Author: Leonard Gill

Do you have a book manuscript? Need some professional advice on it? And you’d like to help out a good cause? Make an online bid — or bids — by 5 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, June 29th. The winning bid will receive 20 minutes of sound advice, by phone, from a New York literary agent.

[jump]

As she does every summer, agent (and native Memphian) Anna Olswanger is participating in the Born Free Foundation’s annual online auction. Born Free is committed to alleviating wild-animal suffering throughout the world, and Born Free USA’s “Keep Wildlife in the Wild” auction is for one week only, with bidding open now. Browse the auction website for the wide variety of items up for bid and go here for more on Olswanger’s item, valued at $350, and to place your bid. (As of this writing, bidding stood at $120.) All proceeds from the auction go directly to funding Born Free’s efforts.

Olswanger, herself an author, launched Olswanger Literary LLC last year after many years with Liza Dawson Associates in New York. As her auction page points out, she specializes in children’s fiction and nonfiction, in addition to adult nonfiction and selected adult fiction. Past clients have had their manuscripts accepted at major publishing houses and gone on to be award winners and New York Times bestselling authors. Who knows, then, what 20 minutes with Anna Olswanger could mean for that manuscript of yours?

Delta ’Shine isn’t the first time we’ve read of a Memphis “tinner.” Author Joe Werner introduced us to the world of sheet metal workers and to Memphis’ skid row in his autobiographically based The Tinsmith’s Son in 2006. But Hoyt Jackson, in Werner’s new novel, Delta ’Shine (AuthorHouse), is not a tinner any longer. After serving as a captain in the Air Force during World War II, he’s back in Memphis and worse for wear, because he can’t shake the guilt he feels after sending his men — on order of Hoyt’s superiors — to their deaths over Germany.

[jump]

These days, Hoyt, with a defeated look in his eyes, would rather spend his nights in the company of a few bourbons at the Red Rose, then head home to sleep it off, which is easy enough to do. Hoyt lives alone in an apartment above the bar, haunted by the ghosts of those doomed airmen and with a view of the telephone poles standing like “drunken timber” outside his window.

But Hoyt moves on. He trades that apartment in Memphis for some peace and quiet in an Airstream 20 or so miles from the town of Holly Grove in northeast Mississippi, a mason jar of Jim Beam in one hand and a book (say, Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, a favorite of Hoyt’s) in the other.

Hoyt’s peace and quiet, though, is about to be tested: first by a family who moves nearby, with 18-year-old daughter Jenny (not only a real looker but also an avid reader), then by a woman named Sissy, a “highstepper” Hoyt knew back in the day and a welcome presence when she cautiously accepts Hoyt’s invitation to join him in that Airstream.

Jenny and Sissy aren’t the problem, however. Nor is Randy, “tough as a dime steak” but a boy sweet on Jenny. It’s Randy’s step-father, Ethan, who does more than test Hoyt’s newfound peace of mind. He shatters it.

Ethan’s a ‘shiner — head moonshiner in these parts — and he doesn’t take to anyone on his home turf who’s capable of challenging him, such as Hoyt the newcomer. Ethan didn’t care for his abusive preacher father either. He once traded copperheads for the harmless garden variety during a snake-handling service conducted by his father at the Church of the Holy Redemption. Those copperheads killed Ethan’s old man and sent Ethan to Parchman for 10 years.

Ethan doesn’t much care for women either. He lusts after them, uses them, abuses them, and worse. And now he has his eye on Jenny, in the worst way. But Jenny has her eye on Randy. A girl named Beth has her eye on Jenny. Randy has his eye out for Ethan. And watching over all is Hoyt, who’s had his eye on Sissy since before the war, and he wants to do right by her and her mission work among Memphis’ down-and-outers.

Hoyt’s a troubled but good man. Ethan’s all trouble, and he gets what’s coming to him in the fiery finish to Delta ’Shine.

