the THE NEWSLETTER OF THE
CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SOUTHERN CULTURE • SUMMER 2009
THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI
New Southern Studies Faculty Member Zandria Robinson James Haile
Z
andria Robinson will join the faculty in the fall as the new McMullan Assistant Professor of Southern Studies and Assistant Professor of Sociology. Robinson, who calls herself “an urban Southerner,” grew up in Memphis, the daughter of a mother raised in Memphis and a father from Coahoma County, Mississippi. She says she grew up thinking about the differences between city people and country people and has never really stopped. Describing herself as a nosy person from early childhood, Robinson was drawn to academic projects that allow her to talk and listen to people. With her six-year-old daughter, Assata, she will be moving to Oxford in August. As an undergraduate the University of Memphis, Robinson became interested in Southern topics as a subject for academic study in English classes, reading the works of Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Studying African American literature raised questions about the idea of reclaiming the South, an issue that seemed especially intriguing to Robinson, who felt many of the African Americans she knew had already claimed the South. Of the authors she read, Zora Neale Hurston stood out as particularly inspiring because she both wrote fiction and
Zandria Robinson did social science research. Robinson recalls that a turning point for her was an undergraduate class on sociology and race. She started studying sociology and went on to get an MA in the discipline at the University of Memphis. Robinson says she faces a tension or perhaps even a contradiction within her own work. She loves the empirical side of sociology, with the potential to counting things, deduce patterns, and prove arguments, but she is sometimes drawn to subjects that are hard to count.
For her graduate work, Robinson went to Northwestern University, home of many of the country’s leading sociologists, with the goal of doing ethnographic work in a Southern city. She discovered that few urban sociologists were studying the American South, perhaps because of the assumption that all American cities and the issues they faced were more or less alike. When asked for a short version of the question that motivates her research, Robinson continued on page 35
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It is sad to say that the topic of the recession dominates so many converPublished 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 www.olemiss.edu/depts/south
IN THIS ISSUE Summer 2009 1 New Southern Studies Faculty Member Zandria Robinson 2 Director’s Column 3 Living Blues News 3 Camarigg Delivers McCarthy Paper 4 Brown Bag Schedule: Fall 2009 4 Gammill Gallery Exhibition Schedule 5 Field School on Religious Music 5 Global South Events 6 SST Students and Alums Win Awards 7 2010 F&Y: “Faulkner and Film” 8 Center’s New Development Officer 8 Mark Your Calendars 8 Teaching Garden Notes 9 Warner’s A Winner 10 Beyond Barnard: Our Alumni 12 Mississippi Reads Welty 12 Williams Festival in Clarksdale 13 Williams Festival in Columbus 14 Intruder in the Dust Screening 15 2010 Natchez Literary Celebration 15 Walter Anderson and World Literature 16 Walter Anderson Research Collection 17 Pedal Pusher: Fragments of Walter Anderson’s Summer Bike Ride 18 Oxford Conference for the Book: Seetha Srinivasan’s Reflections 19 2010 Delta Literary Tour and Oxford Conference for the Book 20 MIAL Awards Gala 21 Reading the South: Reviews & Notes 29 Southern Foodways Alliance News 31 Pictorial History of Oxford 32 2009 F&Y: “Faulkner and Mystery” 34 2009 Faulkner Fringe Festival 35 Eudora Welty Awards 36 NESC Editors at Louisiana Festival 36 Contributors 37 Southern Culture Catalog Items 39 New Encyclopedia Discount Offer 40 Address Section/Mailing List 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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sations. When professors from different universities and colleges gather, talk usually moves quickly to terms like unpaid leave, furloughs, cutbacks, and hiring freezes. Discussions can sound like people talking about a storm: “How hard were you hit?” or, “we think we dodged the worst of it.” In a time when tax revenue, endowment income, and gifts can all be somewhat tenuous, what can an institution like the Center for the Study of Southern Culture do? Some fairly obvious steps are good ideas at any time. We should work more as partners with other groups, write grant proposals for things we really want to do, and find ways to economize without sacrificing things that are most important. And, as always, we can try to have new ideas about the American South and how to study it. For Southern Studies, recessions and depressions lead a historian like me to think about the prominent role the South had in American policy and American thought in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Part of the language of government policy, including Franklin Roosevelt’s famous statement that the South was “the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem,” intended first to demonstrate that the region was poor before policy changes could then try to address that poverty. That statement was the most quoted part of The Report on Economic Conditions of the South, a pamphlet the federal government published in 1938. The report was the work of about two dozen Southern activists, academics, journalists, and government figures. In stark and straightforward language with plenty of comparative statistics, it depicted the South as backward, with poor land, low incomes and wages, limited opportunities for credit and consumer spending, poor health, declining housing, and high illiteracy. What might it look like if a new committee today tried to write a new Report on Economic Conditions in the South for 2009? Would that committee call today’s South “the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem”? One certainly could make that argument, given the high rates of poverty in the South, but I don’t hear many people saying that today, with most press attention concentrating on financial institutions and nationwide problems like unemployment and home foreclosure. Despite that point, or perhaps because of it, it might be intriguing to imagine what a new report for 2009 might say. Some topics would look fairly similar, with emphases on poverty rates, especially among women and children, significant problems with health, education, the environment, and wages. The problems in many of those areas would be different. For example, obesity, heart problems, cancer, and diabetes (and also government policies about health and insurance) would replace discussion of pellagra, malaria, and tuberculosis. A new report would continue to discuss low wages, but it would deal with factory jobs the South has been losing to lower-wage economies, whereas the early report dealt with the South attracting lowwage factory jobs from other parts of the United States. Some parts of a new report would look very different. Agriculture would continue to be important, but discussions of tenancy and sharecropping would not have featured roles. A new report would deal far more with issues of race—a point on which the 1938 report had little to say—and it would have to face questions of structural inequality and the successes and failures of government policies that emerged from the civil rights movement. A new report would deal with new immigrants, especially Hispanics in the South, and it should deal with global issues of poverty and the movement of workers. A new report would likely address the number of Southerners who are in prison. Depending on its purposes and politics, a new report might also discuss some clear or qualified economic successes of high-technology economies, tourism, creative economies, some urban and suburban centers, and numerous examples of Southern life that look relatively little like the South of the 1938. A new report would deal with a two-party political system. The truth is that, at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, it is not our responsibility to write a new report on economic conditions in the South (although some of us might like a seat on that imaginary committee). It is, however, part of our job to think continued on page 3
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about the differences between past issues and present issues—who defines them, how they define them, who is left out, and who might be posing a different set of questions—and to consider the relationship between those issues and creative expression. Surely one of the most intriguing features of the 1938 report is that the federal government and a group of Southern activists believed they needed to prove the existence of poverty in the South. The idea that Southern poverty needed to be publicized, humanized, and explained inspired, or at least was part of, some startling creativity in the 1930s and 1940s. The Farm Security Administration photographs and related works like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, 12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright, You Have Seen Their Faces by Margaret Bourke White and Erskine Caldwell, and the film The River by Pare Larentz were designed to put human faces on social problems and inspire a national audience to see Southern poverty as a national tragedy. Fiction and memoirs by Richard Wright, Caldwell, and T. S. Stribling and sociological works by Margaret Jarman Hagood, Charles S. Johnson, and Arthur Raper, all tried to make vivid the lives of poor people during the Depression. Music also brought hard times to life, with the specificity of blues and country lyrics. The topic attracted authors from outside the region, like John Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath, who dramatized how poverty followed many migrants as they left the South. And in considering the role that Southern poverty played in the national imagination, one might remember that the most popular movie of the Depression years featured a once-wealthy young woman in Georgia vowing never to go hungry again. Seventy years after The Report on Southern Economic Conditions, it seems unlikely that anyone would have to prove that the South is comparatively poor or that significant poverty exists in the region. In Southern Studies it is our job to be studying and perhaps taking part in new thinking and new forms of expression about problems people in the region are facing. Along with wondering what a new report might look like, we should wonder what forms of creativity, both artistic and political, will take. That creativity will look and sound different, with different accents, different technology, and at least some different questions. While some readers might long for updated versions of American Hunger or Mothers of the South or Tobacco Road, what we need especially are stories about the lives of people facing contemporary issues, whether those stories seem old or new. At the Center, we say goodbye to two friends who taught Southern Studies classes as visiting faculty members in 2008– 2009. Beth Boyd is moving to Chicago to complete her book on recent Southern constructions of femininity. Justin Nystrom, whose book on New Orleans history will come out soon, is moving to New Orleans to teach history at Loyola. Best of luck to both, and thanks. We welcome colleagues Adam Gussow and Charles Reagan Wilson back from their sabbaticals. Adam used his sabbatical to work on a project on the crossroads myth in the blues, and Charles spent his sabbatical completing a collection of his essays, a new edition of his Baptized in Blood, and lots of encyclopedias. Nancy Bercaw spent the past year at the Huntington Library in California and will study at the Smithsonian during the fall semester before returning in January in time to teach Southern Studies 602. And all of us say welcome to our new faculty member, Zandria Robinson, who is profiled on page 1. Ted Ownby The Southern Register
Living Blues News The September 2009 issue of Living Blues is on newsstands now featuring a cover story on venerable Chicago slideman Lil’ Ed Williams. Williams and his band, the Blues Imperials, celebrate a triumphant year with a popular new album and a 2009 Blues Music Award for Band of the Year. The new issue also features a portrait of Delta-raised bluesman Lonnie Shields. Shields sheds light on the Clarksdale scene of years past. Finally, we present our 2009 Living Blues Awards, with B. B. King winning Album of the Year for his newest release, One Kind Favor. Plans are under way for our next Blues Symposium, to be cosponsored with Dominican University in Chicago. The event will occur just prior to next year’s Chicago Blues Festival, June 9–11, 2010. The symposium will mark the 100th birthday of blues legend Howlin’ Wolf and the 40th anniversary of Living Blues magazine. Further details will appear in the November issue of Living Blues. To subscribe to Living Blues, please visit www.livingblues. com or call 662-915-5742.
Camarigg Delivers McCarthy Paper Mark Camarigg, publications manager of Living Blues, delivered a paper at the 20th Annual American Literature Association Conference in Boston, May 21– 24, 2009. The paper, “No Quarks for Old Men: The Influence of Complex Adaptive Systems Theory on Cormac McCarthy,” detailed the influence of physicist Murray Gell-Mann on the author’s post–Border Trilogy work. Camarigg contends McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men incorporates a variety of scientific themes, including quantum physics and chaos theory. Significantly, McCarthy’s narrative reveals numerous features of a complex adaptive system, the primary focus of researchers at Gell-Mann’s Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Camarigg will be discussing this topic at a Brown Bag presentation in Barnard Observatory at noon on November 18.
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Center for the SEPTEMBER 9 “Strawberry Plains Audubon Center: Where History and Nature Meet” Katie Boyle, Outreach/Education Director, Strawberry Plains Audubon Center Holly Springs, Mississippi 16 “Oxford’s Music Scene: A Conversation with the ‘Hines Brothers’” Jim Dees, Writer, Radio Personality Jimmy Phillips, Songwriter Ron Shapiro, Cultural Leader
Study of Southern Culture The University of Mississippi
Brown Bag Lunch and Lecture Series Fall 2009 The Brown Bag Luncheon Series takes place each Wednesday at noon in the Barnard Observatory Lecture Hall during the regular academic year.
14 “A Conversation with Beth Moreton about Wal-Mart, Evangelicals, and Extreme Capitalism” Bethany Moreton, Assistant Professor of History and Women’s Studies, University of Georgia
23 “Slavery, Irish Immigration, and American Gynecology” Deidre Cooper Owens, Assistant Professor of History 30 “The Piney Woods School and the Legacy of Dr. Laurence Jones” John Long, Visiting Scholar at Johnson State University Chicago, Illinois OCTOBER 7 “Primal Scenes, Preachers’ Blues: Why the Devil’s Music Comes from the Delta” Adam Gussow, Assistant Professor of English and Southern Studies
21 “Studies in Documentary Fieldwork 2009—Films: Tortillas de Maiz, Honey Bee Bakery, and A Soul Reviving Feast” Undergraduate Students Holly Acey, Caroline Graham, and Corynne Ware Southern Studies Graduate Students Miles Laseter, Ferriday Mansel McCarthy, Duvall Osteen, Alan Pike, Sarah Simonson, and Melanie Young 28 “Voices of Mississippi Women: Selections from Oral Histories of MSCW Alumnae, 1926–1957” Bridget Pieschel, Professor of
English, Director of the Oral History Project, Mississippi University for Women, Columbus, Mississippi NOVEMBER 4 “A Sacrifice for Human Dignity: Child Activism in the Jackson Freedom Struggle” Daphne Chamberlain, Visiting Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies 11 “Race, Place, and Space in the Urban South” Wanda Rushing, Associate Professor of Sociology, Director of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Memphis 18 “No Quarks for Old Men: The Influence of Physics on Cormac McCarthy” Mark Camarigg, Publications Manager, Living Blues Magazine
Exhibition Schedule August 17–October 16, 2009 Vaughn Sills African American Gardens 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. Page 4
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David Wharton
The Center hosted the Library of Congress Field School for the third year in a row, from May 11 through May 23, 2009. One field observation was of a Sacred Harp singing at Concord Baptist Church in Calhoun County on Sunday, May 17. Those in attendance were (left to right) Holley Acey, Stephanie Little, Jamison Hollister, Kevin Dyess, Miles Laseter, Duvall Osteen, David Taylor (head of research and programs at the Folklife Center), Corynne Ware, Melanie Young, and David Wharton (not pictured).
