Author: Leonard Gill

If it’s gently used books — at bargain-basement prices — you’re after, the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library (3030 Poplar) is where you need to be Friday and Saturday, May 22nd and 23rd.

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The event is the Friends of the Library Spring 2015 Book Sale, where adult hardbacks are priced at $2 and paperbacks at 75 cents. Children’s hardbacks ($1), paperbacks (50 cents), and board books (50 cents) are another real bargain. But CDs, LPs, cassettes, magazines, videos, DVDs, and sheet music will also be for sale, as will signed editions.

All proceeds go to the Memphis Public Library collections and to improvements in the library’s community services.

Book sale hours are 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, with a special preview sale for Friends of the Library members on Friday from 8 to 10 a.m.

And don’t overlook what’s in store at the Second Editions second-hand bookstore off the library’s main entrance. Can’t make it to the sale on Friday and Saturday, however? There are online bargains every day and throughout the year at the Memphis Public Library’s Amazon store.

For more information on the Friends of the Library Spring 2015 Book Sale, along with dates for the fall 2015 sale and branch book sales, see the Memphis Public Library’s website. •

There’s a conventioneer found murdered on Front Street; a North Memphis gang known as the Bones Family; and a well-to-do business leader named Aires Saxon, murdered too inside his Central Gardens home.

Then there’s Saxon’s creepy son, Franklin, who’s CEO of Delta Pride BarBQ, which supplies the pork to its franchises throughout the Mid-South. And there’s Franklin’s half-sister, Cameron, who’s this year’s Maid of Cotton, but she’s no shrinking violet.

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This is the late 1990s. Willie Herenton’s the mayor of Memphis. Hootie & the Blowfish are big. And Gerald Duff’s Memphis Ribs — starring the Bones Family, the Saxon family, and a bunch of other unsavory types, North and South of the Mason-Dixon — has just been published.

But now it’s back: Memphis Ribs — Duff’s over-the-top satire on Memphis movers, shakers, law breakers and enforcers — has been reissued by Brash Books, which means a linebacker turned homicide detective, J.W. Ragsdale, is back too.

Back to uncovering why there’s a truckload of stinking pork shoulder turned to mush and why the pig meat is hiding this year’s cash cow: coke from Columbia. But what’s the pork carrying the crack doing in the hold of the barge carrying Cotton Carnival royalty at the Memphis waterfront?

No time like now to find out. It’s Memphis in May and the weekend of the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest. Read the background “recipe” for Duff’s Memphis Ribs in his guest post on the blog of his friend Lee Goldberg, author and television writer. Find out why this writer from east Texas and former English professor, college dean (including Rhodes), and TV bit actor was all up in some Memphis mojo in 1999, when the riotous Memphis Ribs was first published. Duff’s recipe is a kind of reverse love letter to the Bluff City — a city with some big issues mixed in with good times and a city to make a novelist feel, as Duff once did, not only inspired but, hell, right at home.

. . .

What’s the secret to the sauce of the champion Hitting the Sauce Whole Hog barbecue team?

There’s no telling, but the secret is worth a bundle to anybody who can discover it and market it. Bad thing is, the guy who knows that ingredient, team member Bobby Joe McLarty, goes missing when he was supposed to be tending to “Boss Hog” inside the cooker. Missing until Harriet, the narrator in “Long Pig” by Carolyn McSparren, gets down to business. She opens the lid of the cooker. No sign of “Boss Hog,” but yes indeed, there’s very dead (and extra-crispy) Bobby Joe, and that’s when things for Hitting the Sauce get more than messy at the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest. They get downright criminal, and, in McSparren’s hands, slapstick funny.

There’s more. “Long Pig” is one of 15 stories in the anthology Malice in Memphis: Bluff City Mysteries (Dark Oak Press), which was published last November, but McSparren’s story is a fun fit for this weekend’s barbecue contest.

As one of the book’s contributing authors, James Paavola (author Blood Money, the latest in his “Murder in Memphis” series), said in an email, Malice in Memphis is a local mystery writers’ group, and in Bluff City Mysteries the authors have tied each story to a Memphis landmark — the Peabody, Elmwood Cemetery, Voodoo Village, the James Lee House, etc.

