the the newsletter of the
Center for the Study of Southern Culture • Winter 2010
the university of mississippi
2010 Oxford Conference for the Book The 17th Oxford Conference for the Book, set for March 4–6, 2010, will be dedicated to Barry Hannah, one of Mississippi’s most distinguished contemporary writers. The author of nine novels and four collections of short stories, and the recipient of the Award in Literature from the American Institute of Arts and Letters, Hannah is writer in residence and director of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Mississippi. Four sessions on Saturday will discuss his fiction, teaching, and life, and Hannah will be in the spotlight on Thursday afternoon during John Grisham’s talk on “Literary Oxford” and at Thacker Mountain Radio. The conference will begin at the J. D. Williams Library at 11:30 a.m. on Thursday with lunch and a keynote address by Nicholas A. Basbanes, described by Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and historian David McCullough as “the leading authority of books about books.” The first session on Thursday afternoon will be a Celebration of National Poetry Month, with poets Mark Jarman, a professor at Vanderbilt University, and E. Ethelbert Miller, of Washington, D.C., reading their work. Beth Ann Fennelly, a poet who teaches at the University of Mississippi, and Jon Parrish Peede, director of literature at the National Endowment for the Arts, will make comments during the celebration. During the next session, at 2:30 p.m., journalist Curtis Wilkie will discuss the topic “Writing about Politics” with Hendrick Hertzberg and Todd S. Purdum. Hertzberg, senior editor and staff writer for the New Yorker, is the author of Politics: Observations and Arguments, 1966–2004 and ¡Obamanos!: The Birth of a New Political Era. Purdum, national editor of Vanity Fair since 2006, worked for 23 years at the New York Times where his last assignment was as a diplomatic and White House correspondent in the Washington Bureau. John Grisham will be welcomed by Chancellor Daniel W. continued on page 15
Illustrating 2010 Oxford Conference for the Book materials is Maude Schuyler Clay’s 1985 photograph of Barry Hannah. The photograph is reproduced on posters and T-shirts available from the Center by calling 800-390-3527.
Call 662-925-5993 or visit www.oxfordconferenceforthebook.com for more information or to register for conference programs.
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the Published Quarterly by The Center for the Study of Southern Culture The University of Mississippi Telephone: 662-915-5993 Fax: 662-915-5814 E-mail: cssc@olemiss.edu www.olemiss.edu/depts/south
IN THIS ISSUE Winter 2010 1 2010 Oxford Conference for the Book 2 Director’s Column 3 Living Blues Celebrates 40th Year 4 February Symposium on “Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi” 4 Early History and Culture Conference 4 Bolden Is 2010 Early Wright Lecturer 5 Southern Studies Alumni and Faculty Photography Exhibition 5 Gammill Gallery Exhibition Schedule 6 Films on Center’s Web Site 6 SST Alum Steve Cheseborough 7 F&Y 2010: “Faulkner and Film” 8 Southern Studies Alumni News 8 Herring on All Things Considered 9 Walter Anderson and World Literature 10 Books by Southern Studies Faculty 11 Summer School in Germany: “The South in Global Perspectives” 11 Southern Studies Faculty on the Road 12 2010 Delta Literary Tour Schedule 13 Deltalogy 101: Thomas on Delta Tour 14 Creative Writing Workshop, March 3 15 Basbanes to Give Keynote Address 18 Howorth on Hannah 20 The Write Stuff for Kids 21 University Press of Mississippi at 40 22 Southern Arts Federation Workshops 23 O’Connors Offer Book & Author Publicity Session 24 MIAL’s Awards, Nominations 25 Reading the South: Reviews & Notes 28 Eudora Welty Awards 30 William Anderson Exhibition 30 Notes on Contributors 31 Southern Foodways Alliance News 36 Southern Culture Catalog Items 40 Address Section/Mailing List Form/ Friends Information and Form
REGISTER STAFF Editor: Ann J. Abadie Graphic Designer: Susan Bauer Lee Mailing List Manager: Mary Hartwell Howorth Editorial Assistant: Sally Cassady Lyon Lithographer: RR Donnelley Magazine Group The University complies with all applicable laws regarding affirmative action and equal opportunity in all its activities and programs and does not discriminate against anyone protected by law because of age, color, disability, national origin, race, religion, sex, or status as a veteran or disabled veteran.
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The start of the new year almost always encourages thinking about what’s new. It is the season for students to apply to graduate schools and for current students to start thinking about graduating. It is also a good time to learn outside the classroom. In February and March, one can receive a pretty solid education simply by attending free events on and off campus. In February, the Center will cohost the Porter Fortune Jr. History Symposium, this year in partnership with the Future of the South Conference, on the civil rights movement in Mississippi. Then in early March the Oxford Conference for the Book brings together writers, readers, editors, and others, especially those interested in featured writer Barry Hannah. The Early Wright Keynote blues lecture by author Tony Bolden will be later in March, a few hours before a Cassandra Wilson concert. Campus is full of Black History Month and Women’s History Month events, and off campus, the Oxford Film Festival, the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, and the meeting of the Mississippi Historical Society are all scheduled during the next few months. The start of a new year is also, for good or bad, a season of lists. I write in early January at a time when everyone who writes a column seems to be required to write a list of best and worst things of the past year (or past decade), what’s hot, what’s not, what’s underrated, and the like. Since I write a column, I suppose I have an obligation to offer a list, although I would suggest that anyone looking to a middle-aged academic for suggestions about what’s hot is looking in the wrong place. I can only offer a list of some of the most notable developments of the past decade among Southern historians. Of course I do not read anywhere close to everything or in every subspecialty within Southern history, but this seems a good start to considering what trends have been particularly meaningful and exciting (if not necessarily hot) in the field in the past 10 years. Some changes are continuations or culminations of developments from previous years, others are brand new, and others are already facing challenges. (1) Constructing, making, and defining. Perhaps nothing in the past decade or so has been as influential as the argument that concepts, ideas, arguments, assumptions about race, blackness, whiteness, gender, nation, region, and lots of other ideas are constructions (sometimes referred to as “mere constructions”) that some people use to support existing social relations, to try to make them seem natural and normal, or to subvert or at least complicate those social relations. Despite suggestions that this movement was not as revolutionary as it seemed and some concerns that its tendency toward theory made it dense for nonspecialists, I suspect that more Southern historians than ever are studying construction and deconstruction. (2) The global South. An idea that once seemed to threaten the significance of Southern history, the goal of studying the South as part of global networks of people, products, ideas, and information, has actually made Southern history bigger, more exciting, and more meaningful. Beyond simply emphasizing what was already obvious—you have to study the South in the context of European and African history—this movement encourages new questions outside North-South comparisons, and better study of continuing international exchanges involving everything from Wal-Mart to global Pentecostalism to migrant workers. (3) Gender studies and women’s studies. The past decade has been a good time for gender scholars, who have examined the construction of the concept, the intersections of gender and race, and gender differences in labor, health, legal status, and politics. And women’s history seemed for some time to be in decline as a form of what critics called “contribution history,” but it’s back, with a broader agenda, numerous women’s history collections, conferences, and new work. (4) Respectability and uplift. One way gender studies has changed Southern history is through works that see respectability and uplift as political strategies for African Americans, especially in the Jim Crow period, to reject harmful stereotypes and to pursue new possibilities. The construction of respectability has become a theme in other fields as well, as scholars detail how people claimed that certain types of clothing, manners, education, and language were respectable and others were not. Winter 2010
The Southern Register
(5) Indians. For too long, most Southern historians left Indians to anthropologists and archaeologists. Even worse, those historians too often left Indians out of their classes, at least after the first week. In the past decade or two, historians have joined the anthropologists in including American Indians as they rethink the history of the agriculture, slavery, the meaning of the frontier, and other topics, and they no longer stop with the Trail of Tears. (6) The slave trade. Several of the most important recent works on slavery have studied the slave trade, both the international and the internal trade, including the American Indian trade. Part of seeing how slavery changed in response to various challenges, this scholarship has studied the slave trade as a changing economic process, as a moral, political, and legal issue, and as a powerful institution in certain American cities. (7) Memory. In the past decade, a number of influential books have studied how groups and individuals understood or constructed the past for its politics, ethics, and aesthetics. Much of this scholarship has studied the Civil War and Reconstruction, but others have studied memory and the civil rights movement, agriculture, violence, and other topics. (8) Civil rights scholarship: local studies and white Southerners’ responses. In the 1990s, some major books emphasized that it was local people more than well-known national leaders who provided the energy and focus of the movement. Since then numerous scholars have studied the civil rights movement in individual places to study the particulars of how they defined issues and pursued goals. A second movement has widened the range of white Southerners’ responses, with new books emphasizing a variety of responses among ministers, journalists, businesspeople, women’s groups, and others. (9) The environment. Most Southern historians were slow to study the environment, but in the past decade the environmental scholarship has become a lively field of Southern history, with several important books on the landscape, labor, and law, and more to come. (10) The end of social history, cultural history, and maybe political history as separate subfields. When I applied for academic jobs in the 1980s, it was essential to describe myself as a type of historian, and I called myself a social and cultural historian to differentiate my field from political, legal, and diplomatic history. Most historians today, believing that parts of life are essentially interconnected and using a broad definition of politics, do not need or want to make those distinctions. If these are among the major trends among Southern historians, what’s out (or not hot)? First, any question or line of argument that begins and more or less ends with white Southerners as the only Southerners under consideration is out. Second, questions about central themes or continuities are out. Many recent scholarly movements suggest that things worth studying are contingent, ever-changing, and open for multiple definitions, and such an approach does not lead to discussion of central themes. What’s coming? It is hard to speculate about how events will intersect with scholarly production in the next decade. But here in Southern Studies, we can hope our interests in literature, history, sociology, documentary studies, filmmaking and film studies, religion, gender studies, foodways, the blues, interdisciplinarity, encyclopedias, and whatever we do next will be part of the story. Ted Ownby The Southern Register
Living Blues
Celebrates 40th Year The year 2010 will be a big one for Living Blues as the magazine celebrates its 40th anniversary. Each issue of the magazine will feature a look back at some of the stories and features over the past four decades. Our eighth annual Blues Today Symposium will be held March 26 in Oxford and feature University of Kansas scholar Tony Bolden as our esteemed keynote speaker for the Early Wright Lecture. Past keynotes have included authors Paul Oliver, Samuel Chambers, and Bill Ferris. (See Bolden article on page 4 of this issue.) The symposium will conclude with a performance by Cassandra Wilson at the Gertrude Castellow Ford Center on the University of Mississippi campus. All symposium lectures are free and open to the public, but tickets for the Cassandra Wilson show must be purchased separately and may be obtained by contacting the Ford Center box office at 662-915-7411. On June 9 and 10, Living Blues teams with Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, to present Blues and the Spirit II: A Symposium on Chicago Blues and Gospel Music Commemorating the Centennial of Howlin’ Wolf’s Birth and the 40th Anniversary of Living Blues Magazine. The program will include • Panels and presentations with blues and gospel scholars, musicians, writers, and industry representatives. • Special panel with the founding editors and contributors of Living Blues on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. (Early registrants will receive an original Vol.1, No. 1 edition of Living Blues with Howlin’ Wolf on the cover.) • Blues and the Spirit Awards honoring Barry Dolins, director of the Chicago Blues Festival, and Howlin’ Wolf’s daughters, Bettye Kelly and Barbra Marks. • Wednesday evening reception and pro jam with an allstar array of blues musicians from Wolf’s generation and from the contemporary Chicago music scene. • Thursday evening motor coach transportation and entrance to Chicago Blues Festival opening (tentative) and symposium after party at the legendary Rosa’s Lounge. Additional details and registration are available at www. dom.edu/blues. A one-year subscription to Living Blues is $27.95 and may be purchased on our Web site: www.livingblues.com. A sample copy of the magazine is also available. Please send an e-mail to info@livingblues.com and request your free copy today! Mark Camarigg
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Symposium on “The Civil Rights Early American History and Movement in Mississippi” On February 18–20, the Porter Fortune Jr. History Symposium, which this year partCulture ners with the Center’s Future of the South Conference, will discuss the topic “The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi.” The goal is both to learn new information and Conference new perspectives about the Mississippi movement and also to consider how that history is important in thinking about education and movements among today’s young people. Sessions on Thursday and Friday, February 18 and 19, will feature new lectures by scholars in history, political science, religion, and sociology, and they will conclude by comments by John Dittmer, whose 1995 book Local People helped direct civil rights scholarship toward local activists in individual communities. On Saturday, those historians will join activists, educators, and others for open-ended discussions about the place the civil rights movement has in thinking about the future of the South. All events are free and open to the public. No registration is necessary. Thursday, February 18: all events in Johnson Commons Ballroom 9:30–11:00 a.m. Presentations by Emilye Crosby (SUNY Geneseo) and Michael Williams (Mississippi State) 1:00–2:30 p.m. Presentations by Francoise Hamlin (Brown) and Jelani Favors (Morgan State) 3:00–4:30 p.m. Presentations by Akinyele Umoja (Georgia State) and Wesley Hogan (Virginia State) Friday, February 19: all events in Johnson Commons Ballroom 9:30–11:00 a.m. Presentations by David Cunningham (Brandeis) and Joseph Reiff (Emory and Henry) 1:00–2:30 p.m. Presentations by Byron D’Andra Orey (Jackson State) and Chris Myers Asch (U.S. Public Service Academy) 3:00–4:00 p.m. Comments by John Dittmer (DePaul) Saturday, February 20: all events in Tupelo Room, Barnard Observatory 9:00–10:30 a.m. “Civil Rights Movement and Education”: Chauncey Spears (Mississippi Department of Education), Curtis Austin (Southern Mississippi), Rita Bender and Bill Bender (University of Mississippi) 10:45 a.m.–noon “Civil Rights Movement and Youth”: Moderated by Nan Woodruff (Penn State), a discussion with members of the Mississippi Truth Project, including Geoff Ward (California Riverside), Charles Tucker, and Diana Freelon Foster
Bolden Is 2010 Early Wright Lecturer Blues Scholar Talks Funk On Friday, March 26, at 1:00 p.m., poet and scholar Tony Bolden will give the annual Early Wright Lecture at the Center. Bolden, an associate professor of African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas, was a panelist in several of the early Blues Today Symposia sponsored by Living Blues. His lecture in March will be entitled “The Epistemology of Blue/Funk.” “What I’m proposing to do,” says Bolden, “is provide a brief overview of the early history of funk, particularly as it relates to the blues idiom—Buddy Bolden, Bessie, Duke, as well as a few literary texts that are pertinent to the discussion.” Bolden is the author of Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture (2004) and the editor of The Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspectives on Black Popular Culture (2008). He Page 4
The 16th annual Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC) conference will be held in Oxford, Mississippi, June 10–13, 2010. Bringing together scholars from throughout the entire United States, the conference will be both wide-ranging and eclectic. It will, however, focus heavily on issues of race and slavery in America and the Atlantic World. Of particular interest to many attendees will be three plenary sessions. The first is devoted to the memory of Professor Winthrop Jordan, whose White Over Black continues to receive accolades over 40 years after it first appeared. Honoring Jordan will be Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed, Sylvia Frey, and Peter Wood. Daniel Usner, of Vanderbilt University, will lead a session dealing with Native Americans in early Mississippi, and Charles Eagles, of the University of Mississippi, will close the conference with a discussion of the “legacy,” dealing with the integration of the University by James Meredith. All sessions are free and open to the public. For further information, please contact Sheila Skemp at sskemp@olemiss.edu.
is currently at work on a booklength study that traces the history of the funk principle from its association with the blues to its subsequent manifestation in swing, soul, funk (as such), and hip-hop. Bolden will be the eighth invited guest to deliver the Early Wright Lecture, an endowed series created in the name of Mississippi’s first African American disc jockey, a legend who spun blues records for decades on Clarksdale’s WROX. Wright’s colleague at RWOX, David Havens, established the fund. Previous lecturers have included Stanley Crouch, Paul Oliver, Samuel Charters, and William Ferris. Adam Gussow
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Southern Studies Alumni and Faculty Photography Exhibition
David Wharton
images of and perScripture Reading bespectives on the fore a Baptism, Panola region. One of the County, Mississippi, 2008 unique features of the Southern Studies Program is that it has always had at least one documentary Elvis Devotee, Memphis, photographer on Tennessee, 2002 its faculty. The current exhibition in Barnard O b s e r v a t o r y ’s Gammill Gallery features the work of faculty members Ease. The photographs of Tom Rankin, and student alumni from the Southern now at Duke University, deal with peoStudies Program. Assistant Professor ple in natural and perhaps wild settings and Director of Documentary Studies in Mississippi. Atlanta-based artist Lynn David Wharton will exhibit some of Marshall-Linnemeier (MA 2004) is conhis documentary photographs from the tributing work from her series entitled contemporary South, while Center Stereo Propaganda. MA graduate Kate Founding Director William Ferris has Medley (2007) has sent photographs made available some of the photographs documenting the effects of Hurricane of Mississippians, especially Mississippi Katrina, while the photographs of Joe musicians, he made in the 1960s and York (2006), some of which appeared 1970s. Some of Ferris’s photographs apin his book, With Signs Following, deal pear in his new book, Give My Poor Heart with religious themes along Southern roadsides. Southern Foodways Alliance oral historian Amy Evans Streeter (MA 2005) contributes portraits of some of her interview subjects. Photographers had the freedom to choose their own subjects. “We weren’t trying to have a theme,” said Center Director Ted Ownby. “The exhibition is one way of showing off the work of people associated with the Center. It is especially good at showing the variety of interests and approaches. Some February 1–April 2, 2010 of the photographs are closer to art Back to the Center: photography, some are docuPhotographs by Southern Studies Alumni and Faculty mentary photographs, some William Ferris, Lynn Marshall-Linnemaier, Kate Medley, are both, and some may Tom Rankin, Amy Evans Streeter, David Wharton, and Joe York be something else. We’re happy to all of them April 5–June 15, 2010 up in one exhibit.” Work and Play: Photographs from the Southern Weekend The alumni exhibSouthern Studies Documentary Students it, free to the public, will run through April 2. 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.
