick Oliver hosted the birthday tribute on Literary Nation (KABF FM 88.3, Little Rock, Arkansas), which included interviews with Patricia McGraw and Jerry Ward. At Tougaloo College, Howard Rambsy (Southern Illinois University–Edwardsville) spoke on publishing and Wright, a prelude to evening activities. In Little Rock, the Willie Hinton Neighborhood Resource Center unveiled the “Richard Wright Day Proclamation” and presented a program of Wright’s poetry; discussions of Wright’s teenage years, Wright and the Harlem Renaissance, Wright and today’s music (rap, R&B, hip hop); and readings of excerpts from Wright’s works by male youths. In Dallas, Texas, the Paul Quinn College Library presented “One Book, One College.” In Mississippi, citizens of Jackson initiated a week of events (September 4–11) with a birthday reception for Wright’s daughter Julia at Smith Robertson Museum and Cultural Center, the school from which her father graduated in 1925. Although the 100th anniversary of Wright’s birth was a climactic moment, it marked new beginnings rather than a traditional sense of an ending. The week of events in Jackson included September 5: Tour: Richard Wright’s Jackson September 5–6: Richard Wright Institute for Teachers sponsored by the Margaret Walker Alexander Research Center, Jackson State University September 6: Richard Wright Parade in which five Jackson Public Schools marching bands participated September 7: Humanities forum on “Richard Wright and Activism” featuring Julia Wright, College of Liberal Arts, Jackson State University September 9: Keynote address by Julia Wright at Tougaloo College September 10: Wright Day to Read (Tougaloo College) with Jerry Ward’s lecture “One Writer’s Legacy: Richard

Novelist John Edgar Wideman, Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, addressing the International Richard Wright Centennial Conference at the American University of Paris in June 2008

Wright and Our 21st Century” Mississippi Department of Archives and History “History Is Lunch Series” featuring Julia Wright and former Governor William Winter September 11: Address and book signing by Julia Wright at Tougaloo College Lecture by Dr. Marvin Haire (Mississippi Valley State University) on “Richard Wright and the Blues” at the State Capitol Fall 2008

Other September events included September 15: “Celebrating African American Voices at Pennsylvania State University” (“The Legacy of Richard Wright” lecture by Jerry Ward) September 20: Initial meeting of the Mississippi Humanities Council’s “4 W Teachers Institute,” which will involve workshops throughout the year on Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, Page 9

Claudius Claiborne

Tennessee Williams, and Margaret Walker September 27: “Richard Nathaniel Wright: A Centennial Celebration” at the Historic Natchez Foundation

(above) Julia Wright, Richard Wright’s elder daughter, with her son, Malcolm, at the June 2008 Richard Wright Celebration at Tsuru University in Yamanashi, Japan (left) Maryemma Graham, Professor of English at the University of Kansas, and Sachi Nakachi, Professor of English at Tsuru University, during the Richard Wright Celebration in Japan

Claudius Claiborne

Wright left Jackson for Memphis in 1925, and the celebratory events followed the same path with Julia Wright’s keynote address at the University of Memphis, Fogelman Executive Center, on October 2. The University sponsored a symposium on Wright and Reginald Brown, “Performing Richard Wright,” on October 3. The same day Southwest Tennessee Community College students performed dramatic readings of Wright’s texts under the direction of the playwright Levi Frazier. Conversations with Julia Wright and Honors Academy and Service Learning Students were held on October 4 at Parrish Library; on October 6, Julia Wright was the International Education speaker at the STCC Union Campus Theater. Also scheduled for the month were Jerry Ward’s “Reading Wright” for the Wright reading group at Vanderbilt University (October 8); “Drumvoices: A Celebration of Richard Wright (1908– 1960) and Henry Dumas (1934–1968)” at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey on October 16 (This event was organized by Cheryl A. Wall, Rutgers, and Eugene B. Redmond, editor of Drumvoices Revue.); “Richard Wright Centennial Discussion,” Community Book Center, New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 18. On October 21, at Vanderbilt University, the Richard Wright Centennial Reading Series, a yearlong discussion of Wright’s work and its historical and cultural contexts, featured Uncle Tom’s Children. Native Son (November 19) and Black Boy (December 16) will also be examined during the fall semester. On November 7–8, the Richard Wright Centennial Symposium was held at the African American Museum in Dallas, Texas. This meeting included talks by James A. Miller (Richard Wright Circle), Maryemma Graham (University of Kansas), Jerry W. Ward Jr. (Dillard University), and Dereck Page 10

C. Catsam (University of Texas of the Permian Basin). Darryl Dickerson-Carr (Southern Methodist University) will speak on “Writers’ Block on Richard Wright” at Paperbacks Plus (Dallas). The final major event for the 2008 centennial year will be “Richard Wright at 100,” an International Conference sponsored by the Department of Letters, University of Beira Interior, Portugal, on November 28 and 29. In addition to many 2008 newspaper and magazine articles on Wright, The Richard Wright Encyclopedia, edited by Jerry W. Ward Jr. and Robert J. Butler, was published by Greenwood Press on June 30. Drumvoices Revue, vol. 16: 1 and 2 (Spring–Summer–Fall 2008) featured “Kwansabas for Richard Wright Centennial” by 95 writers; Julia Wright’s essay “The Homestretch to the Centennial” and her four tankas for Wright’s 100th Birthday; and Joyce Ann Fall 2008

Joyce’s review essay “Richard Wright’s A Father’s Law.” The Mississippi Quarterly’s special issue on Wright is now in press, as is the Southern Quarterly’s issue that will contain papers from the 2008 Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, “Richard Wright, the South, and the World.” Wright’s influence in the worlds of literature and international thought is such that tributes to him will continue in 2009. Wilfred D. Samuels has already issued a call for papers for the symposium “Richard Wright: The Man, the Writer, and His Place in American and African American Letters” at the University of Utah, April 2–5, 2009. Those who have profited greatly from Richard Wright’s legacy now await an official announcement from the United States Postal Service that we will be able to mail our letters with Richard Wright stamps. Jerry W. Ward Jr. The Southern Register

Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration to Celebrate Eudora Welty Centennial

The Southern Register

Fall 2008

Chrissy Wilson

When it comes to literature, the American South is well known far and wide for its writers. What might not be so well known is that a large number of Southern women are part of that elite group. “The Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration will try to remedy that situation,” said Carolyn Vance Smith, founder and cochairman of Eudora Welty (left) and Suzanne Marrs the Olympic Award–winning conference. The 20th annual conference, set for February 19– Louisiana Poet Laureate, All Saints: 22, 2009, will use the theme “Southern New and Selected Poems Women Writers: Saluting the Eudora • Dorothea Benton Frank, New York Welty Centennial.” Times best-selling author from “Consider some of the women writers South Carolina, Sullivan’s Island, from Mississippi and their long-lasting Bulls Island works,” Smith said. They include: • Katherine Anne Porter, 1890–1980, Pulitzer Prize–winning author from • Eudora Welty, 1909–2001, Pulitzer Texas, Flowering Judas and Ship of Prize-winning author of Delta Fools Wedding and The Robber Bridegroom • Margaret Walker Alexander, 1915– “All of these women writers will be 1998, Jubilee and Richard Wright: featured at the 2009 NLCC,” Smith Daemonic Genius said. “Programs will be either by them • Elizabeth Spencer, born 1921, PEN/ or about them.” Malamud Award for Short Fiction, On February 19, the conference The Light in the Piazza and The Night will focus on Welty and her works; on Travelers February 20, on Welty’s contemporaries • Ellen Douglas, born 1921, National and their works; and on February 21, on Book Award nominee, Apostles of Welty’s successors and their works. On Light and Truth: Four Stories I Am February 22, writing workshops named Finally Old Enough to Tell in honor of Natchez native Ellen • Natasha Trethewey, born 1966, Douglas will conclude the conference. Pulitzer Prize–winning author of “Again this year, we have some of the Domestic Work and Native Guard top scholars and writers in the coun• Julia Reed, born 1961, The House on try on the agenda,” Smith said. “The First Street: My New Orleans Story keynote speaker is Suzanne Marrs of and Queen of the Turtle Derby Millsaps College, who is the author• Carolyn Haines, born 1953, Summer ity on Eudora Welty. Among other of the Redeemer and Them Bones books, she has written Eudora Welty: A Biography and One Writer’s Imagination: “Also consider women writers from The Fiction of Eudora Welty.” other Southern states,” Smith said. Enhancing the programs will be docThey include: umentary films, a dramatic version of To Kill a Mockingbird at the Natchez Little • Harper Lee, born 1926, Pulitzer Theatre, panel discussions, book signPrize–winning author from Alabama, ings, exhibitions, concerts, a writing To Kill a Mockingbird awards ceremony, and receptions. In • Brenda Marie Osbey, born 1957, addition are two meals featuring menus

suggested in Miss Welty’s writings. Honoring Eudora Welty was a natural decision for the NLCC Steering Committee, Smith said. “Miss Welty helped found the Celebration when she agreed to be on the agenda for the first conference in 1990,” Smith said. The theme for the first conference was “The Natchez Trace: Its Literary Legacy.” Welty read aloud her famed story that is set on the Trace, “A Worn Path.” “She absolutely captivated the audience,” Smith said. “She read with such flair. She could have been a successful actress if she had wanted a second career.” Welty continued to support the event the rest of her life, Smith said. In addition to honoring Southern women writers, the conference will honor former Mississippi governor William Winter and his wife, Elise, at a free public reception on February 21, Smith said. “Every year since the beginning, Governor Winter has been director of proceedings for the NLCC. We can’t imagine having the conference without him and Mrs. Winter. We are so grateful to them.” Hosting the reception will be the NLCC, the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, and Copiah-Lincoln Community College, which has sponsored the conference since 1990. The NLCC is free except for certain meals and the play To Kill a Mockingbird. Information and tickets are available at www.colin.edu/nlcc, by calling 601446-1208 or 866-296-6522, or by emailing NLCC@colin.edu. Sponsors of the conference in addition to Copiah-Lincoln are Natchez National Historical Park, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and Mississippi Public Broadcasting. Partial funding comes from the Mississippi Humanities Council and the Mississippi Arts Commission. Page 11

2009 Mississippi Delta Literary Tour The Mississippi Delta Literary Tour, set for March 22–26, 2009, will again travel across the Delta countryside exploring the region’s rich literary, culinary, and musical heritage. The tour will be based at the Alluvian Hotel in downtown Greenwood and will travel to Indianola, Clarksdale, and Greenville, making stops along the way in the communities of Money, Tutwiler, and Merigold. The group will gather at the Alluvian on Sunday afternoon, March 22, for talks about the history of Greenwood, which became known as the “world’s largest inland long-staple cotton market” and the home of Endesha Ida Mae Holland, Frank Smith, Mildred Spurrier Topp, and other writers. We’ll learn about area art and artists, visit Turnrow Book Company, and enjoy dinner prepared by one of the Mississippi’s famous cooks. In Indianola, on Monday, the group will visit the new B. B. King Museum; experience down-home Delta music in Club Ebony, the famed blues club; and see an exhibition celebrating the life and work of New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne, who grew up in the town’s legendary boardinghouse run by his mother. Indianola native, author, and former English professor Marion Barnwell will give a presentation about Claiborne and his books. Steve Yarbrough, another Indianola native, will also be along to talk about growing up in the Delta and writing about the place in several of his award-winning works of fiction, including Visible Spirits, Prisoners of War, and The End of California. En route to Clarksdale, on Tuesday, Delta State University professor Henry Outlaw and director of the Delta Center for Culture and Learning Luther Brown will talk about the region, and the group will stop at Robert Johnson’s gravesite, see the remains of the store in Money where Emmett Till allegedly made his tragic whistle, and visit with local quilters and gospel singers at the Tutwiler Community Education Center. Clarksdale sites will include the Cutrer Mansion and St. George’s Episcopal Church, where literary scholar W. Kenneth Holditch will speak on the town’s influence on Tennessee Williams’s work; Cathead Records, a Page 12

The B. B. King Museum and Delta Cultural Center opened in Indianola, Mississippi, on September 13, 2008. For details, see www.bbkingmuseum/org.

center for blues recordings and folk art; and the Delta Blues Museum. After dinner, the tour will return by way of Merigold, with visits to McCartys Pottery and Po’ Monkey’s juke joint. In Greenville, on Wednesday, Hodding Carter III, author and former publisher of the newspaper his father began in 1938, the Delta DemocratTimes, will discuss his father’s lasting influence and legacy. Using his newspaper as his platform, Hodding Carter Jr. publicly tackled the hot-button Southern issue of racial equality, and in 1946 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his outspoken editorial work, writings that eventually Fall 2008

earned him the moniker “Spokesman for the New South.” Joining the discussion on Hodding Carter Jr. will be University of Mississippi journalism professor Curtis Wilkie and author and journalist Julia Reed, both of whom are natives of Greenville. The tour will once again visit McCormick Book Inn, the Delta’s—and Mississippi’s—oldest independent bookstore, where visiting and local authors will gather to sign their work. The Delta tour is $575 per person for all program activities, 10 meals, and local transportation. The fee does not include lodging. Remember to sign up early. Only a limited number of places are available, and they will go fast. Group accommodations are offered at the Alluvian, in downtown Greenwood (www.thealluvian.com). Rooms at the Alluvian require a separate registration. Standard rooms are priced at a discounted rate of $170. Call 866-600-5201 and ask for the Literary Tour rate. Also call the hotel to inquire about rates for luxury rooms and suites. Additional rooms have been set aside at the Greenwood Best Western, 662-455-5777, or the Hampton Inn, 662-455-7985.