Core writing-group members Patricia Potter, Phyllis Appleby, Barbara Christopher, and McSparren have been meeting weekly for more than 15 years to critique their own work and the work of other members. It’s a way for seasoned mystery writers to serve as mentors for aspiring mystery writers. And according to Paavola, another anthology by the group is in the works.

Have a short-story mystery on your hands? It’s set in the Mid-South? And it involves a ghost? Or you just want to learn more about Malice in Memphis? Check out the group’s Facebook page here. •

If you’re a poet, a fiction writer, or a writer of creative nonfiction, your deadline date is Friday, May 15th. That’s when online applications (including writing samples) are due for a series of June workshops conducted by staff members of The Pinch, the literary journal of the creative-writing program at the University of Memphis.

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The full-day workshops, held at story booth (438 N. Cleveland), will be next month and run on three consecutive Saturdays: June 6th (poetry); June 13th (fiction); and June 20th (creative nonfiction).

Costs to attend are $25 for one workshop; $40 for two workshops; and $65 for all three. For more information, application forms, and where to send writing samples, go to pinchjournal.com.

“It’s a great opportunity for writers age 16 and up,” Ashley Roach-Freiman, MFA student at the U of M, recently wrote in an email.

“The workshops are one day each, genre-specific, and incredibly cheap! They are taught by Pinch editors who are also MFA students and seasoned creative writing teachers, so they will be a great experience.”

Roach-Freiman, who will be co-teaching the poetry workshop, also coordinates the “Impossible Language” reading series, and the next big event is on Saturday, May 23rd, at 7 p.m.

That’s when Ruth Baumann, P.J. Williams, Ashley Chambers, and Heidi Staples will be reading from their work at 430 N. Cleveland. Except for Baumann, the poets are recent graduates or faculty of the University of Alabama. For updates on the evening, go to “Impossible Language” on tumblr. •

There’s Memphis Movie, the working title of the film being made in the pages of Memphis Movie (Soft Skull Press), the new novel by Corey Mesler. And then there’s Memphis Movie, a hypothetical film version of Memphis Movie the book, and if such a film were made, its dream cast, according to Mesler, would read as follows:

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Eric Warberg, director and lead character in Memphis Movie the novel: Johnny Depp, Peter Sarsgaard

Sandy Shoars, Memphis Movie’s seasoned screen writer: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Rebecca Pidgeon

Dan Yumont, 45-year-old lead actor and lech, who’s bedding a 16-year-old named Dudu: Brad Pitt, Viggo Mortensen

Sue Pine, a non-actress last seen in a commercial shot in Orlando, brought in to act opposite (and under) Dan Yumont: Jennifer Lawrence, Rebecca Hall

Mimsy Borogroves, bedmate of Eric Warberg: Amy Adams, Zoe Kazan

Luke Apenail, national film critic wise to the creative catastrophe that is the making (and unmaking) of Memphis Movie: Jack Huston, Chris Ellis

Camel Jeremy Eros, Midtown hippie burnout but a writer still, brought in to add some local mojo to the script for Memphis Movie: Peter Coyote, Donald Sutherland

Lorax, childlike bedmate of Eros: Juno Temple, Felicity Jones

Hope Davis, actress with understandable doubts about her starring role in Memphis Movie: Hope Davis herself, Amy Adams

And to direct Memphis Movie the novel: Paul Thomas Anderson, Noah Baumbach

A little confused? Director Eric Warberg is big-time confused in Memphis Movie. He admits to as much in an anti-pep talk to his cast and crew before production of Memphis Movie gets under way. “Lost, uninspired, fearful”: Warberg’s all that too. As he also tells his ready cast and crew: “It is with a heavy heart that I tell you that we are about to begin the long and arduous process of dragging this movie into the light.”

“Dragging” is right. As Warberg tells Mimsy: “I’m somnambulating through the damn thing. … This movie — there’s nothing there … There is no story! That’s the dirty secret.”

But there is a story, and Warberg knows it. But how to film it? That’s a hard one, because, in Warberg’s words: “The story is about cynicism. It’s about how irony only takes one so far and then you discover that you are tightrope walking without a net.”