As with most works of fiction, Werner’s novel draws on the nonfictional: in the case of Ethan, an unsavory real-life character from northeast Mississippi whom the author once knew — and whose violent behavior Werner knew of. Hoyt too, according to the author, was loosely inspired by a former serviceman who moved from Memphis to rural Mississippi, where he lived alone in a trailer and downed his share of strong drink.

For the scenes in Delta ’Shine set inside Mr. Joe’s sheet metal shop, where Hoyt once worked, we have Werner’s own background to lend the scenes the ring of real life. So too, the convincing atmosphere inside the Red Rose, which is dark as a cave, smoky as hell, but a home away from home for the bar’s regulars: a handful of solitary down-and-outers.

It’s Hoyt Jackson, though, whom readers of Delta ’Shine will take a real shine to. Hoyt’s haunted? No denying it. Some saint? He’s never claimed to be one. Redemption? No church needed for what Hoyt has coming: some peace of mind, which he deserves — and finally finds. •

Delta ’Shine is available at the Booksellers at Laurelwood and Burke’s Book Store, in addition to Amazon and Barnes & Noble, where it also comes in ebook formats.

Joe Werner will be reading from and signing Delta ’Shine at The Booksellers at Laurelwood on Sunday, June 14th, from 2 to 4 p.m. For more information or to reserve a signed copy, call the store at 901-683-9801. To find out more about the author, visit his website, joewerner.com.

In a town a lot like Memphis, Tennessee, Baker Davis, private investigator, is having a tough time. His license has been suspended and he’s under suspicion after the money in a drug ring that Davis helped bust goes missing. Plus the rent on his second-floor office inside a downtown building known as McDermott Center is due.

On the 20th floor of that same building, lawyer Richard McDermott, Esquire is having cash-flow problems too. So is the bank on the ground floor, which has obligations to its investors.

More money problems: McDermott’s half-sister, Gloria … she’s just discovered that Orion Pallet Company is close to bankruptcy, and the head of the company, Karl Orion (Gloria’s much older husband), knows why. He’s been paying a woman named Mira Ogilvy $20,000 per month for several years.

Mira has it worst. She’s been murdered, her body discovered in a weed-infested lot in a neighborhood called Sloetown, “where bad news is no surprise.” It’s a crumbling, crime-ridden neighborhood not far from the big river in this unnamed city.

[jump]

Cheryl Lester lives in that neighborhood, and she’s doing her best (waitressing by day; schooling by night) to take care of her younger brother and her baby girl. But then she meets Richard McDermott. Baker Davis meets Gloria Orion. And readers of Twenty Grand, a debut novel by Memphian Austin McLellan, will eventually learn what the checks for 20 grand every month and signed by Karl Orion are all about.

A detective story? Twenty Grand is that. But the subtitle of the book, “A Love Story,” says it better, because these are complicated, fully rounded characters thrown together by misfortune and in unexpected ways, their private motives clues to their better selves.

“I think all the characters love in their own way, though I don’t name it as such,” McLellan said of the men and women in Twenty Grand.

“It’s never obvious. Sometimes they’re hot and passionate, sometimes loyal and strong, sometimes desperate and manipulative. A few times they’re just a little drunk. As they say, it’s complicated. But no, this is hardly The Bachelorette. I wanted to write about people overcoming adversity; characters struggling with poverty, grief, violence, and desire.”

He might have also mentioned guilt.

Who is Austin McLellan and what prompted him to write Twenty Grand? According to the author (who’s been published on the Akashic Books website and in small reviews; his play, King Henry, Mayor, was finalist in the 2014 Tennessee Williams Play Contest):

“The characters, their speech, the sights and sounds in the novel have crowded my mind for a long time. The plot developed itself, so to speak, though I always planned to use suspense to drive the action. But I was never sure how the story was going to end until the characters ‘told’ me. During revisions, I worked hard to leave myself open to surprises, discoveries.”