Exhibition Schedule
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Winter 2010
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David Wharton
Photography has long been a lively part of the Southern Studies academic program. Classes frequently analyze Walker Evans photographs, Farm Security Administration photographs, civil rights photographs, and many others as ways to understand the South and
Studies Alum Films on Center’s Southern Steve Cheseborough Web Site The Center’s Web site, www.olemiss.edu/depts/south, is home to a growing collection of films available for anyone to watch. Over the years, an extraordinary number of lectures, conversations, and other Center events have been filmed, so making many of those events available to the public will be an important new form of outreach. Most of the material currently on the site comes from sessions of the 2009 Oxford Conference for the Book that featured artist Walter Anderson. One can watch Walter Anderson biographer Christopher Maurer discuss Anderson’s creative life; a discussion JoAnne Prichard Morris led with the artist’s children John Anderson, Mary Anderson Pickard, and Leif Anderson; Patricia Pinson’s presentation on Anderson and world literature; and a discussion about Anderson among Seetha Srinivasan, Patti Carr Black, and William Dunlap. Other filmed sessions available on the site include a discussion of memoirs written after Hurricane Katrina, readings by Major Jackson and Deborah Johnson, presentations by children’s authors Jay Asher and Trenton Lee Stewart; Peggy Whitman Prenshaw’s Eudora Welty Centennial Address; and panels on book reviewing and contemporary literacy. A recent addition was a conversation Charles Reagan Wilson had in July 2009 with Bishop Duncan M. Gray Jr. about religious and civil rights issues. The conversation focuses on Gray’s time as rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Oxford and his experience with the riots caused by James Meredith’s enrollment at to the University of Mississippi. Plans for future filmed material on the site include student films from Documentary Studies classes, other lectures and conversations, and many more conference sessions. The idea to digitize the films and put them on the Center’s site came from filmmaker and Southern Studies alumnus Joe York, and funding came from the offices of the Liberal Arts Dean and the Vice Chancellor for University Relations. York oversaw the work of graduate assistants Ben Gilstrap and Blount Montgomery, who have digitized countless hours of filmed material. There are several ways to use these films, according to Center Director Ted Ownby. First, people looking for information on conference subjects like Walter Anderson can find a quick and inviting way to learn. Second, people who missed conferences or other talks can experience part of the events through their computers. He continued that the films can serve as recruiting tools by showing potential students some of the things that go on at the Center. Ownby concluded, “I can imagine this as something with a lot of creative possibilities for student films and interviews and heaven knows what else.” To view the films, visit the Center’s home page at www. olemiss.edu/depts/south and select “Film Projects” from the main menu.
If you’re affiliated with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, it’s hard not to get excited (and a little smug) about Steve Cheseborough (MA1999). This Southern Studies alum is the literal and figurative definition of a one-man band. He is a teacher, a freelance reporter, an author, and a solo blues artist who specializes in prewar, 1920s–’30s style blues music and who has three albums under his belt. Growing up in Rochester, New York, meant Cheseborough was more than a little removed from a blues context. “My first exposure to blues was hearing groups like the Rolling Stones and other British bluesy rock bands,” Cheseborough says. “Then I wanted to find out where they got their music from, so I looked at their records, checked the liner notes, and saw that they got songs from people like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and others with cool names who made me want to go hear their music. Then I would try to figure out where their influences came from. I keep always trying to push it back and earlier and study earlier blues music and learn how to play it and figure it out.” Cheseborough began performing in rock bands when he was a teenager and continued making music throughout and after his college years. While in his 30s he starting playing around with the early blues style he is now known for, but he did not consider it to be a viable career option until a girlfriend heard him play and asked him to make a tape for her. “I think she just meant for me to turn on a tape recorder, but, being the perfectionist I am, I went to a studio and made a professional recording. Made a cover for it and everything. Gave some out to my friends and realized that I still had a couple hundred of these cassette tapes and I said I guess I better try to play some gigs so I can sell some of these tapes. So I started playing in coffeehouses, and I got more into it, and I realized that this is cool, I liked playing this music, people liked it, I didn’t have to worry about recruiting the rest of the band or depending on the band for rehearsals or anything.” Cheseborough was living in Phoenix, Arizona, at the time and working as a newspaper reporter. Like most blues musicians and enthusiasts, he had a deep interest in Mississippi, but he figured that the Mississippi of Robert Johnson’s time continued on page 9
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Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference Faulkner and Film • July 18–22, 2010 For many readers, William Faulkner’s relationship with the world of film consists of a few anecdotes pointing to a general atmosphere of friction and misunderstanding. The conversation with Clark Gable: “Oh, do you write?” “Yes Mr. Gable, what do you do?” Faulkner’s alleged mantra as he would trudge off to the studio each morning: “They’re gonna pay me Friday, they’re gonna pay me Friday.” Faulkner’s response on being informed by Howard Hawks that Joan Crawford was available for the film being made of the story “Turnabout”: “I don’t recall there was a woman in that story.” Or the debacle that ensued when Faulkner, having received word that he could work “at home” instead of his studio office, immediately left Hollywood for Oxford. Behind those stories (some of them even true), we are now coming to realize, is not so much a Southern novelist temporarily abandoning his roots for the lure of Mammon, as an amazingly resourceful artist seriously committed to the writing of screenplays and open to the creative possibilities for fiction of the film medium. Moreover, there is increasing evidence that influence was traveling in two directions: between film and Faulkner, which begins to show up as early as Absalom, Absalom!, and between Faulkner and film, as in American film noir and French New Wave cinema. The 37th annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference will explore for five days the phenomenon of “Faulkner and Film,” through lectures, panel discussions, and films. Appearing at the conference for the first time are Eli Caplin, the exclusive representative of the Faulkner literary estate and a film producer in Hollywood; Robert Jackson, lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Virginia, author of Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture; Sharon Monteith, professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham, author of Advancing Sisterhood?: Interracial Friendships in Contemporary Southern Fiction, Film Histories, and American Culture in the 1960s; and Riché Richardson, associate professor of The Southern Register
Riché Richardson Africana Studies at Cornell University, author of Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta. Returning speakers will include Deborah Barker, associate professor of English, University of Mississippi, author of Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature: The Portrait of the Woman Artist and coeditor of Shakespeare and Gender; Robert Hamblin, Southeast Missouri State University, director of the Center for Faulkner Studies and author and coeditor of eight volumes, including Faulkner and Hollywood: A Retrospective from the Brodsky Collection and A Critical Companion to William Faulkner: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work; Peter Lurie, assistant professor of English, University of Richmond, author of Vision’s Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination; and Matthew Ramsey, assistant professor of Film and Media Studies, Salve Regina University, author of a dozen articles and reviews, the majority of them on film and adaptation. Among the topics these scholars will take up are “The Black ‘Mammy’ in the Film Sanctuary” (Deborah Barker), “A Reassessment of Faulkner and Hollywood” (Robert Hamblin), “Images of Collaboration: William Faulkner’s Motion Picture Communities” (Robert Jackson); “‘Fascination’ in Absalom, Absalom!” (Peter Lurie), “From the Faulknerian South to the New Wave: French Directors and Their Fascination with Faulkner” (Sharon Monteith); and “Road to Glory, Winter 2010
Screenplay by Joel Sayre and William Faulkner” (Matthew Ramsey). Additional speakers and panelists will be selected from the “call for papers” submissions. There will be showings of several films and film clips, either from screenplays by Faulkner, such as The Road to Glory, (1936), To Have and Have Not (1944), and The Big Sleep (1946); films made from Faulkner novels or short stories, such as Sanctuary (1961), Tomorrow (1960, 1972), Barn Burning (1980), and Old Man (1997); or films influenced by Faulkner’s fiction. Stephen Railton, professor of English at the University of Virginia, will make a special presentation at the conference, announcing the online availability of the complete tape recordings of Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957–1958 (only half of which appeared in the published volume). Railton will play segments from the tapes. Other program events will include sessions on “Teaching Faulkner,” conducted by James Carothers, University of Kansas, Charles Peek, Professor Emeritus, University of Nebraska at Kearney, Terrell Tebbetts, Lyon College, and Theresa Towner, University of Texas at Dallas; a discussion of “Collecting Faulkner” by Seth Berner; and an exhibition of Faulkner books, manuscripts, photographs, and memorabilia at the John Davis Williams Library. There will also be guided daylong tours of Memphis and North Mississippi, including Oxford, the Delta, and New Albany/Ripley; a picnic served at Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak; and “Faulkner on the Fringe,” an “open mike” evening at the Southside Gallery. Discount rates for the conference are available for groups of five or more students. Inexpensive dormitory housing is available for all registrants. Contact Robert Fox at rfox@olemiss.edu for details. There are also a limited number of waivers of registration for graduate students. Contact Donald Kartiganer at dkartiga@olemiss.edu for details. Donald M. Kartiganer Page 7
Southern Studies Alumni News Dozens of alumni of the Southern Studies undergraduate and graduate programs have continued their educations in PhD or other graduate programs. The Southern Register has often publicized their accomplishments once they finish new degrees and write or edit books and start careers. For this article, I asked several alums who are currently in graduate school about the nature of their graduate programs, their most intriguing challenges or readings, their dissertations or theses, and their career plans. Franklin Ridgway (BA 1999) is finishing his PhD in English at the University of Illinois. Like several SST alumni, Mary Battle (MA 2006) is working toward a PhD in Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts at Emory University. Aaron Rollins (MA 2009) is in his first year in the PhD program in Public Policy and Administration at Mississippi State University, and Ben Gilstrap (MA 2009) has started the PhD program in history here at the University of Mississippi. On the West Coast, Brooke Butler (MA 2004) is completing a Cultural Studies PhD at the University of California–Davis, and Rory Fraser (MA 2009) is pursuing an MFA in Documentary Filmmaking at Stanford. Last summer, Sarah Freeland Simonson (BA 2009) began work in the Tulane School of Architecture pursuing both a Master of Architecture and a Master of Preservation Studies, and Meredith Devendorf (MA 1998) is in the history PhD program at the University of South Carolina. Sarah Condon (BA 2005) is in the Master of Divinity program at Yale Divinity School, and Carly Grace (BA 2001) is pursuing a Master in Library and Information Science at the University of Southern Mississippi.
(above) Sarah Condon and her husband, the Rev. Josh Condon (right) Mary Battle
Discussions of particular challenges varied. Mary Battle wrote that an observational filmmaking class tested her understanding of how to use film technology. Brooke Butler recalled that qualifying exams “were stressful, but I got a tattoo to commemorate them.” Sarah Condon’s challenge was more theological: “I had to write about the presence of the Holy Spirit in my faith tradition. As an Episcopalian in class with Pentecostals, she found this task came much more naturally to my classmates.” Aaron Rollins found Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions “the most challenging book that I encountered during my first year,” and Sarah Simonson mentioned an accelerated architecture program that “involved doing a different design problem every week with a different professor, as well as a lot of all-nighters.” Some emphasized unexpected pleas-
Herring on All Things Considered On January 3, Caroline Herring (MA 1998) was the subject of an interview on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Discussing her new album, Golden Apples of the Sun, Herring played one of the songs from that album and discussed songs, songwriting, and topics ranging from Eudora Welty and Walter Anderson to her grandmother. The interview is available on the NPR Web site at www.npr. org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122110056. Page 8
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ures. Rory Fraser described the biggest accomplishment of his first semester in graduate school: “Last term I made a short film about an old San Francisco men’s hatter, Paul’s Hat Works, and the four young ladies who recently bought it. It’s called We Continue in the Old Style.” Watch it here: www.vimeo. com/8129309. Devendorf was surprised, after 16 years away from graduate school, to find that much “newer scholarship is both scholarly and engaging. Who knew?” In one archiving class, Carly Grace had the assignment of creating a finding aid about her own life based on the idea that she was “dead and famous.” Graduate students writing dissertations have a variety of topics. Brooke Butler’s work is entitled “The Other Magical Kingdom: New Orleans Voodoo and Tourism.” Mary Battle’s dissertation studies what she calls the “changing representations of race, class, and the history of slavery in historic tourism in the South Carolina Lowcountry.” Devendorf is planning to write on Southern women’s intellectual history, and Gilstrap plans to explore the “intellectual side of early-19th-century Southern agricultural journals.” Rollins is developing a plan to study the effects No Child Left Behind programs have had on Mississippi schools. Ridgway’s dissertation explores The Southern Register
“how white middle-class writers of the American Gilded Age and Progressive
Aaron Rollins
Era struggled to make sense of emergent technosocial systems of mobility.” Several current graduate students have taught, first as teaching assistants and then as instructors, and many but not all imagine teaching as a career goal. Rory Fraser writes, “I will probably teach and continue making films.” Butler, Rollins, and Battle have taught introductory classes and are looking forward to possible teaching positions, and Devendorf and also Battle mention the possibility of public history work. Ridgway writes, “I’m currently on the academic job market. God help
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Cheseborough
had long since faded and was now just like the rest of the country. That perception changed when he attended the Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival in Clarksdale. “I had just seen the movie Deep Blues. Seeing that movie showed me that there were still some obscure musicians who were playing very down-home kinda blues in these very cool little places, and also seeing the look of the whole place made me start thinking ‘Hmm, maybe I’d better get down to Mississippi.’ And I went to the festival and I realized that there was a lot more that I needed to learn about and explore in Mississippi than I would learn in a short visit, so I had to live there. Then I found out about the Center and thought that sounded like a great thing for me, so I applied for the graduate program in Southern Studies.” While in the program, Cheseborough was asked to write a guidebook to blues-related places in Mississippi. “I was kinda amazed that that book didn’t already exist; I would have bought it as soon as I got there if they had such a text. It took me a while to finish it; after I received my degree, I stayed and did the book.” The book, Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of Delta Blues, published in 2001 by the University Press of Mississippi, is now in its third edition and is internationally acclaimed. Cheseborough’s latest album, Fetch It! (released in January 2009), finds him expanding his musical abilities. “I’m kinda proud of it, because I’ve done more arranging on this one, doing songs that were not necessarily originally played by someone sitting and playing guitar. Some of the songs were done by band or by piano players and I’ve reinterpreted them for guitar.” Like his previous albums, Fetch It! is made entirely of covers by legendary blues artists such as Tampa Red, Bo Carter, and Blind Lemon Jefferson; Cheseborough doesn’t see himself venturing into early blues songwriting anytime soon. “People ask me do I write songs; I think you cannot really write a song in the tradition anymore. I think some people try to do it, and it kinda comes out as a parody or something because we don’t live the same kind of life that people lived then. We can’t use the same kind of references they did to mules and roosters crowing and stuff because we don’t have those around us, and if you try to use the things that are around you it comes out ridiculous. I’m happy with just exploring all the great traditions and trying to work with them.” Cheseborough lives in Portland, Oregon, working as a music teacher and a freelance reporter. While busy figuring out what do to next (a European tour and another book are in the works), he tries to take a trip back at least once a year. “I really miss it. I really love Mississippi and really feel that that’s my true home even though I did not grow up there. I felt more at home there after three days than I ever felt in Arizona, where I lived for 13 years.”
me.” Gilstrap hopes to combine teaching and political goals: “After graduate school I will pursue the career of a professional scholar, challenging the leftwing hegemony of modern academia.” Grace is working with the Mobile Area Education Foundation and hopes her degree and experience will open up a library or archival job. Simonson hopes to become an architect involved in restoration work, preferably in New Orleans, and Condon writes that her “dream job would be in prison chaplaincy.” Ted Ownby
Library Exhibition on Walter Anderson The exhibition Walter Anderson and World Literature will remain on display through July 2010 at the University of Mississippi J. D. Williams Library. Curated by the artist’s son John Anderson, it features 85 prints. In addition to the complete alphabet series, the exhibition includes illustrations to accompany the text of such classics as Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, Legends of Charlemagne, and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner as well as scenes from beloved fairy tales like Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Puss and Boots. The library has also created an online subject guide to accompany the exhibit at http://apollo.lib.olemiss. edu/center/subject_guide/anderson/ intro. It includes lists of publications on the life and work of Walter Anderson, other online resources, and books illustrated by Anderson that appear in the exhibition. The subject guide also features an essay by the curator. The exhibition was sponsored in conjunction with the 16th annual Oxford Conference for the Book, which on March 26, 2009, presented four sessions on the role of books in Walter Anderson’s life and art. Films of these sessions are posted on the Center’s Web site, www.olemiss. edu/depts/south.