The Southern Register

The 16th Oxford Conference for the Book The University of Mississippi • Oxford, Mississippi March 26–28, 2009 The 16th Oxford Conference for the Book, set for March 26–28, 2009, will celebrate the life and legacy of Mississippi Gulf Coast artist, author, and naturalist Walter Inglis Anderson (1903–1965) on the opening day. Fifth and ninth graders will join the audience on Friday morning for sessions with authors of books for young readers, and the conference will continue through Saturday afternoon with a variety of addresses, readings, and panels. The conference edition of Thacker Mountain Radio, a special Elderhostel program, a fiction and poetry jam, a marathon book signing at Off Square Books, a writing workshop (March 25), and an optional literary tour of the Mississippi Delta (March 22–26) are also part of the festivities. The program will begin at the J. D. Williams Library on Thursday with lunch and a presentation on a new

exhibition titled Walter Anderson and World Literature, curated by the artist’s son, John Anderson of Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Anderson and his sisters, Leif Anderson and Mary Anderson Pickard, will talk about their father’s life and artistic and literary legacy during a panel moderated by editor JoAnne Pritchard Morris. Other sessions will include remarks by artist William Dunlap, publisher Seetha Srinivasan, Patti Carr Black (American Masters of the Gulf Coast; Art in Mississippi, 1720– 1980), Christopher Maurer (Fortune’s Favorite Child: The Uneasy Life of Walter Anderson; Dreaming in Clay on the Coast of Mississippi), and Patricia Pinson (The Art of Walter Anderson; Form and Fantasy: The Block Prints of Walter Anderson). Following these sessions will be a live broadcast of Thacker Mountain Radio and a dinner honoring speakers.

CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP, MARCH 25, 2009

The Southern Register

Fall 2008

Perry Smith

Margaret-Love Denman, former director of the creative writing program at the University of New Hampshire and currently coordinator of off-campus writing programs at the University of Mississippi, will offer a special workshop in conjunction with the 2009 Oxford Conference for the Book. The daylong workshop, titled “Mining Your Raw Materials,” will take place Wednesday, March 25, at the Downtown Grill on the Oxford Square. The workshop is open to 20 writers. The workshop fee of $250 includes evaluation of up to 20 double-spaced pages submitted beforehand, a private 20-minute session with the instructor during the March 26–28 conference, attendance at all conference events, lunch and refreshments on Wednesday, dinner on Thursday, and a box lunch on Friday. Also, each registrant will receive a copy of Story Matters: Contemporary Short Story Writers Share the Creative Process. The fee does not include lodging. First come, first served. See page 14 for additional details and page 16 for a registraMargaret-Love Denman tion form.

Two Literature for Young Authors sessions are scheduled for Friday morning. All Oxford-area fifth- and ninth-grade students (nearly 1,000 readers) will receive their own copies of books from the selected authors, courtesy of the Junior Auxiliary of Oxford, the Lafayette County Literary Council, and Square Books Jr., and also have a chance to hear the authors speak about writing and reading. Fifth graders will receive copies of The Mysterious Benedict Society, winner of the 2008 E. B. White Read Aloud Award, and meet the author, Trenton Lee Stewart, from Little Rock. The author and book for ninth graders will be announced later this fall. On Friday afternoon literary scholar Peggy Whitman Prenshaw will present an address commemorating the 100th anniversary of Eudora Welty’s birth and prepare readers for her Collected Stories, the 2009 Mississippi Reads book. To celebrate American Poetry Month, poets Jimmy Kimbrell, this year’s Grisham Writer in Residence, and Camille Dungy will read from their work and talk about the state of poetry today. Jack Pendarvis, last year’s Grisham Writer and author of two story collections and the recently published novel Awesome, will chair a panel on graphic narratives. Journalist Curtis Wilkie will lead a discussion of books about politics, with authors Hodding Carter III (The Reagan Years, The South Strikes Back), Julia Reed (Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena, The House on First Street), and David Maraniss (First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton; The Prince of Tennessee: Al Gore Meets His Fate; “Tell Newt to Shut Up!”). Following a break for dinner will be a session open to all participants who wish to read selections of their own poetry or fiction. On Saturday, educator Elaine H. Scott will moderate a panel titled “The Endangered Species: Readers Today and Tomorrow,” and Center interim director Ted Ownby will discuss “Writing after Katrina” with authors Page 13

who changed the subjects of their work after dealing with the effects of the hurricane. J. Peder Zane, of the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, will consider the topic “Writing Book Reviews” with memoirist and novelist Haven Kimmel, fiction writer Lydia Millet, and John Freeman, a prolific critic whose first book, Don’t Send: The Unbearable Tyranny of Email, will soon be published by Scribner. The slate of speakers is not yet final, but Jesse J. Scott, assistant professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi, has invited three authors to read from their work, and the Square Books staff is organizing a literary magazines session, to be moderated by Richard Howorth. Additional authors and others involved with the world of books will also speak at the conference. The complete pro-

gram will soon be posted on the Center’s Web site. The conference is open to the public without charge. To assure seating space, those interested in attending should preregister. Reservations and advance payment are required for two optional events: a cocktail buffet on Thursday ($50) and a box lunch on Friday ($10). Call 662-915-5993 or visit www.oxfordconferenceforthebook.com for more information or to register for conference programs. The University of Mississippi and Square Books sponsor the conference in association with the Junior Auxiliary of Oxford, Lafayette County-Oxford Public Library, Lafayette County Literacy Council, Oxford Middle School PTA, Mississippi Library Commission, and Mississippi Hills Heritage Area Alliance.

ELDERHOSTEL PROGRAM, MARCH 25–29, 2009 An Elderhostel program will take place during the 2009 Oxford Conference for the Book. Cost is $597 per person, double occupancy, for conference programming, a special Elderhostel-only session with a Faulkner expert, tour of Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, four nights’ lodging, all meals from dinner March 25 through breakfast March 29, and local transportation. Elderhostel participants must be 55 years old or older or traveling with someone at least 55. To register, call toll-free, 877426-8056 and ask for program 12317032509. For information, call program coordinator Carolyn Vance Smith in Natchez, 601-446-1208, or e-mail her at Carolyn.Smith@colin.edu.

Registration Information Oxford Conference for the Book and Delta Literary Tour OXFORD CONFERENCE FOR THE BOOK The conference is open to the public without charge. To assure seating space, those interested in attending should preregister. Reservations and advance payment are required for an optional cocktail buffet on Thursday ($50). All proceeds of the cocktail buffet on Thursday will go toward supporting the conference and are tax deductible. Participants are invited to make additional tax-deductible contributions to help support the conference. All proceeds for the box lunch will go toward support of the Lafayette County Literacy Council and are tax deductible. LUNCH ON THURSDAY, MARCH 26 The Williams Library will host a light lunch at noon for the Walter Inglis Anderson exhibition and talk. To accept the invitation, please check Friday lunch on the conference registration form.

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WORKSHOP FOR WRITERS The daylong workshop “Mining Your Raw Materials” will take place Wednesday, March 25, at the Downtown Grill on the Oxford Square. The workshop fee of $250 includes evaluation of up to 20 double-spaced pages submitted beforehand, a private 20-minute session with the instructor during the March 26–28 Oxford Conference for the Book, attendance at all conference events, lunch and refreshments on Wednesday, lunch and dinner on Thursday, and lunch on Friday. Also, each registrant will receive a copy of Story Matters: Contemporary Short Story Writers Share the Creative Process, by workshop instructor Margaret-Love Denman and novelist Barbara Shoup, writer in residence at the Writers’ Center of Indiana.

DELTA LITERARY TOUR This special event takes place March 22–26 and is $575 per person for all program activities, 10 meals, and local transportation. The fee does not include lodging. GREENWOOD HOTEL REGISTRATION Rooms at the Alluvian require a separate registration, are priced at a discounted rate of $170, and may be reserved by dialing 866-600-5201 and asking for the special Delta Literary Tour rate. Also call the hotel to inquire about rates for luxury rooms and suites. Additional rooms have been set aside at the Greenwood Best Western, 662-455-5777, or the Hampton Inn, 662-455-7985. Note: Contributions and payments must be made by credit card.

Details about the conference, tour, and workshop are posted on www.oxfordconferenceforthebook.com/. Fall 2008

The Southern Register

“Along with thousands of paintings, sculptures, block prints, and writings, Walter Anderson (1903–1965) created over 9,500 pen-and-ink illustrations of scenes from Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, Pope’s Iliad, and Bulfinch’s Legends of Charlemagne. He also drew inspiration from such sources as Paradise Regained, Temora from The Poems of Ossian, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Alice in Wonderland, and Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle.” —from Illustrations of Epic and Voyage, edited by Redding S. Sugg Jr. (University Press of Mississippi, 2006) Walter Anderson “is Mississippi’s greatest artist . . . [and] was also a poet and a writer who attempted to interpret the natural world of the Gulf Coast. . . . At his death 82 volumes of his journals were discovered. The Horn Island Logs of Walter Inglis Anderson (1973) contains portions of these journals, mostly written on Horn Island. A revised edition was published in 1985; both were edited by Redding Sugg Jr. —from Touring Literary Mississippi by Patti Carr Black and Marion Barnwell (University Press of Mississippi, 2002)

Images Courtesy the Family of Walter Anderson

Walter Anderson and World Literature

Images Courtesy the Family of Walter Anderson

Images Courtesy the Family of Walter Anderson

Ancient Mariner: Raising the Sail

Charlemagne: Adorned Bayard

Iliad: In Hot Pursuit

For tourist information, contact: Oxford Convention and Visitors Bureau 102 Ed Perry Boulevard Oxford, MS 38655 telephone 800-758-9177 662-232-2367 fax 662-232-8680 www.oxfordcvb.com The Southern Register

For information about books and authors, contact: Square Books 160 Courthouse Square Oxford, MS 38655 telephone 800-468-4001 662-236-2262 • fax 662-234-9630 www.squarebooks.com/ Fall 2008

For more information concerning the conference, contact: Center for the Study of Southern Culture The University of Mississippi P.O. Box 1848 University, MS 38677-1848 telephone 662-915-5993 fax 662-915-5814 e-mail cssc@olemiss.edu www.oxfordconferenceforthebook.com/ Page 15

OXFORD CONFERENCE FOR THE BOOK 2009 REGISTRATION FORM Photocopy a separate copy of this form for each registrant. Please type or print the information requested. Please return by March 20, 2009 PLEASE MAIL REGISTRATI0N FORMS TO THIS ADDRESS: OXFORD CONFERENCE FOR THE BOOK CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SOUTHERN CULTURE THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI • P.O. BOX 1848 • UNIVERSITY, MS 38677-1848 FAX TO 662-915-5814 • E-MAIL TO CSSC@OLEMISS.EDU

NAME _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ADDRESS ______________________________________________________________________________________________________ CITY ___________________________________________________________ STATE _____________________ ZIP ________________ OCCUPATION/POSITION _______________________________________________________________________________________ INSTITUTION/ORGANIZATION _________________________________________________________________________________ PRIMARY TELEPHONE___________________________________________ MOBILE TELEPHONE ___________________________ FAX ____________________________________________________________ E-MAIL _______________________________________ I request reservations for the following: ❏ Entire Program (all readings, panels, talks) ❏ If not attending entire conference, indicate day(s) below. ❏ Thursday, March 26

❏ Friday, March 27

❏ Saturday, March 28

❏ Library Luncheon on Thursday, March 26 (no charge) ❏ Cocktail Buffet on Thursday, March 26 ($50 contribution) ❏ Creative Writing Workshop, Wednesday, March 25 ($250) ❏ Delta Literary Tour, March 22–March 25 ($575) I am making a contribution in the amount of $ for the March 26 cocktail buffet and/or for conference support. I am making a payment of $ for the Creative Writing Workshop and/or the Delta Literary Tour. Note: Separate checks must be made for payments and contributions. Contributions and payments made by credit card may be charged together. ❏ Check, made payable to THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI, is enclosed. ❏ Charge to

❏ Visa

❏ MasterCard

Account Number _________________________________________________________________________Expiration Date _________ Signature ________________________________________________________ Date __________________________________________ I understand that refunds for contributions are not allowed and that payments for meals, the Writing Workshop, and the Delta tour, less a $10 service charge, are refundable if I submit a written request for cancellation, postmarked no later than March 16. No refunds will be made after March 16. Signature ________________________________________________________ Date ___________________________________________ I learned about the conference from (mark all applicable sources): ❏ Conference flyer

❏ Southern Register

❏ Other:__________________________________________________________________

Posters and t-shirts for the 2009 Conference, illustrated with a drawing by Walter Inglis Anderson, will be available in March 2009 for $10 and $15 plus shipping and handling. Please call 662-915-5993 or e-mail cssc@olemiss.edu to order.