Faculty Continue Study of Global South The Interdisciplinary Faculty Working Group at the University of Mississippi has been engaged for the past two years in collective reading and discussion centered on the topic of the “Global South.” The next lecture and workshop series is planned for September 10 and 11, 2009. The lectures will focus on historical dimensions of the Global South, specifically the movement of Africans and African Americans within the international context of the African diaspora. We have invited two speakers to present public plenary lectures and meet with the faculty to discuss various theoretical aspects of Global South studies and also practical, institutional initiatives. The guest speakers are Michael Gomez and Gaurav Desai. Michael Gomez, professor of History, Middle Eastern, and Islamic Studies at New The Southern Register
York University, will lecture on “African Society and Culture in the Colonial and Antebellum South”; his address centers on the reconstruction of various African codes of ethics, beliefs, and relations, not as specific “Africanisms,” but as indices of transnational transformations in the Global South. Gaurav Desai, professor of English at Tulane University and scholar in residence at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, will deliver a lecture titled “Oceans Connect: The Atlantic and Indian Ocean Imaginaries.” Desai’s current research focuses primarily on the Indian Ocean in a global and transhistorical context. Both lectures are scheduled for Thursday, September 10: the first at 4:00 p.m. to be followed by informal discussion, the second at 6:30 p.m. During Friday’s workshop session, we plan Summer 2009
to discuss the significance of cultural migrations in the Global South, specifically those that connect Mississippi to the African diaspora, how such a focus on movement and migration might transform our understanding of the American South, and what such a new understanding might yield for our teaching and institutional practices in the humanities and social sciences. The faculty working group on the Global South is funded by the Office of Research, and visits are made possible by the generous contributions of many departments and institutes across campus. Recent guests to participate were Professor Caroline Levander (Rice University), Professor Walter Mignolo (Duke University), and Professor Saskia Sassen (University of Chicago). Annette Trefzer Page 5
Southern Studies Students and Alumni Keep Winning Awards of All Kinds David Wharton
As we take pleasure in the success of the Phi Beta Kappa chapter that outgoing Chancellor Robert Khayat worked so hard to build for the University, we should applaud the fact that three 2009 Southern Studies students—Matt Hopper, Woody Herrington, and Brock Herrington—won entry into PBK. The Center has had an important role in the University’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Professor Katie McKee has completed her successful two-year term as PBK chapter president, and former Center faculty member Robbie Ethridge also served as chapter president. Other honors went to BA student Brock Herrington and graduate student Ben Gilstrap, who both won election to the honorary society Phi Kappa Phi. Matt Hopper graduated in the Honors College with a thesis on the career of L. Q. C. Lamar. Graduating MA student Mary Warner won two awards. She won a Universitywide Graduate Student Achievement Award and also won the Lucille and Motee Daniels Award for the best Southern Studies graduate paper for
Among Southern Studies spring 2009 graduates were (front) Jennifer Lawrence, (row 2, from left) Mary Warner, Matt Hopper, Sarah Simonson, (row 3, from left) Nelson Griffin, Rebecca Batey, and Andrew Mullins.
Coterie Award winner Mallory Blasingame (left) with Katie McKee
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tary film, a version of which was shown at the Oxford summer film festival. In spring 2009, the Documentary Studies class David Wharton taught along with Andy Harper and Joe York concentrated on making documentary David Wharton
David Wharton
her thesis, directed by David Wharton, on the history of Thacker Mountain Radio. That thesis, surely the first time a Southern Studies graduate student studied the work of former Southern Studies graduate students, included a documen-
PBK grad Matt Hopper with Katie McKee Summer 2009
The Southern Register
films about Southern foodways. The Southern Foodways Alliance put up a prize for the best film, and the winners were Ferriday Mansel, Duvall Osteen, and Alan Pike, for their film on taco makers in northeast Mississippi. Honorable Mention went to Miles Laseter, Sarah Simonson, and Melanie Young for a film on the tradition of dinner on the grounds in Southern churches. Mallory Nicole Blasingame (English major) won the Coterie Club award for her Honors College thesis (directed by Katie McKee) on the works of Eudora Welty, and Joseph Green won the Gray Award for his Honors College thesis (directed by Ted Ownby) on the end of prohibition in Mississippi. English Department graduate student Ben Child won the Peter Aschoff award for the study of Southern music for a paper (in Jay Watson’s graduate seminar) on the meanings of the South in Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft. At graduation ceremonies, we learned that Ellen Meacham (MA 2003), who teaches in journalism and serves as career coordinator for journalism students, won the University-wide Frist Award for service to students. The awards, one for faculty and one for staff, were established with a gift from the late Dr. Thomas F. Frist Sr., of Nashville, a 1930 UM graduate. “I benefited from my professors when I was an undergraduate at Ole Miss,” said Meacham, who received a BA on 1990. “I was shy and some professor put their hands between my shoulder blades and figuratively pushed me and challenged me to write for the Daily Mississippian, to put my work in front of 10,000 readers. Next thing I knew, I was hooked. I simply want to do the same for today’s students.” In May, John T. Edge was one of five winners of the James Beard Foundation Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America Awards for his publications as a foodways author and editor and his work with the Southern Foodways Alliance. Ted Ownby Rebecca Lauck Cleary
The Southern Register
Call for Papers Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Faulkner and Film • July 18–22, 2010 “Faulkner and Film” has the distinction of being the first instance in the 37 years of Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha that we have repeated a conference theme. Over 20 years ago, with “Faulkner, Modernism, and Film,” the conference first endeavored to tackle the question of what Faulkner and film have to do with each other—with the broad concept of “modernism” as an assumed common denominator. That the conference is returning to that theme—and to its (now implicit) common denominator—is indicative of major advances both in Faulkner and film studies during the last two decades. The first has to do with our growing awareness of the impact on Faulkner of his experience in Hollywood, especially in the 1930s, and the second, the prodigious attention to film as being in many respects the epitome of what is meant by the concept of modernism. “Faulkner and Film” will take up the broad areas of Faulkner’s involvement in film—biographically, aesthetically, culturally, financially—and the parallel universes of Faulkner’s fiction and the world of cinema and the ways they may derive from and impose on each other. In the first of these areas, we are looking for discussions of Faulkner in Hollywood: his work as a screenwriter; his work as a novelist while in Hollywood and the impact of that milieu on his fiction; the biography of his life there (the frustrations, the opportunities, the meaning of the distance from Oxford); the film adaptations of his fiction, including the ideological and cultural politics of adaptation. In the second area, we are looking for investigations of film as a modernist medium and the similarity and difference between the methods of film makers and Faulkner in contributing to that medium. For example, if a fundamental similarity between film and modernist writing is the use of montage, then a major question to raise is how the juxtaposed elements go together in Faulkner and film, how the space and time between acquires meaning, if not resolution. Another question is the relationship between Faulkner and popular culture, and how film, in which that relationship has always been blurred, may illuminate a comparable blurring that Faulkner critics have often missed. And a third: how the adversarial dynamic of a technological breakthrough that may resist the world that has generated that breakthrough compares with the high modernist Faulkner critiquing a culture that, in many ways, he exemplifies. 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 University of 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, 2010. Authors whose papers are selected will receive a waiver of the conference registration fee and lodging at the Inn at Ole Miss from Saturday, July 17, through Thursday, July 22. For short papers, two-page abstracts must be submitted by January 31, 2010, preferably through e-mail attachment. 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: 662-2367194, e-mail: dkartiga@olemiss.edu. Decisions for all papers will be made by March 5, 2010. Summer 2009
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Center Welcomes New Development Officer Michael Upton joined the Center for the Study of Southern Culture as the associate director of development in the fall of 2008. A Tupelo native and University alum, Upton is responsible for securing financial support benefiting the Center. He also serves in this role with the University Libraries, where he has worked for the last two and a half years. Center director Ted Ownby said he has enjoyed working with Upton. “As an academic himself with an MA in history, Michael understands the need to keep thinking about scholarships and fellowships. I have been impressed with the range of things he does for us. Michael makes visits and calls to help develop and sustain relationships for the Center, Michael Upton works with academics like me who have little understanding of money or how to raise it, and meets with me at least twice a month so we keep up-to-date and work together. He is developing a new giving document for potential Center supporters, and he has also worked with members of the Center Advisory Committee.” “Michael’s professional experience and his experience both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student here at the University have given him an excellent background for this position,” said Dean of Libraries Julia Rholes. “He clearly understands the importance of the library to the university community and the very real needs that our library has. We’re delighted to have him.” Part of Michael Upton’s work involves keeping in contact with supporters of the Center. Feel free to contact him at mupton@olemiss.edu or 662-915-3027.
Mark Your Calendars October 29–November 1, 2009 Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium
www.southernfoodways.com February 28–March 4, 2010 Mississippi Delta Literary Tour www.oxfordconferenceforthebook.com March 4–6, 2010 Oxford Conference for the Book www.oxfordconferenceforthebook.com July 18–22, 2010 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner/ Page 8
Summer 2009
Teaching Garden Notes The Teaching Garden at the Boys and Girls Club in Oxford is experiencing another successful summer with new garden educator Helen Thompson, who joined the program in June. Thompson stresses the importance of continuity from last season’s pilot program to her first summer at the Boys and Girls Club. In fact, many of last year’s students are participating in the garden’s activities again this summer. For a few hours each morning, 10 six- and seven-year-old students work together on various experiential learning projects ranging from weeding and mulching to brewing sweet tea with fresh mint cultivated in the garden on the LOU Clubhouse campus. Thompson also organizes outdoor classroom activities including insect identification, seed sprouting, and the importance of irrigation and watering cycles. While some activities are more invigorating for the students than others, Thompson stresses how excited the children are to be outdoors in such a positive learning environment. Although an onslaught of bugs and weeds choked out much of the early spring crops, the students are currently enjoying radishes, beans, zucchini, tomatoes, and basil while continuing to plant heavily for a large fall harvest. Later this summer Thompson plans to incorporate student cooking classes when a Viking Range donated by the Southern Foodways Alliance is installed. Further plans for the fall include creating an indoor worm farm and building a permanent compost structure and cold frames for winter crops. Cale Nicholson
The Southern Register
Warner’s a Winner
The Southern Register
Chris Attebery
Recent Southern Studies MA graduate Mary Warner picked up a few accolades before graduating from Ole Miss and leaving for Atlanta. On awards night, she won one of six Graduate Achievement Awards from the Graduate School and also won the Lucille and Motee Daniel Best Paper Award from the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Warner’s MA thesis is a history of Thacker Mountain Radio, and it includes a short film on the beginning of the radio program. David Wharton was her thesis director. The Lucille and Motee Daniel Award honors the best papers by Southern Studies graduate students. Faculty nominate and submit papers to the program chair, who appoints a faculty committee to evaluate the papers. The award includes an honorarium. Warner, who has a BA in art history from the University, worked as producer of Thacker Mountain Radio from 2007 to early 2009. Started in 1997 as the brainchild of two University of Mississippi Southern Studies graduate students and Square Books owner Richard Howorth, the free weekly show won a 2005 Governor’s Award for Excellence in Broadcasting. It is held in Oxford during the school year at Off Square Books and combines unscripted, unrehearsed live music with author readings. Musical acts each week may be bluegrass, jazz, rock, or folk and have included Peter Rowan, Elvis Costello, Gillian Welch, Victoria Williams, and Olu Dara. Authors famous near and far such as poet laureate Billy Collins, Elmore Leonard, Roy Blount Jr., Kinky Friedman, and Robert Olen Butler have offered spoken words from their books’ pages. As producer, Warner served as the liaison between the front and the rear of the stage. She took over from Jamie Kornegay and Lyn Roberts, who sustained the show for many years with their time and efforts. “You never know what you’re going to get,” said Warner, a Florida native who transferred to the University in 2001. “Thacker Mountain is a place you can experience live music and readings without distraction. It’s all about what’s happening on the stage. Curiosity is innate and that’s what fuels the show—curiosity about seeing the person behind the work.” According to Ted Ownby, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, “Mary Warner is a good example of how students can study something they love. She used her connections with Thacker Mountain Radio to get interviews from people that have been part of the show throughout its history, and she has put together the first history of the radio program.” Ownby continued, “It is intriguing for the faculty to see her writing this thesis, because we’re pretty sure it is the first time a Southern Studies student has been studying other Southern Studies students.” Warner said she simply wanted to tell the story of how
Mary Warner and David Wharton Thacker Mountain Radio came into existence, and credits the Southern Studies Program for helping her follow through with her vision. “It was really special because I had a plan going into the program and all of my professors helped me accomplish it. Southern Studies is exciting and there are so many things you can do and the world can be your oyster. I gained a more thoughtful understanding of the South and where we are going, and I am proud to say I lived in Mississippi because I miss it.” Her thesis has piqued interest by the University Press of Mississippi staff, who want to publish it as a book. The documentary film was also shown on July 27 at the Lyric Theatre as part of the Oxford Film Festival’s slate of summer movies, along with Southern Studies alum Joe York’s film Saving Willie Mae’s Scotch House. Warner is currently employed by Atlanta-based Houser Walker Architecture, the region’s leader in museum and library design, as their marketing and development director. She also has a blog (http://southernblueprint.blogspot.com) where she writes about ideas of home in the South.