I’Nasah Crockett The Southern Register
Winter 2010
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New Books by Current and Former Southern Studies Faculty Southern Studies faculty members and former faculty members continue to publish new books. Late in 2009, Associate Professor of Southern Studies and English Adam Gussow welcomed a new edition of Mister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir. The new edition comes from the University of Minnesota Press and includes a new preface. “Mister Satan’s Apprentice was originally published in 1998,” said Gussow. “I somehow managed to write it while I was a full-time grad student at Princeton and a blues musician on the weekend. It’s basically the story of a young white harmonica player who is lucky enough to be mentored by two older African American bluesmen, both of whom were extraordinarily charismatic. One, Nat Riddles, was like a big brother to me, and the memoir traces his troubled life to its tragic end. The other, Sterling ‘Mister Satan’ Magee, was Mississippi-born and Harlem-bred, a rough, oracular, streetwise older man whom I connected with musically in a powerful way. In fact, I’m still playing occasional gigs with him, 23 years after we first jammed on a Harlem sidewalk. When the book isn’t exploring these tangled, challenging, and enlightening relationships, it’s following me as I leave the streets to play harmonica with the bus-and-truck tour of Big River, Roger Miller’s stage version of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Among other things, the actor who played Jim used to describe himself as ‘the highest-paid runaway slave in America.’ My book had a good run the first time around; I couldn’t be more pleased that the University of Minnesota Press dePage 10
cided to issue it in a new edition, 11 years down the line.” William Ferris, the Center’s founding director and now Joel Williamson Eminent Professor of History and Senior Associate Director for the Center of the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina, has two new books published in 2009. Give My Poor Heart Ease, published by the University of North Carolina Press, documents African American musicians, both professional and amateur, that Ferris met and studied in the 1960s and 1970s. With photographs, long transcriptions of interviews, a CD, and a DVD, the book takes readers, watchers, and listeners as close as a book can take people into the homes, juke joints, and churches of Mississippians who made music. Ferris Winter 2010
and his UNC colleague Glenn Hinson, associate professor of anthropology, have published the Folklife volume, the 14th book in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture series, also from the University of North Carolina Press. Asked about the volume and its subject, Hinson replied, “The elusive soul of the South rests in its folklife, in both the subtle unfolding of everyday traditions and the dazzling blossoming of grand spectacles. Whether savory sweet potato pie served up at a family reunion, the magnificent drama of an African American marching band, or the quiet passion of gospel harmonizing, the spirit of Southern communities is ever finding new ways to express itself. This volume offers us a guide to many of these ways, revealing not only continuities between old and new, but also the altogether novel expressions of Southern soul.” Robbie Ethridge, associate professor of sociology and anthropology and former Center faculty member, has published an edited collection, Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South, along with coeditor Sheri M. Shuck-Hall. Published by the University of Nebraska Press, the long and thorough collection of more than 500 pages brings together work from 17 scholars who study early contact between American Indians and Europeans in the early South to study slavery, disease, and extraordinary social and demographic change. Finally, Justin Nystrom, who taught as visiting assistant professor of history and Southern Studies in 2008–2009, The Southern Register
Summer School in Germany
will publish his first book, New Orleans after the Civil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom, in spring 2010 on the Johns Hopkins University Press. The book blends political history with issues of class, economic change, and racial definition. Nystrom now teaches at Loyola College in New Orleans. “My aim was to write a book that broke free from some of the old assumptions and stereotypes of the postbellum period,” Nystrom says. “I felt the best way to do this was to piece together a tale from the perspective of different people and how the war changed their personal lives. I’d also be lying if I said that Katrina did not influence some of my thinking. In a lot of ways, I think rewriting the manuscript after the storm helped me get a better grip on the sort of uncertainty that surely dominated life for New Orleanians after the Civil War.”
“The South in Global Perspectives” Charles Reagan Wilson and Kathryn McKee were among faculty members at the July 2009 Trinational Summer School at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. The Summer School, a joint venture of Georgia State University and Johannes Gutenberg University and sponsored in part by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), is the first of three such programs, all focused on Transnational American Studies. This summer’s topic was “The South in Global Perspectives.” Wilson and McKee joined professors and graduate students from Georgia State, Johannes Gutenberg, and Peking University for an intensive twoweek interdisciplinary seminar in which faculty offered plenary lectures about assigned reading and then participated in daily discussions with the group as a whole. The session culminated in a series of research presentations by the graduate students. The remaining two sessions of the Summer School will continue pursuing the recent turn in American Studies away from its formerly strict focus on national processes in favor of examining the flows of transnational cultural exchange. The group will convene in Atlanta during the summer of 2010 to discuss “New Directions in Southern Studies,” with a possible side trip to Oxford, and reassemble during the summer of 2011 at Peking University to study “Southern Landscapes and Life Writing.”
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Katie McKee and Charles Wilson on the Rhine River during a boat trip narrated by a German scholar who studies 19th-century American authors who visited Germany
Charles Wilson (left) with Alfred Hornung, professor of American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University and one of the Trinational Summer School’s organizers. Hornung was a visiting scholar for English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi during the spring semester of 2006.
Kathryn McKee
Charles Reagan Wilson will speak at the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration on February 25. Wilson’s lecture, entitled “God’s Laughter: Humor and Southern Religion,” will be part of the event’s theme, “Humor in the Deep South.” Information on the Celebration is available at www. colin.edu/nlcc. Katie McKee will take part in a roundtable discussion at the Society of Southern Literature meeting April 8–11 in New Orleans, along with Southern Studies alumna Molly McGehee (MA 2000), on the topic “Teaching Southern Studies.” One can read more about the SSSL at http://web.wm.edu/english/sssl. Ted Ownby will be part of the Banners Cultural Series (www.banners.org) at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, on April 20. His talk will imagine a conversation on the nature of Southern family life in the 1970s among Jerry Falwell, Alex Haley, and Southern Rock musicians.
Anna Kathryn Samonds
Southern Studies Faculty on the Road
Winter 2010
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MISSISSIPPI DELTA LITERARY TOUR SCHEDULE February 28–March 4, 2010 SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 28: GREENWOOD 3:00 p.m. Registration—Alluvian 4:00 p.m. Welcome by Jimmy Thomas Marion Barnwell, talk on Mary Craig Kimbrough Sinclair 5:00 p.m. Mary Carol Miller, talk on Greenwood history 5:30 p.m. Talk with Jim Abbott, former editor of the Indianola Enterprise-Tocsin, Tim Kalich, editor of the Greenwood Commonwealth, and Curtis Wilkie, journalism professor at the University of Mississippi 7:00 p.m. Dinner at the Crystal Grill MONDAY, MARCH 1: YAZOO CITY 8:00 a.m. Alluvian Breakfast 9:00 a.m. Depart for Yazoo City 10:30 a.m. Presentations at the B. S. Ricks Memorial Library Welcome—Paul Cartwright, Library Director On Yazoo City Writers—Teresa Nicholas On Willie Morris—JoAnne Prichard Morris On Herschel Brickell—Sam Olden Visit Henry Herschel Brickell Memorial Walkway Noon Lunch at the home of Sam Olden 1:00 p.m. Tour of Yazoo City—Sam Olden, guide Triangle Cultural Center Sam Olden Historical Museum Oakes African American Cultural Center Glenwood Cemetery 4:00 p.m. Depart from Yazoo City 6:00 p.m. Dunlap, Burgess, and Dunlap: Art Exhibition at Gallery Point Leflore with Bill Dunlap, Linda Burgess, and Maggie Dunlap 6:30 p.m. Cocktails and entertainment at the Alluvian 7:30 p.m. Dinner at Delta Bistro TUESDAY, MARCH 2: GREENVILLE 8:00 a.m. Alluvian Breakfast 9:00 a.m. Depart for Indianola 9:45 a.m. Visit B. B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola 11:00 a.m. Depart for Greenville 12:00 p.m. Lunch at the home of Greenville author Gayden Metcalfe 1:00 p.m. Greenville Tour, led by Mary Dayle McCormick, including the Greenville Flood Museum 2:30 p.m. William Alexander Percy Memorial Library “The History of Greenville,” talk by Hugh and Mary Dayle McCormick “Greenville Writers,” talk by W. Kenneth Holditch 4:30 p.m. William Alexander Percy graveside reading by Mary Dayle McCormick Page 12
5:00 p.m. Book signing at McCormick Book Inn with Marion Barnwell, Nicholas A. Basbanes, Kenneth Holditch, Franke Keating, and Gayden Metcalfe 6:00 p.m. Cocktails at the home of Leila Wynn 7:30 p.m. Dinner at Doe’s Eat Place 8:00 p.m. Depart for Greenwood WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3: TUTWILER, CLARKSDALE, AND MERIGOLD 8:00 a.m. Alluvian Breakfast 9:00 a.m. Depart for Clarksdale—Luther Brown and Henry Outlaw, tour guides Visit Little Zion Church and Robert Johnson’s Grave Site Visit Money, Mississippi 10:00 a.m. Visit Tutwiler Community Education Center— Quilting Display/Gospel Music 12:00 p.m. Lunch at the Cutrer Mansion 1:00 p.m. “Tennessee Williams,” talk by W. Kenneth Holditch 2:00 p.m. Bus tour of Clarksdale by Panny Mayfield Visit St. George’s Episcopal Church Walking tour of Downtown Clarksdale Visit Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art Visit Marshall Bouldin’s Studio 5:00 p.m. Cocktails and Porch Plays: Scenes from Tennessee Williams’s plays performed by actors Johnny McPhail and Alice Walker at the home of Panny Mayfield 6:00 p.m. Dinner at Panny Mayfield’s House 8:00 p.m. Visit Po’ Monkey’s Juke Joint THURSDAY, MARCH 4: OXFORD CONFERENCE FOR THE BOOK 8:00 a.m. Alluvian Breakfast 9:00 a.m. Depart for Oxford (1.5 hours) Oxford Conference for the Book, dedicated to Barry Hannah on the University of Mississippi campus, March 4–7 *All events subject to change
MISSISSIPPI DELTA LITERARY TOUR, FEBRUARY 28–MARCH 4 The tour is $575 per person for all program activities, 10 meals, and local transportation. The fee does not include lodging. Group accommodations are offered at the Alluvian, in downtown Greenwood (www.thealluvian.com). Rooms at the Alluvian require a separate registration. Standard rooms are priced at a discounted rate of $170. Call 866-6005201 and ask for the Literary Tour rate. For more information and registration instructions, visit Olemiss.edu/ depts/south/DeltaLiberaryTour.html.
Winter 2010
The Southern Register
Deltalogy 101
The Delta Isn’t Just a Place. It’s a People.
The Southern Register
courtesy PORTICO jackson magazine
Jimmy Thomas grew up in the towns of Leland and Greenville in the Mississippi Delta, studied literature and philosophy at the University of Mississippi, and worked for Guideposts magazine in New York before returning to Oxford in 2003 as managing editor of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. He is coordinator of the Mississippi Delta Literary Tour sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. When asked about the Delta Tour, this is what he had to say: It is generally, if not universally, accepted that the culture of the Mississippi Delta is unique. The Delta is the home of the blues, the home of catfish and the hot tamale, the home of a turbulent past, and the home of great literature. And while elements of this or any culture can be independently discussed, understood, and experienced, it is the symbiotic relationship between culture and the people who create, mold, and nurture it that keeps that culture thriving. Indeed, the people in and of the Mississippi Delta not only participate in Delta culture, but they keep it vibrant and alive. Every spring, during our annual Mississippi Delta Literary Tour, we travel across the Delta in search of what it is that makes this region unique. That is why people come. They come to exist within that culture, to participate in it, to absorb it. And while it is true that one can listen to the blues music of B. B. King or Robert Johnson and enjoy it independent of any significant understanding of who they are or what their lives in the Delta were like, nothing compares to driving down an old blacktop road and stopping at the final resting place— in a churchyard nearly engulfed by cotton fields—of Robert Johnson himself. There’s nothing like strolling through one of Mississippi’s greatest monuments to blues music, the B. B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola, and stopping in front of Lucille, the guitar that helped make King famous, while listening to him croon out “The Thrill Is Gone.” There’s nothing like sitting, surrounded by brilliantly colored quilts, in the Tutwiler Community Education Center
Sam Olden, host and guide for the March 1 tour in Yazoo City, at his historic home while those same ladies who handcrafted those quilts in a centuries-old African American quilting tradition sing gospel songs and praise Jesus for the riches that He has bestowed upon them—conspicuously without mention of the hardships that Delta living also provides. There’s nothing like walking into one of the lastremaining, bona fide, honest-to-goodness juke joints in Mississippi, thus perhaps the world, on a chilly, dark-as-pitch night and having the proprietor—Po’ Monkey, a man who drives a tractor by day—shake your hand, sell you a cold beer, and show you around the place he is so proud to call his own. You suddenly come to realize you’ve just discovered something that you couldn’t have found anywhere else in the world but in the Mississippi Delta. You’ve found the blues personified. And while music might be that bit of Delta culture that one can most easily experience while being hundreds of miles from the nearest cotton field, the food of the Delta is not. Driving across the Delta you see rows of square ponds extending across the landscape. Within those ponds live catfish—catfish exported from coast to coast and eaten in nearly every Delta restaurant from Greenwood to Greenville, from Yazoo City to Clarksdale. Ask any Deltan—at least those who are 40 or younger—and they’ll tell you they were raised on it. And ask any restauraWinter 2010
teur there, and they’ll tell you that they sell a lot of it. And then you’ll try some for yourself. And you’ll like it. The next day you’ll walk into Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville, one of Mississippi’s most famous eating establishments. But you’re not there for the catfish. Oh, don’t be disappointed—you’re there for the steaks and the hot tamales. Doe Signa, the owner, will most likely meet you at the door, give you a hearty Delta welcome, and then turn around and get back to work cooking. You see, at Doe’s you have to walk through the kitchen to get to your table. In fact, much of the restaurant is kitchen, and you can even sit in the kitchen to eat. Don’t worry, though. The cooks don’t mind, and they’re good company, too. Despite the plethora of good eats at Delta restaurants, there’s something to be said from having a meal set out for you in the home of Delta residents. Southern hospitality isn’t a marketing gimmick, and it isn’t a thing of the past. During the Delta tour a number of the Delta’s most generous residents host our guests in their homes, inviting you to come in, sit a spell, and have a meal that Deltans not only enjoy themselves but enjoy sharing with friends and guests. (Visiting is sport in Mississippi, and visiting over a meal is as civilized a sport we know.) In Yazoo City, Sam Olden, Page 13
CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP MARCH 3, 2010
Doe Signa cooking at Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville
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In Greenville, too, there is a bookstore. No, not just any bookstore. This bookstore, McCormick Book Inn, is the keeper of the Delta’s literary torch. It’s the oldest and one of the most respected independent bookstores in the great state of Mississippi. Out of a deep and sincere love for Delta history and literature Hugh and Mary Dayle McCormick have made it their mission to promote not only the Delta’s literary legacy, which includes writers William Alexander Percy, David Cohn, Walker Percy, and Shelby Foote, but to promote the Delta itself. They’ve even coined a word to describe the Delta as “a place, a melting pot of people, a mythology and a reality”: Deltalogy. There is none more equipped to introduce newcomers to Greenville and Greenville writers than the McCormicks. And that they will do. Mary Dayle will even lead you to the graveside of William Alexander Percy and read from his seminal book, Lanterns on the Levee. (As an extension of our obsession with our past, we Southerners are, obviously, also obsessed with our cemeteries.) So, you see, the Delta isn’t just a place. It is filled to brimming with people— people who are part of the fabric of the culture. In addition to the writers, actors, musicians, culinary aficionados, and historians of the Delta, there are also the artists, the scholars, and the just-plainwelcoming everyday folks who live, work, and play there. You’ll meet them, too. They, as much as anybody else, make the Delta, well, the Delta. Winter 2010
Perry Smith
a true Southern gentleman who knew fellow Yazooan Willie Morris personally, will welcome you to his dinner table and tell you stories about what Yazoo City was like when Willie lived there as a boy. In Greenville, one of the city’s most gracious hostesses and most famous contemporary writers, Gayden Metcalfe, will invite you into her home for “dinner” (we still call lunch “dinner” here). And in Clarksdale, Panny Mayfield, one of Clarksdale’s most devoted patrons of arts and culture, will not only provide you with a supper you’ll not likely soon forget, but she’ll open up her wide front porch to two Mississippi actors who will transport you into the intimate world of Tennessee Williams by performing scenes from his work. But what is a tour without a guide? And who better a guide than those who have made it their life’s work to keep Delta culture alive and well? In Greenwood, Jamie and Kelly Kornegay own and operate Turnrow Book Company, one of the state’s newest and best bookstores. They’ll host the tour for a talk with local newspaper editors, Jim Abbott, former editor of the Indianola Enterprise-Tocsin, and Tim Kalich, editor of the Greenwood Commonwealth—men who know the Delta from the inside. In Yazoo City, Sam Olden will personally give us a guided tour of his hometown, and JoAnne Prichard Morris, the widow of the late Willie Morris, will lead us into the world that Willie created, as well as to his final resting place in Glenwood Cemetery.