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Fall 2008

The Southern Register

Trenton Lee Stewart Selected as Fifth-Grade Author Each year the Oxford Conference for the Book showcases two writers who specialize in books for young readers. All participating Oxford-area fifth- and ninth-grade students receive personal copies of novels from the selected authors (courtesy of the Junior Auxiliary of Oxford, the Lafayette County Literary Council, and Square Books Jr.) and also have a chance to hear the authors speak about their work during the conference. Last year’s authors were Christopher Paul Curtis (Bud, Not Buddy) and Margaret McMullan (In My Mother’s House). Other notable authors from past Young Authors Fairs include Laurie Halse Anderson, Karen Hesse, John Green, Mildred D. Taylor, T. A. Barron, and Sharon Draper. The 2009 author selection for fifth graders is Trenton Lee Stewart. The ninth-grade author has yet to be decided. Trenton Lee Stewart’s first book for children (and the 2009 Young Author’s pick), The Mysterious Benedict Society, comes in at a whopping 484 pages, but that’s nothing for today’s long-bookloving middle readers. Nearly every fifth grader in the world, it seems, has read at least one 600-plus-page Harry Potter volume, so any book coming in under 500 pages might seem to them like a walk on the playground. The real challenge for the writer of such a work, then, is keeping the kids’ eyes glued to all that black and white. And that is precisely what Mr. Stewart has managed to pull off. The recipe for such a book might look like this: take three genius orphans and one bespectacled (also genius) runaway, a crazy riddle-filled test, a white-haired tweedy narcoleptic, a maniac inventor with a penchant for green plaid, a brainsweeping, brain-reading machine, and a cafeteria full of the best junk food a kid ever tasted, then load it all up into a creepy old fortress of a boarding school nestled on a craggy island in the middle of shark-infested Stonetown Harbor and stir. The Southern Register

Clever, riddle-loving Reynie Muldoon, skinny (as a stick) Sticky Washington, the always prepared Kate Wetherall, and the diminutive but tough-talking Constance Contraire are the four children hand-selected by the mysterious Mr. Benedict of the novel’s title, to save the world. Benedict knows that the evil inventor Mr. Curtain is working on a system using television that can broadcast silent messages to all of mankind, essentially brainwashing them to do his bidding. Many important government agents have gone missing, yet no adult believes Benedict when he tries to warn them of Curtain’s dangerous ways. Benedict knows that only by sending innocent clear-minded children undercover into Curtain’s Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened is there a chance that Stonetown and the rest of the world can be saved. With only their wits in tow, Reynie, Sticky, Kate, and Constance enroll in Curtain’s school and, during secret meetings each night, they begin to unravel Curtain’s plot. As a young reader himself, Trenton Lee Stewart favored classic adventure tales like The Hobbit, Watership Down, and the Rats of NIMH. “I read just about everything I could get my hands on, which meant I read a lot of bad books along with the good ones. But my favorites were always adventures about kids in strange and difficult circumstances. . . . I learned to read with Spider-Man comic books, and Spidey has always remained my favorite. My reasons are the same as everyone’s: He’s a regular guy with a lot of problems, and he has to work hard for everything.” In real life, Stewart is himself a riddle lover and identifies the most with Reynie Muldoon, from whose point of view The Mysterious Benedict Society is mostly told. “I wish I had Reynie’s shrewdness and his gift of perception, Fall 2008

Winner of the 2008 E. B. White Read Aloud Award

just as I wish I could read as quickly and remember as well as Sticky does, and be as acrobatic as Kate, and have a fraction of Constance’s ability to say what she thinks.” Mr. Stewart lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with his wife and two sons. He graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, teaches creative writing, and loves chocolate-chip cookie dough. In addition to The Mysterious Benedict Society, which has a new sequel out in hardback (The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey), Stewart has written one book for grown-ups, Flood Summer. All Oxford-area fifth graders will have the opportunity to meet with Stewart during the Literature for Young Readers session on campus. All students, teachers, parents, and other fans of the authors’ work are invited to attend a book signing at Square Books Jr. on Thursday, March 26, at 3:30 p.m. Sally Cassady Lyon Page 17

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Fall 2008

The Southern Register

Reading the South Pelican Road. By Howard Bahr. San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2008. 325 pages. $24.00 cloth. With Pelican Road, Howard Bahr makes a fascinating departure from his well-received Civil War novels, The Black Flower, The Year of Jubilo, and The Judas Field. Surely few novelists have explored the mid-20th-century American railroad with the precision and care Bahr brings to Pelican Road. Acquainted readers will appreciate his signature stylistic presence with the bonus of this inspired subject. Writing about a railroad with its crew of war-damaged men comes out of the author’s personal history, as do the novel’s various locales. During the Vietnam War, Bahr was a gunner’s mate in the U.S. Navy and later worked as a brakeman and yard clerk on five railroads in the South and Midwest. Pelican Road itself is a lonely stretch between Meridian, Mississippi (Bahr’s birthplace), and New Orleans. Ole Miss, where Bahr served a number of years as curator of Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, and received his master’s degree, and Tulane University dominate some important character narratives. Bahr’s years as a college professor are on display at the novel’s outset, which opens with a witty little English composition by the niece of railroad brakeman Artemus Kane. Kane, who works on the Silver Star, a luxury passenger train, is described by Fanny as a former Marine “Corpral” and writer who has “written many stories and essays but has been rejected each time” and whose sweetheart, Anna Rose Dangerfield of New Orleans, “has actually written a book that is published, which aggervates my uncle.” Not to disappoint, she ends her essay with “In conclusion.” Knowing a little bit about Kane helps going forward as the novel de-

The Southern Register

picts a host of characters—mostly men who work two ill-timed trains— and shifts in and out of numerous points of view. The novel’s action involves the northbound Silver Star and the southbound 4512, a mostly empty freight train (save stowaway Sweet Willie Wine and some hogs), and their doomed 1940 Christmas Eve trip. While the train travels Pelican Road, a lonely stretch between Meridian, Mississippi, and New Orleans, it is the mental and spiritual journey of the men that dominates. Many are haunted World War I vets whose work on the railroad has ruined marriages and dominated their existence. Railroad work is edgy and dangerous. While they would all like to daydream, each is conscious of the risk. A moment or two misspent can mean serious injury or even death. Time, inconsequential to many, is to the railroad man “the stuff of life and death. Men died for a moment lost, or because they were tired and misread a train order in the dark.” The 4512’s conductor, A. P. Dunn, who is nicely realized, knows time and precision are of the essence. However,

Fall 2008

he suffers from dementia and often confuses this 1940 trip with a similar one from 1923. Dunn lapses in and out of the present, and his confused crew are too polite to openly question his ability. Dunn’s mental state is one of the factors contributing to this North and South collision (perhaps it isn’t entirely a non-Civil War novel). Another is Donny Luttrell, who serves out his penance at Talowah, an obscure train station without waiting room, baggage room, or running water, where no passenger trains ever stop. The Talowah job—“so lonesome and remote that nobody ever bid on it” —was perfect for Luttrell’s father’s purpose. He arranged Danny’s job to banish him from the Southern college he attended, most likely the University of Mississippi, after he got a young girl pregnant and failed most of his freshman courses. Danny’s memories of his brief courtship with Rosamond Lake, “a Chi Omega from a good Greenville family,” helps him pass his lonely Talowah days and nights. The Confederate cemetery near the university, private and remote, served as an unlikely location for college romance, and was the site of their ill-fated rendezvous. Danny, who is alternately burdened and comforted by recollections of his mother, who died when he was young, felt moved by the dead soldiers around him. Other students “found little purpose there and no meaning at all . . . they could discern no connection between their own lives and the rumor of nameless men long dead.” Man and machine are best described in this passage depicting Danny’s first humiliating effort at passing an order: “And all at once, the engine loomed over him, its bell tolling, tolling doom. The earth shook, and the very air seemed pushed out of shape as if by a towering storm. The engine erased the sky, extinguished the sun, filled all the universe with darkness

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Reading the South continued and spitting steam, moving fast, the drive rods like great mechanical arms reaching for him, the white-rimmed wheels higher than his head, the long boiler higher than God almighty himself.” The fate of these characters and many more unravel as the trains come closer to their destinies. All along, the day’s journey has been haunted by the death of June Watson, brother to stowaway Sweet Willie Wine. The night before the 4512’s Christmas Eve departure, Watson is tragically caught in the train’s couplings. Watson knows once he is released he is dead, and it his ability to communicate with the Roy Jack, a detective for the Southern Railway—this “rescuer” who can only hasten his death—that so unnerves. Watson asks Roy Jack to do the uncoupling. It must be, he says, somebody I know. News of the tragedy spreads quickly and reaches the crew before they leave. Their sympathy for Watson extends also to Roy Jack and the horrible task he is asked to perform. Throughout Pelican Road, Bahr is intent on examining all varieties of human interaction. Roy Jack’s gruff tenderness and respect for June Watson’s life is a powerful reminder, and there are many in this book, of our human connections, especially those we would rather not claim. Lisa C. Hickman

Larry Brown and the BlueCollar South. Edited by Jean W. Cash and Keith Perry. Foreword by Rick Bass. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. 184 pages. $50.00 cloth. Larry Brown and the Blue-Collar South, the first publication of literary criticism devoted entirely to the late author’s writing, builds upon previous, individual essays by scholars such

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as Matthew Guinn, Suzanne Jones, and Owen Gilman (among others) and may well forecast an oncoming burst of attention from the field. This is both inviting and appropriate, given the body of available short stories, novels, essays, and correspondence, and of course the Rough South/New South/No South region to which Brown’s writing is so intricately bound. Of course, Brown’s biography also remains compelling as literary focus—the high-school senior who failed English but taught himself to write; the firefighter-writer; the Oxonian whose sharp sense of place begged a lineage to Faulkner; the “King of Grit Lit”; the gone-toodamn-fast father, friend, contemporary, and guidepost. Yet alongside the praise and significance that scholarship imposes upon authors like Larry Brown, and perhaps in particular when examining a someone whose sentences so uniquely tangle literary prose, social discourse, regionalism, and even pop-culture reference—not to mention what Cash labels a merged “autobiographical and artistic focus”—criticism can threaten to diminish the force and idiosyncrasy, let alone the pleasure, of the writing itself. Put in a more

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practical manner, to quote Brown (via Robert G. Barrier’s included essay “Home and the Open Road: The Nonfiction of Larry Brown”), writing was about “drawing upon the well of memory and experience and imagination. . . . A writer rolls all that stuff together kind of like a taco and comes up with fiction.” Memory and experience as rolled tacos? This is exactly the earthy “stuff” that begs a presence when discussing Larry Brown’s work, even when critically analyzing his employment of region, gender, race, and perhaps most prominently, class. The collection’s10 essays effectively examine Larry Brown’s published work, from the socioenvironmental concerns of the novel Joe to the implications of the narrative structure in The Rabbit Factory, without casting aside the lure of the text itself. Editors Jean W. Cash, professor of English at James Madison University and author of a forthcoming biography on Brown, and Keith Perry, associate professor of English at Dalton State University, have compiled work that forefronts scholarship and the unpacking of the subject matter, without severing all ties to its creative benefactor. Beginning with the forward by Rick Bass, both a critical introduction and testament to the gentle, generous nature of his friend, Larry Brown and the Blue Collar-South aims to hold a discussion with, versus dissection of, the texts and as such doesn’t edge too far into academic colonization of the relatively unexamined material. Bass sets the tone for this balance, when in the opening paragraphs of the foreword, “A Tribute to Larry Brown,” he writes: “The essays that follow this foreword are scholarly treatises, not personal ones, but because Larry was my friend, it’s important to me to tell future readers what I know, what I worry they may not otherwise discern: that his novels are novels of manners, of deeply moral values, works in which every action has profound consequence and in which every description is either laced—if not