Summer 2009
Rebecca Lauck Cleary
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Beyond Barnard Our Alumni in the World
When the Southern Register ran an article in Winter 2009 on new jobs and recent accomplishments by Southern Studies alumni, we knew we would hear more news. Here is a short list of what some graduates of the MA and BA programs have been doing. The Arts. Among various artists of many kinds among Southern Studies alumni, Joe York (MA 2007) has become an impressive documentary film maker with interests in foodways, Oxford history, and many other topics. His film on Willie Mae’s Scotch House and its restoration in New Orleans has been playing on numerous public television stations, and his films have shown at independent film festivals. Along with films, many of them made with the Southern Foodways Alliance, Joe helps oversee documentary film projects by Southern Studies students. On the subject of films, fans of independent films who watched The Night of the Loup Garrou, an Oxford-made production based on an old Cajun story, saw actress and SST alumna Tiffany Kilpatrick (BA 2000) fighting a werewolf. Jay Lang (BA 2002) works both in his own band and in booking blues groups for a club on the Oxford square. In Portland, Oregon, Steve Cheseborough (MA 1999) has released a new CD called Fetch It: Old Style Blues, and the University Press of Mississippi recently published the third edition of his influential volume, Blues Traveling. Sawyer Riley (BA 1999) in Atlanta and Oxford’s Cynthia Gerlach (MA 1993) are among the many alumni working in the food arts. Mary Margaret Miller (MA 2007) can now be heard on the radio as one of the hosts of Mississippi Arts Hour on Mississippi Public Radio, and Melissa McGuire Bridgman (MA 1999) has begun working full time as a potter. Publications. Along with Amy Wood (MA 1995), whose book Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940, receives a rePage 10
view in this issue, numerous Southern Studies alumni have new books and articles. John T. Edge (BA 1996, MA 2002) writes a regular foodways column in the New York Times. Anne Evans (MA 20002) has a newly published short story, SFA oral historian Amy Evans (MA 2003) has new pieces on Appalachian cuisine in Now and Then magazine, and Mary Warner (MA 2009) has a new foodways article in a Georgia publication, Edible Metro & Mountains. Former Southern Studies MA student Phoenix Savage, who graduated with an anthropology degree, has published African Americans in Jackson, Mississippi, along with coauthor Turry Flucker. Bert Way (MA 1999) coedited a new work published by the University of Georgia Press, The Art of Managing Longleaf. Emory University PhD students Franky Abbott and Mary Battle (both MA 2006) have had significant roles in Southern Spaces, an online publication produced at Emory. Teaching. Southern Studies alumni have positions teaching at all levels. Among the many alums who teach for a living, Molly McGehee (MA 2000), at Presbyterian College, and Pete Slade (MA 1999), at Ashland College, recently visited the University of Mississippi along with their students as part of civil rights history classes. Dan “Jake” Morris (BA 1989) has moved from a position Summer 2009
at Freed-Hardeman and is now graduate program director and professor of psychology at David Lipscomb University. Amy Clukey (BA 2003) completed a PhD in English at Penn State with a dissertation on plantation literature in the South, the Caribbean, and Ireland. She teaches English at the Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University. Among many teachers who have moved recently into new positions are Chris Hedglin (MA 2004), who teaches history and coaches soccer at Oxford High School, Jennifer Lawrence (BA 2009), who will be working in Tunica as part of the Mississippi Teacher Corps, Stephen Bowles (BA 2003), who teaches English Language Arts in Wasco, California, and L. V. McNeal (MA 2008), who teaches gifted students in Greene County, Mississippi. At least 25 Southern Studies alumni are currently in graduate programs preparing to teach in various disciplines. Nonprofit Work. Many Southern Studies graduates continue to have an
Melissa McGuire Bridgman The Southern Register
Graduates. Eleven Southern Studies students completed their degrees in May. They were honored with a brunch at Barnard Observatory after the Commencement ceremony in the Grove. Our BA recipients were Jake Fussell, Timothy Herrington, Matt Hopper, Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Mullins, Sarah Simonson, and Woody Skinner. Jake is joining the MA program in Southern Studies this fall. Master’s recipients were Rebecca Batey, Nelson Griffin, Cale Nicholson, and Mary Warner. We also have several Southern Studies students completing their degrees this summer. Undergraduate Stephanie Little is graduating, along with MA students Camp Best, Eric Feldman, Rory Fraser, Ben Gilstrap, Derek Johnson, and Aaron Rollins. Best and Gilstrap are continuing at graduate programs at the University of Mississippi, Camp in education and Ben in history. Rory and Eric are beginning work in graduate programs in film, Rory at Stanford and Eric at Texas Tech. Marriages. So many Southern Studies students and alumni have gotten married or engaged recently that it would be almost impossible to mention them all. However, we should take note that two alumni of the MA program, Miranda Cully (MA 2008) and Nelson Griffin (MA 2009), married in Oxford on July 4. Ted Ownby
Joe York
impact in the public service and nonprofit world. Marsha Watson (MA 2005) recently moved to Jackson to coordinate work that helps students in the Delta and southwestern Mississippi prepare for college. Also in Jackson, new MA graduate Rebecca Batey (2009) is starting a position as Education Director of the Old Capitol Richie Caldwell Museum. Sarah Torian (MA 1997) worked for the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta for six years. Now she works as a freelance consultant providing communications, research, and technical assistance to nonprofit groups like the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Becca Walton Evans (MA 2008) has moved to South Carolina, where she works for the Charleston Symphony. Recent graduate Cale Nicholson (MA 2009) has a new position on a community farm in New York’s Hudson Valley. Ford O’Connell (MA 2006) is president of ProjectVirginia, an organization that specializes in mobilizing voters and using new media as part of the political process. Anne Mueller (MA 2003) works as a fundraising consultant for several nonprofits in New Orleans. Representative Steve Holland (MA 2006), often described in the press as “D-Plantersville,” continues his efforts at reform in the Mississippi legislature. Susan Glisson (MA 1994) continues to involve Southern Studies students and alumni in the work of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, and Jon Peede (MA 1993) is the director of Grant Programs for Literature for the National Endowment for the Arts. For-profit work. Sallie Ann Westbrook (BA 2004) completed a decorative arts program in Munich before moving to Chicago to work for a railings company that deals with architects. Richie Caldwell (MA 2005) is finishing an MBA at Millsaps and has been working in Vicksburg. Emily Romines (MA 2007) works for Lockheed Martin in St. Louis, and Jane Harrison Fisher (MA 2008) is working for the South Financial Group in Greenville, South Carolina. Archives. Among the numerous librarians and archivists with Southern Studies degrees are Courtney Chartier (MA 2003), who works in the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta, and Renna Tuten (MA 2006), who works in the Richard Russell Political Archives at the University of Georgia. One of the Center’s first students to become an archivist, Shelly Ritter continues her work at the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, where a new exhibit of blues photography went up this summer. Elizabeth Janke (BA 2005) received a degree in art business from Sotheby’s Institute of Art and now works at the Historic New Orleans Collection. The Southern Register
Southern Studies alums Miranda Cully and Nelson Griffin on the Courthouse Square in Oxford on their wedding day, July 4, 2009
Summer 2009
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Broadcast of BBC Documentary Mississippi Reads Welty on Tennessee Williams Recorded
Mississippi Reads Contacts WEB SITE www.mississippireads.org E-MAIL misssissippireads@gmail.com
Eudora Welty. Kay Bell. 1950s. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty covers, from top: original edition, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980; paperback edition, A Harvest Book • Harcourt, Inc., 1982; paperback edition, A Harvest Book • Harcourt, Inc., 1982; British edition, Penguin Books, 1983; The Library of America edition, 1998.
The Mississippi Reads project is partially funded under the federal Library Services and Technology Act administered through the Mississippi Library Commission for the Institution of Museum and Library Services. Page 12
in Clarksdale Aired August 4
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the BBC’s long awaited Radio 2 documentary exploring the Mississippi Delta’s influences on America’s great playwright Tennessee Williams, was broadcast Tuesday, August 4, to an audience of 13 million listeners in the United Kingdom. Recorded by veteran BBC producer Carmel Lonergan in Clarksdale at the 16th annual Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival in 2008, the program is narrated by award-winning British playwright/actor Kwame Kwei-Armah. “Pop the champagne corks! We are so pleased with the finished product,” says Lonergan. “For me, the documentary transports listeners to Clarksdale and gives them an insight into who Tennessee was.” She says actor Kwame Kwei-Arah explores the social, religious, and cultural influences behind the great works of Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), who lived in Clarksdale, Mississippi, for much of his impressionable childhood. The program forges direct links between Williams’s upbringing and surroundings and many of his acclaimed dramas such as The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Orpheus Descending (1957). Tennessee Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911 and spent a great deal of his early life in Clarksdale, sharing the church rectory with his grandparents, mother, and sister, while his father—a traveling salesman—was largely absent. The richness of his religious upbringing in the Deep South and the music he loved have influenced the plays that have made such an impression on both sides of the Atlantic, comments Lonergan. Many refer to actual places in Coahoma County and some of his most famous characters—Blanche, Brick, Baby Doll, Stella, and Amanda Wingfield—are named after real-life Clarksdale residents. The annual Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival was established in 1993 to celebrate his talent and the cultural heritage immortalized in many of his plays. The festival runs in mid-October alongside the cotton harvest, and plays are performed by local Clarksdale actors and actresses on historic porches and in venues offering an authentic backdrop to the action. Contributors to the documentary include residents of Clarksdale, aficionados of his work, the American musician Charlie Musselwhite, and some of the actors who have taken on Williams’s characters. Hearing about the festival in the fall of 2007 and contacting its organizers, Lonergan pitched the documentary idea to Radio 2, who loved it and sent her to record the 2008 festival. “I urge people to listen online on the BBC Radio 2 Web site,” says Lonergan. “It’s a fabulous show.” To listen online, go to www.bbb. co.uk1programmes/b001yr43. Lonergan will be speaking and playing excerpts from the program at the 17th annual Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival in Clarksdale October 16–17. For additional information, visit the festival’s Web site at the Coahoma Community College’s address: www.coahomacc.edu/twilliams. Panny Flautt Mayfield Summer 2009
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Collection of Richard Freeman Leavitt
Mississippi Reads is a statewide initiative to encourage schools, book clubs, and libraries as well as all readers to read and discuss a single work by a Mississippi author. Previous choices were William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses in 2007 and Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children in 2008. The 2009 Mississippi Reads selection is The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. The project is one of many activities celebrating the author’s 100th birthday.
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Columbus Convenlion & Visilors Bureau www.columbus-ms.org • (800) 327-2686
Dozen Distinctive Destinations® NATIONAL TRUST FOR HISTORIC PRESERVATION ®
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Intruder in the Dust 60th Anniversary Screening at the Lyric Oxford
Schedule of Events: 7:00–7:30 p.m. Reception for sponsors and gala ticket holders, catered by John Currence 7:30 p.m. Premiere of Joe York’s documentary film about the making of Intruder in the Dust 8:00 p.m. Screening of Intruder in the Dust, with special guest star Claude Jarman Jr. 9:45 p.m. Musical performances
Intruder star Claude Jarman signing photographs for Oxford fans Page 14
Summer 2009
Filming Intruder scene on the Oxford Square
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MGM Publicity Stills for Intruder in the Dust; photographs courtesy of Rowan Oak/University Museums
MGM Publicity Stills for Intruder in the Dust; photographs courtesy of Rowan Oak/University Museums
William Faulkner (left) at Rowan Oak during filming of Intruder in the Dust
MGM Publicity Stills for Intruder in the Dust; photographs courtesy of Rowan Oak/University Museums
To commemorate the 60th anniversary of the world premiere of Intruder in the Dust, based on the novel by William Faulkner, the Oxford Film Festival is hosting a special screening of the film, on loan from MGM, at the Lyric Theatre, site of the 1949 premiere on October 2, 2009. Filmmaker Joe York’s documentary about the making of the movie on location in Oxford, Mississippi, will also be a part of the program. Special guest Claude Jarman Jr., Academy Award winner for The Yearling (Best Juvenile Star, 1947), will share his memories of being the teenage star of Intruder in the Dust. This gala evening will begin with a reception catered by James Beard Award– winning chef John Currence. The menu will include many of the selections from the original cast party in 1949. Following the screenings, musical performances will close the night. Tickets are on sale at www.lyricoxford.com for $35/person. Bundles of 10 tickets will be discounted. The event will serve as a fundraiser for the 7th Oxford Film Festival (www.oxfordfilmfest.com), February 4–7, 2010. Please contact 877-560-FILM for more information.
21st Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration to Feature Southern Humor “This conference couldn’t come at a better time,” said NLCC founder and cochairman Carolyn Vance Smith of Natchez. “Several years ago, when the NLCC Steering Committee decided to feature Southern humor as the conference theme in 2010, we had no idea that during these times we’d need to laugh,” she said. “With the state and national economy as it is, and with so many other serious pressures all around us, we hope the conference will let us stop, laugh a little, and be refreshed.” Among the programs and other activities of the conference will be: • Presentations by some of America’s most outstanding authors, historians, and film experts, such as James C. Cobb, Robert Harling, Trudier Harris, Sam Haskell, M. Thomas Inge, Scott Dixon McDowell, JoAnne Prichard Morris, Marshall Ramsey, Julia Reed, Clifton Taulbert, Jerry W. Ward Jr., Diane Williams, and Charles Reagan Wilson • Screening and discussion of Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias • Premiere of Scott Dixon McDowell’s documentary Horton Foote: Regional Voice, Universal Vision, about the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and screenplay writer • Richard Wright Literary Excellence Awards ceremony honoring the authors Robert S. McElvaine Jr. and Steve Yarbrough • Horton Foote Award for Special Achievement in Screenwriting ceremony honoring the screenplay writer and playwright Robert Harling • Thad Cochran Humanities Achievement Award ceremony honoring Jerry W. Ward Jr. • Performances of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, in cooperation with the Natchez Little Theatre • Writing workshops, including “Chocolate Milk Café” for grade school children • Book signings and other informal times with authors • Live music • Festive meals and other social events in some of Natchez’s most beautiful mansions Because of major support from the four cosponsors as well as the Mississippi Humanities Council, the Mississippi Arts Commission, and other agencies, most of the NLCC is free of charge, Smith said. “The only ticketed events are meals and the play,” she said. Information and tickets are available at www.colin.edu/nlcc; by calling toll-free 866-296-6522; or by e-mailing Carolyn. Smith@colin.edu. Sponsors of the NLCC are Copiah-Lincoln Community College, Natchez National Historical Park, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and Mississippi Public Broadcasting. Chairmen are Smith, representing Co-Lin; Kathleen Jenkins, NNHP; Jim Barnett, MDAH; and Sherry Johnson, MPB. The Southern Register
Artwork by renowned artist, writer, and naturalist Walter Inglis Anderson is on exhibit at the J. D. Williams Library through January 2010. The 60-piece display, Walter Anderson and World Literature, is hosted by the Department of Archives and Special Collections on the library’s third floor. It features line drawings, watercolors, and panels inspired by great works of literature such as Don Quixote, The Iliad, Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast, and The Magic Carpet. Block prints from Anderson’s book An Alphabet—created for his own children—stretch around Children Swimming the exhibit wall. “There are many artists who explored a story but few who fused with it,” said Patricia Pinson, former curator of exhibitions at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs. “The book to Anderson was a way of life, part of the quest to find realization and meaning. It was the distillation of the timeless epics that gave him the grasp of the significance of the moment. Great books and great art are about insight, and Anderson gives us insight into both.” A voracious reader, Anderson created nearly 10,000 pen-and-ink drawings to illustrate page after page of the books as he would read them. “It’s exciting for the library to showcase this wonderful exhibit of work by Walter Anderson,” said Jennifer Ford, head of Archives and Special Collections. “His genius can be clearly seen, as well as his love for literature. We hope that our patrons will be able to get a glimpse into his world.” While Anderson’s “world” stretched from his home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast to faraway places such as China and South America, he found solace in being alone, often immersed in the imaginary world of books. “Daddy was essentially on a quest—he was pursuing the Holy Grail,” said Anderson’s son John Anderson, curator of the library exhibition. Sponsored in conjunction with the 16th annual Oxford Conference for the Book, which was dedicated to Walter Anderson, the exhibition was the focus of the conference’s opening session March 26. Following its close at the library, plans call for the exhibit to travel to other libraries, cultural centers, and schools for years to come. “This exhibit might be little explosions if allowed to be shown in schools where children can look at the work and say, ‘Wait a minute, I see something another way,’” John Anderson said. A Subject Guide for the exhibit is available at http://apollo. lib.olemiss.edu/center/subject_guide/anderson/intro.
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Courtesy the Family of Walter Anderson
“Humor in the Deep South” is the theme of the 21st annual Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, which will take place February 25–28, 2010, in Natchez, Mississippi.