Margaret-Love Denman, former director of the creative writing program at the University of New Hampshire and currently coordinator of off-campus writing programs at the University of Mississippi, will offer a special workshop in conjunction with the 2010 Oxford Conference for the Book. The daylong workshop, titled “Mining Your Raw Materials,” will take place Wednesday, March 3, at the Downtown Grill on the Oxford Square. The workshop is open to 20 writers. The workshop fee of $250 includes evaluation of up to 20 doublespaced pages submitted beforehand, a private 20-minute session with the instructor during the March 4–6 conference, attendance at all conference events, lunch and refreshments on Wednesday, and dinner on Thursday. Also, each registrant will receive a copy of Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process. The fee does not include lodging. First come, first served.
Margaret-Love Denman
The Southern Register
Nicholas A. Basbanes to Give Keynote Address
Nicholas A. Basbanes, a noted book collector and author of books about books, will present the keynote address for the 2010 Oxford Conference for the Book. The address is scheduled for Thursday, March 4, following an 11:30 a.m. lunch in the Department of Archives and Special Collections at the J. D. Williams Library. Basbanes’s first book, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction for 1995 and was named a New York Times notable book of the year. Now in its 20th printing, it has recorded sales of more than 120,000 copies. The release in 2001 of a companion volume, Patience & Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture, prompted the twotime Pulitzer Prize– winning biographer and historian David McCullough to describe him as “the leading authority of books about books and this, his latest, is a jewel.” Basbanes’s subsequent books are Among the Gently Mad: Perspectives and Strategies for the BookHunter of the 21st Nicholas A. Basbanes Century, Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World; Editions & Impressions, and a centennial history of Yale University Press, A World of Letters. A cultural history of paper and papermaking, titled Common Bond, is set for publication this year. In addition to his books, Basbanes has written for numerous newspapers, magazines, and journals, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Smithsonian, Civilization, and the New England Quarterly among them, and lectures widely on book-related issues. In 2004 he began writing the “Gently Mad” column for Fine Books & Collections magazine. With his wife, Constance Basbanes, he writes a monthly review of children’s books for Literary Features Syndicate, which they established in 1993, and which appears in a dozen newspapers. Well known for writing about books and bibliophiles, Basbanes has worked as worked as an award-winning investigative reporter, a literary editor, and a nationally syndicated columnist.
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Oxford Conference for the Book
Jones and Square Books owner Richard Howorth to the stage of the Ford Center at four o’clock for a talk on “Literary Oxford.” Grisham will reflect on Oxford’s transformation, during the past 30 years, from a one-author town dominated by William Faulkner and his fictional Yoknapatawpha to a thriving literary community where many writers live and study. Willie Morris’s decade in Oxford (1980–1990) and Barry Hannah’s continuing presence since 1982 are major contributors to the transformation. Two Literature for Young Authors sessions are scheduled for Friday morning. All Oxford-area fifth- and ninth-grade students (nearly 1,000 readers) will receive their own copies of books from the selected authors, courtesy of the Junior Auxiliary of Oxford, the Lafayette County Literary Council, and Square Books Jr., and also have a chance to hear the authors speak about writing and reading. Ingrid Law will speak to fifth graders, who will receive copies of Savvy, winner of Newbery and National Book honors. Watt Key will speak to ninth graders, who will receive copies of his book Alabama Moon, winner of the 2007 E. B. White Read-Aloud Award. Fifth and ninth graders from Teach for America and Mississippi Teacher Corps schools will also attend the sessions and receive copies of Law’s and Key’s books. In addition, students will be invited to meet the authors during a special after-school autograph session at Square Books Jr. Friday afternoon’s program will begin with Ted Ownby, director of the Center, talking with two authors whose recently published memoirs discuss the issue of race within their own families. Ralph Eubanks, in The House at the End of the Road, describes what was said and not said about certain relatives in his Deep South family. Bliss Broyard, in One Drop, tells about learning, near the time of her father’s death, that her father, a prominent figure in New York literary world, had relatives considered black or Creole in New Orleans. She wrote her memoir to get to know the relatives she had never known and to think more broadly about the race and history. “The University Press of Mississippi at 40 Years” is the topic for the next session. Seven panelists—former UPM staff members JoAnne Prichard Morris and Seetha Srinivasan; current staff members John Langston, Leila Salisbury, and Steve Yates; and scholars Noel Polk and Peggy Whitman Prenshaw—will reflect on the history and accomplishments of the state’s only academic publisher. The Press will also host a picnic at noon on Saturday as part of its anniversary festivities. (For details about the Press, see page 21 of this issue of the Register.) Following the panels will be readings by fiction writers Steven Amsterdam (Things We Didn’t See Coming), John Brandon (Arkansas), Donna Hemans (River Woman), and Wells Tower (Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned). Brandon is 2009–2010 Grisham Writer at the University of Mississippi. Hemans leads fiction writing workshops at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and has served writer in residence at Georgetown University. Tower is a full-time writer who divides his time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Brooklyn. Amsterdam is a New Yorker who now lives in Melbourne, Australia, where he works as a psychiatric nurse and is writing his second book. On Friday evening, Margaret-Love Gathright, Lynda M.
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Amy Hempel
Bliss Broyard
O’Connor, and James V. O’Connor will offer a “Promoting Books and Authors” workshop, followed by an “Open Mike—Poetry & Fiction Jam” for all participants who wish to read selections of their own poetry or fiction. MFA students Anya Groner and Corinna McClanahan Schroeder are moderators for the Poetry & Fiction Jam. Saturday’s program on Barry Hannah will begin with William Dunlap moderating a “Survivors of Geronimo Rex” panel with persons who knew the author at Mississippi College in the 1960s and will tell stories that offer insight into his remarkable first novel. The panelists are Harry Brown, a Jackson musician and Hannah’s friend since childhood; Horace Newcomb, author and professor of telecommunications at the University of Georgia; Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, a
literary scholar and teacher at Millsaps College; Noel Polk, also a literary scholar, and professor emeritus at Mississippi State; and John N. Quisenberry, a lawyer in Los Angeles. The first panel on Saturday afternoon, “Barry Hannah as Teacher,” moderated by fiction writer Tom Franklin, will hear from three of Hannah’s former creative writing students. A film supervisor for more than 40 features between 1981 until 1997, Anne Rapp moved to Oxford to study with Hannah; after receiving an MFA, she returned home to Texas to write and to work with the director Robert Altman. Cynthia Shearer, a student and colleague of Hannah’s while living in Oxford from 1984 until moving to Texas in 2003, is the author of the novels The Wonder Book of the Air and The Celestial Jukebox. Jonathan Miles, who studied with Hannah during the 1980s and 1990s, is a columnist for the New York Times, a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and a contributing editor to Men’s Journal, where he oversees books coverage. His
Steven Amsterdam first novel, Dear American Airlines, was published in 2008. Donald Kartiganer and Jay Watson, English professor at the University of Mississippi, will discuss “Teaching Barry Hannah” with Daniel E. Williams, a specialist in early American literature who also teaches writing and contemporary American fiction at Texas Christian University. From 1985 to 2003, he was a professor at the University of Mississippi and in 2000 taught the firstever seminar on Hannah. The final panel, moderated by Richard Howorth, will consider “Barry Hannah as Writer” with comments by authors William Harrison, Amy Hempel, Mark Richard, and Wells Tower. Harrison, novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter, and his colleague Jim Whitehead founded the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1966. Barry Hannah, in 1967, was the first MFA graduate of the program. Hempel is coordinator of the fiction writing program at Brooklyn College and has written four story col-
Todd Purdum
Hendrick Hertzberg
Peggy Whitman Prenshaw Page 16
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The Southern Register
Wells Tower
W. Ralph Eubanks
Daniel E. Williams lections. Richard is a screenwriter and author of one novel and two story collections. A film based on his story “The Ice at the Bottom of the World” is currently in production. Tower has published short stories in the New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, the Paris Review, and elsewhere; his first collection, John Grisham
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, was published in 2009. The conference will end with a marathon book signing at Off Square Books at 6:00 p.m. on Saturday. The University of Mississippi and Square Books sponsor the conference in association with the Junior Auxiliary of Oxford, Lafayette CountyOxford Public Library, Lafayette County Literacy Council, Oxford Della Davidson Elementary PTA, Mississippi Library Commission, Mississippi Hills Heritage Area Alliance, and Southern Literary Trails. The conference is par-
tially funded by the University of Mississippi, a contribution from the R&B Feder Foundation for the Beaux Arts, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Southern Arts Federation, the Mississippi Humanities Council, the Oxford Tourism Council, the Lafayette Oxford Foundation for Tomorrow, and the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council.
The conference is open to the public without charge. To assure seating space, those interested in attending should preregister. Reservations and advance payment are required for a cocktail buffet on Thursday ($50). Reservations are required for lunch hosted by the Williams Library on Thursday and a picnic a picnic hosted by the University Press of Mississippi on Saturday. Call 662-9255993 or visit www.oxfordconferenceforthebook.com for more information or to register for conference programs.
For tourist information, contact: Oxford Convention and Visitors Bureau 102 Ed Perry Boulevard Oxford, MS 38655 telephone 800-758-9177 662-232-2367 • fax 662-232-8680 www.oxfordcvb.com The Southern Register
For information about books and authors, contact: Square Books 160 Courthouse Square Oxford, MS 38655 telephone 800-468-4001 662-236-2262 • fax 662-234-9630 www.squarebooks.com/ Winter 2010
For more information concerning the conference, contact: Center for the Study of Southern Culture The University of Mississippi P.O. Box 1848 University, MS 38677-1848 telephone 662-915-5993 fax 662-915-5814 e-mail cssc@olemiss.edu www.oxfordconferenceforthebook.com Page 17
Howorth on Hannah Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books and former mayor of Oxford (2001–2009), reflects on his friend Barry Hannah as author, teacher, and influence on the Oxford literary scene. The literary life of Oxford, Mississippi, took a dramatic turn in the spring of 1982 when the late Evans Harrington, longtime English Department Chairman at Ole Miss, hired Barry Hannah to teach creative writing. Hannah had published several books and taught at Clemson and Alabama by 1982, but had met Evans Harrington many years earlier as a student at his hometown school, Mississippi College, in Clinton. Harrington had come to talk to MC students about writing that day, and Hannah once told me that he knew he wanted to be a writer when he saw Evans Harrington, saying that “he was so handsome and cool, with his tweed coat and his pipe.” Barry Hannah became the first student to receive an MFA from the creative writing program at the University of Arkansas. His first novel, Geronimo Rex, garnered critical acclaim when it was published by Viking Press in 1972, becom-
ing a National Book Award finalist and winner of the PEN/ Faulkner Award for the best first novel. The following year Viking published a second novel, Nightwatchmen, furthering Hannah’s status as a deep talent, and he was hired to teach at Clemson. By 1978 he had published enough short fiction in magazines for the legendary editor at Knopf, Gordon Lish, to issue Airships, a story collection that continues to be one of the most influential books for fiction writing students, and which includes “Testimony of Pilot,” one of the most widely anthologized American short stories of the past 30 years. With Airships, Hannah’s writing had received reviews and recognition from distinguished critics and other writers, with such descriptions as “old as hell and modern as hell” (William Price Fox); “lyrical and half-crazed” (Harry Crews); “explosive but meticulous originality” (Cynthia Ozick); “violent honesty and power” (Alfred Kazin); “inexpressibly singular” (James Dickey); and “half a dozen brilliant new voices” (Philip Roth). Hannah was said to be using language in a way that his jazz idol, Miles Davis, played music; indeed, his writing style often is noted for having a musical quality. Bruce Newman
Barry Hannah, 1995
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Entrekin at Grove Atlantic, the imprint for both the stories of High Lonesome and the novel, Yonder Stands Your Orphan, a title borrowed from a lyric by Bob Dylan, another musician who might be said to share a certain quality with Hannah. In Martin Scorcese’s film about Dylan, it is clear that genius is not simply a quality this artist applies to his work; it is part of his nature. Hannah’s writing similarly shows his ear for language as a kind of genius, the element of which perhaps does not come as a result of arduous application to craft; it is, as with Dylan, a resident trait of self. There is a notable difference, however, between Hannah and Dylan: the prominent aspect of Dylan’s genius is serious irony, which is often tiresome, whereas for Hannah the frequent companion is humor, of which there never seems to be enough. This characteristic never fails to shine in personal conversation with Hannah, at least with this petty biographer. Over the nearly three decades that Barry Hannah has lived in Oxford and taught at Ole Miss, his life has gained him the devotion of his wife, Susan, the love of his family and friends, the admiration of his readers and his students, respect of his colleagues, kinship with his community, and the undying affection of his many very highly attentive dogs.