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Reading the South continued UNIVERSITY PRESS of MISSISSIPPI fraught—with beauty or laments the absence thereof.” Following the foreword, alongside Cash’s introduction, the studies then move through Brown’s fiction and non, from Darlin’ Neal’s analysis of how “vulnerability” and “unmasked” suffering counter the Southern masculine façade within Brown’s debut, Facing the Music, to John A. Staunton’s view that Brown’s posthumous A Miracle of Catfish “refuses to let regional, working-class characters be subsumed into the sprawl of national and homogenizing discourses.” The book concludes with an examination by coeditor Perry on the “building” of Larry Brown as marketable writer and with an afterword by filmmaker Gary Hawkins about the making of his film The Rough South of Larry Brown. By book-ending the scholarship with biographical pieces, Larry Brown showcases both the closeness of the writer to his environment and characters, as well as their contradictions. As provided, we can more fully consider the bound but inverted connection between Brown’s liberating drives through the Mississippi back roads and the namesake in his novel Fay, who as Robert Beuka points out “takes to the open road to escape the horrors of her family life,” but finds “only more of the same.” Understanding that, like the title character Joe, Larry Brown once took work poisoning trees, something he “regretted” but had to do to “feed his family,” serves as complement to Jay Watson’s “Economics of the Cracker Landscape: Poverty as an Environmental Issue in Larry Brown’s Joe.” And editor Keith Perry’s essay, “FiremanWriter, Bad Boy Novelist, King of Grit Lit: Building Larry Brown(s) at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill,” illustrates both the empowering and overpowering relationship that a simplified narrative or catchphrase can have on an author’s career. As proposed in Robert Donahoo’s “Implicating the Reader: Dirty Work and the Burdens of Southern History,” Larry Brown’s work actively engages the reader, forcing us to confront the flesh-and-bone gravity of not only story or character, but also the author’s environment and experience as a whole. Integrating critical focus and biographical sketch, Larry Brown and the Blue-Collar South promotes both the insight of scholarship, as well as the intimacy of its subject matter. A fine taco, it would seem. Odie Lindsey

Spice Up Your Reading! Delta Deep Down PHOTOGRAPHS BY JANE RULE BURDINE EDITED BY WENDY MCDARIS INTRODUCTION BY STEVE YARBROUGH Powerful images capturing the land, people, and ever-present spirits of the Mississippi Delta $40 hardback

Blues Traveling The Holy Sites of Delta Blues, Third Edition

BY STEVE CHESEBOROUGH Expanded and updated, an indispensable new edition of the acclaimed travel guide to the cradle of the blues $22 paperback

TVA Photography, 1963–2008 Challenges and Changes in the Tennessee Valley

BY PATRICIA BERNARD EZZELL Documentary photographs depicting the recent evolution of a powerful government agency which has greatly impacted the Tennessee Valley region $55 unjacketed hardback; $25 paperback

Photographs from the Memphis World, 1949–1964 BY THE MEMPHIS BROOKS MUSEUM OF ART INTRODUCTION BY MARINA PACINI An invaluable pictorial overview of African American vitality in a southern metropolis $24.95 paperback

You Are Where You Eat Stories and Recipes from the Neighborhoods of New Orleans

BY ELSA HAHNE

Ordering the Façade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women’s Writing. By Katherine Henninger. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 232 pages. 36 illustrations. $59.96 cloth, $19.95 paper.

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A tour of the delectable and original from thirty-three renowned home cooks in the Crescent City $35 hardback

www.upress.state.ms.us 800-737-7788 Page 21

Reading the South continued Katherine Henninger’s Ordering the Façade expertly blends an extensive knowledge of the history and function of photography in America with thoughtful readings of fictional photographs in recent women’s writing. The result is an invaluable contribution to the University of North Carolina Press’s New Directions in Southern Studies series. Henninger’s work exemplifies the sort of crossdisciplinary thinking currently energizing studies of region and place, at the same time that it meaningfully disrupts conventional thinking about frames, framers, and the power of the photographic eye. From the beginning, Henninger makes clear the reasons for her regionalized, gendered focus. The American South, she maintains, has been so frequently visualized within our national consciousness that to many minds it exists primarily as an image that has naturalized a certain set of competing “truths”: the South as poor, the South as gracious heir to a columned plantation past, the South as backward, the South as a haven from modernity, the South as convulsed around issues of race, the South as feminized. In fact, Henninger suggests, the photographed and fictionalized bodies of women have been the sites for much of that contestation. Discussing works written primarily since 1980, Henninger argues that a number of Southern female authors explicitly engage a history of visual representation that has essentialized gender and conflated it with region. In a place where appearance was long central to racial “placing,” images have held an uncalculated power to tell particular stories and unravel others. Henninger’s book is a look at how the façade of Southernness has been visually ordered, as well as an examination of the fault lines that are just as clearly part of the picture, if we look closely enough. Henninger’s opening chapter, “A Short and Selected History of Photography in the South,” is a re-

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markably lucid and concise treatment of her subject, keyed to 36 included images. The essay could almost function independently of the volume, making on its own an excellent contribution to, for example, any cultural or documentary studies course. Henninger’s main point, that “photography may encapsulate the complexities of southern representational politics better than any other medium,” seems inarguable after she traces the South through its visual incarnation in the Civil War, postReconstruction period, Depression era, and civil rights movement, with particular attention to photographers whose image-making has persistently helped to define the South—James Agee, Walker Evans, and Eudora Welty, among others. Henninger makes it clear, however, that art and documentary photographs tell only one segment of regional photographic history; she is interested as well in self-commissioned and family pictures, images constructed, at least in part, by their very subjects. Fictional photographs, Henninger maintains, are likewise the author’s construct, springing as they do out of at least a partial awareness of the po-

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litical nature of representation. Such images serve at least two functions: they stand in for narrative, and they extend narrative beyond the representational limits of the text itself. In these fictional photographs, she contends, “southern women picture the picturing, critiquing and revising the cultural visions that would still and silence them.” The three chapters at the center of Ordering the Façade each take up the work of a different subset of Southern women writers: white women of some privilege (Rosemary Daniell, Jill McCorkle, and Josephine Humphreys); African American women (Zora Neale Hurston, Julie Dash, and Alice Walker); and white women from Appalachia, with a primary focus on the work of Dorothy Allison. Using Daniell’s memoir Fatal Flowers (1980), McCorkle’s novels The Cheer Leader (1984) and Tending to Virginia (1987), and Humphreys’s Dreams of Sleep (1984), Henninger investigates the crippling effects for white women of internalizing the white male gaze that renders their bodies objects of fetish. All three women use photographs (real in Daniell’s case and fictional in the other two) to denaturalize the Southern patriarchal order. Yet only in Humphreys’s fiction does Henninger find female characters actually locking eyes with the male gaze instead of merely acknowledging its power. The women in this story consistently refuse to play their role, even though they know well what is expected of them. They recognize family photographs as frames that threaten to fix them in time, yet they resist being trapped images and so take “the South’s fixing of masculine subject/feminine object positions as a problem, rather than as a given.” Casting a long shadow on the peripheries of these texts are the vastly underdeveloped African American female characters who share some of the white women’s levels of awareness, but never their textual primacy. Henninger begins chapter 3,

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Reading the South continued “Cameras and the Racial Real,” by confronting that underrepresentation. She observes that “obsessive visualization of southern white womanhood leads to a myopic and willful blindness toward black southerners,” but in turning to the fictional photographs by African American women writers, she quickly demonstrates the high stakes attached to self-representation in these texts. Within the Western tradition of photography, the camera has often functioned as an imperial tool, establishing and then reinforcing the boundaries between subject and object, masculine and feminine, colonizer and colonized. Yet these are not inherent attributes of the camera itself; rather they are cultural signifiers, and Henninger’s point—that the camera sees different things depending on who operates it—is driven home by an extended comparison of the zombie photographs Hurston took and then included in Tell My Horse (1938) and those photos made of the same subject by a white man, Rex Hardy Jr. In Hurston’s work, and then that of Julie Dash and Alice Walker, Henninger maintains that we can “begin to trace a southern, ‘womanist’ history of African-American reappropriation of photography to transgress boundaries and reorder representational politics within the anthropological and literary fields.” The persistent racial subtext of photographs—call to mind any image of a black mammy and a white child—means that African Americans who create pictures find themselves engaged in a highly self-conscious project. Treating Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust as both film (1992) and book (1997), Henninger reads the prevalence of fictional photographs in those texts as the author’s effort to “picture” the subjectivity that white American culture has failed to see. Alice Walker’s works, particularly “Everyday Use” (1994), Meridian (1977), and The Temple of My Familiar (1989), are likewise “saturated” with photo-

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graphic images that meditate on how communities of people come to understand themselves visually when the images they repeatedly confront and the lives they lead are at odds. That sense of disconnection applies equally well to the poor white figures at the center of Henninger’s fourth chapter, “Envisioning ‘White Trash.’” She uses Dorothy Allison’s work, particularly the novel Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) and the memoir Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995), to pose a central question: “How have poor white bodies, particularly female bodies, been represented in the southern and national imaginaries?” Highly conscious of the visual tradition of framing Appalachia and poor white America as the antithesis of mainstream, middle-class culture, Allison creates fictional photographs in Bastard and incorporates real ones in Two that claim the power of selfrepresentation for what Henninger calls “the queered of southern culture.” She invokes here both the sexual connotation of “queered” and the broader reference of the term to that labeled “‘deviant’ in a southern economy of representation.” Without narrative, Henninger reminds us, pictures run the risk of retelling a master narrative they do not intend to serve. In this chapter, as in the two previous, she argues compellingly for the interconnection of the visual and the oral, suggesting that the writers of her study use that intersection to challenge directly the history of their representation. That contest over representation moves Henninger into the post-South for her final chapter, where she treats five works that take as their subject women who are themselves photographers. Invoking Lewis Simpson’s early use of the term “postsouthern” and tracing some of the term’s subsequent nuances, Henninger concludes her work by posing a question fundamental to contemporary Southern Studies: what are the “politics of creation” in a region now almost fully conscious of

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its performative, constructed nature? Focusing on novels by Anne Tyler (Earthly Possessions, 1997), Lee Smith (Oral History, 1983), Ann Beattie (Picturing Will, 1989) and poetry by Natasha Trethewey (Domestic Work, 2000 and Bellocq’s Ophelia, 2002), Henninger finds authors who openly question what the South is, who belongs to it, and what the function of region and place might be in a world where impermanence and the absence of singular reality are acknowledged and in fact embraced. That South— the one we live in—becomes more legible through Henninger’s work and infinitely more complicated in its multiple layers of self-awareness. Kathryn B. McKee

Farther Along. By Donald Harington. Milford, Conn.: The Toby Press, 2008. 225 pages. $24.95 cloth. It is a bittersweet pleasure to review Donald Harington’s new novel Farther Along—a sense of “ending music” pervades. The novel is divided into three parts: Solo for Hair-Comb and Tissue; Duet for Harmonica and French Horn; and Trio for Harmonica, Hair-Comb and Tissue, and Hammered Dulcimer. And the title is drawn from the funereal gospel song that says, “Farther along we’ll know all about it. Farther along we’ll understand why.” Harington (b. 1935) has published 13 novels and a book of nonfiction since 1965, and almost all his novels are set in the Arkansas Ozarks. A brief biography may be in order, for to his mystification and to the astonishment of his readers Harington remains the most unknown, yet one of the more critically acclaimed and highly esteemed, novelists in America. Though born and reared in Little Rock, Arkansas, where his first novel, The Cherry Pit, takes place, Harington

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Reading the South continued spent the summers of his youth in the mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, where his grandparents ran the general store. As Mississippi’s late novelist Thomas Hal Phillips said, around the stoves in those general stores farmers and townspeople traded the very best stories. There something both tragic and magical happened to Harington. All around Drakes Creek and the store twanged the musical dialect of the Ozarks before satellite television and free music downloads taught us how else to talk. For Harington, meningitis froze this tune in amber when the disease took his hearing at age 12. Throughout his writing, the dialect of his Arkansawyers is unique. Some claim it to be pure in its rendering, and it makes a special music progressing in all his novels. Harington started his academic and writing career in the East, where he taught with John Updike and began a long friendship with William Styron. But he returned to the Ozarks, to Fayetteville and the University of Arkansas. There he often conducted his coveted classes in art history by the unforgettable method of asking students to write questions on index cards, and then pass them forward. From this interaction, amazing lectures unfolded. This latest novel, Farther Along, harkens back somewhat to that first novel, The Cherry Pit, in which a curator from the East has given up on life and marriage and returned to Arkansas. It is appropriate that ending music would harken back to the first overtures. In rock and roll, even in some bluegrass performed live, ending music consists of the minor, augmented, or diminished chords in a crescendo pounded out at the close of a song. In literature there is ending music as well, often in the form of a whimsically indulgent, short novel with a sort of inward spiral to its journey. Often it comes at the late stages of a long, productive career. Reading