Sometimes, as Eric Warberg learns, you fall. And sometimes there are shots — the ones caught on film, others that are fired from a gun. Leading up to the climactic shots in Memphis Movie, though, there is: high and low comedy, more than a fair share of sex, bruised egos, false promises, behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hangers-on, assorted misfits, exasperated crew members, and some serious soul-searching on the part of Eric Warberg, boy-wonder film-maker from Memphis in the throes of a possible career comeback in the city he’s come back to — a city that gave him his start and might see to his end. In Warberg’s words:

“Memphis is like that. The city you can’t shake. The one you return to and nothing has changed. Though you’ve gone through massive changes, the city treats you the same, and you try to act like you’re the same. It’s a subtle form of torment.”

Torment wasn’t the word when Mesler was writing Memphis Movie. The book (whose publication history was featured months ago in the Flyer) was in fact a joy for him to write. “Pure joy” is how Mesler described it in a recent interview.

“I hope that some of that joy shines through,” he said. “I think it’s a very funny book, and I think it’s my most plot-driven. I also got to talk about movies, which are manna to me, second only to books in my pantry of staples.”

But what is Memphis Movie about — the film titled Memphis Movie, which is being shot on sets inside the empty Pyramid in downtown Memphis?

Memphis Movie the novel isn’t so concerned about that question, and that was Mesler’s intention. “Yeah, I wanted to talk about how the sausage is made and not about the sausage itself” is how he put it. And no, Mesler didn’t go into this project as a first-hand witness to the daily trials and tribulations of movie-making. But it is a book partially inspired by the movie-making he’s been on hand to see.

“I wrote this at a time when Craig Brewer and Ira Sachs were beginning to make waves and after many big star movies had been shot here. And I do remember thinking that no one had chronicled, yet, the burgeoning film scene in Memphis.

“I saw them film a bit of the Jerry Lee Lewis biopic in front of Sun one afternoon, but it quickly bored me. I saw Craig shoot a bit of his first film in the book store. But, mostly, I made stuff up. This is in keeping with my half-assed, no-research method of composition.”

With that in mind, “flummoxed” is how Mesler described his reaction to the attention that Memphis Movie is receiving, with good advance reaction from actor Peter Coyote and writer Ann Beattie.

“Inexplicably yes, this one is getting more attention,” Mesler said. “Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s about movie-making, and movie stars are our royalty. Perhaps it’s because I have been tossing around Peter Coyote’s name as if he invited me to live with him in California. Truthfully, I’m a little flummoxed by the heightened awareness for this, my eighth novel. It makes it harder for me to whine to my wife about being ignored, and, God knows, I relish my whining.”

No whining allowed on the evening of April 30th. That’s when Mesler will be at Burke’s Book Store, the store he co-owns with wife Cheryl, to sign and read from Memphis Movie, 5:30 to 7 p.m. The reading begins at 6 p.m. Mesler will also be signing his latest poetry collection, The Sky Needs More Work, and his latest short-story collection, As a Child. •

In last year’s novel, A Wanted Woman (now in paperback), author Eric Jerome Dickey took readers on a wild, often very violent ride across the country and including Memphis, where his lead character, a woman named Reaper, once lived.

But as Dickey writes in the acknowledgments to his latest novel, this time out he wanted to “create something smaller, less populated, a novel that used fewer locations.” Then he adds:

“Did my best to leave out the guns. I did. I promise. I really tried.”

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And Dickey has, mostly: left out the guns. He’s pared down the action. He’s scaled back on the number of characters. And so, instead of a cast of untrustworthy, unsavory men and women, Dickey’s focused on two main characters: a woman named Jackie and a guy known simply as the “man from Orange County” — an “O.C. dude” to Jackie’s first-person narrator, who’s just an “L.A. girl.”

Dickey has trimmed way back on the number of settings as well: a gas station, a Denney’s, a movie theater, a 7-Eleven, and a hotel room. So too on the time frame: 6:31 p.m. to 6:31 a.m. — dusk to dawn and hence the title of Dickey’s new novel, One Night (Dutton).