McLellan’s life has had its own share of twists and turns.

He earned a degree in philosophy from Rhodes College, a master’s in literature from the University of Memphis, and taught English and writing at the university level both here and abroad. He once operated an art gallery, sold used cars, and today works in real estate. Memphis, where McLellan has lived most of his life, helped inspire Twenty Grand.

“I simply wanted a broader appeal,” McLellan said of his decision to leave the city in the novel unnamed. “Others have captured the local vibe better than I can. But sure, any Memphian will instantly recognize a few scenes. (The cover photograph was taken on Mulberry Street, a few steps from the front door of the Lorraine Motel.) I think Twenty Grand could happen in any major Southern city — Atlanta, New Orleans, Nashville.”

What about any major non-Southern city? Seattle, say, or Boston? In the words of Austin McLellan, “No, maybe not.” •

Twenty Grand is available at the Booksellers at Laurelwood, at South Main Book Juggler (548 S. Main), and on Kindle. Austin McLellan will be reading from and signing Twenty Grand at Book Juggler on Saturday, June 6th, at 1 p.m. For more information on the signing, call the store at 249-5370.

“You ain’t so special. Is alive, the Pinch, with people used to be dead.”

That’s Pinchas Pinsker talking to his nephew, Muni, who was beginning to feel like a spectacle, what with everyone in the Pinch wanting to see the new arrival. Thanks to his uncle’s help, Muni’s made it to the Jewish neighborhood north of downtown Memphis after crossing Siberia — where he’d been held for his anti-czarist sympathies — on foot.

Muni and his brethren were hardly the first Jews to arrive in Memphis. Nearly 400 years before, Rodrigo (born Ruben) da Luna of Portugal was one of the small army of men led by the conquistador Hernando de Soto, who was in search of cities of gold. But Rodrigo wasn’t a lancer or musketeer. He was a tailor. How do we know all this? Because Muni Pinsker went on to write about Rodrigo in his chronicle called The Pinch. It’s where we read the earliest known instance of what would become a Memphis trademark: its entrepreneurial spirit. For a fuller description of the enterprising and peace-loving Rodrigo, go to a brand-new book, also called The Pinch:

[jump]

“The author Pinsker chronicled the moment when the rapacious conquistador, sitting astride his Barbary steed atop the Chickasaw Bluffs, looks across the broad expanse of the river that separates him from the golden cities; while from the ranks Rodrigo da Luna is thinking you could go farther and fare worse. He would have liked to try and trade with the natives — maybe swap a starveling mule for fresh fish and persimmon bread — rather than slaughter them as his captain preferred. He thought that maps made a more enduring means of marking a trail than de Soto’s method of paving it with corpses. And wasn’t the real estate atop these rust-red bluffs eminently well situated for civilized habitation? After all, what was to keep the indigenous folk, once they pointed their weapons in another direction, from becoming the tailor’s devoted clients? (“Allow me to custom-fit you for a nice suede breechclout.”) But already the soldiers and carpenters were constructing the barges that would ferry them across the river, and rather than be left behind, Rodrigo da Luna would travel with them into an even more hostile landscape and obscurer death.”

A landscape more hostile? Rodrigo should have stuck around the Chickasaw Bluffs another 300 years.

The year was 1878: That’s when Pinchas Pinsker, himself an enterprising man, arrived in Memphis — or what was left of it. Pinchas, a peddler, had traveled from the Russian Pale of Settlement, to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, to Cincinnati, to Kentucky, down to Tennessee, where he was stopped by a soldier at a small bridge leading into Memphis, a city people were fleeing.

“What bidness you got in Mefiss?” the soldier asked Pinchas.

“Iss to make a livink, mayn beezniz,” Pinchas replied.

The soldier let Pinchas pass — right into a town in the middle of a yellow fever epidemic. But Pinchas survived after being mistaken for dead. He married the Irish girl who nursed him back to health. He established, on North Main Street, Pin’s General Merchandise. And so, to repeat:

“Is alive, the Pinch, with people used to be dead.”