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Farther Along, a shorter novel than any of Harington’s other works, one may recall the experience of reading Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey or Gustav Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. Ending music prevails even though Harington’s narrator steps into Farther Along to roar—“There is no end. THERE IS NEVER ANY END.” Harington hates ending books and parting ways. In his fourth book, the hillbilly-Macondo romp The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, Harington switches to future tense verbs just to put off the parting of reader, narrator, and characters. While this may sound gimmicky to readers new to Harington, the technique does prolong the bittersweet feeling of the inevitable final pages of a book, and he employs this in several novels and even jokes about it in Farther Along. So what is ending here in Farther Along? Our unnamed protagonist, an antiquities curator, has returned to his ancestral homeland, the Arkansas Ozarks. He takes up moonshine and life as a bluff dweller near the ruins of the town of Stay More, the setting

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for a majority of Harrington’s fiction, which has now been abandoned and nearly wiped from memory. Our heroine, a bewitching history professor named Eliza Cunningham, arrives. She becomes possessed by the spirit of the long-dead mistress to the only Ozark governor of Arkansas before Orval Faubus, one of the Ingledews from previous Harington novels. And it is quite possible the ruins of the town Stay More cannot be rebuilt. There is a great deal of direct and veiled reference to Harington’s previous novels in Farther Along. So much that this book seems written primarily for the loyal reader who has been a regular traveler on the previous journey with Harington and the residents of his Stay More. Reading When Angels Rest or The Pitcher Shower or other Harington novels may bring the novitiate into readiness for Farther Along. The novel fits within Harington’s insistently quirky and beautiful body of work, but it is not the ideal entry novel to the others. Also Farther Along poses some challenges to the reader. This is not unique among Harington’s books. He operates, as Salman Rushdie says of Günter Grass, constantly without a net. In Farther Along, though, the rewards of stylistic daring are more subtle than Lightning Bug or The Cockroaches of Stay More. Part 1 is a journal of sorts from a grumpy, reclusive refugee from the antiquities world; in part 2 the narrator inserts himself so vigorously he converses with characters; and part 3 is epistolary. Thanks to the Toby Press, we have all 14 books in print. With them readers can warm up for the musical riffing of Farther Along. And another book, titled Enduring, is forthcoming (according to Wikipedia), so the bittersweet pleasure of parting and ending music will surely be prolonged. Steve Yates

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Reading the South continued

Dear American Airlines. By Jonathan Miles. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. 180 pages. $22.00. The debut novel from Jonathan Miles proves to be just as timely as it is timeless. Dear American Airlines takes the reader through the life of protagonist Bennie Ford in the form of a complaint letter to a faceless air carrier that has caused the latest misfortune in Bennie’s downtrodden life. The novel hit shelves this summer when airlines grounded flights, spiked fairs, and initiated checked-bag fees, making the premise of Bennie’s neverending layover in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport a well-timed topic. Yet the underlying story of Bennie’s internal struggle with a life wasted on self-indulged introspection and alcoholism makes this narrative of regret and sarcastic despondency one of universal measures. Bennie Ford is stranded in O’Hare on his way from New York to Los Angeles to attend the wedding of his estranged daughter. To pass the time, Bennie begins writing a scorching refund request for the cost of his cancelled plane ticket. The letter soon takes a turn through tightly woven transitions to tell of Bennie’s blemished past, an anecdote that often sarcastically, and amusingly, reflects on the present. “How pleasant to think of the past as something curable, as a benign rather than malignant cancer, no? Almost as pleasant a concept as a world in which tickets costing $392.68 earned you the passage to your destination on the date printed on the ticket.” The 180-page letter recounts the stories of several characters, most notably ex-poet turned translator, Bennie; his schizophrenic and strokeridden mother, Miss Willa; deceased father of Polish decent, Henryk; mother of his child and ex-wife,

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Stella; and Walenty Mozelewksi, the main character of a Polish novel Bennie has been hired to translate. The stories emerge in the form of digressions from the complaint letter, and from each other, providing comic relief, perspective on Bennie’s circumstances, and commentary on the American way. Miles’s ability to build characters is delightful. He describes Bennie’s father, the “man from Dixie Pest Control,” as one who “though a hired killer, he had the eyes of an old priest, of a dispenser of daily mercenaries, rather than acrid poison.” And while Dear American Airlines lacks a traditional plot, the anecdotes of the strongly crafted characters advance the story and keep the reader engrossed. During one flashback to Bennie’s childhood, the reader is taken along on one of Miss Willa’s schizophrenic road trips, where she and Bennie drive to the “Faraway” (also known as New Mexico) to begin a new life as painters and cowboys. The road trip turned kidnapping further reveals Bennie’s complicated relationship with his mother. Throughout the novel, the reader is transported from the cold concourses of O’Hare to warm apartments in

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New York and New Orleans, wintry nights in Poland, and sunny days in Italy. Miles’s narratives are equally at home in the varied environments and laugh-out-loud funny at points. While Bennie has lost much, his sense of humor is powerfully intact, and Miles’s ability to relate the hilarity of Bennie’s sarcasm is a notable talent. “The marriage was so brief I think I used the same bath towel for its entire duration.” Dear American Airlines is dedicated to the memory of Larry Brown, whom Miles considers a surrogate father and writing mentor. Brown’s influence is apparent in Miles’s attention to situational details and his knack for sharing sweet, sad emotion through straightforward actions and voices. Miles’s passion for words and the act of writing is contemplated and expounded upon throughout the novel, especially by way of Bennie’s job as a translator. Individuals offended by profanity will want to pass on Dear American Airlines and those looking for a read with an evident beginning, middle, and end may grow weary of the digressions that constitute the novel’s sequence of events. The digressions, however, bare the heart of the novel and reveal Miles as a Southern novelist on the rise. “I can’t even write a . . . refund request without detailing my lineage.” Mary Margaret Miller

Book Reviews and Notes by Faculty, Staff, Students, and Friends of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture

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New Volumes of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Released This Fall Now that the frenzy that accompanied the 2008 political season has all but passed, it is only fitting that we editors of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture look forward from our most recent accomplishment of the Law and Politics volume and onward toward the next volumes in the series, Agriculture and Industry (volume 11) and Music (volume 12). These two subjects have been particularly instrumental in defining the South in the global imagination, conjuring images of banjo and cotton pickers alike. Both volumes approach the subjects with a keen eye toward historical and contemporary trends, and publishing the New Encyclopedia as a series of individual volumes has allowed us to thoroughly address the subjects. Nearly without exception, the agricultural and industrial changes that have occurred across the South within the past 20 or so years have been considerable. The Agriculture and Industry volume elaborates on how—from the rise of aquaculture (“fish farming”) as a promising and lucrative agricultural industry, to the tremendous growth of the automotive industry across the region— the South’s primary economic sources have transformed into multibranched systems that, today, are at odds with the centuries-old concepts of agriculture and industry in the South. The “Agriculture” section of the volume, edited by Melissa Walker, the George Dean Johnson Jr. Professor of History at Converse College, takes a historical approach to addressing these agricultural changes, with essays covering topics such as African American landowners, women’s roles in agriculture, the agricultural practices of Native Americans, and the evolution of the antebellum plantation into the neoplantation of today, as well as the cultural significance of various crops grown across the South, such as apples, peaches, rice, and, of course, cotton. The “Industry” section of the volume, edited by James C. Cobb, the B. Phinizy Page 26

Spalding Distinguished Professor in the History of the American South at the University of Georgia, takes a similar historical approach to addressing the ubiquitous industrial changes that have occurred in the region since the colonial era. Essays cover topics such as “Antebellum Industry,” which included a vast range of products, including hemp, salt, timber, and turpentine, and “Globalization,” how the cultural, political, and economic integration of Fall 2008

the world into the South, and vice versa, creates diversity. Shorter essays include cultural biographies of Southern industrialists, including Sam Walton and James B. Duke, and discussions of various Southern commercial domains, such as the music industry, the liquor industry, and the railroad industry. Since The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture will consist of 24 volumes in all, the Music volume represents the midpoint in the series. This much-anticipated volume celebrates an essential element of Southern life and makes available for the first time a stand-alone reference to the music and music makers of the American South. Southern music has flourished as a meeting ground for the traditions of West African and European peoples in the region, leading to the evolution of various traditional folk genres, bluegrass, country, jazz, gospel, rock, blues, and hip-hop. With nearly double the number of entries devoted to music in the original Encyclopedia, this volume, edited by Bill C. Malone, a professor of history emeritus at Tulane University, includes 30 thematic essays, covering topics such as ragtime, zydeco, folk music festivals, minstrelsy, rockabilly, white and black gospel traditions, and rock. And it features 174 topical and biographical entries, focusing on artists and musical outlets. From Mahalia Jackson to R.E.M., from Doc Watson to OutKast, this volume considers a diverse array of topics, drawing on the best historical and contemporary scholarship on Southern music. The Agriculture and Industry volume is now available, and the Music volume, available for preorder, will be published in January 2009. Check the Center’s Web site for updates. James Thomas

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Southern Foodways Register The Newsletter of the Southern Foodways Alliance “The canned dream of the South is something I’ve resisted my entire career. . . .” —Barry Hannah, as quoted in the November 2008 issue of Garden & Gun John Rosenthal

President’s Valedictory Column In early September, my husband, Bill, and I participated in the opening weekend of Biltmore Estate’s first “Field to Table Festival”—a nine-day celebration of the mountain South’s food, wine, music, stories, crafts, and agricultural heritage. We gathered with Biltmore guests and an incredible roster of panelists, most of whom are longtime members of SFA, to discuss the power of food and sense of place. The festival was also an opportunity to explore Biltmore’s historic ties to sustainable agriculture, a fascinating Appalachian story overlooked in discussions dominated by the foodways of the plantation South. Over 100 years ago, the Vanderbilt family oversaw the creation of farms and gardens both to provide the food served in Biltmore’s elegant dining rooms and to feed the estate’s small army of workers. After a devastating week of watching Wall Street come precipitously close to collapse, we escaped the barrage of blaming and bailouts for the softly blue silhouettes of the Blue Ridge. In uncertain times and with a presidential election looming, our conversations about soup beans and cornbread, paw paws, and chowchow, chased by stiff drinks of corn whiskey and mellow glasses of Biltmore Estate chardonnay, were heartening. I thought about other historic times of economic distress in this country, when the market collapsed in the 1929 Depression, the financial crisis of the 1980s, and the economic downturn after 9/11. Just as in those unstable times, Southerners gathered around the table to restore a sense of balance and to find comfort in food and companionship. Throughout our weekend at Biltmore, we enjoyed meals and conversation with SFA friends Allan and Sharon Benton, Belinda Ellis, John Fleer, Ronni Lundy, Tim O’Brien and Kit Swaggert, Sarah Fritschner, Mark and Kathy Sohn, and Fred Thompson. We spoke about the economy and politics, about the “super-sizing” of corn and pigs, and their shift from local farms to large agribusiness. We discussed the need to bring these important discussions to the table at the SFA symposium, where we must confront the future of the world’s food. Just when it all seemed too overwhelming, we came back to what does make sense—Benton’s finely cured Tennessee ham and bacon, Belinda Ellis’s stack cake, Tim O’ Brien song “Cornbread Nation,” and the eloquent voice of Ronni Lundy, self-proclaimed member of the “Hillbilly Diaspora,” who described the powerful ties of food and music in Appalachia. We also talked about how women have supported foodways in the region—the mountain mothers who each day prepared hot biscuits for their families, women who gathered on summer porches to string and shuck beans, and the women on staff at Biltmore, who skillfully orchestrated the Field to Table Festival. I want to thank our friends at Biltmore Estate and, in particular, Elizabeth Sims, past president of the SFA board; Travis Tatham, and Heather Serre; chefs Brian Ross, Edwin French, Don Spears, Heather Gatesman, and Angela Guiffrida; and at Biltmore Wine Company, Jerry Douglas. I am grateful for their hospitality, for their leadership in creating a historic event dedicated to sustainable tourism, and for their continued support of the SFA. Marcie Cohen Ferris University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Marcie Cohen Ferris

Folse Award He was born in St. James Parish, just south of where he lives now in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, right on a big bend of the Mississippi. In 1978, John Folse opened the restaurant Lafitte’s Landing in Donaldsonville. For the next 20 years he traveled incessantly, introducing Cajun cuisine and culture to, among other far-flung places, Beijing, Moscow, London, and Seoul. More recently, Folse has distinguished himself as a public servant. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina chefs like Folse emerged as leaders, feeding the people of their communities. In the wake of Hurricane Gustav, Folse led a team that distributed over 400 tons of food to area shelters. In recognition of these and many other attributes and accomplishments, the Southern Foodways Alliance presented John Folse with our 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award.