But downsizing on the sex, a Dickey trademark? No way. Things between Jackie and her man start rocking at 10:32 p.m., and they’re still rocking hours later, with some quieter cuddling at the 3:56 a.m. mark.

That isn’t what gives One Night a special quality in the long list of works by Eric Jerome Dickey, who grew up in Memphis and attended the University of Memphis and who’s gone on to write nearly two dozen novels, a screenplay, and a miniseries of graphic novels. What’s special is the dialogue in One Night — the back and forth between Jackie and the man from Orange County, their give and take on what it means to be black in contemporary America, to be rich and poor in contemporary America. It’s talk that gradually reveals just who this L.A. girl and her O.C. guy actually are, until, in the novel’s closing pages, yes, there is a gun.

“Why would a guy like you want to talk to a girl like me on a night like this?” Jackie says near the beginning of One Night.

It’s Christmastime in Los Angeles — chilly, rainy. Jackie is in the parking lot of a gas station off of 605 and dressed like a Best Buy employee. She’s playing a short con called “rocks in a box,” and the well-dressed, well-spoken man from Orange County is pretty sure there’s no MacBook Pro I in the sealed box Jackie’s trying to sell. What he should be more sure of, though, is the electronic trail of his charge-card history and his wife’s access to that history. The wife? He — and we — learn eventually that she’s running her own con, and it’s a long one.

So too: the long back stories, the hurt lives of Jackie and her Orange County dude, back stories that Dickey skillfully brings to light. Rest assured, though, that in the end Jackie does get her reality check. And you, naive reader, will learn the definition of a “ramping shop.” •
Eric Jerome Dickey will be signing One Night at The Booksellers at Laurelwood on Friday, April 24th, at 6:30 p.m. For more on the author, visit his website here.

As professor of English at New York University, John Guillory has written extensively on literary theory, in addition to books and essays on early-modern European literature. His Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993) also won him widespread recognition. But when Guillory visits Rhodes College on Thursday, April 23rd, he’ll be turning to art historian Erwin Panofsky, whose essay “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline” (1940) will be Guillory’s jumping-off point in a lecture titled “Monuments and Documents: On the Object of Study in the Humanities.” Guillory’s talk — free and open to the public — is at 6 p.m. inside Blount Auditorium of Rhodes’ Buckman Hall. •

Bookstock — now in its fifth year at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library — is this Saturday, but it’s more like a series of events, free and open to all. Featured national speakers will be young-adult novelist and American Library Association Lifetime Achievement honoree Patricia McKissack; best-selling novelist Mary Monroe; and Charles Graeber, author of The Good Nurse, a true-life tale of “medicine, madness, and murder.”

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Bianca Phillips, Flyer staff writer and author of Cookin’ Crunk, will also be at Bookstock for a vegan cooking demonstration, as will Flyer photographer Justin Fox Burks, who, along with his wife Amy Lawrence, co-wrote The Southern Vegetarian Cookbook.

That’s all in addition to a panel designed for aspiring children’s-book authors and featuring McKissack and local writers Barry Wolverton and Mariah McStay. The panel will be moderated by Jane Schneider, editor of Memphis Parent, sister publication of the Memphis Flyer.

There’s another Bookstock panel too, led by the library’s Wayne Dowdy, and the topic’s no mystery: It’s how to write a great mystery, according to panelists Laura Cunningham, Phyllis Appleby, and Carolyn McSparren, editor of the recently released short-story collection Malice in Memphis.

Ten lucky aspiring writers will also have their work critiqued at Bookstock by Memphis mystery writer and Edgar Award nominee Lisa Turner and by poet Linda Reaves, but more than 40 local writers appearing at Bookstock aren’t aspiring. They’ve been published, and they’ll be on hand to meet local readers. According to Director of Libraries Keenon McCloy, that’s one of the big idea behind Bookstock.

“We’ve been focusing from the beginning on local authors,” McCloy said, “promoting all the great talent that’s here in Memphis. Our three visiting speakers — Patricia McKissack, Mary Monroe, and Charles Graeber — are from different backgrounds, and they each bring something different to the table. With Bookstock, we want to show just how diverse the Memphis reading audience is.”