Library Exhibition Features Walter Anderson
Walter Anderson Research Collection Donated to University Library Christopher Maurer tells about writing two books on a family of Mississippi artists and the decision about where to deposit the research collection resulting from the project. The first book, Dreaming in Clay on the Coast of Mississippi: Love and Art at Shearwater, written with María Estrella Iglesias, was published by Doubleday in 2000; a second edition is forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi. Maurer’s second book, Fortune’s Favorite Child: The Uneasy Life of Walter Anderson, was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2003. In 1996, when María Estrella Iglesias and I decided to write about Shearwater Pottery and began gathering material on the Anderson family, of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, I remember proposing a division of labor: “You take the living, I’ll take the dead!” There were people to talk to and archives to explore, and, in writing biography (my first book was the life of a 16thcentury Spanish poet), I’ve always relied mostly on the latter. María Estrella, who was born in the South (Granada, Spain), likes her history viva voce. Getting to our sources—oral, written—was no easy matter. It took a good many trips to Ocean Springs, first from Nashville, later from Chicago, before we gained the trust of this multigenerational clan of painters, potters, and poets: “the obsolete extended family,” as Walter Anderson’s daughter Mary likes to call it. It cannot have been easy for the Andersons to allow us into their lives— at first we were “the book people”—but somehow they did, and not only did they tell us their stories, they allowed us to copy, almost without restriction, one of the richest family archives imaginable. “It isn’t that we save things,” Mary told me when I praised the Andersons’ respect for the past. “It’s just that we never get around to throwing them out.” In the showroom of Shearwater Pottery, beside newly fired pieces and older ones thrown by Peter Anderson Page 16
and cared for by Mary in a cinderblock building called “the Vault” and in the 19th-century carriage house the Andersons called “the Barn,” seemed like the scraps and sawdust of a carpenter. The real “work” was elsewhere. Those pages were so many, and some so intense, that they produced vertigo. I learned to take them in a few at a time, and often turned my attention to María Estrella Iglesias and Christopher Maurer Walter Anderson’s writing, to that of his wife, Agnes Grinstead Anderson, or and decorated by his brothers, Walter the diaries, unfinished essays, and poand Mac (James McConnell Anderson), etry of his mother, the indomitable were two wooden filing cabinets, Annette McConnell Anderson, pascrammed with correspondence and busisionate reader of Tolstoy, who had deness records dating back to the earliest cided that, as she had, her three boys days of Shearwater in the mid-1920s. would dedicate their lives to art. In Marjorie Ashley—Peter’s daughter and the Vault, also, were the papers of her Shearwater’s business manager—alhusband, George Walter Anderson, lowed me to go through those cabinets who had retired from business in New folder by precious folder and blow the Orleans to get Shearwater on its feet. dust off account books, albums, and When Katrina struck, and the Vault photos no one had looked at in decades. was breached by water and debris and Sitting at my portable photocopier, listhe Barn and most of the other buildtening to Estrella in lively conversation ings at Shearwater swept away, María with the Andersons, I dreamt of weavEstrella and I realized that, with many of ing their voices—gathered from letters, the originals damaged, disfigured, or depoems, diaries, interviews—into a famstroyed, we probably had the only extant ily portrait. copies of some of the writing and graphWhile researching Shearwater, the ic work. What to do? In Oxford, at the two of us were overwhelmed by the art 2009 Conference for the Book, thoughtof Walter Anderson and by the drama of fully organized by Ann Abadie and dehis life: the epic voyages on bike and on voted to Walter Anderson, it occurred foot; the long periods of creative solitude to me that the University of Mississippi’s on Horn Island and in the Cottage at Archives and Special Collections would Ocean Springs; the struggle to reconcile be the right place for those precious the demands of art and those of famcopies and for all the other informaily; the constant “yearning to “realize” tion I had gathered over the years about nature through painting. No painter or Shearwater and about Walter Anderson. writer ever knew the natural world more We hope that the collection will grow; intimately or captured it more memorathat it will prove useful to other writbly in writing, drawing, and watercolors. ers; and that their encounters with the And none was more prolific. Pottery, the painter, and with Andersons The tens of thousands of pages Walter past and present will be as intense and as Anderson left behind, lovingly studied fruitful as ours. Summer 2009
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Pedal Pusher
Fragments of Walter Anderson’s Summer Bike Ride Recalling a summer bicycle trip from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, to Chattanooga, Tennessee, Walter Anderson reflects on the joys of water and of the pools he called nullahs, where he lay down to soak his tired limbs. The following fragments are from his logbooks. The Hindi word “nullah” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a watercourse, river-bed, or ravine; a drain or channel for rain- or floodwater.” Nullahs are all various. No two are alike. The elements may be the same but in their composition they are always different. They are always magical. The magic of water, above all of running water, has never been explained. Science may discover what art has known for a long time: the more that is known the more there is to be known. . . . . I have just traveled over a thousand miles, all my joys were associated with water. Watercolors, watermelons, water from clouds in the form of rain, all contributed to my happiness. As far as I know it was all fresh water. I left the sea behind me, and as far as I know I caused no tears to flow. The first nullah was caused either by seeping or by a spring in red clay high above a brown river filled with swirling clouds of stirred-up mud. My nullah was set in a deep ravine and flowed thru banks of damp green moss growing among young gum trees and mountain laurel with an occasional magnolia, and was so cold after the heat of the day that I could stay in it only for a short while. There were magic forms of life: crawfish and what looked like small trout, and I drank in the manner of men and beasts and of women and I suppose fish and it was all good. The memory of that one had hardly faded when I came to my second. This was larger with white sand bars which shone in the darkness under the moon, and a white mist which hung over it when the night became cool. At dawn two cardinals sang a duet on opposite sides of the stream. And I bathed in it before sunrise and was much refreshed. The Southern Register
The next water I stopped at was hidden among tall, straight young trees and was barely two feet wide, but I could lie on my back and look upward through the branches and marvel again at the way trees manage to fit together without touching a leaf, no matter how closely they grow. A water snake, the epitome of the water movement, swam up the stream and I left that place to the snake and some querulous jays and went my way. After dark I came to more water. Cows had used it first and [I] had not reached that state of ecstasy when even a cow could not dampen my appreciation for a pool of water. . . . At Enterprise there was an artificial lake and as it was almost dark I went into it, but it was rather warm and lacked something. A nullah is a thing of the present and does not mean “a powerful emotion evoked in tranquility,” presumably after the event. It is an experience which is probably ephemeral but probably produces a lasting effect upon the spirit. It has to do with liberty and logic. Heaven at this time shed a few drops of rain and threatening to shed more, so I began the night under a bridge, then because the rain stopped and the mosquitoes kept up I moved to a hillside. For a while I went through flat country, excellent for farming, but the nullahs were sluggish and had very little water in them. . . . Chattanooga I remember for its crushed ice. It’s true that in passing through the tunnel under the mountain I couldn’t resist tasting the seepage that was coming through the wall. I found it very good. But the climax, half past ten on a Summer 2009
hot June night, was a five-pound bag of crushed ice which I placed open on the basket in front of me and rode into the night melting ice as I rode. Then the water changed to a clear green blue turquoise. But a beautiful color. I bathed in it. It was a river running among rocks which formed a kind of dam. Later it bent and farther up it became green. Green water running through orange colored rocks. There were numerous small streams running over rocks down the mountain to join the river. I stopped and spent the night at one of these and part of the next day. A little further east and I turned south again. There was more water from heaven on the way to Atlanta and a refreshing bath before the last long stretch to the city. . . . I had bought a bottle of ginger ale. I crossed into Alabama and drank soda water. I passed through Tuskegee and stopped long enough to drink iced tea. Montgomery, more ginger ale. Then I began to get back my self respect and found more nullahs and heaven forgave me and sent rain, and more rain. And on the 17th day after leaving home I got into my own bath tub. Walter Anderson’s collection of experiences and the nullah image are courtesy of the artist’s family. Page 17
Seetha Srinivasan, director emerita of the University Press of Mississippi, where she worked from 1979 until 2008, wrote this article about the Oxford Conference for the Book after participating as a panelist in the 2009 program this spring. The 16th annual Oxford Conference for the Book (OCB), held in April 2009, was dedicated to Walter Anderson (1903–1965), artist and writer from Ocean Springs, Mississippi. An important part of the conference was an exhibition curated by John Anderson, the artist’s younger son, of Anderson’s drawings and paintings for various scenes from Western civilization’s books of myth, legend, and fairy tales. The exhibition was in the library at the University of Mississippi, and when I was there appreciating it, I overheard a couple express their admiration for Anderson’s genius. I struck up a conversation with them, learned they were from Franklin, Tennessee, had happened upon a “book conference” a few years ago, and had returned every year since. They did not know Anderson’s work, were thrilled to learn about it, and looked forward to reading more by and about him. As I talked with them,
Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Paris Review at the 1993 Oxford Conference for the Book are (from left) novelist William Styron, PR founding editor George Plimpton, PR managing editor James Linville, PR editor at large Jeanne McCullouch, and bookseller Richard Howorth.
I knew that, as it has been doing for 16 years, the Oxford Conference for the Book had realized one of its major goals—bringing readers to the work of great writers. The conference was begun in 1993 and has been held every year except in 1997. The idea for the conference came from Richard Howorth, owner of Oxford’s famed Square Books and past president of the American Booksellers
Dan Sherman
Buddy Nordan talks with Endesha Ida Mae Holland at 2000 conference.
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Association (ABA). At ABA meetings, there were not only readings and addresses by authors but also panels covering the gamut of issues pertaining to books and book publishing, and Howorth thought it would be interesting to have an annual gathering in Oxford focused in similar ways. Ann Abadie, associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, agreed and ever since has been the prime mover behind the illuminating and exciting Oxford Conferences for the Book, which, remarkably, are free to the public. It is impossible in a restricted space to convey the full range of programs and spirit of the conference weekends and what follows are paltry examples of the riches on tap each year. Honorees: Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, Stark Young, Walker Percy, Zora Neale Hurston, and Flannery O’Connor. Speakers (Fiction): Larry Brown, Pat Conroy, Edwidge Danticat, Ellen Douglas, David Guterson, Barry Hannah, Stephen King, John Grisham, Stewart O’Nan, Elizabeth Spencer, William Styron, and Geoffrey Wolff. Nonfiction: John M. Barry, Sven Birkerts, Rick Bragg, John Egerton, The Southern Register
Tom Rankin
Oxford Conference for the Book Reflections
Peter Guralnick, Paul Hendrickson, Hendrik Hertzberg, David Maraniss, Jon Meacham, Jack Nelson, and Tom Oliphant. Poetry: Wendell Berry, Robert Bly, Brooks Haxton, James Seay, William Jay Smith, and Natasha Trethewey. In addition, speakers include booksellers, scholars, cartoonists, illustrators, agents, editors, publishers, marketing specialists, book designers, educators, librarians, advocates of literacy, people from the world of theater, and musicians. The conference includes an optional tour of the Mississippi Delta (a region that is home to famed writers and musicians) that gives attendees a sense of place. Evenings bring dinners of memorable warmth and hospitality. During the 2009 conference, at a panel on young readers and reading, there was discussion of discouraging reading scores among Mississippi schoolchildren but also discussion of innovative and successful measures being taken to draw youngsters into libraries and into becoming readers of books. That same morning, a gaggle of excited fifth-graders from local schools enjoyed a reading by best-selling author Trenton Lee Stewart and received copies of his book The Mysterious Benedict Society courtesy of local sponsors. In a time when the book as we know it and the entire book publishing industry are under siege, the OCB is indeed a salutary and most welcome reminder that “words are things, and a small drop of ink,/falling like dew, upon a thought produces/that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think” (attributed to Lord Byron). In addition, local high school students and teen book clubs were able to hear Jay Asher read from and talk about his novel for young adult readers, Thirteen Reasons Why, during Saturday’s events. Patricia Pinson, former curator of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, said in her talk on the 2009 OCB honoree: “The book to Anderson was a way of life, part of the quest to find realization and meaning.” And so also is it to those who make their way to the Oxford Conference for the Book every spring. All lovers of the printed word owe a world of gratitude to Richard Howorth, Ann Abadie, and the staff of the Center of Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi for this annual celebration of books and people associated with every imaginable aspect of the book industry and for focusing in powerful ways on what really matters and endures in a world where so much is fleeting and transitory.
The 17th Oxford Conference for the Book
Robert Jordan
The University of Mississippi Oxford, Mississippi March 4–6, 2010
Sarah Frances Hardy
Christopher Paul Curtis poses with (from left) Claire, Emily Elise, and Heath Stevens at Square Books Jr. during 2008 conference.
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Barry Hannah
The 2010 program will open on Thursday with a library lunch and an address on book history by Nicholas A. Basbane, known as “the leading authority of books about books,” and continue through Saturday with addresses, panels, and readings. Included will be sessions discussing the fiction, teaching, and life of author Barry Hannah; a celebration of American Poetry Month with readings by Mark Jarman and Ethelbert Miller; workshops by Margaret-Love Denman, Donna Hemans, and others; “Literature for Young Readers” sessions attended by Oxford and Lafayette County students, with Savvy author Ingrid Law meeting with fifth graders and Alabama Moon author Watt Key meeting with ninth graders. The conference is open to the public free of charge. The 2010 Mississippi Delta Literary Tour, scheduled for February 28–March 4, will be based in Greenwood and visit Yazoo City, Greenville, and Clarksdale. Details about the conference and tour will soon be posted on w.oxfordconferenceforthebook.com/.
