Author: Leonard Gill

“I hope no one thinks this is a sentimental story,” Carole Shelby Carnes said recently of A Street in a Town Remembered: A Memoir of Shelby, Mississippi (1852-2010) (Nautilus Publishing).

“I’m no Southern sentimentalist. My idea was to try to capture what it felt like to live in the Delta at the time. I wanted it to be remembered. And if I didn’t do that, then I didn’t succeed.”

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Carnes was on the phone from her home in Oxford, England, where she’s lived for decades with her husband (and distant cousin), the writer and world traveler Shelby Tucker. And in case you’re wondering, yes indeed, “Shelby” gave name to Shelby County, Tennessee. “Carnes” gave name to a street in Memphis, Tennessee. So too another family name and Memphis street: Cooper. Turns out, Carnes’ book signing in Memphis late last year was on that very street, at 936 S. Cooper, home of Burke’s Book Store. But the bigger book signing on the author’s tour, which took her also to New Orleans and Oxford (Mississippi, not England), was in Cleveland (Mississippi, not Ohio).

“I saw people in Cleveland, I’d never heard of or hadn’t seen in 65 years!” Carnes said of that signing in Cleveland, and among them was a member of the Chow family — the same family that once operated a Chinese grocery store in Shelby and that sent one daughter to Stanford, another daughter to Newcomb, which is where Carnes went to college too before later earning a law degree.

“The Delta was very good to them,” Carnes said of the Chows. The Delta was very good to the Shelby and Poitevent families, the author’s forebears. In A Street in a Town Remembered, Carnes traces her own long lineages — in tales told in the voice of her mother and according to Carnes’ own memories of the place and the times — back to the 19th century and to a time when the land was cleared of forests and swamps and early settlers dealt with the original settlers: Native Americans.

The early plantation families were followed by, in addition to the Chinese, a cosmopolitan mix of Italians, Jews, Poles, and Middle Easterners, whom Carnes grew up referring to as “Assyrians.” And in among the white families — rich or poor — there were a far larger number of African Americans, among them Octavia Jackson.

“Octavia was unforgettable,” Carnes said. “She’s been dead for 48 years, and even today, if I mention her name to those who remember her, a smile breaks out. She was just such a complete individual.”

Unforgettable too: the young man whom Carnes, a teenager at the time, met at the dances held throughout the Delta for the sons and daughters of white planters: William Eggleston. In our conversation, Carnes recalled the photography exhibit of Eggleston’s work that she saw in London several years ago, but she called him “totally individual” even when she first met him and he introduced her to the first hi-fi set she’d ever seen and to the music of Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Muddy Waters.

In her book, Carnes also recalls the buffet suppers that preceded those dances — light suppers served on Limoges china but with only a fine-silver fork, no knife, to cut the ham. Which is why, the author writes, she often sent a serving of ham off her plate and onto the floor, then to be kicked under a chair.

“I’m 74, but I still miss the dances,” Carnes admitted. “You never felt like you came from Shelby or Rosedale or Marigold. You came from the Delta.”

Her mother, May, was born in Memphis, “capital of the Delta.” It was Memphis, not Jackson, where husbands often did their banking business and wives just as often did their shopping. The Gartley-Ramsey Hospital in Memphis was also where many from the Delta went for treatment, including shock treatments. Carnes doesn’t shy away from describing it in A Street in a Town Remembered. She didn’t shy away from talking about it by phone:

“Gartley-Ramsey was a nice hospital, then it became a mental hospital. But the Delta kept it filled either way — women mostly. They didn’t have anything to do! It was too hot to garden. They didn’t ride horses. Society drove them crazy, and that hospital was part of society. My generation of women were educated. We went off to do things. And it wasn’t the first and second generations of women in the Delta either [at Gartley-Ramsey]. It was the third and fourth generations. They were the ones caught in the ‘trap.’”

These days, Carnes doesn’t travel as she once did with her husband, Shelby. (Someone needs to stay home and look after the couple’s Jack Russells.) And she no longer practices law, as she once did in England and the United States. Today, the couple live in a late-19th-century house originally built for railway workmen.

Carnes described Oxford, England, as a kind of village that makes day-to-day activities (not to mention doctor appointments) easier. But she’s also lived in New York, Washington, and New Orleans. She was “called to the Bar” in England and Wales in 1974. And she’s hitchhiked, with her husband, around East Africa (the couple married in Zanzibar in 1976), North Africa, and Europe.

Shelby is still into hitchhiking, often on the back of motorcycles (to “someplace awfully disagreeable,” according to Carnes). But she does still travel some (southern India was on her agenda when we spoke), and she returns to Shelby, Mississippi, where she still owns land inherited from her father. And she still misses things about the Delta — the season of fall; the site of cotton fields — though her family home has been torn down, as so many homes have on that street in Shelby.