Maude Schuyler Clay
Barry Hannah, 1985
Having moved to Oxford less than two years after Willie Morris had come here, Hannah and Willie each became to some degree “the other writer in town,” a characterization that annoyed both because they were very different. Willie was the nonfiction writer, Rhodes Scholar, accomplished journalist, editor, and belles-lettrist; Barry was the wild man of modern fiction, a jazzy mix of biker-beatnik, rebel-artiste, and gentleman-hepcat. Willie wore his khakis and loafers, cruising around town in his Buick; Barry, shades and a leather jacket, on a motorcycle. One week Willie would be quoted in Newsweek, Barry in Rolling Stone. They both came from the same sort of small-town Mississippi and, roughly, of the same era, which is to say they shared a fundamental knowledge of the same sorts of people and things. But their DNA was so very different, as was their literature, and the alchemy of the two in Oxford at the same time helped create a rich and magical period of cultural history here. Hannah would publish three more books at Knopf—Ray (a favorite among many Hannah afficianados), The Tennis Handsome (whose publication in 1983 made for the writer’s first event at Square Books), and Captain Maximus. By 1987 Seymour Lawrence, the wily independent publisher of a number of prominent writers, attracted the author to his imprint and published Hey Jack!, and their relationship served to strengthen Lawrence’s connection to Oxford, to the extent that he eventually moved here. The house he bought and moved into with the writer Joan Williams, across the street from Rowan Oak, today is used as the home for John and Renée Grisham visiting writers. Lawrence published Boomerang, Never Die, and, in 1993, a feast of 23 fabulous stories entitled Bats Out of Hell, marking a highly prolific period for the short story master. Upon Lawrence’s death in early 1994, Barry Hannah, who much of his career has chosen to eschew an agent and deal directly with his publisher, began a relationship with Morgan The Southern Register
Richard Howorth January 24, 2010
Barry Hannah at Square Books, early 1980s
Winter 2010
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The Write Stuff for Kids Each year the Oxford Conference for the Book showcases two writers who specialize in books for young readers. All participating Oxford-area fifth- and ninth-grade students receive personal copies of novels from the selected authors (courtesy of the Junior Auxiliary of Oxford, the Lafayette County Literary Council, and Square Books Jr.) and also have a chance to hear the authors speak about their work during the conference. In addition, selected fifthand ninth-grade classes from Mississippi Teacher Corps and Teach for America schools in the Mississippi Delta have been invited to join the Young Authors events this year. In 2009 Trenton Lee Stewart (The Mysterious Benedict Society) spoke to the fifth grade and Jay Asher (Thirteen Reasons Why) met with high school students. Other notable authors from past Young Authors Fairs include Laurie Halse Anderson, Christopher Paul Curtis, Margaret McMullan, John Green, and Mildred D. Taylor. The 2010 young people’s authors are, for fifth graders, Ingrid Law, and for ninth graders, Watt Key. Ingrid Law was born in New York, but moved to Colorado when she was six years old where her father was a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. During her childhood in Colorado, Law was a voracious reader and loved stories about magic and adventure. Some of her favorites growing up were the Anne of Green Gables series by Lucy Maude Montgomery, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Chronicles of Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander. Savvy, the first novel by Law, was selected as the fifth grade book this year, but she just finished Savvy’s follow-up, Scumble, the story of a relative of Savvy’s Beaumont family, which will be out in April 2010. Savvy is a Newbery Honor book, a New York Times bestseller, and a film version of the novel is currently in the works from Walden Media (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). Law still lives in Colorado with her 13-yearold daughter, writes full-time, blogs at straightfromthejar.blogspot.com (featuring scans of Savvy’s internationaledition jackets!), and claims that her Page 20
savvy (a super-hero-type talent) would be flying or breathing underwater. Savvy is story of almost-13-year-old Mississippi “Mibs” Beaumont and the rest of the Beaumont clan, who have recently relocated from the Coast to the middle of the country: “nowhere near or nearby or next to or close to or on or around any largish bodies of water.” Reason for that? Mibs’s brother Fish had received for his 13th birthday the savvy of hurricane-making. Hence the move inland. Mibs’s grandfather’s savvy caused a half-dozen Midwestern states to move around. Mibs’s mama has a savvy, too: perfection in all things. “Even Winter 2010
when she messed up, Momma messed up perfectly.” But just a couple days before Mibs’s own savvy is revealed, everything changes. Part fantasy, part science fiction, and part supernatural coming-of-age tale, Mibs’s story is the adventure of a regular girl with not-soregular talent. Watt Key was born and raised in south Alabama and sites among his influences “the time I spent fourteen days in the swamp, living off what I killed,” which included, among other things, an opossum. Alabama Moon is his first published book, but he had written 10 novels by the time it had sold. Currently, Key lives in Alabama with his family. His second novel, Dirt Road Home, comes out in July 2010, but the first story he ever wrote was about a collie surviving a tornado. Alabama Moon, the 2010 selection for ninth graders, won the 2007 E. B. White Read Aloud award and was recently made into a feature film. The book is the story of 10-year-old Moon Blake, a boy raised by his father in the Alabama wilderness. When his father is injured, and subsequently dies, Moon must fend for himself in the outside world of which he knows nothing. Eventually, he is captured and sent to a government-run reform school where he meets Kit, a soft-spoken boy with a troubled family life. The two eventually break out of the school and set off on an adventure across Alabama. Moon Blake is the 21st-century cousin of the original boy-adventurer, Huckleberry Finn. Like Huck, Moon is torn between the freedom and excitement that life on the run in the wilderness provides and the comfort and family the civilized world can offer. Participating fifth and ninth graders will have the opportunity to meet with Law and Key during the morning Literature for Young Readers panels at the Ford Center on campus on March 5, beginning at 9:00 a.m. Students, teachers, parents, and other fans of the authors’ work are invited to attend a book signing at Square Books Jr. that afternoon. Sally Cassady Lyon The Southern Register
The University Press of Mississippi at 40 Throughout this year, the University Press of Mississippi (UPM) will be hosting special events to mark its 40th anniversary, including two events at the Oxford Conference for the Book. Founded in 1970, the Press has long been a home for publications showcasing Southern literature, art, and culture. In 1989, the Press published Eudora Welty: Photographs, garnering a front page review in the New York Times Book Review and introducing the world to Miss Welty’s remarkable photographic work. Other notable volumes have included Birney Imes’s Juke Joint, The Art of Walter Anderson, and the guidebook Blues Traveling. The Press is also known to scholars and fans the world over for its two series of interview volumes: Literary Conversations and Conversations with Filmmakers.
Above: Seetha Srinivasan (left), accepting the Publisher’s Recognition Award from the Toni Morrison Society in 2008 for her outstanding work as editor and publisher in the area of Morrison scholarship, is pictured here with the author. Left: UPM staff Walter Biggins, Craig Gill, and Leila Salisbury converse with UPM board member Susan Allen Ford during at a campus visit at Delta State University in the fall of 2008.
Press books have dominated competition for the American Folklore Society’s prestigious and coveted Chicago Folklore Prize, with Press authors winning the honor in three of four the last four years. In 2008, UPM was one of three presses to receive a joint five-year, $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support publications and innovation in this field of scholarship. The Press began a comprehensive digital publishing program in 2008. UPM now publishes all rights-available titles simultaneously in print and electronic formats, and over the next several years the Press will begin conversion of hundreds of older titles. As the popularity of reading devices, such as the Kindle, grows and as libraries develop their collections with e-books, UPM seeks to use new technologies to The Southern Register
disseminate its high quality content to readers worldwide. So at 40 years, the Press celebrates four decades of publishing the finest works about art, culture, and literature and looks ahead to continuing its mission of excellence through traditional print and new electronic offerings. UPM takes as its mission the publication of scholarly books of the highest distinction and books that interpret the South and its culture for the nation and the world. UPM is the state’s only notfor-profit publisher and is partly supported by and serves all eight of Mississippi’s public universities. Governed by an editorial board comprising two representatives from each university and two members from the board of the IHL, the Press acquires, edits, designs, and promotes approximately 70 new books evWinter 2010
ery year written by authors from all over the world. The publishing program is focused on the humanities, with areas of strength in African American studies, literature, film and popular culture, comics studies, music history, Mississippi and regional studies, and folklore. The Press has published more than 900 titles and distributed more than 2,500,000 copies worldwide. UPM is a 501(c)(3) organization with a full-time staff of 17 and annual sales of approximately $2 million. The Press has won awards and achieved acclaim in three areas of the humanities: African American history and culture, folklore, and literature and literary criticism. Its publishing program began with William Ferris’s Mississippi Black Folklore (1971). Though its early focus was on the state’s life and history, the Press made a concerted effort to broaden its editorial program. With an understanding and appreciation of evolving areas of scholarly communication, the Press expanded its scope to encompass popular culture, including comics studies, and groundbreaking studies in folk art and folklore. The Press is also proud to partner with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture on two important book series: the Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History Series, and the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series, which now includes 26 volumes that represent the premier gathering of Faulkner scholarship. Page 21
Southern Arts Federation Workshops The Southern Arts Federation has awarded a grant to support special workshops during the Oxford Conference for the Book. Poets Mark Jarman and E. Ethelbert Miller will present readings and also conduct poetry workshops. Donna Hemans will present a reading and conduct a fiction workshop. The two authors of books for young readers—Ingrid Law and Watt Key—will join literacy advocates Elaine H. Scott and Claiborne Barksdale in a discussion about reading and writing problems and opportunities. Teachers from local schools, Teach for America schools in the Mississippi Delta, Mississippi Teacher Corps schools, librarians, education students, writers of poetry and fiction, and other interested persons are invited to attend. Continuing Education Units are available for conference and workshop participants.
Poetry Craft Talk “The Craft of Writing the Political Poem” Lafayette County & Oxford Public Library Friday, March 5, 2010, Noon The public is invited to attend a presentation by noted poet E. Ethelbert Miller. His presentation will be a craft talk, of interest to writers and readers of poetry. The event will include lunch and is open to the public without charge. Deadline for Reservations: Monday, March 1, 2010.
Fiction and Poetry Writing Workshops Overby Center Rooms TBA Saturday, March 6, 2010, 9:00 a.m. Writers of poetry and short fiction are invited to submit a short manuscript for critique by two acclaimed authors, fiction writer Donna Hemans and poet Mark Jarman. Interested individuals should send one poem or no more than 10 pages of fiction to Blair Hobbs, Department of English, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677; e-mail vhobbs@ olemiss.edu. Manuscripts should include name and contact information. Depending on number of manuscripts received, workshop manuscripts may be selected on basis of quality. These workshops will meet concurrently on Saturday, March 6, at 9 a.m. The workshops are free and open to the public. Deadline for submissions: Wednesday, February 24, 2010.
E. Ethelbert Miller is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Whispers, Secrets, and Promises and First Light: New and Selected Poems. His memoir, Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer, was selected in 2003 for the One Book, One City program sponsored by the Washington, D.C., Public Libraries. He has been director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University since 1974.
(above) Mark Jarman is the author of numerous collections of poetry and Iris, a book-length poem. His poetry and essays have been published widely in such periodicals and journals as the New Yorker, Southern Review, and Yale Review. He is Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.
Claiborne Barksdale is executive director of the Barksdale Reading Institute at the University of Mississippi. Previously, he practiced law in Jackson, worked for Senator Thad Cochran, and was a clerk for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
CEUs Continuing Education Units will be available for teachers and others who attend Oxford Conference for the Book programs and workshops. A person must attend at least 5 hours of instruction to receive CEUs. The conference offers a total of 16 hours (1.6 units). The cost is $20. Participants should complete CEU registration forms and pay the fee when they check in at the conference. Page 22
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(left) Donna Hemans is the author of the novel River Woman, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in 2003; her short fiction has been published numerous literary journals. She leads fiction writing workshops at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and has twice been writer in residence at Georgetown University.
The Southern Register
“The Endangered Species: Readers Today and Tomorrow” Overby Center Auditorium Saturday, March 6, 2010, 9:00 a.m. Claiborne Barksdale, Watt Key, Ingrid Law, and Elaine Scott will discuss reading problems and opportunities and address written questions submitted prior to the Saturday morning session. Teachers should send their questions to Rosemary Oliphant-Ingham, School of Education, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 386777; email ringham@olemiss.edu. Deadline for submissions: Wednesday, February 24, 2010.
Elaine H. Scott is former chair of the Arkansas State Board of Education, a member of the Education Commission of the States (1987–1997), and a leader in several organizations concerned with education, teacher training, libraries, and literacy. She has worked with the Reading Is Fundamental program since 1974 and received the RIF Leader for Literacy Award in April 1994.
O’Connors Offer Book and Author Publicity Session So, you’ve written the book and found a publisher. Now what? For many authors, the writing and editing are the easy parts. But getting copies to book reviewers? Writing press releases? Hiring a publicist? Not all publishing houses, probably only a handful of them, have their own in-house publicity departments. It’s up to you the writer to beat the pavement and get the word out yourself. Fear not, dear writer! At this year’s Oxford Conference for the Book, Lynda and James O’Connor, who operate a husband-and-wife public relations firm in Chicago, will once again lead a workshop titled “Promoting Your Book and Yourself.” The O’Connors will discuss effective ways to acquire media coverage beyond book reviews, explain how to find
James O’Connor
and contact members of the media, and explore creative ways to get favorable exposure. In addition, Lynda and Jim will cover such topics as using the Internet and viral marketing, overcoming fear, and the pros and cons of hiring your own publicist. Lynda and Jim O’Connor have operated their own public relations firm in Chicago for 21 years and have specialized in promoting books and authors since 2006, beginning with Jim’s book, Cuss Control: The Complete Book on How to Curb Your Cursing. Cuss Control took the duo to over 100 television programs, all the way from Oprah to the O’Reilly Factor. Their clients call the O’Connors “tireless, tenacious, creative, enthusiastic and dedicated.” Lynda O’Connor The workshop will be at Off Square Books on Friday, March 5, at 7 p.m. The O’Connors, in addition to leading the workshop, have offered to schedule individual meetings with conference registrants. To schedule an appointment, sign up at the registration desk or give one of them a call: Lynda’s number is 847-863-5017. Jim’s is 847-863-3591. Sally Cassady Lyon
The Southern Register
Winter 2010
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Missississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Announces Awards, Nominations The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters (MIAL) has chosen William Ferris, the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History and senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as the recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award. The presentation will be made at the annual Awards Gala on June 5, 2010, at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson. Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books in Oxford, will be the master of ceremonies. A native of Vicksburg, William R. Ferris is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where he served on the faculty for 18 years. He also is the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Named one of the Top Ten Professors in the United States by Rolling Stone magazine, Ferris is the author of the recently published Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues. A rare Special Achievement Award will be presented for The Passions of Walter Anderson: A Dramatic Celebration of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Artist. First performed in 2009 at the Oxford Conference for the Book, this interdisciplinary work combines drama,
William Ferris art, music, and dance to pay tribute to Walter Anderson and his family. Awards will also be presented for works first shown, published, or performed in 2009 in the categories of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, visual arts, photography, and music composition, both classical and popular. Artists must have significant ties to the state of Mississippi and must have been nominated by an MIAL member. Judges in each category are chosen from outside Mississippi.