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Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Celebrates 30th Anniversary at Lauren Rogers Museum of Art The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters (MIAL) marked its 30th anniversary with a retrospective exhibition at the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel and by awarding two new Lifetime Achievement Awards and awards in seven categories to creative Mississippians. The celebratory events took place on June 13, 2009, with the exhibition opening in the Lower Level Galleries and awards presented at the evening banquet. Writer Elizabeth Spencer and painter Marshall Bouldin III received Lifetime Achievement Awards. This year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for nonfiction, Douglas A. Blackmon, accepted the MIAL Nonfiction Award for Slavery by Another Name. The Fiction Award went to Howard Bahr for Pelican Road, and the Visual Arts Award to H. C. Porter for her traveling exhibition Backyards and Beyond: Mississippians and Their Stories—The First Year after Katrina. The Poetry Award was accepted on his behalf by Brooks Haxton’s cousin Vidal Blankenstein of Jackson. Haxton could not attend because of illness; his book is They Lift Their Wings to Cry. Jane Rule Burdine received the Photography Award for her collection Delta Deep Down. In the Music Composition category, Steve Rouse was awarded the Classical/Concert Award for Between Stillness. Darrell and Romona Roberts, parents of Matt Roberts, received the Contemporary/Popular Award on behalf of the group 3 Doors Down for their album 3 Doors Down. Members of
the group, which was on tour, are Matt Roberts, Brad Arnold, Todd Harrell, Chris Henderson, and Greg Upchurch. MIAL President Ann Abadie presided at the ceremony and MIAL Board member Aubrey Lucas was master of ceremonies. A PowerPoint presentation of highlights from MIAL’s past was designed by former Board member Terry Simmons. Each award winner received a piece of raku pottery created by Byron Myrick of Moselle, Mississippi. Myrick is a member of the Craftsman Guild of Mississippi and has spent the past 34 years as a professor of art at Jones County Junior College. Events began in the afternoon with a tour of the museum led by director George Bassi and followed by readings and signings by MIAL award winners. At the annual membership meeting officers for the coming year were elected: Mark Wiggs of Jackson, president; Bridget Pieschel of Columbus, vice president; Margaret Anne Mitchell of Pontotoc, secretary; Jan Taylor of Jackson, treasurer; and Nancy Guice of Laurel, archivist. Ann Abadie will serve as past president. The 30th Anniversary Exhibition opened in the Lower Level Galleries during a reception honoring 2009 nominees and previous MIAL winners. The exhibition featured MIAL award winners in Visual Art and Photography over the past 30 years. The exhibit is described as a “virtual ‘Who’s Who’ of Mississippi artists, including works by William Dunlap, Sam Gilliam, Birney Imes, Mildred
Wolfe, Maude S. Clay, Eudora Welty, Wyatt Waters, and Charles Carraway. Sanderson Farms sponsored the exhibition. Other sponsors were the Mississippi Quarterly for the Fiction category, Leila Wynn for Nonfiction, and Greenville Friends of the Arts for Poetry. Dockery Farms in memory of Keith Dockery McLean sponsored the Classical/Concert Music Composition award and Nan and Mike Sanders the Contemporary/Popular Music award. The Photography category was sponsored by Sandra and Tom Shellnut and the Visual Arts category by Ella and Aubrey Lucas. Among the founders of MIAL were William Winter, Cora Norman, Aubrey Lucas, Noel Polk, and Keith Dockery McLean. The MIAL juried competition is one of a kind in Mississippi. Judges, prominent in their fields, are chosen from out of state. For 2008, a total of 46 artists and writers with significant ties to Mississippi were nominated. The deadline for nominations of work shown or published during 2009 is January 15, 2010. Only members of MIAL may nominate, but membership is open to anyone. To join, fill out the form below and send with the appropriate check to the address indicated. Next year’s awards ceremony is scheduled at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson on June 5, 2010. For more information about MIAL, visit the Web site www.ms-arts-letters-org.
MIAL MEMBERSHIP FORM Dues July 1, 2009–June 30, 2010 Name _____________________________________________________________________ Address ____________________________________________________________________ City _________________________________ State _________ Zip___________________ E-mail ________________________________ Daytime Telephone ____________________
Dorothy Shawhan 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.
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. Page 20
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Reading the South Eudora Welty as Photographer. Photographs by Eudora Welty. Edited by Pearl Amelia McHaney, with contributions by Sandra S. Phillips and Deborah Willis. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 96 pages. $35.00 cloth. Occasions: Selected Writings. By Eudora Welty. Edited by Pearl Amelia McHaney. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 350 pages. $35.00 cloth. From Jackson, Mississippi, to Venice, Italy, celebrations for Eudora Welty’s centenary year have ranged from book club meetings, academic conferences, photo exhibits, writing contests, and drama performances to a plant sale held in conjunction with tours of the Welty family garden. Perhaps the most exuberant tribute was a concert this April at Belhaven College (near the Welty home in Jackson), featuring four exceptional singer-composers: Kate Campbell, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Caroline Herring, and Claire Holley. Between songs inspired by Welty’s works, Herring, a Southern Studies graduate and cofounder of Oxford’s Thacker Mountain Radio, emphasized “the fact that she gives her characters such dignity through her honest portrayals of Southern life in the 20th century.” Honest portrayals of the South are prominent in the pictures and texts so meticulously selected by Pearl Amelia McHaney for two new collections, Eudora Welty as Photographer and Occasions: Selected
Writings. These attractive volumes from University Press of Mississippi are among the centennial’s most significant productions. Until now, their contents were available chiefly in archives and in hard-to-find magazines, newspapers, and literary journals. McHaney is the longtime editor of the Eudora Welty Newsletter and founding editor of the Eudora Welty Review; she is also a consummate researcher who previously collected and edited Welty’s book reviews in A Writer’s Eye (1994) and more than 200 responses to the author’s work in Eudora Welty: The Contemporary Reviews (2005). McHaney has “a sharp eye out,” as one character says of another in Welty’s story “Petrified Man.” Of the 43 images beautifully reproduced in Eudora Welty as Photographer, 34 are published here for the first time. Three valuable essays accompany the gallery of blackand-white photos. McHaney’s 20page study, “The Observing Eye,”
precedes the pictures, referring in detail to several specific views. Two shorter essays follow the photographic section: “Eudora Welty and Photography,” a comprehensive look at Welty’s work in 1930s contexts by Sandra S. Phillips, Senior Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and a reflection on Welty’s portraits of black men, and especially black women, at labor and leisure in “Eudora Welty: The Intrepid Observer,” by Deborah Willis, professor at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and specialist in African American photography. The volume concludes with a unique chronology of photographic events in Welty’s life (such as her acquisition of various cameras, her photographic exhibitions and books, and her writings on other photographers’ work); and an “Index of Photographs,” which identifies known facts about the pictures in this volume, including title, setting, date, camera, and—in a few cases—the size and finish (“matte” or “glossy”) of Welty’s prints. Asserting that Welty’s photographic work “deserves study and respect for its formal as well as its narrative qualities,” McHaney artfully arranges most of the images in related groups of two, side by side. On a light note, the photo series begins on a righthand page with “Chickens,” a cluster of several birds, the majority facing left toward a blank page. The final photo, “Cow,” is on the left side of the volume, with the heavy-bagged bovine facing right toward a blank page. Between these rustic bookends, an intriguing procession of people (black and white), buildings (urban and rural), landscapes, and objects (fishing nets, signs, laundry, a child’s toy horse) unfolds in partnered scenes. For instance, McHaney
Book Reviews and Notes by Faculty, Staff, Students, and Friends of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture
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Reading the South continued places a portrait of a vibrant black countrywoman in her well-stocked potting shed opposite a picture of vine-covered pillars in Natchez. McHaney’s essay explains that the photograph of “the columnar Ellen is paired with that of ruins that Welty said were not Windsor.” In a different pairing, Welty’s long shot of Port Gibson’s towering Windsor columns is juxtaposed with a close-up of Vicksburg’s monumental Cotton Exchange, its stone lions resting on a grand pillared porch. For many viewers, pictures of devastated mansions will evoke such Welty stories as “Asphodel” and “The Burning.” The “columnar Ellen” could be a younger version of Welty’s life-bringing Phoenix Jackson in “A Worn Path”; and Welty’s Pearl River photograph “Sandbar,” with a rowboat in the foreground and miniscule human figures assembled in the distance, recalls the neighborly journey of “A Wide Net.” Sandra Phillips ends her essay with the insight that “Welty’s interests as a writer and as an observer cohered. She was interested in place, in the point of view of the observer, in the fluidity of time—how the passage of time also implies a past.” These concerns, so vividly recorded in Eudora Welty as Photographer, are evident in all nine divisions of Occasions: Selected Writings. Editor McHaney’s selections are extremely diverse, from a Welty family recipe for “Charles Dickens’s eggnog” to a 1948 “Letter in Defense of William Faulkner” and a review of William Hollingsworth’s posthumous exhibit of paintings at the Jackson Municipal Art Gallery. Readers who assume Welty had little interest in politics might be surprised by her enthusiastic support of Adlai Stevenson, William Winter, and Ray Mabus in section VII, “Public Engagements.” This group of texts begins with an outspoken 1945 letter to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, in which Welty describes the white supremacist politician Gerald L. K. Smith as a “fascistic” intruder and “public enemy.” For lovers of Welty’s fiction, sections 1 and 8, “Stories and Skits” and “More Stories,” will be the main attraction. The earliest story is “Acrobats in a Park” (1935), followed in this collection by Welty’s humorous and illuminating introduction to a 1980 limited edition printing of that seminal work. “It can hardly have occurred to me to ask myself first what I knew about acrobats; the answer would have been, as little as I knew about incest, Europeans, or the Catholic Church, also elements in the story,” Welty comments. Yet, she recognizes that “these acrobats were prophesying for the subject that would concern me most in all my work lying ahead”: the subject of “human relationships,” epitomized by the “besieged” family that had thought itself “unassailable.” Occasions provides many such revelations, especially in section IX, “Looking Back,” where Welty discusses her first published story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman”; her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Optimist’s Daughter; and two of her Morgana stories, “June Recital” and “Moon
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Lake.” Section V, “On Writers,” includes tributes, forewords, and afterwords on the work of Flannery O’Connor, Allen Tate, Elizabeth Spencer, Walker Percy, and others. The most expansive item in this section is the essay “Place and Time: The Southern Writer’s Inheritance” (1954), which appeared anonymously in the Times Literary Supplement but has much in common with Welty’s wellknown essay “Place in Fiction.” A few of the collected pieces concern photography. “Letters to Charles Shattuck Regarding Ida M’Toy” is a comic sequence on the midwife subject of some famous Welty photographs. In “Literature and the Lens,” Welty provides fascinating narratives for three pictures that Vogue magazine published in 1944; McHaney’s footnote helpfully directs readers to the reprints in Welty’s Photographs (1989). “A Word on the Photographs for Twenty Photographs” (1980) is particularly moving. “In the most unpretentious snapshot,” says Welty, “lies the wish to clasp fleeting life. Framing a few square inches of space for the fraction of a second, the photographer may capture— rescue from oblivion—fellow human beings caught in the act of life. He is devoted to the human quality of transience.” Welty makes a similar observation in her memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings (1983), where she adds that she “felt the need to hold transient life in words—there’s so much more of life that only words can convey—strongly enough to last me as long as I lived.” To the delight of viewers and readers, the images and sentences of these new books “hold transient life.” Joan Wylie Hall
Eudora Welty as Photographer. Photographs by Eudora Welty. Edited by Pearl Amelia McHaney. With contributions by Sandra S. Phillips and Deborah Willis. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 96 pages. 43 black-and-white photographs. $35.00. Eudora Welty (1909–2001) is widely recognized as one of America’s great writers. Most people familiar with her life and work know that she was also an accomplished photographer. Anyone who has spent much time looking at her photographs will probably also be aware that she made her best pictures while still in her twenties, before turning her creative energies almost exclusively to writing fiction. This handsome little book from the University Press of Mississippi suggests that if things had gone differently for her in the 1930s—had gone the way she wished—Welty might be better known today as a photographer than as a writer.