As far as future writing plans, Carnes reported that her next book is a love story — between two Jack Russells — and she’s calling it Tender Is the Bite. Another book idea, a cookbook, will be based on the recipes of Octavia Jackson, but that will take some doing: testing the recipes, Carnes said.

A Street in a Town Remembered took some doing too.

“Part one [on the author’s earliest extended family members and Native Americans in the Delta] was the most challenging, because I didn’t want it to sound like a genealogical book. I rewrote it eight times,” Carnes said. But she certainly didn’t lack for materials.

“I had a trunk with old letters and documents — letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother. I had a number of family genealogical books too, and most impressive was a history of Bolivar County. Families in the 1920s and ’30s also wrote their histories, and one of the contributors wrote on the Shelbys.

“And then there was my mother, who would tell a story so many times that I could hardly forget it. Shelby took down my mother’s stories, and once I found them, I knew I could go on with the book.”

But as in most working manuscripts, Carnes said that she took a look at the first draft and pronounced it awful. She reworked it. She rewrote it. Nautilus in Oxford, Mississippi, agreed to publish it. Not until then had her husband read it. And as Shelby Tucker wrote in an email:

“Knowing how ferociously critical I am when reverting to a previous typescript of my own work and not wanting to discourage her, I did not read Carole’s book, 10 years in the making, until it was published; then I sat down to deal with a marital duty. By page 50, I was hooked. Gosh, the girl could write!”

No, it is not a “good” book, he told Carole. He called it a “wonderful” book.

Not the least of the wonders in A Street in a Town Remembered, there’s the fact that Carnes has those twin gifts no true-blue deep Southerner is without: a vivid memory to go with a natural-born talent for storytelling. No, she’s no sentimentalist. Nor is she an apologist, though there’s plenty in these pages for white Southern society to be sorry for. Plenty here to be proud of, thankful for, too. Best then that not just some of it but all of it be remembered. Author’s measure of success in this her debut book: goal met. •

Joan Williams was a writer born in Memphis in 1928, and before her death in 2004, her first novel, The Morning and the Evening (1961), had been a finalist for the National Book Award. Robert Penn Warren and Joyce Carol Oates wrote admiringly of her novel Old Powder Man (1966). And another novel, The Wintering (1971) — inspired by Williams’ real-life relationship with William Faulkner early in her career — won the praise of Anne Tyler. Other of Williams’ works include two novels, County Woman (1982) and Pay the Piper (1988), and a short-story collection, Pariah and Other Stories (1983).

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And now, all six of Williams’ titles are available through digital publisher Open Road Integrated Media in ebook form. Williams’ essay “Twenty Will Not Come Again” — on her relationship with Faulkner and first published in the Atlantic Monthly — is included in the ebook edition of The Wintering.

For more on that relationship, see Memphian Lisa C. Hickman’s William Faulkner and Joan Williams: The Romance of Two Writers (2006). (There are plans in the works for that book too to come out in an ebook edition from McFarland.) And for a biographical sketch of Williams’ life, a publication history, and bibliography, see Hickman’s useful overview at The Mississippi Writers Page.

If you haven’t read Joan Williams, now would be the time. As Grace Srinivasiah of Open Road wrote in an email, “We hope that the release of Joan Williams’ ebooks will not only continue to preserve her legacy, but also introduce Williams to a new generation of readers who are not familiar with this often overlooked author.”

Go to Open Road’s website for more information on the Joan Williams collection. The website also make it easy to order from a number of outlets, including Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play. •

Most philosophers can probably pinpoint the time and place when the big ideas first hit and the questions kept coming. Scott Samuelson, associate professor of philosophy at Kirkwood Community College in Iowa City, knows exactly when and where he got to wondering.

He was 10 years old, he was using a pillow to practice kissing, and he was imagining a classmate’s blond curls and “sea-blue” eyes. But then his consciousness “broke,” and everything suddenly “felt extremely iffy.” Why, for example, did anything exist, Samuelson asked himself. Why did he exist? And more to the point: “What great cosmic mystery led to my making smooching noises into a pillow?”

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That’s how Samuelson tells it in The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone (published last year by The University of Chicago Press), and he’ll be signing copies of that book after lecturing inside the sanctuary of Evergreen Presbyterian Church, on University across from Rhodes College, on Thursday, January 15th, at 6 p.m. The lecture, titled “Suffering and Soul-Making: On the Deep Value of the Liberal Arts,” is the 2015 opening event in Rhodes’ “Communities in Conversation” series, which is free and open to the public.

“The deepest human life” is a phrase borrowed from William James, but “philosophy for everyone” is Samuelson’s own goal in The Deepest Human Life. As he writes: “This book is my attempt to bring philosophy down from its ethereal theorizing and put it back on the earth where it belongs, among wrestlers and chiropractors, preschool music teachers and undertakers, soldiers and moms, chefs and divorcees, Huck and Jim — you and me, in fact.”