The Passions of Walter Anderson: A Dramatic Celebration of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Artist Adapted by Alex Mauney from the Writings of Agnes and Walter Inglis Anderson in collaboration with Jimmyle Listenbee, Amanda Malloy, Kevin Malloy, Rhona Justice-Malloy, Jared Spears, and Michael Barnett Meek Hall Auditorium The University of Mississippi March 26, 27, and 28, 2009 Page 24
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In the category of Poetry are nominees D. C. Berry, Jack Crocker, Kendall Dunkelberg, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Larry Johnson, and Greg Miller. Fiction nominees are Frederick Barthelme, John Grisham, Greg Isles, Margaret McMullan, Kathryn Stockett, and Quentin Whitwell. The Nonfiction nominees are Alex Alston and James Dickerson, David W. Beckwith, D. C. Berry, Gene Dattel, Charles W. Eagles, W. Ralph Eubanks, Alan Huffman, Alan Lange and Tom Dawson, Stokes McMillan, David Magee, Deanne Stephens Nuwer, and Neil White. The Visual Arts nominees are Duncan Baird, Charles Crossley, Millie Howell, Chris Minor, Sandra Murchison, Carol Piggott, Lee Rennigar, and Elizabeth Veglia. Photography nominees are Will Jacks, Eyd Kazery, Gloria Norris, Kim Rushing, and Michael Lloyd Young. In Music Composition–Classical the nominees are Ken Davies, Albert C. Oppenheimer, and Shandy Phillips. The nominees for Music Composition– Popular are Johnny Bertram, Caroline Herring, Nash Street, and Jamie Weems. Winners in each category will receive a cash prize and a Mississippimade gift. Past winners include Willie Morris, Natasha Trethewey, Richard Ford, Ellen Douglas, Samuel Jones, and Walker Percy. Mark Wiggs of Jackson serves as president of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. Past president is Ann Abadie of Oxford. Jan Taylor of Jackson is treasurer, and Margaret Anne Robbins of Pontotoc is secretary. Anyone may join MIAL and thus be eligible to nominate artists in each category. For more information about membership and about attending the awards ceremony and banquet on June 5, 2010, visit the website www.ms-artsletters.org. Mary Thompson The Southern Register
Reading the South Awakenings: The Story of the Kate Chopin Revival. Edited by Bernard Koloski. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. 226 pages. $35.00 cloth. “Many of the pieces are page-turners,” Peggy Prenshaw promises in her blurb for this essay collection on the rediscovery of Kate Chopin; and she is right. Chopin’s own page-turner, The Awakening, retains its power over readers, even though more than a century has passed since the novel’s publication in 1899. Each contributor to the appropriately titled Awakenings has published at least one book on the author. While they are quick to credit their professors, friends, colleagues, and predecessors, editor Bernard Koloski and his fellow essayists are all well-known figures in the Chopin revival. Among them, the group of 12 has produced several editions of Chopin’s writings, as well as biographies, bibliographies, essay collections, and books of literary criticism on her famous novel, her less famous novel, At Fault, and her many short stories. Koloski describes this three-part volume as a “literary foundation narrative” that “focuses on what happened a generation ago and why—and how that literary activity looks today.” The unconventional accounts gathered here are well suited to the unconventional Kate Chopin, whose frank descriptions of women’s sexuality shocked many of her contemporaries. In fascinating detail, the essayists recall their initial encounters with Chopin’s fiction between the 1950s and the 1980s, when the Louisiana writer’s long neglected texts again became available. Throughout the collection, person-
al reflection and scholarly discussion come together in intriguing ways; but the professors’ earliest Chopin memories comprise an especially appealing facet of Awakenings. Aboard a segregated New Orleans streetcar in 1956, Thomas Bonner Jr. read “Désirée’s Baby” for high school freshman English and “came the nearest that I had ever been to what I later learned was an epiphany, the opening of an unforeseen question.” The racially motivated tragedy in Chopin’s story made him reflect that passengers sitting in front of a streetcar’s Jim Crow sign “were frequently darker than the people behind it.” Anna Shannon Elfenbein was in high school in the ’60s; but “no one I knew had ever heard of Kate Chopin,” she says. At graduate school in 1973, Elfenbein overheard a “sotto voce conversation” about Chopin’s “The Storm” in a women’s restroom at the University of Nebraska and “went straight to the library” to find the story (unpublished during Chopin’s lifetime) in
Norwegian Per Seyersted’s “recently published edition of her complete works.” A contemporaneous graduate student, Emily Toth, was protesting the Vietnam War in Baltimore when a friend put an orange paperback Awakening into her book bag. “It gave me a lifetime of questions that I’m still pondering,” says Toth, who answers others’ questions as “Ms. Mentor” for the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Feminisms” is the title for the fiveessay part 1 of Awakenings. The gossipy tone of Toth’s Chronicle columns is refreshingly present in “My Part in Reviving Kate Chopin,” with scenes of herself as “a snobbish grad student,” a young assistant professor, and a 40year-old biographer for whom “the time was ripe, for biographers no longer had to be keepers of their subjects’ secrets.” Essayist Barbara C. Ewell credits Ann Abadie of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture with helping her secure a national grant to work on Chopin early in her career as an authority in Southern local color literature. Ewell became “a full-fledged, card-carrying feminist” the semester she “stripped the men away” from her women-in-literature course. In “Bringing Kate Chopin to Britain: A Transatlantic Perspective,” the British Helen Taylor describes her “immersion in Louisiana archives,” where she ironically found the importance of European influences on the Francophone, bilingual Chopin. The Awakening, says Taylor, “has opened doors to new British readers of southern literature in ways other southern works (notably those by William Faulkner) have failed to do.” Barbara H. Solomon, editor of The Awakening for the New American Library, defines the qualities of a literary classic and comments on the unpredictability of an author’s popularity over
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 long periods of time. Like Taylor, Mary E. Papke emphasizes Chopin’s biculturalism in an essay that opens with Papke’s own bicultural experience: “I was a poor graduate student living in a cold-water basement flat in a city in which I did not speak the majority language.” She bought The Awakening at an “English-language feminist bookstore” in Montreal and was so “profoundly shocked” that she changed the focus of her studies from Marxist criticism and radical drama to Chopin and Edith Wharton. In the first of four essays in “Foundations,” part 2 of the collection, Bonner explains how he developed essential tools for the study of Chopin, from an annotated bibliography to a glossary of names, places, and other allusions. Robert D. Arner, author of the first modern American dissertation on Chopin, stresses the need for further studies of such complex stories as “A Pair of Silk Stockings.” “The Death of Edna Pontellier and the Card Catalogue” by Marlene Springer evokes “the perils of trying to track down sources in a pre-Internet age,” as she did for her 1976 Chopin-Wharton bibliography. Lynda S. Boren’s “Romantic Overtures” proposes that isolation is the defining characteristic of romantic literature like The Awakening; although “utterly alone” at the end of the novel, Edna is nevertheless “in total possession of self.” Like Arner, the three essayists in part 3, “Expansions,” call for deeper investigation of specific aspects of the fiction. Short story theorist Susan Lohafer believes Chopin “has something to offer those of us who are working in the boundary zone between genre theory and cognitive science.” Elfenbein has revised her original view of Edna Pontellier as an “exemplary” character and now sees her as “a cautionary one whose conventional, class-bound attitudes not only harm other women”—especially women of color—“but also circumscribe her sense of self.” In the vol-
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ume’s final essay, Koloski, too, relates in the early 20th century. Martin’s a shift in perspective; his Fulbright sketches, which examine a five-counyears in Poland in the early 1980s ty span from Jasper County at the opened his eyes to the reality of povSavannah River to Colleton County erty in much of the short fiction. “I just south of Charleston, are vivid and had viewed Chopin through many tell the story of sites primarily studied lenses,” says Koloski, “but economics and understood as they were before the was not one of them.” Like Taylor, Civil War. Papke, and Bonner, he is also sensiMartin’s contemporary accounts tive to French influences on Chopin, function as advertisements for the particularly in the darker stories of A development of a region that, at the Vocation and a Voice. time, had little infrastructure or busiSuggesting that Chopin stands ness investments. The editor of the apart from “other writers focused on News and Courier viewed the influx women’s concerns,” Koloski could be of capital from Northern investors as summing up the whole collection in a boon to the coastal region, which concluding: “It’s that undercurrent of had never recovered from the ecoexternal forces and internal tensions, nomic devastation of the Civil War. of French language and culture and At a time of nationwide economic deAmerican optimism and hope, that pression, Northern money meant demakes her the extraordinary writer velopment, and the News and Courier we know her to be.” The imaginative was an unabashed booster of land acand dedicated scholars of Awakenings quisition by persons of means. Hoffius are not daunted by undercurrents. notes that “the story of South Carolina coastal development is not just what Joan Wylie Hall Yankees did to Southerners; it was all business, and South Carolinians profited too.” In the world portrayed by Martin, sectional conflict was mediated and forgotten in the exchange Northern Money, Southern of stunningly beautiful land for muchLand: The Lowcountry needed capital. Plantation Sketches of Martin discussed 80 estates in more Chlotilde R. Martin. than 50 articles, most of which were purchased as hunting preserves and Edited by Robert B. Cuthbert encompassed thousands, or tens of and Stephen G. Hoffius. thousands, of acres. The investors ofColumbia: University of ten made joint purchases of land to South Carolina Press, 2009. create exclusive clubs, such as the 272 pages. $34.95 cloth. Okeetee Club, known for its requirement of formal evening dress for dinIn this annotated collection of ner. Martin’s sketches include highly Chlotilde Martin’s 1930s Charleston detailed accounts of the interior and News and Courier articles about the exterior features of the houses, which purchase of Lowcountry plantations by ranged from very simple hunting lodgNorthern investors, Robert Cuthbert es to the restoration or construction of and Stephen Hoffius provide a window “ornate mansions of brick or stone.” into a little-studied time in the histoDuring the investors’ winter-time resry of Southern plantations. Drawn by idences on their Carolina plantations, cheap land and a desire to create pristhey enjoyed ideal conditions for bird tine hunting preserves, Northern inhunting, a mild climate, and, most dustrialists and bankers with names importantly, privacy. like DuPont, Kress, and Vanderbilt beAs Hoffius humorously notes in gan purchasing land in the Lowcountry the introduction, “What happened
Winter 2010
The Southern Register
Reading the South continued in Yemassee stayed in Yemassee.” These plantations, accessed down long lanes and often far remote from neighbors because of their vast size, were the settings for debauchery impossible for business leaders constrained by the dictates of Boston or New York society. Locals told stories of wild parties complete with “showgirls.” Cat Island near Beaufort was the site of the first nudist camp in America, though the inhabitants assured Martin that they were nothing beyond newly minted farmers disenchanted by city life. Martin, who would work for the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration a few years after she produced the plantation sketches, had the chatty prose style of a society columnist. She paired factual information with flowery and poetic accounts of the sites, and her enjoyment of the assignment is evident. Cuthbert and Hoffius provide context for Martin’s sometimes cursory commentary. The editors note that Martin was discouraged from delving too deeply into historical records, as her role as a journalist prevented her the time to study land deeds and plats, a task her editor at the News and Courier deemed better suited to lawyers. To gather some semblance of a historical background for the plantations, Martin relied on the storytelling of locals and on the tropes of the Lost Cause so present in contemporary popular culture. Martin writes very little about the black full-time residents who inhabited the coastal swath she was surveying and who served as caretakers of the plantations. When she did include the black residents in her accounts, she again relied on the kind of language characteristic of Lost Cause romances that celebrated the “happy times” of slavery. There is an ephemeral quality to Martin’s accounts of antebellum life on the plantations that seems to acknowledge the mythic nature of the stories even as she revels in them.
The Southern Register
Eudora Welty Review Volume 1 (Spring 2009) Pearl McHaney, editor.
Martin’s News and Courier articles allow one to understand the important legacy of Northern landholding in the early 20th century. While Hoffius and Cuthbert note that many of the plantations described by Martin have been subdivided into residential developments (many of which bear the name of the original plantation), a small but significant amount of land originally acquired by Northern investors remains intact, with much of it placed under conservation easements in recent years. Martin’s sketches play an important role in telling the story of conservation in the Lowcountry. The context that Cuthbert and Hoffius provide for Martin’s sketches illustrates the evolution of the Lowcountry plantation, from the colonial period to its present day reimagination as a carefully manicured multifamily real estate development. Northern Money, Southern Land is at once a travel guide for those curious about where the live oak alleés lead, an exploration of sectional reconciliation through commerce, and a foundation for understanding conservation and development in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Becca Walton
Winter 2010
Eudora Welty would have turned 100 in 2009. She wasn’t here to celebrate, but the many readers and students of her work did it for her, with, among other tributes, a birthday party at her house in Jackson and a yearlong engagement with her Collected Stories through the Mississippi Reads program. And that was just in Mississippi. Exhibitions and programs in Georgia, Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, and California marked the occasion as well, in addition to various international commemorations. The study of Welty and her work has long depended on the Eudora Welty Newsletter, begun in 1977 at the University of Toledo by W. U. McDonald Jr. Published biannually, the Newsletter was expressly devoted to publishing brief bibliographic notes and announcements of new publications by and about the author; Noel Polk described it in 1999 as “this beloved twice-yearly potpourri of miscellaneous scholarly notes and notices.” When the Newsletter moved in 1997 to Georgia State University under the capable editorship of Pearl McHaney, it expanded its scope and began to include short scholarly treatments of Welty’s work as well. In concert with the centennial of Welty’s birth, and following the publication of 65 issues, the Newsletter has taken one more step forward, this time transforming itself into the Eudora Welty Review. Edited by McHaney and guided by Advisory and Editorial Boards comprised of leading Welty scholars, the Eudora Welty Review will continue the bibliographic work of the Newsletter but now devote itself primarily to the publication of scholarly essays. To mark this transition, the first volume of the Eudora Welty Review is a collection of notes and short articles originally published in the Newsletter.
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Reading the South continued The volume opens with Elizabeth Spencer’s introduction to a reading given by Welty in 1979, includes two notes from Peggy Whitman Prenshaw from 1978 and 1982, and concludes with two reviews, one by Daniele Pitavy-Souques recounting a special Welty issue of the French journal Delta V and a second, omnibus review by Michael Kreyling of three essay collections published in 1978 and 1979 about Welty’s work. As Kreyling points out, scholarship about Welty was gaining momentum by the late 1970s; it was possible to locate innovative approaches to her work at the same time that certain critical perspectives were becoming commonplace. But the bulk of the entries in the inaugural Eudora Welty Review were originally published in the Newsletter between 1997 and 2008. As a result, the reader of the volume gets no sense of what was happening in the world of Welty scholarship during the better part of two decades, the 1980s and 1990s. Were there shifts in the focus of submissions the Newsletter was receiving? Were readers and scholars more
drawn to one book or story over others at different moments in that 20-year span? Or is it not really possible or useful to judge? Those questions aside, the 21 essays included from that 11-year period address a range of Welty’s work, usually relying on fairly traditional but valuable readings of the texts themselves. There are treatments of familiar stories, “A Worn Path” (Stang) and “Why I Live at the P.O.” (Russel), as well as two engagements with Welty’s more troubling “Clytie” (Cohoon, McLaughlin). Perhaps most fascinating is McHaney’s publication history of “Magic,” a Welty short story reprinted for the first time (since its debut in the September-October 1936 issue of a short-lived magazine called Manuscript) in the Summer 2004 issue of the Newsletter. There is one reading of The Robber Bridegroom (Ramirez), two of Delta Wedding (Snow and Romines, who includes a reconstructed recipe for Mashula’s coconut cake and an argument for its significance in the novel). There are three essays dealing with various facets of The Golden Apples (Shimkus, Gordon, Bayne) and two
And Speaking of Miss Welty. . . .
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Winter 2010
Kay Bell
Do you have a son who just may be the next Richard Wright? A daughter who can channel her inner O’Connor with a flick of a pen? If so, encourage these young people to enter stories and poems for consideration in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture’s annual Eudora Welty Awards. Schools may submit one entry per category. Students should be Mississippi resident ninth through twelfth graders and must submit writing through their high schools. Maximum length of short stories is 3,000 words and of poetry, 100 lines. Winners and nominating schools will be notified in May. First place carries a $500 prize and second place, $250, plus recognition by Center director Ted Ownby at the opening of the 2010 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference on the University campus in July. Entries should be postmarked by April 15, 2010, and will be judged by University of Mississippi English professors. Applications and submission requirements have been sent to all Mississippi public and private high schools, but if you know a Mississippi student currently enrolled in high school outside the state or who is home-schooled, please e-mail slyon@olemiss.edu or call 662915-5993 for a copy. To see a list of past winners or to download a PDF of the application, visit www.olemiss.edu/depts/south/EudoraWeltyAwards.html.
with The Ponder Heart (Eichelberger and Fell, whose intriguing focus is Joe Krush, the novel’s illustrator). A welcome surprise are two articles about The Shoe Bird (Michaels, Hoyt), Welty’s one book allegedly for children and thus unfortunately absent from even the Library of America’s compilation of her work. Into a sort of miscellaneous category fall Lois Welch’s treatment of Welty’s humor, John Ferrone’s recollections of working with the author to compile The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1980), Joan Hall’s observations on Welty’s reference in One Writer’s Beginnings to the forbidden Elsie Dinsmore series, Stuart Kidd’s reading of Welty’s Mississippi photographs, and Maria Sciacco’s study of Welty’s reception in Italy. The first volume of the Eudora Welty Review is, then, a bit scattershot and vaguely unsatisfying. That remark is meant, not as criticism, but as optimism for the Review’s future success. The more expansive scholarly articles made possible by the Review’s format will engage the growing community of Welty scholars in new ways, as well as appeal to critics of United States literature more broadly. Signaling the importance of Welty to that wider audience, the Eudora Welty Review promises to become the outlet for the best scholarship produced about the writer, the journal that other journals will cite as the definitive source about her and her work. In many ways that was already true; the Newsletter has since its inception been the authority on textual variants, collations, scholarly checklists, and events showcasing Welty’s writing and the scholarship generated by it. In retaining the Newsletter’s most frequently consulted features, while extending its reach to full-length critical articles, the Eudora Welty Review will surely become invaluable to even more readers. Katie McKee
The Southern Register
UNiVerSity PreSS of MiSSiSSiPPi
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An illustrated history of the grand plantation homes lost to war, disaster, and neglect $40 hardback
Missing New Orleans
Compiled and edited by Phillip Collier Text by J. Richard Gruber, Jim Rapier, and Mary Beth Romig With a Hurricane Katrina epilogue featuring photography by David Rae Morris
thomas Jefferson on Wine By John Hailman
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Mississippi Politics
The Struggle for Power, 1976–2008, Second Edition
By Jere Nash and Andy Taggart Foreword by John Grisham
Celebrating 40 Years
Highway 51
Mississippi Hill Country
Photographs by Gloria Norris Introduction by Rick Bass Photographs the illuminate the state’s rich but underexposed terrain $40 hardback
eudora Welty as Photographer
Photographs by Eudora Welty Edited by Pearl Amelia McHaney With contributions by Sandra S. Phillips and Deborah Willis
A visual and historical love letter for all those who know what it means to miss New Orleans $39.95 jacketed paperback
Updated and expanded to reflect the profound consequences of the 2007 and 2008 elections in Mississippi $35 hardback
Madame Vieux Carré
Louisiana Governors
Occasions
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By Walter Greaves Cowan and Jack B. McGuire
By Eudora Welty Edited by Pearl Amelia McHaney
A revelation of the wild, wily, and well-meaning chief executives of a colorful state $45 hardback; $25 paperback
A treasury of hard-to-find stories, essays, tributes, and humor from a literary master $35 hardback
Crusades for Freedom
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The French Quarter in the Twentieth Century
From dicey red light district to historic tourist destination, the story of the Quarter’s transformative century $28 hardback
Rulers, Rascals, and Reformers
Memphis and the Political Transformation of the American South
By G. Wayne Dowdy How Republicans and African Americans took the stage after the fall of a great southern political machine $45 hardback
Dictionary of Louisiana French
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Senior editor Albert Valdman Associate editor Kevin J. Rottet The definitive reference tool for understanding francophone Louisiana $38 hardback SouthernRegisterWinter10.indd 1
A centennial consideration of the great author’s vision as expressed in her renowned photography $35 hardback
My two Oxfords
By Willie Morris Afterword by JoAnne Prichard Morris Photograph by David Rae Morris A special edition honoring an adored Mississippi writer on the 75th anniversary of his birth $20 hardback
reading Faulkner Absalom!, Absalom!