Lenny Sklarew isn’t dead. But Lenny’s head does take a beating from police when he gets caught up in the riot that erupted during a march in downtown Memphis led by Martin Luther King Jr. The year is 1968, the city’s sanitation workers are on strike, and one of Lenny’s legs gets broken too. It wasn’t broken because of police action. It was because the stretcher Lenny was strapped to flew out of the ambulance carrying him to the hospital, and that stretcher traveled west down Madison and into oncoming traffic.

Lenny survives. He returns to his day job: working inside a dusty, rarely visited used bookstore on North Main — same location as Pin’s General Merchandise. But Lenny is doing his own bit in the spirit of entrepreneurship: He sells drugs to the bohemians inside the bar across the street in this once-thriving, now derelict neighborhood known as the Pinch. How do we know all this? It’s in The Pinch, but it isn’t The Pinch by Muni Pinsker (or is it?). It’s The Pinch (from Graywolf Press) by novelist (and native Memphian) Steve Stern.

Stern will be reading from and signing The Pinch (subtitled “A History”; sub-subtitled “a novel”) at Burke’s Book Store on Thursday, June 4th, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. And it will be a challenge — a challenge on Stern’s part to pick what to read from this very crowded and enormously entertaining novel (or is it a history?).

And like the city where it’s largely set (Siberia at its worst is one major detour), The Pinch comes with its own trademark. Make that trademarks, because for this gifted author — who has written about the Pinch throughout his writing career — there are plenty of stylistic markers: convoluted but masterly storytelling, eye for the tiniest but telling detail, raucous good humor, and an imagination often spilling over into mysticism. All of that in addition to the resilience of a people, which Stern captures down and across the ages.

Time itself in The Pinch? It’s as elastic as a rubber band, as twisted as a Mobius strip, with events far apart in time sometimes chronological, sometimes simultaneous. And for readers: It pays to take your time, because the bigger story in Steve Stern’s The Pinch, which can seem ever about to end, is, as with God and his relationship to his chosen people, really something else: never-ending. •

Barbecue: What could be more Memphis? Promoting literacy in Memphis: What could be better for the city? Combine the two and you get the first annual “Books & BBQ,” which will be at the Agricenter on Saturday, June 6th, from 10:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. It’s only $3 for adults, but children 12 and under get in free. Parking too is free. And the food: It’s from Baby Jack’s BBQ and Central BBQ.

[jump]

But that’s not all. There will be authors selling their books, and professionals will be leading free business workshops (but preregistration required) for adults looking for lessons in branding and marketing. There will be live music and spoken-word performances. And in the Youth Corner, more than 300 new children’s books will be given away, with Curious George, Rocky the Redbird, and Sheldon of the Memphis RiverKings for kids to meet.

Among the sponsors for “Books & BBQ” are Youth United Way, Hyundai, Boost Mobile, Kroger, Vantage Point Golf Center, Chick-fil-A, and Lasting Expressions Portraits. But the driving force behind the event is one woman, Angela Cole, a writer herself but a frustrated one when she set out to publish her own inspirational book and saw the hurdles to publication firsthand.

“I’m an author and ran into a lot of challenges getting my book published,” Cole said. “There are people who take advantage of authors. People who aren’t reputable. I needed a central network: writers, publishers, and graphic artists in one place.”

That’s what helped to inspire the “Books & BBQ” event. But Cole’s other important order of business was promoting literacy — and doing it in a fun way. After two early sponsors, including Youth United Way, came on board, other sponsors followed.

“If we can get people to the Agricenter on Saturday, we can also get them behind our cause: literacy,” Cole said. “We can do something positive here. We can dream bigger. But we can also have fun doing it!”

For detailed information on all the activities at “Books & BBQ,” go to its website.