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Reading the South continued
Eudora Welty as Photographer is organized around a selection of 43 photographs, only nine of which have been published previously. They are nicely reproduced, one per page, and small in size. Their modest size makes for an intimate viewing experience that is well-suited to Welty’s gentle gifts. The pictures rarely dazzle, but the best of them confirm her ability to see (with meaning) and enable us to see better (with greater meaning) than we saw before. In terms of content, this is a diverse group of images, ranging from rural landscapes to farm animals, from architectural renderings to light-and-shadow abstractions, from informal portraits to pictures of Mississippians, black and white, going about their daily lives. They vary stylistically as well, with some images (the architectural photos and abstractions in particular) appearing somewhat derivative of what was in photographic vogue at the time. The rest, however, seem to lack any self-conscious attempt at “style.” Instead, the pictures of Mississippi and its people, filtered through Welty’s familiar eye and sympathetic understanding, feel more purely about their subject matter. This is what makes them so good. Accompanying the photographs are essays by Pearl Amelia McHaney (who also selected and edited the pictures), Sandra S. Phillips, and Deborah Willis. McHaney’s essay comments on many of the photographs in the book, citing them as illustrations of a talented photographer’s early development. She also chronicles the young Welty’s frustrations at having to return to Mississippi from graduate school at Columbia to care for her ailing father in 1931 and her subsequent attempts (after his death) to find work in the New York City photo world, whether through exhibiting her photographs, publishing them in book form, or receiving magazine assignments. In a 1934 letter, she even begged New York photographer Berenice Abbott to
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take her on as a student, writing that she had learned all she could learn about photography in Mississippi and felt badly in need of professional instruction. The essays by Sandra Phillips and Deborah Willis are shorter and more tightly focused. Phillips writes of the relationship between Welty’s photographs and much of her later short fiction. Astutely, she notes the need for proper “framing” (the angle and distance at which the photographer/writer stands in relation to her subject) in both media. Phillips also finds “modesty and constraint” in Welty’s pictures, qualities there are no shortage of in her stories as well. Deborah Willis’s essay discusses Welty’s images of African American women, characterizing the photographs as remarkably open-minded for their time and place. She credits Welty’s pictures with “challeng[ing] ideas about the culture of black women” and exhibiting a “curiosity [that] opened up a more enlightened view.” Eudora Welty as Photographer is a nice addition to anyone’s Eudora Welty collection. It helps reconcile two seemingly disparate creative urges and explores how each contributed to the making of a great American artist. David Wharton
Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art. By Judith L. Sensibar. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 594 pages. $40.00 cloth. Judith Sensibar has spent much of her academic career trying to demonstrate that William Faulkner’s success as a novelist was due to his wife, Estelle. In Faulkner and Love, she enlarges her claim to include his longtime family servant Caroline “Callie” Barr and his mother, Maud Butler Falkner. Her newest book, some 25 years in the making, contains a great deal of new research and information about these three women, each of whom was vital to Faulkner in some way and who considered together did provide what Sensibar rightly terms a community that nurtured his imagination, “a living web of ongoing intrapsychic and psychosocial dynamics.” In so doing, the book offers some much-needed correctives in the often myth-ridden world of Faulkner biography; it successfully resists the clichés that Callie was only a loving and selfless mammy, that Maud was mostly just a cold mother, and that Estelle was a bitchy drunk. I for one have never been satisfied by the traditional explanations for the longevity of the Faulkners’ marriage, and Sensibar is convincing when she supplies Estelle’s backstory, including her academic successes, her musical and dramatic talents, her gifts of conversation, and her undeniable personal charm. Sensibar’s
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Reading the South continued Estelle, in short, sounds like a woman with the intellectual and creative gifts to engage Faulkner’s long-term interest, not just a flapper whom he couldn’t avoid marrying. Similarly, Callie Barr’s story begins to emerge from the straitjacket of Faulkner’s famous eulogies for her. Interviews with her surviving family members and searches of extant records (of which there are precious few) result in a new portrait of this illiterate but imaginative and courageous woman, including a convincing argument for her birth date in 1833 rather than 1840. Even Maud, usually reduced by biographers to the sign that hung in her kitchen (“Don’t Complain— Don’t Explain”), comes forth from Sensibar’s pages as a woman who, with her own mother, gave Faulkner a “first language” of visual art that nearly all readers remark in his prose. Such new material allows Sensibar to augment the record. Although she admits that in the process “I have had to speculate more than I would have liked,” she calls her work “a beginning” that she hopes “will spur others to present a fuller and more accurate profile” of Callie in particular and her other subjects by extension. It must be said that Sensibar’s critical project is less successful than the biographical. Based on the premise that a few short stories Estelle wrote during the last years of her first marriage formed the basis of a full-fledged “collaboration” between her and her husband that did nothing less than give him “the means to translate himself from the stuck poet to the great novelist,” Faulkner and Love founders on two serious grounds. First of all, it claims that a minor anecdote from Faulkner’s letter to his favorite aunt is a “screen memory” that reveals his deeply buried love for Callie and his shame at having to deny that love because of racial pressures; the anecdote serves as the basis for a pyramid of Freudian interpretations, including one that speculates on whether Faulkner knew of his grandfathers’
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black mistresses. “There is no evidence that Faulkner knew of these betrayals,” Sensibar writes, but no matter: “He never would have spoken of them because, like his attachment to Callie Barr, such things were unspeakable. His fiction is devoted to that unspeakability and its dreadful emotional and physical toll.” Setting aside for the moment the tautology of how one can speak of something one doesn’t know and then take its opposite as a lifelong subject for fiction, I note that Sensibar has preceded this conclusion with an instance of those very betrayals being spoken about among Faulkner’s family. Second, just as improbable, her claim that when Faulkner “allowed his imagination to dwell in and explore the tone and rich content of [Estelle’s] fiction, he found his genius” rests on the slim evidence that Faulkner typed her stories for her when she returned from Shanghai and that the typed drafts bear corrections in both of their hands. There is not a satisfactory way for a reader to evaluate Sensibar’s claims for the quality of Estelle’s fiction—and at least one of the stories seems to be thinly veiled autobiography—because with one exception the stories remain un-
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published. Sensibar notes at several points the sketchy record but proceeds without it. There is simply not sufficient extant evidence to support the claim of collaboration; Estelle quit writing fiction and even burned the manuscript of her novel when it was rejected for publication. She just doesn’t seem to have been interested in writing anymore—at least not her own; she did read Faulkner’s work and comment on it as he asked her to do. That strikes me as a collaboration, and Sensibar is convincing when she focuses on that aspect of their complicated, nearly lifelong relationship. In leaving this vexed issue because of the space restraints of this review, I note that “Doctor Martino,” the one story of Faulkner’s that does seem as if it could spring directly from Estelle’s “Dr. Wohlensky,” doesn’t even receive a mention, nor do other more demonstrable instances of collaboration in Faulkner’s career, such as Requiem for a Nun or his work in Hollywood. Perhaps Sensibar has simply tried to do too much in one book. She takes on the Faulkners’ alcoholism, for example, alongside the cultural history of the Jim Crow South and interweaves both with the three major biographies she undertakes. The result is often a repetitive mishmash. Some readers will be troubled by Sensibar’s reading of a series of photographs that Faulkner took of his daughter as his (unhealthy) inscription of Caddy Compson from The Sound and the Fury onto Jill’s two-year-old body. Others will be interested in the original images themselves; Faulkner and Love abounds with such provocative source material as Maud’s paintings and previously unpublished family photographs. One hopes that the wealth of primary materials employed in the making of this massive effort have been archived so that we can indeed make “a beginning” down a new road in Faulkner studies. Theresa M. Towner
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Reading the South continued
Golden Days: Reminiscences of Alumnae, Mississippi State College for Women. By Southern Women’s Institute, Mississippi University for Women. Introduction by Bridget Smith Pieschel. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 384 pages. $35.00 cloth. Mississippi University for Women (MUW), like many other women’s colleges, has needed a victory in recent times—though it got so much more than that from Golden Days, an oral history project of the Southern Women’s Institute directed by Bridget Pieschel, author of the institutional history Loyal Daughters: One Hundred Years at Mississippi University for Women, 1884–1984. Legally required to repurpose as a coeducational institution in 1982, MUW now stands on the brink of a name change in 2010 as an effort to “rebrand” in a marketplace where coeducation is the norm and full access to higher education for women is deemed achieved. While the institution is forced to grow new wings, Golden Days explores the University’s roots (as the Mississippi State College for Women or MSCW) through the lives and vibrant perspectives of 20 50-year alumnae or “Golden Girls.” Designed to enhance the MUW archives and student learning, the oral history project involved the collaboration of alumnae and students working through the Southern Women’s Institute who filmed or recorded, conducted, and transcribed interviews with alumnae. As to be expected of the genre of institutional history completed by “loving” insiders and featuring the perspectives of loyal alumnae, the volume presents very little critique of the institution and undeniably attributes each
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woman’s life accomplishments to her attendance at MUW. Arguably, this limitation is offset by the richness of what is offered up in terms of detail about alumnae backgrounds, life experiences, and social conditions before and after college, in addition to the thick and rich detail about college life at MUW. Of course, alumnae readers of Golden Days will find connection and much to celebrate in the individual reports of campus traditions. This includes, but is not limited to, women racing to pluck a magnolia from the “Mag Chain” after commencement (in imitation of daisy chains carried by Northeastern schools), socializing at “the Goose” (Golden Goose Tearoom), partaking in formal family-style meals, wearing navy blue uniforms, scratching from institution-issued wool swimsuits for required swimming classes, walking backwards through the Old Maid’s Gate to avoid spinsterhood, participating in Professor Emma Ody Pohl’s Zouave (French military drill), blind-dating Mississippi State College men, rolling bandages during World War II, speeding back to campus for the 10:00 p.m. whistle, surviving Hell Week, practicing for the Junior-Freshman Wedding (a cer-
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emony to unite the classes), rushing social clubs, and taking the courses “Spoken English” or “Mothercraft,” to name a few. Clearly from these accounts, MUW traditions made for a vibrant and cohesive campus culture constructed by women for women to mitigate the restrictions placed upon them by paternalistic administrators, exacting policies, a demanding curriculum, and small-town Columbus. Frankly, some stories astound and others, particularly in juxtaposition, emerge as oddly bittersweet. For example, Katherine Lipscomb Worrell (1936) revealed that students were routinely photographed in the nude for physical education classes to identify bodily features in need of correction. Furthermore, Worrell reported that she injured her neck from the repeated activity of standing on her head in P.E.!—a problem for which she was treated by a doctor in Memphis who bored four holes in her skull and laid back her scalp in search of a tumor! The account of student activism from Emily Eugenia Summer (1945), who as student body president brought the first jukebox to campus and presided over the vote that brought about the end of the school uniforms among other changes, is particularly interesting. Understanding that the navy blue MUW uniform often consisted of students’ home-dyed garments makes the words of Mary Glynn Williams Lancaster, who as a freshman voted to keep the uniform, more poignant: “When they did away with the uniform, a lot of us didn’t have the money to go buy a whole new outfit, a new wardrobe. So then we dyed our clothes again, trying to get a different color and trying to put some color with that navy blue to keep it from looking too navy.” Beyond alumnae, students and historians of higher education stand to gain from this collection as well, as much of the literature on women’s colleges is dominated by the history and student life at the Seven Sisters
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Reading the South continued institutions (Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley), which in early days predominantly attracted social elites with little need to work outside the home for a living. Through Golden Days, the reader comes to see MUW more as an “instrument of great good,” sharing important characteristics with the American state normal schools as articulated and described by educational historian Christine Ogren—though MUW never expressed teacher education as a sole mission or purpose. Yet through the education of Mississippi’s nonelite women, MUW made an invaluable contribution to society by providing a quality education to the South’s “forgotten women,” a term used by Walter H. Page in 1897 and Amy Thompson McCandless in 1999 to describe the legion of uneducated white women and especially the daughters of farmers who at the turn of the 20th century lacked literacy and real opportunity for practical education. In turn, these MUW alumnae slowly transformed Mississippi, bringing it into the modern era by taking on roles to serve the state’s “forgotten” people through work as pioneers in the fields of home economics, agricultural extension, teaching, law, librarianship, journalism, and the arts, for example. Consider the work of Carmen Pearson Rankin (1937) who upon graduation became a home demonstration agent in Leake County, Mississippi, teaching families how to make mattresses from surplus cotton and how to can beef and chicken. Later, Rankin earned an advanced degree in nutrition from Harvard and worked in southwest Mississippi to fight pellagra and other problems caused by nutritional deficiencies. Other alumnae, like Lenore Loving Prather (1953) and Mary Elizabeth Bickerstaff Payne (1954), broke barriers over time as the state’s female “firsts” in many aspects of law, the ju-
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diciary, and state government. Prather became the first female Supreme Court justice and later served as chief justice from 1998 to 2000. Payne became professor and founding dean of the Mississippi College of Law before she was elected as the first and only woman to the state’s Court of Appeals—though, despite having earned an Ole Miss law degree, she could only get hired as a secretary. Make no mistake: these MUW alumnae are accomplished professionals with advanced degrees, achievement awards, and distinguished records of service to society. Magnolias all, each made of steel. In the end, the most refreshing aspect of Golden Days involves the cumulative effect on the female reader—an absolute historical celebratory indulgence in herstory. As we come to see female lives apart from the centrality of “their men folk” and their “repeated follies,” as Faulkner surmised once, the reader comes to understand the essential role of women’s colleges, and specifically MUW, played in creating conditions for women’s social and economic advancement in Mississippi and beyond. It is this window into the past that makes me mournful and hopeful for the University’s future and looking for good things from the “Golden Girls” to come. Amy E. Wells-Dolan
Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940. By Amy Louise Wood. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, New Directions in Southern Studies Series, 2009. 384 pages. $39.95 cloth. The history of lynching is surely one
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of the most difficult, painful subjects for any scholar to address. In the early 20th century, documentary and other scholarly works were important to individuals who wanted to publicize the practice in order to fight it. Then, for years between the 1930s and the early 1980s, surprisingly little scholarship addressed lynchings in a direct way. In the past generation, many of the best scholars of the postbellum South have detailed and analyzed the practice, helping define it, contextualize it, map where it was most and least common, theorize about its causes and meanings, and tell the stories of its opponents. Amy Wood’s thoughtful new cultural history, Lynching and Spectacle, makes many of its most unique contributions in two ways: by studying lynchings in the context of people who opposed the practice, and by studying visual representations of lynchings in photographs and films. Wood, who teaches history at Illinois State University, divides her volume into three sections— Spectacle, Witnessing, and Bearing Witness. Taking a broad view but always coming back to specific moments and individuals, the book begins and concentrates much of its attention on the South and then