By Joseph R. Urgo and Noel Polk For teachers and students, a guide to understanding one of Faulkner’s masterpieces $55 printed casebinding; $25 paperback
Selected Writings
The WPA Guide to the Magnolia State
By the Works Progress Administration Introduction by Robert S. McElvaine Available again, a classic picture of Mississippi in the 1930s $30 paperback
Professors: To request examination or desk copies of our titles, please visit http://www.upress.state. ms.us/about/ordering/educator
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tennessee Williams and the South By Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt
Words and pictures that show the South’s imprint on the life and works of the great playwright $22 paperback
1/25/10 3:37 PM
WilliamSouthern AndersonFoodways C O N T R IRegister BUTORS Photography Exhibition The Delta State University Archives and Museum is exhibiting A Compassionate Eye: Photography of William Anderson through April 30, 2010. For the past four decades, driven by nostalgia and humanitarian concerns, Atlanta photographer William Anderson has documented life among African Americans in the Southeast. His subjects are sharecroppers, rural families, worshippers in ecstatic religious ceremonies, and others of humble origin who remind of his childhood in Selma, Alabama. Widely exhibited, Anderson’s blackand-white photographs have been acquired by numerous prestigious museums, including the National Gallery of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the High Museum of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Anderson recently retired as an associate professor at Morehouse College and is a sculptor, painter, printmaker, and musician as well as a photographer. For more information, call the Archives office at 662-846-4780 or visit www.archives.deltastate.edu.
Mark Camarigg is the former assistant editor and current publications manager for Living Blues magazine. He is also a doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Mississippi researching Soul Blues music in the American South. I’Nasah Crockett is a student in the Southern Studies graduate program. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, she received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College. Adam Gussow, associate professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, is the author of three books on blues music.
Joan Wylie Hall teaches in the English Department at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction and articles on Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Grace King, Frances Newman, and other authors. Richard Howorth is founder of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, and past president of the American Booksellers Association. He served as mayor of Oxford from 2001 to 2009. He and Louis Rubin, distinguished professor of English emeritus at the University of North Carolina and founder of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, were honored with the 2008 Authors Guild Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community. 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. Kathryn McKee is McMullan Associate Professor of Southern Studies and associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She coedited a special issue of the journal American Literature called “Global Contexts, Local Literatures” and is currently coediting a volume about representations of the South in film. Ted Ownby, director of the Center, holds a joint appointment in Southern Studies and History. Jimmy Thomas is managing editor of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. An alumnus of the University of Mississippi, he has worked for publications in Oxford and New York. Mary McKenzie Thompson is a retired high school teacher of English and creative writing from Clarksdale, Mississippi. She serves on the Board of Governors of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. Becca Walton-Evans, a 2008 graduate of the Southern Studies master’s program, lives in Charleston, South Carolina, where she works on the artistic operations staff of the Charleston Symphony Orchestra.
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Winter 2010
The Southern Register
Southern Foodways Register The Newsletter of the Southern Foodways Alliance “There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.” —Mark Twain
2009 SFA ANNUAL REPORT Despite the ailing economy, the SFA had a banner 2009. Herewith, a glance back at the highlights: MEMBER RELATIONS Redesigned and Improved Gravy We remade our newsletter into a ’zine. Gravy is no longer a PR clarion for the SFA. We’re now publishing insightful and unexpected reportage on our region. Stay tuned. New Database The SFA is growing up. We built a real database, using a customized, nonprofit version of Salesforce, one of the best cloud computing solutions out there, so that we can capture event attendance patterns, giving patterns, and the like. Nifty Stickers In an effort to recognize our loyal members and build brand loyalty, we began printing member stickers. Renewing members are now receiving their Proud Citizen of the Banana Pudding Republic decals. New Board Members John Currence, James Beard Award– winning chef of City Grocery in Oxford; Makale Faber Cullen, Brooklyn-based nonprofit marvel; Ted Lee, the glasseswearing half of the dynamic Lee Bros. combo; and Ted Ownby, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, joined the Board.
PRESS
EVENTS
Global Vision Award The Southern Foodways Alliance was chosen as a recipient of a 2009 Travel + Leisure Global Vision Award. Introduced in 2005, the Awards recognize individuals and organizations “working to preserve the world’s natural and man-made treasures.” Fellow honorees this year included the Museum of Islamic Art and the Rainforest Alliance. We also got great ink from Gastronomica, the Financial Times, and a couple dozen more media arbiters.
Taste of the South at Blackberry Farm The Fellowship of Southern Farmers, Artisans, and Chefs, a self-elected body of our region’s finest culinary talent, convened in January at Blackberry Farm. Concurrently, Blackberry Farm staged a generous fundraiser for the SFA.
DOCUMENTARY INITIATIVES 450 Oral Histories Online We topped 450 oral histories. You read that right. We’ve now interviewed, photographed, and Web archived—for easy access, 24 hours a day—more than 450 row crop farmers, oystermen, and fried chicken cooks. Oral History Interactive Map And we’ve mapped them, too. Brand new on the Web site is this travel feature, geared to help you plan your trips by way of oral history subjects and the great food they raise, cook, and serve: www.southernfoodways.com/documentary/maps/index.html. 25 Documentary Films Our latest film, an homage to the Big Apple Inn of Jackson, Mississippi, may be our best. Take a look here: www. southernfoodways.com/documentary/ film/index.html.
Potlikker D.C. SFA packed the house in D.C. in April. Chefs, from Beard Award winners Gillian Clark to Jeff Buben, cooked their hearts out. And more than 200 people packed the house to watch SFA documentary films at Ann Cashion’s restaurant Johnny’s Half Shell. Mountain Empire Field Trip We ranged widely this past June, from the Carter Fold to the owner’s box at Bristol Motor Speedway. Fred Sauceman and “Rathead” Riley led the way, and the good folks from the Town House in Chilhowie, Virginia, cooked their vegetable-loving heads off. Potlikker Athens In August, we debuted a new film, Cud, a portrait of Georgia cattle rancher Will Harris. And we served all manner of eats with his beef. Hugh Acheson, chef and owner of the restaurant 5&10, and Judy Long, literary provocateur, were our guides. Second Annual Viking Range Lecture In early October we hosted Warren continued on page 32
Belasco, pioneering University of Maryland foodways scholar, author of Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food and Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry. 12th Southern Foodways Symposium: Food & Music Chefs ranging from David Chang of Momofuku to Susan Spicer of Bayona convened in Oxford this past October, to make sense of the connectedness of food and music. So did thinkers and writers, from Bob O’Meally to Marshall Chapman. All went home with grease on their fingers and new ideas in their heads. AWARDS Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award SFA renamed our Lifetime Achievement Award in honor of Craig Claiborne, and, at a June event in New York City, celebrated Claiborne’s legacy. In October, at the Southern Foodways Symposium, we presented that award to Kentuckyborn author Ronni Lundy.
Ronni Lundi
get comes from the University of Mississippi. Remaining funds come from event fees, membership fees, foundation contributions, and corporate sponsor contributions. New Sponsors In 2009, SFA welcomed two new sponsors, Lodge Manufacturing Company of South Pittsburgh, Tennessee, and Mountain Valley Spring Water of Hot Springs, Arkansas.
writers, scholars, and others, whose work in the broad field of foodways documents and celebrates the diverse cultures of the American South and addresses issues of race, class, and gender, as well as social and environmental justice.
Dollars on Hand We have an operating reserve of $450,000, earning interest at the University of Mississippi Foundation. Also at the Foundation, we have parked an SFA Endowment of $60,000 and a John Egerton Prize Endowment of $35,000. Funds to fully vest the latter, at the $100,000 mark, have been pledged.
FUNDING
PERSONNEL
Our Budget The SFA operates on a budget of approximately $525,000 per year. Approximately $50,000 of that bud-
Additions to the Staff In July, Julie Pickett began working for us in an administrative role. She’s proven to be a model of efficiency and enthusiasm. In October, Melissa Hall, our events maven, became a full-time employee. (She had previously worked 30 hours per week.)
John Egerton Prize SFA awarded its inaugural John Egerton Prize to Haley Downs and Julie Kahn, filmmakers at work on the documentary Swamp Cabbage. The prize, in the amount of $5,000, recognizes artists,
Additions to the Staff (Family Edition) Amy Evans Streeter birthed a baby girl, Sofia Grace Streeter, on October 21. Mary Beth Lasseter birthed a baby boy, David Allen Mitchell, on December 18.
(above) Mary Beth Lasseter, SFA’s assistant director, with David Allen Mitchell (born 12/18/09) (left) Amy Evans Streeter, SFA’s oral historian, with Sofia Grace Streeter (born 10/21/09)
SFA Internships True to our mission, we are as committed to teaching as we are to documenting. In an effort to mentor students in the field of oral history and initiate collaborations, we offer two kinds of internships. IN-HOUSE INTERNSHIP An In-House Internship at the SFA is a prearranged, structured learning experience usually lasting one to two weeks. An In-House Internship is performed on the campus of the University of Mississippi under the direct supervision of SFA staff, with the SFA’s oral historian, Amy Evans Streeter, being the primary contact. In-House Internships are offered for either one- or two-week durations, depending on interest and availability. Interns will conduct interviews for new or existing SFA oral history projects and/or produce multimedia pieces in support of existing projects. We are interested in collecting the stories behind the food— stories about people. Please visit our Oral history Project Index page to see what projects are already part of our archive. Work completed during the internship term will be deposited in the SFA’s permanent archive. Interns will have the right to utilize the interviews they conduct for their own academic endeavors. Availability: Once per calendar year Term: one–two weeks* *(If your university requires a five- or six-week internship, the first two weeks will be managed in Oxford, and the remaining time will be treated as a Guided Internship, with the remaining work done off site.) Credit: Please note that the intern’s university is the grantor of course credit, not the Southern Foodways Alliance or the University of Mississippi. Deadlines: February 1 (postmark) for Summer (starting June 15) Notification: By March 15 Stipend: Up to $500 per week (on-site only). The stipend is intended to cover travel while in Oxford, housing, and expenses (we have a source for economical housing). Half of the stipend will be granted upon receipt of award; the other half will be granted upon completion of project. Equipment: A personal laptop is required. The SFA has an oral history kit (digital recorder, external mike, headphones, and digital camera), which will be made available for the intern’s use. Depending upon schedule, access to the University’s Center for Media Production [http://mpdl.outreach.olemiss. edu/] may be available for multimedia projects. Office space may also be made available. GUIDED INTERNSHIP A Guided Internship at the SFA offers the opportunity to pursue either an oral history or multimedia project based in any location within the South. Applicants should survey the SFA’s existing catalogue of oral histories to determine what sorts of
projects are appropriate. If applicants do not have a specific subject interest, the SFA can suggest subjects with whom a Guided Intern may conduct interviews. The Guided Internship is performed under the direct supervision of the SFA’s oral historian, Amy Evans Streeter, who will oversee the proposed project and offer guidance before, during, and after the intern’s time in the field. The completed project will be deposited in the SFA’s permanent archive. Interns have the right to utilize the interviews they conduct for their own academic endeavors. Availability: Once per calendar year Term: TBD; project must be completed one year from internship start date. Credit: Please note that the intern’s university is the grantor of course credit, not the Southern Foodways Alliance or the University of Mississippi. Application Deadlines: TBD on an individual basis Stipend: TBD with a ceiling of $1,500. Half of the stipend will be granted upon receipt of award; the other half will be granted upon completion of project. Equipment: A personal laptop is required. The SFA has an oral history kit (digital recorder, external mike, headphones, and digital camera), which will be made available for the intern’s use, if needed. Possible Project Locations: The SFA is currently seeking content in these states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee. ELIGIBILITY: Internships are open to undergraduate and graduate students interested in the field of oral history. IN-HOUSE INTERNSHIPS: Previous documentary experience is a plus but not required. For those interested in producing multimedia projects, some experience with related software and equipment is required. GUIDED INTERNSHIPS: Previous documentary experience and/or experience in multi-media production is required. HOW TO APPLY Please send a letter of inquiry indicating previous experience, areas of interest (fieldwork or media production), and a project description (for the Guided Internship only) to: Amy Evans Streeter SFA Oral Historian Southern Foodways Alliance P.O. Box 1848 University, MS 38677 (662) 915-5993 Email: acevans@olemiss.edu Selected candidates will be invited to submit formal applications prior to the application deadline, if applicable.
REPORT FROM BLACKBERRY FARM A New Fellow, a Very Successful Fundraiser We’re just home from Blackberry Farm, the grand culinary destination on the cusp of the Great Smoky Mountains, in Tennessee, site of the annual Taste of the South fundraiser for the SFA, as well as the annual gathering of the Fellowship of Southern Farmers, Artisans, and Chefs. This year was our most successful fundraiser. With Sam Beall of Blackberry Farm and Mike “Rathead” Riley of the SFA at the helm, we more than doubled our highest take from previous years. We also welcomed a new Fellow to the august Fellowship of Southern Farmers, Artisans, and Chefs. The Fellowship—an independent body of the region’s most accomplished food and drink professionals—fosters camaraderie and mentorship, honoring the bounty of the South and the hands that grow, nurture, and interpret its harvest. Time spent at Blackberry Farm provides a forum during which the Fellows break bread and share knowledge while reinforcing the sustaining bridge between field and table.
Julian Van Winkle III (left) with his son, Preston Van Winkle
This year, the Fellows welcomed a new member of their self-elected cadre, Julian Van Winkle III, the pioneering Kentucky distiller and marketer.
His grandfather, Julian “Pappy” Van Winkle Sr., began his career in the late 1800s as a salesman for W. L. Weller & Sons. In 1908 he and another Weller salesman bought the firm. In 1910 they acquired Stitzel Distillery of Louisville, Kentucky. The Stitzel-Weller opened on Kentucky Derby Day in 1935 and went on to define its own style of bourbon, a wheated whiskey that proved peerless. At the time of his death in 1965, Pappy Van Winkle, age 89, was the oldest active distiller in the nation. Old Rip Van Winkle Company is now owned and operated by Pappy’s grandson, Julian Van Winkle III, our newest Fellow. Over the course of a long career, Julian Van Winkle III has redefined premium bourbon. Some of his innovations are measurable. For example, he introduced hyper-aged bourbon to the marketplace by way of 20- and 23-yearold exemplars of whiskey. But his most important work has been less about the spirits and more about the spiritual. Julian Van Winkle III has taught us to respect bourbon again. He’s the South’s grand ambassador of brown liquor.
Southern Foodways Alliance name company address city telephone
M E M B E R S H I P Please make checks payable to the Southern Foodways Alliance and mail them to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture University, MS 38677.