Summer is for fun and for reading thanks also to Porter-Leath, which will be distributing, for free, two children’s books with Memphis themes: Perre Magness’ We Live in Memphis!, which will go to the 4,500 students in Porter-Leath’s preschool programs, and Grace Hammond Skertich’s Goodnight Memphis, which will be donated to a hundred or so preschool classrooms.

Both titles are designed for children up to 5 years old, and the idea behind the book distribution is to encourage school-readiness skills and to promote language-rich households, especially during the summer months, when learning retention is critical.

“When kids are read to, listen to words, and talk about the stories, it helps prepare them for a lifetime of learning,” according to Karen Harrell, vice president of Early Childhood Services at Porter-Leath, which has seen measurable results among its Head Start and Early Head Start students thanks to its early literacy initiatives.

For more on Porter-Leath’s programs for at-risk children in Memphis, visit the website. As the organization, which has operated for more than 160 years, puts it in their motto: “Better Children. Better Families.” Better Memphis too. •

On a July day in 2001, the temperature in Memphis at 5 in the morning was already in the high 70s, and for breakfast, Bill Hancock had toast, a banana, then a cinnamon roll, followed, for lunch, by cheese crackers and Vienna sausage. The carbs didn’t stop there.

Dinner consisted of a hamburger, a hot dog, onion rings, tater tots, and peach cobbler. To wash it all down, Hancock went through six quarts of water, three quarts of Gatorade, and a root beer. He had to to keep hydrated, because he was on a bike, and he was pedaling cross-country — from Huntington Beach, California, to Tybee Island, Georgia.

And no, that wasn’t Memphis, Tennessee, Hancock was passing through that July day. It was Memphis, Texas.

[jump]

Hancock’s wife rode ahead in the couple’s pop-up tent trailer, where Hancock would spend nights. But on his bike, he was on his own — except for what was on his shoulder, the “blue moth,” the name given to the grief Hancock and his wife shared after their son Will, age 31, died in a plane crash six months before.

The plane was carrying members of the Oklahoma State University men’s basketball team and athletic staff, and Hancock describes that horrible day in the opening pages of Riding with the Blue Moth, a memoir of his 36-day, 2,746-mile bike trip.

Originally published in 2005, the book has been reissued in paperback by Nautilus Publishing of Oxford, Mississippi. Hancock will be discussing and signing Riding with the Blue Moth at the Memphis Botanic Garden on Monday, June 1st, from 6 to 8 p.m., with Burke’s Book Store handling the event.

Bill Hancock has worked as a journalist, but he’s better known for the 13 years he served as director of the NCAA’s Division I Men’s Basketball Championship. He was the first executive director of the Bowl Championship Series, and he currently acts as executive director of the College Football Playoff. He also served on the U.S. Olympic Committee over the course of 11 Olympic Games.

But for someone so identified with sports, it’s surprising to learn in his book that he planned to study piano or math in college. That helps to explain why, in Riding with the Blue Moth, Hancock was a stickler for counting out his Fritos and peanuts and why his diary entries often come with a “song stuck in my head” — from “Play That Funky Music” (while he rode through desert California) to “Farmer and the Cowman” from the musical Oklahoma! (while Hancock headed to Onward, Mississippi).

“The best thing you can do with death is ride off from it,” says a character in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, as Hancock reminds us. But that’s not what Hancock and his wife Nicki did on their cross-country road trip. “Not once did we discuss the journey as a balm for our souls,” Hancock writes, “we were going on an adventure. Nothing more.”

And it was … an adventure: flat tires, sun, wind, bugs, the changing landscape, the changing cast of characters Hancock met on America’s back roads (he avoided the interstates). His trip also drew the attention of a growing number of supporters who contacted Hancock by email — supporters who asked him questions that ranged from his diet to his bike, to his favorite state, to what he thinks about all day, to the condition of his rear end:

“You haven’t written a word about your, er, tail end. If I ride more than five miles, my tail is sore for a week,” one emailer wrote. Wasn’t a problem, Hancock responds. He credits his Cannondale’s split-style seat, which “spreads the burden.”