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Reading the South continued expands to consider national issues. Early chapters add new insights to the issues of the law, race, gender, religion, transportation, and mass communication that some other scholars have addressed. For example, Wood details how different groups made and interpreted the distinctions between legal hanging and illegal lynching. By the 1890s, she writes, lynchings “merged the tradition of vigilantism, previously performed privately by small posses, with the spectacle of the public execution.” This combination of tradition and spectacle “was made acceptable and justifiable through its associations with the older social practice of public executions.” Wood’s analyses of how lynching supporters repeatedly changed their arguments that their practice was respectable and even civilizing is consistently intriguing. Scholars have studied lynching photographs before, in the collection amassed and documented by James Allen and in analysis by Grace Hale and Dora Apel. Asking a basic question of why people would have wanted to view pictures of horrifying deaths, Wood continues her effort to see how photographs made lynchings “somewhat familiar” in part because they had parallels with other photographs of legal hangings, mug shots, and even hunting. But, as much as lynching supporters tried to claim photographs as images documenting respectable acts of group justice, the use such images ultimately failed to gain broad respectability. Wood shows that newspapers very rarely ran lynching photographs, and in 1908 the U.S. Postal Service stopped mailing lynching postcards. By the 1910s through the 1930s, the most important uses of visual images of lynchings were in opposition to lynching. Wood shows how the NAACP and other antilynching activists documented the horrors of the practice by publicizing photographs. As the book begins to discuss film, it moves beyond but never com-
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pletely out of the South. Many of the early film portrayals of lynchings involved the West, and films sometimes blurred the line between legal executions and illegal lynchings. The most prominent movie scene of a Southern lynching in the early 20th century appeared in The Birth of a Nation, and Wood shows that filmmaker D. W. Griffith tried to offer the film not as entertainment but as an uplifting morality play. Again, the attempts to make visual representations of lynchings a sign of their respectability faced serious opposition. By the 1930s, Hollywood films like Fury, They Won’t Forget, and The Ox-Bow Incident represented what Wood calls “spectacular indictment” of lynchings. The book ends with a warning that despite the effects visual images have often had to dramatize brutality, there can be dangers in concentrating only on images. “Lynching,” the author writes, “has come to exist only as spectacle, and only as an image, uprooted from its context, from the narratives and the people that surrounded them.” No matter how difficult, this topic demands more analysis, and Wood’s book offers original and useful ways to think and talk about it. Ted Ownby
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories. By Kevin Wilson. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009. 205 pages. $13.99 paper. Kevin Wilson is indubitably an original author. In Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, the stunning debut short-story collection from this Sewanee, Tennessee–based author, Wilson uses a voice I’ve never really heard before. With the exception of a couple
Summer 2009
of stories—“The Shooting Man” (a rural gunslinger sideshow becomes troublingly sinister) and “Birds in the House” (three brothers gather to carry out their mother’s strange posthumous origami request) come immediately to mind—you might not guess Wilson’s writing about the South at all. In fact, after reading Tunneling one doesn’t really recall where any of the stories take place— the only thing you’re sure of is that you’ve been in the narrator’s mind and, more often than not, that mind is a strange, cryptic, weird, and often hysterical place to be. In “Grand Stand-In,” a woman has a job as a replacement grandmother for families too frightened or embarrassed to break the news to their kids that Grandma or Granddad has passed away. The world Wilson creates in this story is something that should only exist in an alternate universe, yet the narrator’s character is all too real. Ultimately, the granny stand-in cannot accept the perverseness of her position and abandons it to pursue a real relationship of her own. This ability to keep an utterly surreal situation grounded by making the characters so relatable is Wilson’s real strength. He makes the absurd believable (a museum filled with
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Reading the South continued
UNIVERSITY PRESS of MISSISSIPPI
Celebrating 100 Years of Eudora Welty Shaping Memories Reflections of African American Women Writers
Edited by Joanne Veal Gabbin Essays by twenty-five prominent writers who reveal decisive moments in their careers $30 hardback
Making a Way out of No Way African American Women and the Second Great Migration
By Lisa Krissoff Boehm Shared memories from the hardworking southern women who relocated to northern cities and birthed the black middle class $50 hardback
Justice Older than the Law The Life of Dovey Johnson Roundtree
By Katie McCabe and Dovey Johnson Roundtree The autobiography of a groundbreaking civil rights crusader, lawyer, and ordained minister $30 hardback
You Must Be from the North Southern White Women in the Memphis Civil Rights Movement
By Kimberly K. Little How well-meaning and wellto-do Memphis women found themselves in the fray in a city’s civil rights turmoil
thousands of rubber bands, paperclips, and spoons is simply a strange backdrop for the ordinary girl-meetsboy love story of “Museum of Whatnot”; spontaneous combustion is an everyday fear for the young man of “Blowing Up on the Spot”; a baby born with a full set of adult teeth is only a momentary, however freakish, distraction in “The Choir Director Affair (The Baby’s Teeth),” which is, says the narrator, really about the baby’s father), he renders the bizarre as sublime normalcy and, while doing so, draws you in so far that you find yourself laughing out loud or sitting with your mouth agape, captivated and charmed. Most of Wilson’s characters are in some sort of limbo, experiencing a major life-transition or traipsing carefully into a period of self-discovery. It’s an underlying theme in almost every story, and makes sense considering Wilson is barely in his thirties and a new husband and father. All this precarious self-consciousness is belied, however, by the strong emotional center in these stories. There’s profound humanity and warmth: Love is a predominant emotion here, whether between a brother and sister in “The Dead Sister Handbook: A Guide for Sensitive Boys,” high school boys and video games and other high school boys in “Mortal Kombat,” children and their desperate-to-avoid-conflict parents in “Grand Stand-In,” a young pyromaniac and a cheerleader in “Go, Fight, Win,” or even the college grads and dirt in “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth.” I love the sort of stark darkness and gothic weirdness Wilson brings to these stories, too. We’ve all been there—on the cusp of the rest of our lives, when sometimes getting to the next place requires living through some strange days—days not so different from the ones Wilson walks you through in this excellent read. Mary Elizabeth Cochran
$40 hardback
Let the World Listen Right The Mississippi Delta Hip-Hop Story
By Ali Colleen Neff Foreword by William R. Ferris A study of grassroots musical creation happening in the cradle of the blues $50 hardback
Professors: To request examination or desk copies of our titles, please visit http://www.upress.state.ms.us/about/ordering/educator
www.upress.state.ms.us 800-737-7788
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Summer 2009
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Southern Foodways Register The Newsletter of the Southern Foodways Alliance “It is not a question of chauvinism, but I have always averred that Southern cooking is by far the vastest and most varied of all traditional regional cooking in this country. I do not wish to demean the other regional cooking of the nation, but it is far more limited in scope.” —Craig Claiborne, from the Introduction to Craig Claiborne’s Southern Cooking, 1997
Putting the “Fair” in Good, Clean, and Fair Throughout the South, we are witnessing a renewed interest in local food and small farms. Folks who are hungry for good eats and meaningful community are thronging weekly farmers markets. In response, such markets are popping up in parks, town squares, and church parking lots. Paradise, it seems, may not be paved over yet. But has the revolution bypassed the underserved? One of the tenents of this good food movement is that the harvest should not only be delicious and safe. It should also be fair. The meaning of “fair” in this instance is two-fold: Farmers have a right to a sustainable return for their crops. And all eaters, regardless of purchasing power, have a right to good, clean food. How can we pay farmers a fair price for good food and put that good food in the hands, and on the tables, of our friends and neighbors with the smallest of food budgets? The U.S. Department of Agriculture has a program that may help. Most of us know this program, in existence since the ’30s, as food stamps. Here’s the thing, though. Stamps are a thing of the past. Funds are now disbursed through debit cards, known in the jargon-heavy social services world as EBT cards, as in Electronic Benefit Transfer. Of late, savvy, social justice–minded farmers markets have begun to accept
EBT funds. Ditto other state-run nutrition enhancement programs like WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) and seniors coupons. The program now distributes around $34 billion annually. In addition to funds from the USDA and state programs, organizations like Wholesome Wave—a nonprofit based in Connecticut with a Southern beachhead in Georgia—are, in an effort to encourage healthy purchases, running programs that double the value of EBT dollars spent at farmers markets. At the East Atlanta Village Farmers Market, Wholesome Wave Georgia has, in two months’ time, turned $300 EBT dollars into $600 market dollars. Not bad considering the average market purchase is somewhere around $6. EBT funds can be leveraged to help everyone gain access to good and clean food, while boosting the revenue stream at your local farmers market. I hear you asking, How do we do it at our local market? How does a farmers market go about accepting foods stamps? Not surprisingly, it’s somewhat complicated to access this government program. The best thing to do is start online with the USDA and complete the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Application for stores. Concurrently, reach out to your local USDA office and tell them what you
want to do. Eventually, they will come and inspect your market. Meanwhile, you’ll need to start thinking about how to accept EBT cards. Merchant Source has a program offering free WiFi card swipes to anyone accepting EBT. This same system will also allow individual farmers to accept credit cards. The system may be free, but there will be processing fees of $60 per month, at a minimum. Even with swipe technology, you need a way to convert the electronic funds to market-spendable currency. Here’s the hitch: it’s illegal to exchange EBT funds for U.S. currency. Some markets have had success with a token system where the shopper swipes the card at the main market booth and receives tokens to be spent only at market. The token system works well, but also requires funds to print, distribute, and manage the tokens. Once you have everything in place, you’ll need to have some way to get the word out to the EBT recipients. They need to know you’re ready to accept their form of payment. Find out who administers EBT in your state. (In Georgia, it’s the Department of Human Resources) and ask them if they can help you by posting signs in offices near your market or including flyers in their monthly mailings. It may take a little while to attract these new consumers. They may not come right away, but don’t lose heart. This is a long-term project with a big vision. Even seemingly spontaneous revolutions take a bit of planning. Judith Winfrey
Taste of South, Blackberry Farm
News from the SFA 12th Southern Foodways Symposium Music and Food: Exploring Interdependent Cultural Expressions October 30–November 1, Oxford, Mississippi
Walland, Tennessee, January 7–9, 2010
Over the course of four days of lectures and performances, as well as breakfasts, dinners, and suppers, we will unlock the key to what Memphis Minnie really meant when she sang, “I’m selling my pork chops/But I’m giving my gravy away.” New Orleans will get its due, by way of red beans and rice and jazz. So will Texas blues. And Tennessee country. And hip-hop from the ATL. We’ll stage a ballet and a goat roast. We’ll feed on deep-fried catfish and slow-simmered greens. We’ll take you down to the crossroads where food and music intersect, and we’ll sketch the ways in which these cultural expressions are complementary. We’ll provide opportunities for academics, writers, cooks, and intellectually curious eaters to come to a better understanding of Southern culture and Southern cookery. Lectures, held on the University of Mississippi campus, as well as in Oxford at the Lyric Theatre and the Powerhouse, will be amplified by informal lunches and dinners, served in and around the town.
7th Delta Divertissement October 29–30, Greenwood and Indianola, Mississippi Craig Claiborne, the long-tenured New York Times dining editor, and B. B. King, the legendary bluesman, both sons of Indianola, Mississippi, will serve as lodestars for the Delta Divertissement. We’ll explore the boardinghouse tradition that informed Craig Claiborne’s Delta years. And we’ll talk of how cotton pickers of B. B. King’s generation supplemented their meager incomes by working truck patch gardens. Registration information for both the Symposium and the Delta Divertissement can be found at www.southernfoodways.org.
Angie Mosier
In celebration of the achievements of the South’s best, Blackberry Farm, in concert with the Southern Foodways Alliance, hosts the annual Taste of the South gathering. We honor and celebrate farmers, artisans, and chefs, bringing these vital figures of Southern food culture together for enrichment and education, both as recompense for their contributions and as catalyst for the practice of Southern foodways. This event establishes needed linkages between cooks and the craftspeople who produce the building blocks of great food, all the while preserving and strengthening the foundations of Southern culture. In addition to a Gala Dinner honoring the chefs and artisans, the Taste of the South event does, of course, feature the Southern Foodways Alliance’s signature blend of edification, alimentation, and celebration. In other words, we eat and drink well while we learn from one another. And we treat ourselves at the annual silent auction, with the satisfaction that the dollars raised support SFA documentary initiatives. To register contact Ann-Marie Williams at 865.380.2081 or e-mail her at awilliams@blackberryfarm.com.
SFA Contributor JUDITH WINFREY is a full-time farmer in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the leader of Slow Food Atlanta.
Pete Wells, dining editor for the New York Times, and Jacques Pepin, chef and author, celebrate the life and work of Craig Claiborne during a panel discussion in New York City sponsored by the SFA and the State of Mississippi.
Oxford Celebrated in Pictorial History Book Oxford’s most illustrious resident, William Faulkner, was once asked what caused him to begin his Yoknapatawpha Saga. His reply was what you might expect from the Nobel Laureate: “With Soldier’s Pay and Mosquitoes, I wrote for the sake of writing because it was fun.” “Beginning with Sartoris,” Faulkner went on to state, “I discovered my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.” When you walk around our small Southern town, and take time to learn our history, you will understand what Faulkner meant. This small town, like no other, has experienced some “watersheds” of American history. Starting with the Chickasaw Cession in 1832—which opened up the Indian lands of north Mississippi for settlement and was partly the cause of the Trail of Tears—Oxford and Lafayette County were destined to become a crossroads of America. The three pioneers and land speculators who purchased Indian land from Princess Hoka in 1837, forming the city of Oxford, had a plan to make Oxford a center of learning and culture for the old Southwest. By 1841 the Legislature of the State of Mississippi decided that the young men of Mississippi needed a place for higher learning. After several votes in the state legislature, the new town of Oxford was selected as the home of the state’s university. Oxford had been given its name to entice the legislators to vote for it as the location the school. In 1848 the University of Mississippi was opened for the enrollment of students, and for the next 161 years, Oxford and the University have been the scene of many events marking the progress of American history. Examples of these events are many, but to name a few: • The invasion of Mississippi during the Civil War by Generals Grant
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In the spring of 1949, William Faulkner’s novel Intruder in the Dust was made into a movie and filmed in Oxford by MGM. This photograph was taken in front of Heard’s Feed Store on East Jackson Avenue, just off the Square, behind the presentday Oxford City Hall. Noted actor Will Geer, who portrayed the county sheriff, is seen in the forefront opening a package of sunflower seeds. In the background is Reverend “Blind Jim” Ivy, the unofficial longtime “Dean of the Freshman Class” at Ole Miss in the black hat. Next to Blind Jim is F. E. Heard, the feed store owner, shown wearing a necktie. Read about the 60th Anniversary Gala of the movie’s filming in Oxford on page 14 of this Southern Register.
and Sherman in an effort to take Vicksburg in 1862. • The burning of Oxford in 1864 by General “Whiskey Joe” Smith in for what some historians say was in retaliation of the raid on Fort Pillow in Tennessee by General Forrest. A Northern reporter called Oxford “the most devastated town in the South.”
• Reconciliation between the North and South during Reconstruction carried out by men such as Oxford resident and statesman L. Q. C. Lamar. • The “last battle of the Civil War”: the integration of Ole Miss in 1962. Over a period of years, Oxford resident, founder and former president of the Oxford Lafayette County Heritage Foundation, the late Patricia Brown Young, collected photographs of Oxford that cover a period from the early 1870s to the early 1950s. Jack Lamar Mayfield, “A Sense of Place” columnist for the Oxford Eagle and Ole Miss graduate, has taken this photograph collection, along with early photographs of the University of Mississippi, and put them in a pictorial history of Oxford and Ole Miss for Arcadia Publishing Company. The Oxford Lafayette County Heritage Foundation, as one of its preservation and renovation projects, is in the process of restoring the first African American church in Oxford. A few years ago, noted author John Grisham gave the Burns United Church, also known as the Burns Belfry, on Jackson Avenue in Oxford, to the Foundation to be used in connection with the Oxford Development Association as a repository of multicultural history of Oxford and Lafayette County. The 128-page book will be released on August 24, 2009. All proceeds will be donated for use in the renovation of the Burns Belfry in the name of Patricia Brown Young. She had worked tirelessly, before her untimely death, for this preservation project. You may preorder the book from the OLCHF, Post Office Box 622, Oxford, Mississippi 38655, for $21.99 plus shipping and handling in the amount of $3.00.
Summer 2009
Jack Lamar Mayfield
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Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2009 “Faulkner and Mystery” Group tours Faulkner family graves at St. Peter’s Cemetery in Oxford.