Just how diverse? A program called “The Sky Without Birds Book Talk,” featuring Memphian Ting Ting Davis, will be delivered in Chinese, and you have library adult services coordinator Wang-Ying Glasgow to thank for broadening Bookstock’s outreach.

You have the library’s teen services coordinator, Janae Pitts-Murdock, to thank for heading up the young-adult programs at this year’s Bookstock. Programs will include a talk via Skype with manga author and illustrator Martheus Wade, an art wall, a performance by students from the School of Rock, and a “gadget lab.”

Children will have their own “gadget lab” too, along with a “tunes and tales” program, face painting, book making, a puppet show, and pop-up stories.

Bookstock 2015 will also be a good opportunity for everyone to check out the progress on the Central Library’s 8,300-square-foot teen lab, christened by community vote Cloud901.

According to McCloy, the library hopes to have construction finished by the end of this summer, with an official opening sometime in September. The project — which will include a sound-mixing lab, a video-editing suite, 3D printing, coding and gaming technology, and a performance space — has evolved, McCloy said, “into something that’s bigger than we could ever have imagined.”

It’s grown to include input from individuals at the University of Memphis, the Visible School, Memphis College of Art and representatives from recording studios such as Ardent, Stax, and Royal. And it’s all designed to spark lifelong curiosity and prepare young adults in skills that will serve them not only today but in the job market of the future.

“It’s all part of Mayor Wharton’s strategy to invest in our youth, all within a safe environment,” McCloy said of Cloud901. “People need libraries now more than ever.”

And it shows. In McCloy’s words:

“A friend, who hadn’t been to the library recently, dropped me off last week after lunch, and he said, ‘What is going on? The parking lot is full!’ I’m like, ‘Right!’ And with construction of the teen lab, we’re right on track, full steam ahead. We here at the library are just on cloud nine.”

Which may be where these days Charles Graeber is too. As reported last December, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky is due to produce, if not direct, a big-screen adaptation of Graeber’s The Good Nurse. •
Bookstock 2015 at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library (3030 Poplar) is Saturday, April 18th, 10:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. For more information and full schedule of events, visit memphislibrary.org and hit the “hot link” to Bookstock.

Those who have read Anna Olswanger’s Greenhorn know that the author — a native Memphian and literary agent in the New York area — based the book on a true tale of two boys: one a stutterer bullied by his classmates at a New York City yeshiva just after World War II; the other a Polish survivor of the war who keeps a mysterious box by his side.

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The film version of Greenhorn — written and directed by Tom Whitus; co-produced by Olswanger and Whitus — was released last year. It screened earlier this year at the 2015 Morris and Mollye Fogelman International Jewish Film Festival at the Memphis Jewish Community Center, where Greenhorn was honored with an Audience Award for Best Short Film Drama.

Memphians who didn’t make it to the local Greenhorn screening have a chance this week to catch it not once but three times when it airs on WKNO. The showings are on Thursday, April 16th, at 9:30 p.m. and on Friday, April 17th, at 2:30 a.m. WKNO2 will also air the film on Friday at 10:30 p.m. And the timing here is no accident. Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) begins at sunset on Wednesday.

For more on the background to Greenhorn the book and to Greenhorn the film, go to Anna Olswanger’s website, olswanger.com. •

“A cosmopolitan heritage that belongs to us all” is how Scott Newstok, associate professor of English at Rhodes College, describes it: our shared cultural history. That’s one of the main points he makes in an essay called “The Crafts of Freedom,” which was recently posted on Chapter 16, a website devoted to Tennessee “writers, readers & passersby.”

It’s a timely post, because the subject of Newstok’s essay is the “Mountaintop” speech delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. on the evening before he was shot and killed in Memphis. Newstok looks at that eloquent, impassioned speech in terms of its artistry — the art of rhetoric. But he reminds us too of the tradition that went into it — the tradition of a liberal-arts education, the education King received at Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University.

Today, April 4, 2015, first read Newstok’s essay here. Then return to the “Mountaintop” here, but for the full force of King’s speech: hear. •