Taste of the South, January 8–11, 2009, at Blackberry Farm • •

beall + thomas photography

Join us for Taste of the South, the annual SFA fundraiser, hosted by Blackberry Farm in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. Each year we honor the Fellowship of Southern Farmers, Artisans, and Chefs, a peer-elected cadre of our region’s most accomplished food professionals. Fellows inducted to date include: • Karen and Ben Barker, Magnolia Grill, Durham, North Carolina • Allan Benton, Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Ham, Madisonville, Tennessee • Leah Chase, Dooky Chase, New Orleans, Louisiana • Emile DeFelice, Caw Caw Creek Pastured Pork, St. Mathews, South Carolina (2008 inductee) • Betsy and Alex Hitt, Peregrine Farm, Saxapahaw, North Carolina • Sherry and Mark Guenther, Muddy Pond Sorghum, Monterey, Tennessee • Jessica and Jeremy Little, Sweet Grass Dairy, Thomasville, Georgia • Louis Osteen, Louis’s, Las Vegas, Nevada • Scott Peacock, Watershed, Decatur, Georgia • Glenn Roberts, Anson Mills,

Columbia, South Carolina Frank Stitt, Highlands Bar & Grill, Birmingham, Alabama Margaret Ann Toohey and David Snow, Snow’s Bend Farm, Coker, Alabama

In honor of new Fellow, Emile DeFelice, the following chefs will be cooking, alongside the talented roster of chefs at Blackberry Farm: • • • •

Mike Davis, Terra, West Columbia, South Carolina Donald Link, Herbsaint, Cochon, New Orleans, Louisiana Barry Maiden, Hungry Mother, Cambridge, Massachusetts Hilary White, The Hil, Palmetto, Georgia

Our featured winemakers are Mac and Lil McDonald, Vision Cellars, Windsor, California. Spirit providers for the weekend are Julian and Preston Van Winkle, Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery, Louisville, Kentucky. And our Scholar in Residence is Bill Niman, founder of Niman Ranch, proprietor of BN Ranch, and

Bill Allin, chef, Cakes & Ale, Decatur, Georgia, guest chef, 2008 Taste of the South.

this country’s most provocative and persistent champion of sustainably and humanely raised livestock. For reservations and special SFA-only rates contact Kelley Clark at Blackberry Farm: 800-557-8864, kclark@blackberryfarm.com.

SFA Podcasts Online Alan Pike

The SFA Viking Range Lecture, featuring a conversation with authors Bich Minh Nguyen and Monique Truong and hosted at the University of Mississippi on September 10, 2008, is now available as a podcast. Visit http://podcast.olemiss.edu/show-html. php?csecrn=NCP091107949 and click the link for the Viking Lecture Series to hear it online. Or visit http://podcast.olemiss.edu/ findcast.php and subscribe to SFA podcasts on iTunes. Soon after the October 23–26 Southern Foodways Symposium, session podcasts will be available. Pictured above, during 2008 Viking Range Lecture are, from left, SFA’s Melissa Hall, University of Mississippi professor Katie McKee, guest author Bich Minh Nguyen, SFA director John T Edge, and guest author Monique Truoung.

Outlaw Sunday: Celebrating SFA Feeds Literary and Culinary Outlaws the Debate The concept of the trickster is endemic in Southern artistry. Known in native folklore as coyote, the trickster has lived for years in William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. He is present in the kaleidoscopic Lowcountry legend-making of Padgett Powell. He hunts snakes and snipe, biceps and bicuspids bared, with Florida’s Harry Crews. He sits at the breakfast nook with poet and songwriter Vic Chesnutt, and slams Cadillac doors with the Atlanta hip-hop group Outkast. Two true tricksters are the author Barry Hannah and moonshiner-cum-NASCAR icon and culinary entrepreneur Junior Johnson, both of whom appeared at this year’s Southern Foodways Symposium, which focused upon regional drink. Hannah, born in Meridian, Mississippi, matriculated at Mississippi College before earning an MA and MFA from the University of Arkansas. At the age of 30, he turned the literature world on its ear with his debut novel Geronimo Rex, which won the William Faulkner Prize and earned a National Book Award nomination. Nurtured by Gordon Lish, Hannah’s work became known for its unflinching glimpses of Southern life, at turns fecund and fantastical. His sentences, the critics wrote, “crackled with energy” and were “charged with gunpowder.” Hannah is among the best we have, on either side of the Mason-Dixon line. Now an Oxford resident, Hannah is the director of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi. Junior Johnson, born in rural Wilkes County, North Carolina, first made his bones behind the wheel, running moonshine for a local bootleg operation. After a stint learning the curves on area dirt tracks, Johnson joined a fledgling stockcar-racing conglomerate known as NASCAR. Following some initial success, he was tossed in jail for a year. (John Law caught him working at his father’s still.) Upon getting sprung, he won six races the next year. Johnson went on to 50 NASCAR victories in his career, thanks to tenacious driving and the groundbreaking discovery of the effects of “drafting” behind another car. He retired from racing in 1966. In the 1970s and 1980s he became a NASCAR racing team owner. These days, he is an entrepreneur come full circle, selling a line of foods true to his youth—pork skins, country ham, and, perhaps most notably, his own brand of moonshine. That same outlaw spirit also exists in Southern food—arguably the most storied cuisine in America—if we open our eyes wide enough to see it. There are science-obsessed acolytes of Ferran Adria, like Sean Brock of McCrady’s in Charleston, South Carolina. There are big-for-their-britches upstarts like Richard Blais of Atlanta, boiling (and freeze-drying, and sous vide–steaming) the blood of their regional cuisine with flair. All are expanding our horizons beyond the so-called new Southern cuisine that has remained static for months of Sundays. They know also that if a thing does not continue to grow, as Dolly Parton once put it, it is “just like last night’s cornbread—stale and dry.”

Rock the Debate, a free festival held in the Ole Miss Grove on September 26, in conjunction with the first Presidential Debate, included a mix of music, speakers, video presentations, display areas, games, and, of course, food (curated by the SFA). After the festival, several thousand folks gathered at the Grove stage to watch the historic debate live on 14-by-18-foot HD television screens. This election cycle, pork barrel spending may be out but spending for pork is in! Jim ’N Nick’s BBQ sold hundreds of pulled pork sandwiches. Taylor Grocery fried catfish all day. And, thanks to the generosity of the Catfish Institute, Ole Miss faculty and staff members ate free. Taqueria del Sol came over from Atlanta and wowed the assembled with brisket and fried chicken tacos. Chef John Folse and Company offered up steaming bowls of Louisiana crawfish étouffée. Newk’s (an Oxford favorite) rounded out the menu with pimento cheese sandwiches and caramel cake. Henry Mencken

Timothy C. Davis

SFA Contributors Timothy C. Davis, associate editor of the SFA newsletter Gravy, is a Charlotte, North Carolina, native currently living in Nashville, Tennessee. He has written for magazines including Saveur, Christian Science Monitor, and Mother Jones.

Ashley Hall, an Alabama native and lapsed journalist, sells juice in Atlanta for Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant. She is associate editor of the SFA newsletter Gravy. Henry Mencken, a native of the South, now lives and writes beyond.

Marcie Cohen Ferris, SFA president, is assistant professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is author of Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South.

Nicholas Herbemont: Pioneer of American Viticulture “Where wine is most abundant, there is found the most sobriety.” —Nicholas Herbemont Nicolas Herbemont (1771–1839) could well be the most influential American vigneron that wine enthusiasts have never heard of. European wine grapes (aka vitis vinifera) are notoriously difficult to grow in the sultry South. Since colonial days, humidity and pests have thwarted the efforts of countless winegrowers. But Nicholas Herbemont, a native of the Champagne district of France and resident of early 1800s South Carolina, could not be deterred. He spent more than two decades of his life tirelessly tinkering with—and often failing at— more than 250 varieties of grape vines. His unlikely laboratories were an urban garden in Columbia and several acres at his country house in rural Richland County. Herbemont’s important writings have been collected into a volume, Pioneering American Wine, edited by University of South Carolian professor (and 2008

SFA Symposium speaker) David S. Shields, to be published this winter by the University of Georgia Press. Wine aficionados will appreciate Herbemont’s command of wine-growing techniques now considered industry standard. Most notably, Herbemont experimented with the grafting of American rootstock onto French grape vines, a practice that 50 years later would save all of the grape vines of Europe from the imported scourge of phylloxera. The technical sections are, sometimes, a bit tedious for the casual reader, but the sections outlining Herbemont’s social and agrarian values are surprising treats. More than a businessman, Herbemont was gentleman scholar, an ethicist, and “cheerful philosopher,” who eagerly shared his knowledge (at no charge) with any interested party. Herbemont opposed slavery for both “philanthropic and humanitarian reasons” as a “hereditary disease” of the cotton-addicted South. And he advocated sustainable farming and diversified crops. His most audacious proposal was for

government bankrolled vineyards in the farmland of the South Carolina Midlands. The poor soils of these sand hills, thought to be useless for growing crops, are actually more than suitable for raising wine grapes. Herbemont hoped to elevate the local economy through wine production sponsored by the state of South Carolina. “In a few years, this land, now a desert, would be comparatively thickly populated,” he explained, “a green place forever replenishing itself, convivial and modest, graced with hospitality and refreshed with wine.” Predictably, the conservative cotton planters of the day balked, and Herbemont’s utopian vision slowly evaporated from memory. Pioneering American Wine offers a straightforward sketch of a likable, Franco-American hybrid of a man, whose mantra—“deal honestly with the land”—still holds eyebrow-raising relevance today. Ashley Hall

Southern Foodways Alliance name company address city telephone

M E M B E R S H I P Please make checks payable to the Southern Foodways Alliance and mail them to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture University, MS 38677.

state

zip

fax

e-mail

❏ $50 student ❏ $75 individual ❏ $100 family ❏ $200 nonprofit institution ❏ $500 corporation

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, VISIT US AT OUR WEB SITE: www.southernfoodways.com or call John T. Edge, SFA Director, at 662.915.5993 or via e-mail at johnt@olemiss.edu

Wharton Photographs to Benefit Gammill Gallery and Center’s Documentary Studies Program

1. 2. 3. 4.

Church and Cotton Field, Coahoma County, Mississippi, 1999. Okra Madonna, St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, 2001. Confederate Memorial, Okolona, Mississippi, 2001. Church and Speeding Pickup, Bolivar County, Mississippi, 2001.

David Wharton

David Wharton has been photographing the rural South since he came to teach at the Center in 1999. To showcase Wharton’s talent and nine years of service to the Center, a dozen of his landscapes are now available for purchase. Proceeds will benefit the Gammill Gallery and the Center’s Documentary Studies Program. The black-and-white images will be available in various sizes. They are gallery-quality digital prints, made from high-resolution scans of the original medium format (2¼" x 3¼") negatives and printed with Epson’s pigment-based (three-level black) Ultra Chrome K3™ Ink technology. For more information about the prints or to order, please call 662-915-5993 or e-mail us at cssc@olemiss.edu. Look for the images on our Web site (www.olemiss. edu/depts/south).

Confederate Memorial, Okolona, Mississippi, 2001

5. 6. 7. 8.

Tractor, Cotton Wagon, and Church, Coahoma County, Mississippi, 2001. Storefront Church, Drew, Mississippi, 2003. Rural Cemetery and Cotton Field, Tensas Parish, Louisiana, 2003. Gentle Store, Limrock, Alabama, 2003.

9.

Cotton Gin, Como, Mississippi, 2004. 10. Cotton Wagon and Church, near Waterproof, Louisiana, 2004. 11. Abandoned Church, Brunson, South Carolina, 2005. 12. Midville Warehouse, Midville, Georgia, 2006.

David Wharton

Baptism held in a pond behind the Rocky Mount Primitive Baptist Church, Panola County, Mississippi, in 2001; from David Wharton’s 2008 exhibition The Power of Belief: Photographs from the Religious South.