Bruce Newman
“blank slate” of characters such as Joe Christmas and Charles Bon, to portraits of characters in Go Down, Moses whose black identities have a solidity comparable to that of detective stories. In a series of stories collected under the heading “Beyond” in Collected Stories, Faulkner deliberately blocks meaning, even as he allows multiple meanings to emerge. For several speakers, internal tensions within texts became new sources of Faulknerian mystery. Susan Donaldson
distinguished between the radical characterizations within the drama portions of Requiem for a Nun and the evolving history of Mississippi symbols of order, law, and authority of the Prefaces. Donald Kartiganer focused on the relationship between what the narrators of
Don Cole
Although Faulkner’s worldwide reputation—as signaled by the convening of the 36th annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference—is no longer a mystery, “Faulkner and Mystery” offered for Faulkner readers fresh testimony of the Nobel Prize winner’s readiness to open the age-old problems of knowledge: what and how we know, what we cannot know, what we refuse to know, and how we might come to know more than we knew before. Ranging from Faulkner’s forays into stories of successful detection, such as Intruder in the Dust and the collection Knight’s Gambit, to his more ambivalent probing of the nature of narrative, race, history, and female identity in Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, and Requiem for a Nun, 20 Faulkner scholars attempted to come to terms with a body of work that continues to raise new questions about the conditions of his world and ours. One concern of the speakers was Faulkner’s frequent unwillingness to let fictions achieve resolution. Rather, as Michael Gorra, Philip Weinstein, and Noel Polk proposed, narrative plotting invariably leaves the reader with imperfect knowledge. The treatment of race varies from accounts of whites projecting their own identities onto the mysterious
Looking at Faulkner’s library at Rowan Oak Page 32
Summer 2009
Don Cole
Bruce Newman
“Faulkner on the Fringe” activities: James Carothers (above, left) presents Don Kartiganer a signed photograph of his lifelong baseball hero Joe DiMaggio as a gift from conference friends upon his retirement. Below:Kartiganer playing for the “Fringe” audience
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Bruce Newman
Absalom, Absalom! know and the elaborate screens they erect that simultaneously embody and conceal that knowledge. Sarah Mahurin Mutter analyzed The Unvanquished in terms of the difference between what readers of the text do not know and what the characters do not know; and John Padgett described how the indisputable facts of a story can sometimes lead to wrong conclusions. In addition to the scholarly presentations, there was a showing of The Story of Temple Drake, the rarely seen 1933 film version of Faulkner’s Sanctuary; a panel of crime writers—Ace Atkins and Jere Hoar—discussing their own processes of writing as well as Faulkner’s methods; three Teaching Faulkner sessions conducted by James Carothers, Charles Peek, Terrell Tebbetts, and Theresa Towner; tours of Oxford, New Albany and Ripley, and the Mississippi Delta; a picnic at Rowan Oak; and “Faulkner on the Fringe,” hosted by Colby Kullman and the Southside Gallery, in which conference registrants perform riffs of their own on Faulkner’s life and work. A special event was a panel conversation between Hal Freeland and his son
Participant listens to Susan Donaldson’s lecture while wearing 2009 conference T-shirt with a “mystery” quotation from Absalom, Absalom!: “It’s just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that’s it: they don’t explain and we are not supposed to know.”
Tom, both Oxford attorneys, on Hal’s experience as Phil Stone’s law partner in the 1950s, when Faulkner was a regular visitor at Stone’s law office. Hal’s reminiscences were a reminder that the man who lived in and walked the
streets of Oxford for 57 years was, for all the wonder at his work, a human being after all: a “mystery” perhaps, but still one of us. Donald Kartiganer
Don Cole
Donald Kartiganer at Rowan Oak showing Faulkner’s study with outline of Absalom, Absalom! on the walls around the room. The Southern Register
Summer 2009
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10th Annual “Faulkner on the Fringe” Festival Dedicated to Charles E. Noyes Provost Emeritus and English Emeritus Professor Gerald Walton dedicated this year’s 10th annual “Faulkner Fringe Festival” to Charles E. Noyes, who with his wife, Ruthie, founded and hosted the Tuesday cocktail party of the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference and later cohosted this part of the weekly festivities with Sarah and Allie Smith and Colby Kullman, donated money for the libations of the entire program, and supported “Faulkner on the Fringe” with his enthusiasm and blessings. As Walton noted, Noyes was the ideal benefactor because, although of modest means, he made significant contributions to almost every aspect of life on the Ole Miss campus. Thanks to the generosity and hospitality of Vickie and Wil Cook, owner and manager of Southside Gallery, the “Faulkner on the Fringe” meets there each year at 10:00 p.m. on the Monday night of the Faulkner Conference. This year approximately 80 guests arrived after a full day of scholarly papers in anticipation of wine and snacks and of something short, entertaining, and related to William Faulkner. They were not disappointed as the only rule is a maximum of 10 minutes on stage. When asked why they attended and sang at the “Faulkner on the Fringe” program every year, John and Christine Smith replied, “It gives readers of Faulkner a chance to communicate with the community Faulkner came from and with the scholars who’ve devoted their lives to his work.” This year’s program was framed with song thanks to Don Kartiganer, who opened the festivities singing “Barbara Allen” while strumming on his guitar. This was followed by what
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Kartiganer called “a Seattle song” having to do with a logger who stirred his coffee with his thumb. Noting that folks songs are “all Irish, and they’re all sad,” Katriganer left some question as to the relevance of the latter song to the world of William Faulkner. Immediately following his performance, Kartiganer was called back to the stage by James Carothers to share his anecdote about his meeting with Joe DiMaggio, one of Kartiganer’s heroes since childhood. Carothers then thanked Kartiganer for his years of service to Ole Miss and the Faulkner Conference by presenting him with an autographed portrait of DiMaggio. Although Kartiganer is now officially retired as the University Howry Chair in Faulkner Studies and Professor of English, he will direct the annual Faulkner conference one more year. Celebrating Faulkner in song, Christine and John Smith sang their original composition “Snopes’ Lament: William Faulkner Informs the ’60s” to the tune of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which brought a lively response from the late-night audience who joined in singing the song’s wellknown, if modified, refrain. Deborah Freeland then talked about making still photographs for the “Barn Burning Project” which was part of the 1979 filming of the movie Barn Burning in Oxford. She took her photographs over the shoulder of the cinematographer shooting the film of this famous Faulkner short story. Since the barn could be burned only once, there were no retakes so she had to be fast in capturing the awe, horror, and terror of this dramatic climax. This powerful presentation was highlighted by the photos
themselves, which were hanging on the walls to the left of Freeland. Betty Harrington and George Kehoe then performed short scenes found in Absalom Absalom! and The Unvanquished, Jo Dale Mistilis read the letter from Faulkner to J. E. Neilson about money he owed to Oxford’s 1837 department store on the Square, Carolyn Ross performed a dramatic reading from Faulkner’s fiction, and Griff Brownlee read a personal, metaphorical poem on William Faulkner. The evening was brought to a close by a group of Faulkner fans who composed a rap song over dinner and called themselves “Cash and the One Lick Less.” As they chanted their memorable “Yok-napa-taw-pha Rap,” the audience joined in, bringing the evening’s festivities to a boisterous, happy ending. The “Faulkner on the Fringe” program was the idea of Marianne Steinsvik who 11 years ago exclaimed: “Every year I come to the Faulkner Conference from Spain and listen to the scholars read their papers and share their ideas while all I get to do is stand at the microphone and ask a question or two. I have read Faulkner in Spanish and English for over 30 years, and I also have something to say.” Thanks to Marianne, “Faulkner on the Fringe,” which began as an unsanctioned, revolutionary program, is now accepted and praised by the mainstream devotees of the Faulkner Conference. If you wish to sign up for next year’s Faulkner on the Fringe, please send your idea to Colby H. Kullman at egcolby@olemiss.edu or 662-236-3958.
Summer 2009
Colby H. Kullman
The Southern Register
2009 Eudora Welty Awards
From left: Tiffany Croft, Elizabeth Richardson, Elizabeth Seratt
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Zandria Robinson
said she is asking “What is distinctive about Southern communities, in my case, black urban communities, that could illuminate what we don’t already know.” To that end, she studies the backgrounds of urban African Americans in the South, many of whom, like her father, have rural roots, while others are moving to Southern cities from Northern cities. She continued that she is interested in “how Southern blacks in a Southern city accomplish a distinctive regional identity in conversation with race, gender, class, sexual, and other identities.” Her academic work combines interviewing urban Southerners, studying patterns and distinctive features of their lives and backgrounds, and also analyzing the “packaging of Southernness” in things like movies and marketing strategies. One of many ways Robinson immediately contributes to ongoing interests at the Center is through her study of contemporary music. She wrote the entry on hip-hop for Urban Life, the forthcoming volume 15 of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (edited by her MA mentor Wanda Rushing), she will also lend her expertise on hip-hop and food as a panelist at this fall’s Southern Foodways Symposium, and she plans to use music as a starting point for her undergraduate Southern Studies seminar. More than a decade ago, James and Madeleine McMullan of Chicago created the McMullan Professorships in Southern Studies. Zandria Robinson will be the first sociologist to fill one of the McMullan positions and, in fact, the first sociologist with a joint appointment in Southern Studies. Robinson’s new colleagues look forward to what she will bring to the University. According to Center director Ted Ownby, “With her academic interests and plans for teaching, Zandria is perfect for our program. It is always exciting to add new faculty to see how they fit into what is already going on and what they add that we had never even imagined. Zandria cares about both old and new scholarship on the concept of region, especially the concept of the South, and she should be part of a new generation of scholars helping to redefine regional studies.” Sociology and Anthropology Chair Kirsten Dellinger added that Robinson’s “focus on African American experiences in the urban South as well as her general attention to culture, inequality, and theory will bring added strengths to our department and will further develop our ties with the Center. She’s a perfect fit for us.”
Tom Richardson
Each year the Center for the Study of Southern Culture gives the Eudora Welty Awards for Creative Writing to two Mississippi high school students for short stories and poetry written during the previous school year. First place carries a prize of $500, and second place a prize of $250. Schools may submit one entry in each category. Faculty of the University of Mississippi’s English Department judge the entries; the awards are presented during the University’s annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. We are glad to announce that we had 30 entries from 15 public and private high schools across the state. This year both our first- and second-place winners are English students of Emma Richardson’s at the Mississippi School for Math and Science located in Columbus on the campus of Mississippi College for Women. First place went to Tiffany Croft of Vicksburg for her poem “Off of Route 22.” Judges remarked that “[t]he author manages, in a mere four stanzas filled with careful detail, to construct an imagined encounter with Beatle great John Lennon. The exchange between poet and subject is both powerful and surprising in its suggestion that Lennon himself relies upon a media-generated image to understand who he is.” Second place went to Elizabeth Seratt for her short story “Jobe.” According to judges, “[t]he author is remarkably skilled in creating the viewpoints of her two main characters, a middle-aged man and his aging, house-bound mother. Nothing in particular happens in the story—but with her use of subtle detail and careful dialogue the author suggests that this routine constitutes a future that will be interrupted only by death.” To see a list of past winners of the Eudora Welty Awards, visit the Center’s Web site: www.olemiss.edu/depts/south/ EudoraWeltyAwards.html. Sally Cassady Lyon
continued from 1
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The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Editors to Participate in Louisiana Book Festival On Saturday, October 17, 2009, we editors of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture are taking the series on the road by participating in the Seventh Annual Louisiana Book Festival. The festival will take place in the heart of Baton Rouge at the State Library of Louisiana, within the Louisiana State Capitol, at the Louisiana State Museum, and in nearby locations. We attended the festival last year, holding an informal panel that consisted of author/journalist Julia Reed, literary scholar Kenneth Holditch, and LSU political science professor Wayne Parent. Using the Foodways, Literature, and Law and Politics volumes as the central point of focus, the panelists discussed how each of those topics is reflected within the larger context of Southern culture. Series editor Charles Reagan Wilson moderated the panel. As a result of the success of last year’s panel, Jim Davis, director of the Louisiana Center for the Book, has invited us to continue to celebrate the release of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture volumes by participating in the 2009 festival. Again, Charles Wilson will moderate the panel. Center director and Gender volume coeditor Ted Ownby will discuss how gender is reflected within Southern culture, Agriculture and Industry volume coeditor and Converse College professor Melissa Walker will discuss the cultural aspects of agriculture and industry in the South, and Nick Spitzer, the producer and host of the radio program American Routes and contributor to the Music volume, will be on hand to talk a bit about Southern music. After last year’s festival Charles Wilson returned to the Center saying, “The festival was extremely well organized. The accessibility of writers is wonderful—to be able to meet with them and talk with them, to hear the readings, and to hear the panels to give context. I think it’s one of the best organized book events in the country.” The annual Louisiana Book Festival is a free, world-class, literary celebration. The festival offers unique opportunities for booklovers of all ages to interact with more than 175 exceptional writers, poets, and storytellers and to enjoy an inspiring variety of book-related activities, exhibitions, and demonstrations. We are pleased and honored to once again be a part of this exciting event. For more information on the festival, visit www.louisianabookfestival.org.
Jimmy Thomas
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CONTRIBUTORS Mary Elizabeth Cochran grew up in Gulfport and now lives in Jackson with her husband, Pat, and their little boy, Jack. She’s a mom, a drummer, and her favorite song is “Blue Velvet” by Bobby Vinton. Joan Wylie Hall teaches in the English Department at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of a book on Shirley Jackson and articles on numerous Southern writers. Donald M. Kartiganer is Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies Emeritus at the University of Mississippi and director of the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. Sally Cassady Lyon works at the Center, as the director’s assistant. She is a Gulfport native and Sewanee graduate. Sally and her husband, Dalton, have one daughter, Lucy Rose. 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. Christopher Maurer is the author of Fortune’s Favorite Child: The Uneasy Life of Walter Anderson, winner of the 2003 Eudora Welty Prize and the nonfiction award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. Another of his books, written with María Estrella Iglesias, is a history of the Anderson family and Shearwater Pottery, Dreaming in Clay on the Coast of Mississippi: Love and Art at Shearwater. Jack Lamar Mayfield is a graduate of the University of Mississippi, a retired vice president of a life insurance company, and a former history teacher at Northwest Community College. He currently writes a weekly column for the Oxford Eagle, “A Sense of Place,” on Oxford and Ole Miss history. Panny Flautt Mayfield, an award-winning photographer and journalist, is director of public relations at Coahoma Community College in Clarksdale, Mississippi. She is a founder and coordinator of the Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival. Cale Nicholson is a Southern Studies master’s program 2009 graduate. He has coordinated the Teaching Garden at the Boys & Girls Club in Oxford, Mississippi, for two years. Ted Ownby, director of the Center, holds a joint appointment in Southern Studies and History. Dorothy Shawhan writes and teaches fiction and creative nonfiction workshops at Delta State University. Seetha Srinivasan is director emerita of the University Press of Mississippi. During her tenure there from 1979 until 2008 the Press published many books by and about Walter Anderson and helped reveal his amazing talent to the world. Among the other international recognized works she developed for publication are Photographs and other books by and about Eudora Welty. Theresa M. Towner is professor of Literary Studies in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is the author of Faulkner on the Color Line: The Later Novels, coauthor, with James Carothers, of Reading Faulkner: Collected Short Stories, and author of The Cambridge Introduction to William Faulkner. Annette Trefzer is associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction and coeditor of Global Faulkner: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2007 and “Global Contexts, Local Literatures: The New Southern Studies,” a special issue of American Literature. Amy E. Wells-Dolan is an associate professor of higher education at the University of Mississippi. Her research interests include the history of higher education in the South and philanthropy.
Summer 2009
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
Summer 2009
Page 37
The NEW Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Sponsored by
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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 ďŹ rst published in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. The New Encyclopedia is being released as a series of clothbound and paperback volumes, 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. The entire collection will contain 24 volumes in all. CURRENTLY AVAILABLE
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