“I had ridden the bike to a place where I could see the world differently,” Hancock writes at the tail end of his journey and after he’d dipped his front tire in the Atlantic.

What he also saw differently was the blue moth. Where once it was something to shake, it was something now to accept.

“I know the moth will come and go as it pleases, and not as I dictate,” Hancock concludes. “Now I do not try to escape when it arrives. I simply listen to what it has to say, and wait quietly for it to fly away. And it has always done so.”

That’s the great insight Hancock arrived at after completing his cross-country adventure, and Hancock’s words — scattered throughout Riding with the Blue Moth — to his grand-daughter Andie are just as insightful. Readers can’t help but benefit too as they ride with Bill Hancock in these honest, heartfelt pages. •

This year’s Mid-South Book Festival, now in its second year, will run September 9th-13th and take place inside Playhouse on the Square and Circuit Playhouse and outside on Cooper. But according to Kevin Dean, executive director of Literacy Mid-South (which runs the festival), it’s not too early to check out what’s already posted at midsouthbookfest.org.

[jump]

That’s where you’ll find information on becoming a festival volunteer or vendor. And that’s where you can preview this year’s presenting authors, who run from A to if not Z then at least W — Richard Alley to Barry Wolverton.

It’s a comprehensive list of Memphis and Mid-South writers, and they’ll be joined by writers from farther afield to make this Mid-South Book Festival (free, except for a few ticketed events) even stronger than its impressive debut in 2014. As of this writing, the writers scheduled to appear, in addition to Alley and Wolverton, are:

Ace Atkins, Eric Barnes, Shelia Bell, John Bensko, Reshonda Tate Billingsley, Marshall Boswell, James E. Cherry, Dan Conaway, Molly Crosby, Eric Jerome Dickey, James Dickson, Heather Dobbins, Beth Ann Fennelly, Tom Franklin, and Daniel Friedman;

Christian Anton Gerard, Mark Greaney, Jennifer Haigh, Jamey Hatley, George Hodgman, Cary Holladay, Caitlin Horton, Tim Johnston, Janis F. Kearney, Harrison Key, Fredric Koeppel, Jamie Kornegay, Becca J.R. Lachman, Sonja Livingston, Sandy Longhorn, Jonathan May, Kim McLarin, Moriah McStay, Corey Mesler, Mary McCoy, and Tara Mae Mulroy;

Summer Owens, Rebecca Phillips, Heidi Pitlor, Ashley Roach-Freiman, Lonette Robertson, Bobby Rogers, Dana Sachs, Courtney Miller Santo, Margaret Skinner, Cheryl Smart, Dorchelle T. Spence, Kristin Tubb, Susan Vaught, Neil White, Holly Whitfield, David Williams, Brandy T. Wilson, Caki Wilkinson, and Miriam DeCosta-Willis.

Until September’s book festival …

Mark the date (June 12th) and the time (7-10 p.m.). That’s when Literacy Mid-South will be holding its annual fund-raising event, Literatini, at the Booksellers at Laurelwood.

Tickets are $50 per person/$75 per couple, and that entitles you to cocktails (including a “Martini Death Match”) and food from area bars and restaurants, in addition to live music and a chance to meet author and journalist Marja Mills. Mills’ The Mockingbird Next Door, a memoir of her time spent with novelist Harper Lee, is now available in paperback and just in time for the publication of Lee’s pre-To Kill a Mockingbird novel, Go Set a Watchman.

All proceeds from Literatini go directly to helping students in Literacy Mid-South’s reading program, which annually serves more than 500 low-literate adults in the Memphis area.

literacymidsouth.org
; on Twitter: LiteracyMSouth; on Facebook: Literacy MidSouth