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16th Annual Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival to Be a BBC Radio 2 Documentary Colby H. Kullman

This year’s 2008 Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival in Clarksdale, September 26–27, was blessed by the presence of BBC producer Carmel Lonergan, who taped the entire program for BBC Radio 2, which has an audience ranging from 13 to 17 million in the United Kingdom and via the Internet. Earlier in the year, she traveled to Clarksdale to make arrangements for her production and told Panny Mayfield, the Festival’s founder and director, “We have always liked the idea of telling his (Williams’s) story, of giving people an understanding of how important and relevant his work remains today. He touches people. It’s powerful storytelling, more powerful than walking into a cathedral.” Williams’s play Orpheus Descending was the focus of the 2008 Festival with the program beginning with a presentation by Kenneth Holditch on “An Overview of Tennessee’s Delta Plays with Special Emphasis on Orpheus Descending.” Quoting Williams, Holditch noted, “The Delta is so big,

Lynn Dickson (left) and Johnny McPhail performing scene from Summer and Smoke

so flat the Four Seasons could walk abreast of it.” In the Mississippi Delta of Tennessee Williams, Clarksdale frequently becomes Glorious Hill and Coahoma County turns into Two River County. Battle of Angels, Summer and Colby H. Kullman

Broadway star Joel Vig visits Oxford after performing at the Tennessee Williams Festival in Clarksdale

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Smoke, This Property Is Condemned, Baby Doll, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, and The Fugitive Kind are all set in the Delta. Amanda Wingfield’s 17 gentlemen callers and Blanche DuBois’s remembrances of her husband’s suicide at Moon Lake Casino (now Uncle Henry’s Place in Dundee, Mississippi) bring the Delta to life as well. Holditch also commented on the presence of the Delta in Williams’s short plays and his short stories. The importance of the Delta to Williams’s creative genius is not surprising as he lived with his grandparents in Clarksdale for a time when his grandfather was rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church, returned often to visit, and even toured Europe with his grandfather and a group of tourists from the Delta. Immediately following Holditch’s overview was the film version of Orpheus Descending starring Vanessa Redgrave and Kevin Anderson and directed by Peter Hall. Scholars Milly Barranger, Colby Kullman, Rhona Justice-Malloy, Travis Montgomery, Ralph Voss, and Peter Wirth then engaged in a discussion of the three filmed versions of this play (Battle of Angels, 1940; Orpheus Descending, 1957; and The Fugitive Kind, 1960) as well as the The Southern Register

1989 Hall production. Dealing with the eternal struggles of good and evil, life and death, salvation and damnation, light and darkness, cleansing and corruption, this play was first called Battle of Angels. A story of loneliness, passion, betrayal, and revenge, it recreates the Orpheus and Eurydice legend and places it in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. A lively discussion followed thanks, in part, to the many students from Hernando High School who came to the Festival. Luncheon at the Cutrer Mansion with readings from the Writers Guild as entertainment was the first of three memorable meals. Nicholas Moschovakis opened the afternoon with a presentation of “Tennessee Williams’s American Blues,” talking about everything from Williams’s collection of one-act bluesthemed plays, to his planned project of a blues album, to his ideas about blues songs. Jim O’Neal then gave an overview of Clarksdale, the Mississippi Delta, and popular forms of the blues during Williams’s lifetime. The stars came out early this year with late afternoon performances showcasing acoustic blues guitarist Daddy Rich followed by Williams scenes by actors Marissa Duricko, Jeff Glickman, and Erma Duricko. Two-time Tony Award–winning actress Tammy Grimes and Hairspray star Joel Vig brought this theatrical celebration of Tennessee Williams to a close with a presentation of Mr. Williams and Miss Wood by Max Wilk. Once again, these international stars brought their luster to Clarksdale with productions worthy of Broadway. The festivities continued with dinner and cocktails at the home of Mike and Tami Barr, the former mansion of Mississippi Governor Earl Brewer. A gourmet feast was created and served by Chef Robert Rhymes and the Coahoma Community College culinary students followed by monologues by Hernando High School students, music by the Coahoma Community College Gospel Quartet directed by Kelvin Towers, and a concluding bravura performance by acclaimed blues musician Charlie Musselwhite. A highlight of the Williams Festival every fall is the drama competition at the Georgia Lewis Theatre on the The Southern Register

main campus of Coahoma Community College. Monologue competition, scene competition, and a “Stella Calling” competition as well as awards for Best Costume and a Judges’ Award earn students and their high schools $2,500 in prizes. While the drama competition was taking place at CCC, Matthew Wohlgemuth presented his paper on blues music in A Streetcar Named Desire. Milly Barranger explored further the relationship between the playwright, his agent, and the Orpheus plays. Margaret Bradham Thornton, highly acclaimed editor of Notebooks by Tennessee Williams, illuminated the creative process of Tennessee Williams and his focus primarily on the Delta plays. Saturday afternoon included an organ recital by David A. Williamson at St. George’s Episcopal Church, the dedication of the Walk of Fame plaque honoring Williams outside the former church rectory, and porch plays featuring scenes from Tennessee Williams’s works performed on the porches of homes in the historic district where Williams spent his childhood. Featured this year were Johnny McPhail as Big Daddy and Alice Walker as Maggie in scenes from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Clarksdale High School drama students in scenes from The Glass Menagerie; Jeff Glickman and Sherrye Williams in The Glass Menagerie; Marissa Duricko, Johnny McPhail, and Lynn Dickson in Summer and Smoke, and Janna Montgomery in Orpheus Descending. Thanks to the quality of the performances, enthusiasm remained high throughout the entire afternoon. With music by the Wesley Jefferson Southern Soul Band, a barbecue dinner-dance at the Depot Blues Club inside historic Clarksdale Station, and an ethnic buffet at the Greyhound Bus Station, the 2008 Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival was brought to a dynamic conclusion, giving all who attended an understanding of Tennessee Williams’s Mississippi Delta, “this extraordinary landscape.” Colby H. Kullman

Fall 2008

Call for Papers on Tennessee Williams and Mississippi Delta Distinguished Tennessee Williams scholar Philip C. Kolin from the University of Southern Mississippi will be guest editing the Fall 2009 issue of Valley Voices devoted to Williams and the Delta. He solicits original (unpublished) manuscripts ranging from 18 to 24 pages, following MLA documentation, on Williams’s Delta experiences as reflected/radicalized in his plays, fiction, poetry, and films. Essays focusing exclusively on Williams’s biography as an aperture into the plays are discouraged. Instead, potential contributors should ground their work on critical ideologies that expand our understanding of the Delta as place, psyche, body, icon, text, or even fetish. Note that manuscripts will not be acknowledged or returned. If you want to receive an acknowledgment, please include a stamped, addressed postcard. Do not submit an e-copy. E-copies will not be considered. Please send only hard copy to Professor Kolin at the address below no later than June 1, 2009. Philip C. Kolin Professor of English University of Southern Mississippi Box 5037 Hattiesburg, MS 39406-5037 USA

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Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Celebrates Its 30th Year, Calls for Awards Nominations, and Invites New Members

Kim Rushing

The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters (MIAL) will celebrate its 30th year at a gala awards ceremony on June 13, 2009, at the Lauren Rogers Art Museum in Laurel. Awards honor the achievements of living Mississippians (current residents or former ones with continuing, significant ties to the state). Nominations of artists for juried awards in the categories of visual arts, photography, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and music composition (concert, popular) will be accepted from now until January 15, 2009. Works must have been shown, published, or performed in 2008. Judges for the various categories are chosen from outside the state. Among the founders of MIAL were William Winter, Cora Norman, Aubrey Lucas, Noel Polk, and Keith Dockery McLean. Recipients are awarded cash prizes and Mississippi-made gifts at the annual ceremony. Past winners include Walker Percy, Ellen Douglas, Willie Morris, Tom Rankin, Natasha Trethewey, Richard Ford, Samuel Jones, Lee and Pup McCarty, and Clifton Taulbert.

MIAL officers and board members pictured at September 2008 meeting are, left to right, front row: Bridget Pieschel, Columbus; Marjorie Selvidge, Oxford; Nancy Guice, Laurel; Marion Barnwell, Jackson; Nan Sanders, Cleveland; and Dorothy Shawhan, Cleveland; second row: Kim Rushing, Cleveland; Aubrey Lucas, Hattiesburg; David Beckley, Holly Springs; Noel Polk, Starkville; Will Long, Greenwood; Mark Wiggs, Jackson; Ann Abadie, Oxford; George Bassi, Laurel; and Shane Gong, Jackson.

Anyone may join MIAL. Only members may nominate artists for awards and may nominate more than one individual in any category. One page of

comments may be included in support of the nomination. Nominators should use the nomination form on page 35.

MIAL MEMBERSHIP FORM Dues July 1, 2008–June 30, 2009 Name ____________________________________________________________________________________________ Address __________________________________________________________________________________________ City _________________________________________________ State ______ Zip ____________________________ E-mail _______________________________________________ Daytime Telephone __________________________ Check membership dues category: ❏ I am a NEW MEMBER

❏ I am RENEWING my membership

❏ Student - $15

❏ Individual - $35

❏ Contributing (couples) - $60

❏ Sustaining - $125

❏ Institutional - $150

❏ Patron - $1,000

Make checks payable to MIAL. Send to Jan Taylor, Treasurer, P.O. Box 2346, Jackson, MS 39225-2346. NOTE: Couples who wish to be listed jointly as members, as in “Mr. and Mrs.” or “Rachel and Adam,” may enroll as Contributing Members or Sustaining Members and will be listed as such on the membership roll. Individuals may also enroll as Contributing or Sustaining members. Page 34

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Category Chairs

Award Categories: VISUAL ARTS (painting, sculpture, drawing, print, graphic arts, etc.) Eligible are up to 15 pieces first publicly shown or published in 2008. Submit CD, slides, prints, or published work. PHOTOGRAPHY (color, black-and-white, combination) Eligible are up to 15 photographs first publicly shown or published in 2008. Submit CD, slides, prints, or published work. FICTION (novel, short story, etc.) Eligible is work first published in 2008. Submit author’s name, publisher, title of publication, and date of publication.

POETRY JoAnne Pritchard Morris 801 Arlington Street Jackson, MS 39202 PHOTOGRAPHY R. Kim Rushing 406 South 5th Avenue Cleveland, MS 38732

NONFICTION (any literature that is not fictional) Eligible is work first published in 2008. Submit author’s name, publisher, title of publication, and date of publication.

VISUAL ARTS Marjorie Selvidge 405 Lakeview Drive Oxford, MS 38655

POETRY Eligible are up to 15 poems published individually for the first time in 2008, or a collection of at least 15 poems published in book form for the first time in 2008 (poems in the collection may have been first published earlier than 2008). Submit complete tear sheets or publication.

NONFICTION Dr. Peggy Prenshaw 105 Cirencester Drive Ridgeland, MS 39157

MUSIC COMPOSITION–Concert (song, opera, composition, instrumental, etc.) This award is for works first published or performed publicly in 2008. Submit evidence of initial performance or publication (book, CD, tape) in 2008. MUSIC COMPOSITION–Popular (blues, country, jazz, rock, etc.) Submit published scores or the commercial recording first released in 2008. Deadline: Nominations must be postmarked on or before January 15, 2009. Attach the artist’s representative work (slides, photographs, CD’s, books, etc.). Please mail the nomination to the appropriate address according to the awards category entered.

MUSIC COMPOSITION Sandra Shellnut P.O. Box 421 Pass Christian, MS 39571 FICTION Dr. Bridget Pieschel Southern Women’s Institute 1100 College Street, MUW-269 Mississippi University for Women Columbus, MS 39701

MIAL AWARD NOMINATING FORM - PLEASE PRINT CLEARLY Only MIAL members may nominate. To join MIAL visit our Web site at www.ms-arts-letters.org or use the form on page 34. NAME OF MIAL MEMBER MAKING NOMINATION NOMINATOR’S ADDRESS TELEPHONE: HOME

WORK

AWARD CATEGORY

E-MAIL MEDIUM

TITLE OF WORK FIRST SHOWN/PUBLISHED/PERFORMED NAME OF NOMINEE TELEPHONE: HOME

NOMINEE’S ADDRESS WORK

E-MAIL

NOMINEE’S DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH NOMINEE’S EDUCATION (SCHOOLS AND DATES GRADUATED, if applicable)

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eager to build a new society, although bitterness still runs deep among many people on both sides. Time in Dublin enabled students to see the role of the Irish Republic, as well as the Northern Irish and British governments, in providing context for rebuilding a society. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa is the most famous model of reconciliation, and since the peaceful end of apartheid in the early 1990s, that nation has offered a dramatic example of a society undergoing change. Dr. Nico Jooste, who works with international programs at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, was a key figure in organizing the entire program, and his lecture on South African history provided a crucial beginning to the group’s visit, which included time in Port Elizabeth, in the mountains near Grahamstown on the Eastern Cape, in the historic university town of Stellenbosch, and in Cape Town. Students met with political leaders and educators but also had the distinctive opportunity of talking to participants in the American and Northern Irish civil rights movements and in the antiapartheid struggle. They saw museums in all three societies that told the stories from the past, often revised versions of once white-washed stories that omitted groups out of power. They walked the battlegrounds of Derry’s Bogside Catholic neighborhood and the South African townships where the nation’s black majority was brutalized for so long. They saw women of the Mississippi Delta and of the South African townships working daily with young people, providing the education and cultural life in areas of continuing socioeconomic problems. The reconciliation trip was a comparative project that, in the end, showed how far the three societies had come from the violent divisions of the past. Charles Reagan Wilson suggested at the beginning of the trip that reconciliation is a process, and the first-hand encounters of the students brought into focus the differing stages of reconciliation.