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❏ $50 student ❏ $75 individual ❏ $100 family ❏ $200 nonprofit institution ❏ $500 corporation
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, VISIT US AT OUR WEB SITE: www.southernfoodways.org or call Julie Pickett at 662.915.5993 or via e-mail at sfadesk@olemiss.edu
AWARDS PRESENTED AT 12th SOUTHERN FOODWAYS SYMPOSIUM 2009 Ruth Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award: Geno Lee Gene “Geno” Lee, proprietor of the Big Apple Inn, in Jackson, Mississippi, is a fourth generation Farish Street restaurateur, famous for pig ear sandwiches and smoked sausage sandwiches. His great-grandfather, Juan Mora, founded the spot in 1939, and his family has long fueled the blues scene on Farish Street. (His father and bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson were fishing buddies.) For 2009, the SFA focused on the interdependency of food and music. The story of the Big Apple Inn showcases that relationship. In tribute to Geno Lee and his family, the SFA, in concert with the Fertel Foundation, commissioned a film, Smokes and Ears, by Joe York. You may watch it online at www.southernfoodways.org. Click on the documentary tag. 2009 Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award: Ronni Lundy Since its founding in 1999, the SFA has recognized a dozen of its leading lights with an award for their body of work. These are individuals who personify the high standards of culinary expertise and cultural integrity to which we all aspire. This year, for the first time, the formal award bears the name of the late Craig Claiborne, who rose from Sunflower, Mississippi, to become the first male editor of the New York Times food pages, a post he occupied with distinction from 1957 to 1986. As a small-town Southern cook and writer/editor who never was outclassed by the competition, Craig Claiborne is a perfect role model for this year’s honoree. She hails from Corbin, Kentucky, a mountain town where Harland Sanders developed his recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken, destined to anchor a worldwide fast food empire. It may be no coincidence that our honoree used the words “Honest Fried Chicken” in the title of her first book, to distinguish her exquisitely encrusted
Geno Lee
bird from the greasy wings, brawny drumsticks, and buxom pulley bones being peddled from Baghdad to Beijing by a long retinue of Colonel Sanders wannabees. Let it be said for the record that our honoree this evening is nobody’s wannabee; she is her own person, her own model of pride, confidence, determination, and consummate skill. As a music critic for the Louisville Courier-Journal in the 1970s and ’80s, she earned the respect of a generation of performers, including John Hartford, Emmylou Harris, Sam Bush, the Judds,
and Bill Monroe, the fabled father of bluegrass. By the ’90s, the food that supported so many musicians in and around the mountain South had begun to lure our honoree from her critic’s perch to the kitchen, and in 1991 she published Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken, a classic fusion of the food and music cultures of that region. A second book, on food-centered holiday celebrations in the South, came out in 1995, and then our honoree turned—far in advance of the wave now sweeping the nation—to chronicle the return of small-plot farming, community-supported agriculture, heirloom seeds, fresh local produce, and the preservation of culinary traditions in her native Appalachia. She was the single most persistent one among us to advocate an SFA showcase of outstanding food writing, and is thus the true mother of our Cornbread Nation series. Please join me in celebrating the life work of the twelfth SFA Lifetime Achievement Award winner and the first recipient of the Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award of the Southern Foodways Alliance—the divine and audacious Ms. Ronni Lundy. John Egerton
Calendar of 2010 Events February 18: The Great Migration and Southern Foodways, Museum of the City of New York, featuring Jessica Harris and Ted Lee April 25: Potlikker Film Festival, Nashville, Tennessee June 12–13: Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, New York City June 25–27: Field Trip, Buford Highway International Corridor, Atlanta August 20–21: Potlikker Film Festival, Chattanooga, Tennessee (tentative) September 28: Viking Range Lecture, University of Mississippi (tentative) October 21–24: 13th Southern Foodways Symposium, Oxford, Mississippi
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
Page 36
Winter 2010
The Southern Register
Southern Southern Culture Culture Catalog Catalog Covering Covering the the South: South: A A National National Symposium Symposium on on the the Media Media and and the the Civil Civil Rights Rights Movement Movement These DVDs document a national symposium held at the University of
These DVDs DVDs document document aaa national national symposium symposium held held at at the the University University of of These These DVDs document national symposium held at the University of Mississippi in April 1987. Jointly sponsored by the Center for the Study of Mississippi in April 1987. Jointly sponsored by the Center for the Study of Mississippi in April 1987. Jointly sponsored by the Center for the Study MississippiCulture in Apriland 1987. Jointly sponsored by the Center for the Study of of Southern the departments of Journalism and Afro-American Southern Culture and the departments of Journalism and Afro-American Southern Culture and the departments of Journalism and Afro-American Southernthe Culture and the departmentscivil of Journalism and Afro-American Studies, Studies, the the symposium symposium examined examined the the civil civil rights rights movement movement and and the the role role the the Studies, symposium examined the rights movement and the role the Studies, the symposium examined the civil rights movement and the role the media played in both reporting and shaping the movement. Participants, media played in both reporting and shaping the movement. Participants, media played in both reporting and shaping the movement. Participants, media played in both reporting and shaping whose the movement. Participants, including including 53 53 print print and and broadcast broadcast journalists journalists whose whose faces faces and and bylines bylines were were including 53 print and broadcast journalists faces and bylines were including 53 print and broadcast journalists whose faces and bylines were frequently before the pubic during the 1950s and ’60s, discussed various aspects frequently before the pubic during the 1950s and ’60s, discussed various aspects frequently before the pubic during the 1950s and ’60s, discussed various frequently before the pubic during the 1950s and ’60s, discussed various aspects aspects of the civil rights movement in six panels over two days. of the civil rights movement in six panels over two days. of the civil rights movement in six panels over two days. of the civil rights movement in six panels over two days. Aftermath: Aftermath: 1968 1968 to to the the Present Present –––– Aftermath: 1968 to the Present Aftermath: 1968 to the Present Moderator: Nick Kotz; panelists: Moderator: Nick Nick Kotz; Kotz; panelists: panelists: S. S. Moderator: S. Moderator: Nick Kotz; panelists: S. Gale Denley, Paul Duke, John O. Gale Denley, Paul Duke, John O. Gale Denley, Paul Duke, John O. Gale Denley, Paul Duke, John O. Emmerich Emmerich Jr., Jr., Pat Pat Fergurson, Fergurson, Bill Bill Emmerich Jr., Pat Fergurson, Bill Emmerich Jr., Pat Fergurson, Kovach, John Lewis, WilliamBill C. Kovach, John Lewis, William C. Kovach, John Lewis, William C. Kovach, John Lewis, William C. Matney, Austin D. Scott, Wallace Matney, Austin D. Scott, Wallace Matney, Austin D. Scott, Wallace Matney, Austin D. Scott,Jack Wallace Terry. Terry. Closing Closing Remarks: Remarks: Jack Jack Nelson. Nelson. Terry. Closing Remarks: Nelson. Terry. Closing Remarks: Jack Nelson. Color, 212 minutes. Color, 212 minutes. Color, 212 minutes. Color, 212 minutes. DVD1049-6 DVD1049-6 .... .... .... .... $20.00 $20.00 DVD1049-6 $20.00 DVD1049-6 $20.00 Friends .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. $18.00 Friends $18.00 Friends . . . . . . . . $18.00 Friends . . . . . . . . $18.00 Robert Robert Robert Jordan Jordan Jordan Robert Jordan
The The Political Political Movement Movement –––– Moderator: Moderator: The Political Movement Moderator: The Political Movement Moderator: Gene Patterson; panelists: Jack Bass, Gene Patterson; panelists: Jack Bass, Gene Patterson; panelists: Jack Bass, Gene Patterson; panelists: Jack Bass, Reese Cleghorn, John Doar, John Reese Cleghorn, John Doar, John Reese Cleghorn, John Doar, John Reese Cleghorn, John Doar, John Herbers, Herbers, Ray Ray Jenkins, Jenkins, Haynes Haynes Johnson, Johnson, Herbers, Ray Jenkins, Haynes Johnson, Herbers, Ray Jenkins, Haynes Johnson, Marianne Means, Roy Reed, Arlie W. Marianne Means, Roy Reed, Arlie W. Marianne Means, Roy Reed, Arlie Marianne Means,Valeriani. Roy Reed, Arlie W. W. Schardt, Richard Schardt, Richard Valeriani. Schardt, Richard Valeriani. Schardt, Richard Valeriani. Color, Color, 89 89 minutes. minutes. Color, 89 minutes. Color, 89 minutes. DVD1049-4 .. .. .. .. $20.00 DVD1049-4 $20.00 DVD1049-4 . . . . $20.00 DVD1049-4 . . . . $20.00 Friends Friends .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... $18.00 $18.00 Friends $18.00 Friends $18.00 The The Bottom Bottom Line: Line: The The Decision Decision The Bottom Line: The Decision The Bottom Line: The Decision Makers – Moderator: Hodding Carter Makers – Moderator: Hodding Carter Makers – Moderator: Hodding Carter Makers – Moderator: Hodding Carter III; panelists: Brandt Ayers, Callie III; panelists: Brandt Ayers, Callie III; panelists: Brandt Ayers, Callie III; panelists: Brandt Ayers, Callie Crossley, Crossley, Willie Willie Morris, Morris, Hugh Hugh B. B. Crossley, Willie Morris, Hugh B. Crossley, Willie Morris, Hugh B. Patterson, Dick Sanders, Richard B. Patterson, Dick Sanders, Richard B. Patterson, Dick Sanders, Richard Patterson, Dick Sanders, Richard B. B. Stolley, Juan Williams. Stolley, Juan Williams. Stolley, Juan Williams. Stolley, Juan Williams. Color, Color, 98 98 minutes. minutes. Color, 98 minutes. Color, 98 minutes. DVD1049-5 . . . .. $20.00 DVD1049-5 . . . $20.00 DVD1049-5 . . . . $20.00 DVD1049-5 . . . . $20.00 Friends Friends .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... $18.00 $18.00 Friends $18.00 Friends $18.00
Speakers for the panel “Birth of the Speakers for for the the panel panel “Birth “Birth of of the the Speakers Speakers for the panel “Birth of the Movement: World War II through Movement: World World War War II II through through the the Movement: World War II through the Movement: 1950s” were (from left) Robert E. L. 1950s” were (from left) Robert E. L. 1950s” were (from left) Robert E. 1950s”John wereChancellor, (from left)who Robert E. L. L. Baker; moderated Baker; John John Chancellor, Chancellor, who who moderated moderated Baker; John Chancellor, who moderated Baker; the session; Chester A. Higgins Sr.; Ethel the session; session; Chester Chester A. A. Higgins Higgins Sr.; Sr.; Ethel Ethel the the session; Chester A. Higgins Sr.; Ethel L. Payne; and John N. Popham. L. Payne; and John N. Popham. L. Payne; and John N. Popham. L. Payne; and John N. Popham. Robert Robert Robert Jordan Jordan Jordan Robert Jordan
Robert Robert Robert Jordan Jordan Jordan Robert Jordan
Birth Birth of of the the Movement: Movement: World World War War Birth of the Movement: World War Birth of the Movement: World War II through the 1950s – Opening II through the 1950s – Opening II through the 1950s – Opening II through the 1950s – Morris Opening remarks: remarks: Gerald Gerald Turner, Turner, Morris Morris L. L. remarks: Gerald Turner, L. remarks: Gerald Turner, Morris L. Marx, Jack Nelson; moderator: John Marx, Jack Nelson; moderator: John Marx, Jack Nelson; moderator: John Marx, Jack Nelson; moderator: John Chancellor; Chancellor; panelists: panelists: Harry Harry S. S. Chancellor; panelists: Harry S. Chancellor; panelists: Harry S. Ashmore, Robert E. L. Baker, Faith Ashmore, Robert Robert E. E. L. L. Baker, Baker, Faith Faith Ashmore, Ashmore, Robert E. L. Baker, Faith Christmas, Chester A. Higgens Sr., Christmas, Chester A. Higgens Sr., Christmas, Chester A. Higgens Sr., Christmas, Chester A.N.Higgens Sr., Ethel L. Payne, John Popham, Ethel L. Payne, John N. Popham, Ethel L. Payne, John N. Popham, Ethel L.Schakne. Payne, John N. Popham, Robert Robert Schakne. Schakne. Robert Robert Schakne. Color, Color, 87 87 minutes. minutes. Color, 87 minutes. Color, 87 minutes. DVD1049-1 . . . .. $20.00 DVD1049-1 . . . $20.00 DVD1049-1 . . . . $20.00 DVD1049-1 . . . . $20.00 Friends Friends .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... $18.00 $18.00 Friends $18.00 Friends $18.00 The – The Mass Mass Movement, Movement, Part Part 1 The Mass Movement, Part 1 The Mass Movement, Part 11 ––– Moderator: Claude Sitton; panelists: Moderator: Claude Claude Sitton; Sitton; panelists: panelists: Moderator: Moderator: Claude Sitton; panelists: John Doar, Charles M. Dunagin, Karl John Doar, Charles M. Dunagin, Karl John Doar, Charles M. Dunagin, Karl John Doar, CharlesGilliam, M. Dunagin, Karl Fleming, Dorothy John Lewis, Fleming, Dorothy Gilliam, John Lewis, Fleming, Dorothy Gilliam, John Lewis, Fleming, Dorothy Gilliam, John Lewis, Chuck Chuck Quinn, Quinn, Gene Gene Roberts, Roberts, Doris Doris E. E. Chuck Quinn, Gene Roberts, Doris E. Chuck Quinn, Gene Roberts, Doris E. Saunders, Rex Thomas. Saunders, Rex Thomas. Saunders, Rex Thomas. Saunders,Color, Rex Thomas. Color, 87 87 minutes. minutes. Color, 87 minutes. Color, 87 minutes. DVD1049-2 . . . .. $20.00 DVD1049-2 . . . $20.00 DVD1049-2 . . . . $20.00 DVD1049-2 . . . . $20.00 Friends Friends .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... $18.00 $18.00 Friends $18.00 Friends $18.00 The – The Mass Mass Movement, Movement, Part Part 2 The Mass Movement, Part 2 The Mass Movement, Part 22 ––– Moderator: David Halberstam; Moderator: David David Halberstam; Halberstam; Moderator: Moderator: David Halberstam; panelists: Edwin O. Guthman, panelists: Edwin O. Guthman, Herbert Herbert panelists: Edwin O. Herbert panelists:John Edwin O. Guthman, Guthman, Herbert Kaplow, Lewis, Bill Minor, Kaplow, John Lewis, Bill Minor, Kaplow, John Lewis, Bill Minor, Kaplow, Morgan John Lewis,Fred Bill Minor, Charles Charles Morgan Morgan Jr., Jr., Fred Fred Powledge, Powledge, Charles Jr., Powledge, Charles Morgan Jr., Fred Powledge, Bill Shipp, W. C. Shoemaker, Bill Shipp, W. C. Shoemaker, Bill Shipp, W. C. Shoemaker, Bill Shipp,Still, W. C. Shoemaker, Lawrence Lawrence Still, Still, John John Seigenthaler. Seigenthaler. Lawrence John Seigenthaler. Lawrence Still, John Seigenthaler. Color, 89 minutes. Color, 89 minutes. Color, 89 minutes. Color, 89 minutes. DVD1049-3 DVD1049-3 .... .... .... .... $20.00 $20.00 DVD1049-3 $20.00 DVD1049-3 $20.00 Friends . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. $18.00 Friends . $18.00 Friends . . . . . . . . $18.00 Friends . . . . . . . . $18.00
Pictured with the poster for “Covering the South: A National Symp;osium on the Media Pictured with with the the poster poster for for “Covering “Covering the the South: South: A A National National Symp;osium Symp;osium on on the the Media Media Pictured with the poster for “Covering South: National Symp;osium on the Media Pictured and the Civil Rights Movement” are the (from left)Amoderators David Halberstam and and the Civil Rights Movement” are (from left) moderators David Halberstam and and the Civil Rights Movement” are (from left) moderators David Halberstam and the Sitton, Civil Rights Movement” (from left) moderators DavidJack Halberstam and Claude panelists Harry S. are Ashmore, symposium chairman Nelson, and Claude Sitton, panelists Harry S. Ashmore, symposium chairman Jack Nelson, and Claude Sitton, panelists Harry S. Ashmore, symposium chairman Jack Nelson, and Claude Sitton, Harry S. Ashmore, symposium chairman Jack Nelson, and moderator Nick panelists Kotz. moderator Nick Nick Kotz. Kotz. moderator moderator Nick Kotz.
Page Page 32 32 Page 32 Page 32
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The Southern Register
Winter 2010
U.S. Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.) U.S. Congressman Congressman John John Lewis Lewis (D-Ga.) (D-Ga.) U.S. U.S. Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.) speaks with journalist Doris Saunders, of speaks with journalist Doris Saunders, of speaks with journalist Doris Saunders, of speaks with Mississippi, journalist Dorisduring Saunders,the of Jackson, Delta Dogs, the posterduring for Jackson, Mississippi, during the Jackson, Mississippi, the Jackson, Mississippi, during the sympoisum. sympoisum. Maude Schuyler Clay’s sympoisum. sympoisum.
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