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CONTRIBUTORS I’NASAH CROCKETT is a first-year student in the Southern Studies graduate program. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, she received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. LISA C. HICKMAN, a Memphis writer and independent scholar, is the author of William Faulkner and Joan Williams: The Romance of Two Writers. Her work appears in the Southern Quarterly, the Housman Society Journal, Teaching Faulkner, Memphis Magazine, Memphis Flyer, and the Sunday Des Moines Register among others. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Mississippi. DONALD M. KARTIGANER holds the William Howry Chair in Faulkner Studies at the University of Mississippi and is director of the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. In addition to his work on Faulkner, he has published articles and book chapters on a number of modernist writers and theorists, including Conrad, Eliot, W. C. Williams, Kafka, Hemingway, Welty, Philip Roth, Freud, Kierkegaard, and Murray Krieger. COLBY H. KULLMAN is professor of English at the University of Mississippi. Among his publications are articles on Tennessee Williams and other modern dramatists, Theatre Companies of the World, and Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights. He is coeditor of Studies in American Drama: 1945–Present. Odie Lindsey, research assistant for The Mississippi Encyclopedia, received an MA in Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. His wrote his thesis on the military tradition in 20th-century Southern men’s writing, concentrating on William Faulkner, James Dickey, and Larry Brown. He previously lived in Chicago, where he taught at Loyola University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He recently moved to Austin where his wife, Maggie Tate, is enrolled in the PhD program in sociology at the University of Texas. SALLY CASSADY LYON works at the Center, as the director’s assistant. She is a Gulfport native and Sewanee graduate. She lives in Oxford with her husband, Dalton, an orange tabby cat, Patty MacTavish, a dog, Scout, and a daughter, Lucy Rose Lyon, born October 21, 2008. KATHRYN MCKEE is McMullan Associate Professor of Southern Studies and associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She has published articles about various Southern writers, including Sherwood Bonner, William Faulkner, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Josephine Humphreys. She recently coedited a special issue of the journal American Literature called “Global Contexts, Local Literatures,” and she is currently coediting a volume about representations of the South in film. TED OWNBY, interim director of the Center, holds a joint appointment in Southern Studies and History. He is the author of Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1965–1920 and American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830–1998. He is working on a book about the conflicting definitions of family life in the 20th-century South. For his fiction STEVE YATES is the recipient of a fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council and two grants from the Mississippi Arts Commission. He has short stories in recent issues of Valley Voices and Harrington Gay Men’s Literary Quarterly and forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly and TriQuarterly. He lives in Flowood and is marketing director at the University Press of Mississippi.

Fall 2008

The Southern Register

Southern Culture Catalog Civil Rights in the Delta

Photo Courtesy Memphis Commercial Appeal

Journalist Curtis Wilkie in conversation with Patti Carr Black, Emmett Till’s cousin Wheeler Parker, Sumner residents Frank Mitchener and Betty and Bill Pearson, Henry Outlaw of the Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University, and former Mississippi governor William F. Winter. March 29, 2006. Color, 60 minutes. DVD1148 . . . . . . $20.00 Friends . . . . . . . . $18.00

Scene at courthouse in Sumner in 1955 during the Emmett Till murder trial

“Are You Walkin' with Me?” Sister Thea Bowman, William Faulkner, and African American Culture Overview of programs Sister Thea presented at the annual Faulkner Conference from 1980 through 1989. Produced by Lisa N. Howorth, Center for the Study of Southern Culture, 1990. Color, 30 minutes. DVD 1016 . . . . . . $25.00 Friends . . . . . . . . . $22.50 The Eleventh Oxford Conference for the Book Poster (2001) Poster features Richard Wright photograph by Carl Van Vetchen. M9903 . . . . . . . . . . $10.00 Friends . . . . . . . . . . $ 9.00 The Dain & Cofield Collection Posters High quality 18" x 24" duotone posters featuring timeless photographs of William Faulkner Dain Poster M1034 . . . $18.95

Faulkner’s Mississippi: Land into Legend Transforms the fiction of William Faulkner’s mythical Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha into the reality of Oxford and Lafayette County, Mississippi, with quotations from Faulkner’s writings correlated with appropriate scenes. The first motion pictures inside Faulkner’s home are presented along with rare still photographs of the writer. Narrated by Joseph Cotton. Script by Evans Harrington. Producer, Robert D. Oesterling, University of Mississippi Center for Public Service and Continuing Studies. 1965. Color, 32 minutes. DVD1069 . . . . . . $25.00 Friends . . . . . . . . . $22.50

William Faulkner Stamp Ceremony A 22-cent Literary Arts Commemorative stamp honoring William Faulkner was issued by the United States Postal Service during a ceremony at the University of Mississippi on August 3, 1987. The DVD of this program includes remarks by author Eudora Welty, Faulkner’s daughter, Jill Faulkner Summers, and others. Color, 34 minutes. DVD1231 . . . . . . $25.00 Friends . . . . . . . $22.50

William Faulkner and Eudora Welty This film features Eudora Welty at the opening session of the 1987 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. Welty reads from her story “Why I Live at the P.O.” and answers questions about her work and Faulkner’s. Color, 34 minutes. DVD1104 . . . . . . $25.00 Friends . . . . . . . . $22.50

Cofield Poster M1033 . $18.95 Faulkner’s World Exhibit Poster M1789 . . . . . . . . . . . . . $10.00

The Southern Register

Fall 2008

Page 37

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Sponsored by THE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SOUTHERN CULTURE at the University of Mississippi Published by THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS Chapel Hill

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON General Editor The Center for the Study of Southern Culture is currently in the process of producing The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, consisting of new material based on recent scholarship and updated material first published in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. The New Encyclopedia is being released as a series of clothbound and paperback volumes over the next several years, making each individual section of the original edition a handy, one-volume guide for those who are interested in a particular subject, as well as making the volumes more accessible for classroom study. Four to six volumes will be published each year, and the entire collection will contain 24 volumes in all.

CURRENTLY AVAILABLE Volume 1, Religion. Samuel S. Hill, editor. An accessibly written, up-to-date reference to religious culture in the American South, with topics ranging from religious broadcasting and snake handing to Native American religion and social activism. HB101.....$39.95 Friends....$35.96 PG102.....$19.95 Friends....$17.96 Volume 2, Geography. Richard Pillsbury, editor. Grapples with the contestable issue of where the cultural South is located, both on maps and in the minds of Americans. HB102.....$39.95 Friends....$35.96 PB102......$19.95 Friends....$17.96 Volume 3, History. Charles Reagan Wilson, editor. Examines the evolution of southern history and the way our understanding of southern culture has unfolded over time and in response to a variety of events and social forces. HB103.....$39.95 Friends....$35.96 PB103....$19.95 Friends....$17.96 Volume 4, Myth, Manners, and Memory. Charles Reagan Wilson, editor. Addresses the cultural, social, and intellectual terrain of myth, manners, and historical memory in the American South. HB104.....$39.95 Friends....$35.96 PB104....$19.95 Friends....$17.96 Volume 5, Language. Michael Montgomery and Ellen Johnson, editors. Explores language and dialect in the South, including English and its numerous regional variants, Native American languages, and other non-English languages spoken over time by the region’s immigrant communities. HB105.....$39.95 Friends....$35.96 PB105....$19.95 Friends....$17.96 Volume 6, Ethnicity. Celeste Ray, editor. Explores the ways southern ethnic groups perform and maintain cultural identities through folklore, religious faith, dress, music, speech, cooking, and transgenerational traditions. HB106.....$39.95 Friends....$35.96 PB106....$19.95 Friends....$17.96

Volume 7, Foodways. John T. Edge, editor. This volume marks the first encyclopedia of the food culture of the American South, surveying the vast diversity of foodways within the region and the collective qualities that make them distinctively southern. HB107.....$39.95 Friends....$35.96 PB107....$19.95 Friends....$17.96 Volume 8, Environment. Martin Melosi, editor. Examines how the South’s ecology, physiography, and climate have influenced southerners—not only as a daily fact of life but also as a metaphor for understanding culture and identity. HB108.....$39.95 Friends....$35.96 PB108....$19.95 Friends....$17.96 Volume 9, Literature. M. Thomas Inge, editor. Includes essays addressing major genres of literature; theoretical categories such as regionalism, the southern gothic, and the agrarians; and themes in southern writing, such as food, religion, and sexuality. Biographical entries introduce southern novelists, playwrights, poets, and critics. HB109.....$39.95 Friends....$35.96 PB109....$19.95 Friends....$17.96 Volume 10, Law and Politics. James W. Ely Jr. and Bradley G. Bond, editors. Combines two of the sections from the original edition. The law section addresses concepts ranging from law schools to family law, from labor relations to school prayer, and specific legal cases and individuals, including historical legal professionals and parties from landmark cases. The politics section covers issues such as Reconstruction, social class and politics, and immigration policy and politics. HB110.....$39.95 Friends....$35.96 PB110......$19.95 Friends....$17.96

For more catalog offerings, visit www.olemiss.edu/depts/south/our_catalog.html.

Books

All New, Limited Number of Copies Available The South: A Treasury of Art and Literature This richly illustrated volume includes wellselected texts and images from more than 300 years of life in the American South. Edited—and signed—by Lisa Howorth. 384 pages; 120 color, 100 black-and-white illustrations. Only a few copies of this 1983 publication are left. Cloth. B1006 ......... $150.00 Friends ....$135.00

Southern Culture Catalog The University of Mississippi Barnard Observatory • University, MS 38677 Phone 800-390-3527 • Fax 662-915-5814 Sold To:

Studies in English, Volume 15 1975 conference papers by Cleanth Brooks, William Boozer, Carvel Collins, Blyden Jackson, Richard Godden, and Elizabeth M. Kerr along with transcripts of discussions by Victoria Black, Christine Drake, Howard Duvall, Robert J. Farley, Lucy Howorth, Mary McClain, Phil Mullen, William McNeil Reed, Dean Faulkner Wells, and others. Paper. B1021 ............. $25.00 Friends .....$22.50 The South and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha 1976 conference papers by Daniel Aaron, Michael Millgate, Darwin Turner, John Pilkington, Evans Harrington, Shelby Foote, Linda Weishimer Wagner, Victoria Fielden Black, and Louis D. Rubin Jr. Paper B1022 ... $15.00 Friends .....$13.50 Cloth B1023... $30.00 Friends .....$27.00 The Maker and the Myth 1977 conference papers by Calvin S. Brown, Albert J. Guerard, Louis P. Simpson, Ilse Dusoir Lind, and Margaret Walker Alexander. Paper B1024 ... $15.00 Friends .....$13.50 Cloth B1025... $30.00 Friends .....$27.00

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Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference Proceedings Studies in English, Volume 14 1974 conference papers by Malcolm Cowley, Elizabeth M. Kerr, and David Sansing along with transcripts of discussions by Joseph Blotner, Evans Harrington, and others. Paper. B1020 ............. $25.00 Friends .....$22.50

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Faulkner, Modernism, and Film 1978 conference papers by Malcolm Cowley, Hugh Kenner, Thomas Daniel Young, Horton Foote, Ilse Dusoir Lind, and Bruce Kawin. Paper B1026 ... $15.00 Friends .....$13.50 Cloth B1027... $30.00 Friends .....$27.00 Fifty Years of Yoknapatawpha 1979 conference papers by Joseph Blotner, Michael Millgate, John Pilkington, Merle Wallace Keiser, James G. Watson, Noel Polk, and Thomas L. McHaney. Paper B1028 .. $15.00 Friends .....$13.50 Cloth B1029... $30.00 Friends .....$27.00

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