Samuelson could have also added to that list his students at Kirkwood Community College, where he teaches an introductory course in philosophy, which often leaves those students befuddled rather than enlightened — and, Samuelson is willing to admit in some cases, relieved to have gotten a requirement over and done with.

There are also those students who come to him impatient to know the right answers to life’s problems but who finish the course better prepared to ask the right questions. And that’s just what Samuelson wants his students (and readers) to understand: that it’s the philosopher’s job to “live the inquiry.” Why, even Socrates, as Samuelson reminds us, lived in recognition of his own ignorance. And it’s Socrates who begins the book’s journey of philosophy, followed by Epicurus, Epictetus, Descartes, Pascal, and Kant, among others, including Islamic theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. A personal journey, Samuelson calls it, that is also the journey of human civilization.

No reason, according to the author, that that journey not include a detour or two. In The Deepest Human Life, Samuelson has written four such “interludes” — essays to break up the larger narrative and to keep things down to earth. His subject matter in those interludes says it all and simply enough: laughter and tears; wine and bicycles; campfires and the sun; superheroes and zombies. Something else that says a lot: Samuelson, in addition to teaching and writing (and movie reviewing and acting as television host), serves as a sous-chef at a French restaurant in the middle of rural Iowa, so he’s no stranger to the meaning of “dead-tired” after a long shift.

Nor is he a stranger to the serious questions confronting each and every one of us, not the least of which three questions posed as chapter titles in The Deepest Human Life: “What Is Happiness?” “Is Knowledge of God Possible?” And, “What Is the Nature of Good and Evil?”

Samuelson’s students have in their own ways posed those very questions. And Samuelson the philosopher has learned from those students — often “nontraditional” students — too, and they include “harried moms and aspiring plumbers.” It may, in fact, be those moms and plumbers that Samuelson had in mind with the book’s opening chapter: “What Is Philosophy?” — an excellent question to ask whether you’re a practicing philosopher or college undergraduate. It is also a good indicator of Samuelson’s commitment to another issue: the humanities.

“Sure, it’s important that we produce some well-trained scholars and thinkers,” he recently wrote in an essay called “Finding Philosophy” (The Chronicle Review, on the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education). “It’s even more crucial that we initiate students into strong forms of thinking, reading, and writing. But the reason we should support the humanities in a general education isn’t so students can produce slick essays; it’s so they can lead examined lives. Philosophy should be able to speak to a mom in tears.” •
Questions about Scott Samuelson’s lecture on January 15th or this semester’s “Communities in Conversation” schedule? Go to the series’ Facebook page or contact Jonathan Judaken, Spence L. Wilson Chair in Humanities at Rhodes, at judakenj@rhodes.edu. For a preview of Samuelson’s thoughts, listen to Judaken’s recent interview with him at wknofm.org.

It’s been more than a couple years since the publication of Bluff City Butcher, which is where readers first met the serial killer known by that name — a killer on the streets of Memphis known as much for his surgical skill with a knife as for his ability to survive all attempts on his own life. But that book wasn’t the end of the story.

In 2013, readers met the Butcher again in The Skies Roared. And late last year, there he was in Blood Lions (from Barringer, which has published all three books). Blood Lions put case closed to “The Bell Trilogy,” so-called by the author, Memphian Steve Bradshaw.

Or did it? Because in a recent Q&A, Bradshaw — by profession a forensics investigator turned biotechnology entrepreneur — left that question a little open.

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No question, however, that Bradshaw’s extended, multi-character suspense/thriller — set in Memphis and around the globe; gruesome, yes, but speculative too on the subject of genetic engineering — has its faithful followers. Just as Bradshaw’s extended, fictional Bell family has its major problems. Not the least of which: Gilgamesh, a hidden society of world billionaires anxious to get their hands on the formula for life everlasting — so anxious, in fact, that they’re willing to kill to get hold of it. But equally willing to see to it that they don’t get hold of it there’s the Bluff City Butcher.

What’s it like for a first-time author to start out big time at a thousand or so pages of complicated storytelling? And how, as the trilogy progressed, does the writing progress? A few things are for sure: In Blood Lions, there’s lesser emphasis on violence, more interest in the chase, more on motives, more on clearing up background family matters, until we reach, in the book’s closing pages, a key plot point that’s tied to Memphis history.

. . .

Steve Bradshaw: I wrote “The Bell Trilogy” with one mantra: Every page must grab and hold reader interest. Unlike the challenges of an average 85,000-word novel, my story and character-development arcs had to span 300,000 words, and each book had to have the strength to stand on its own merits. Each time, the reader’s expectations had to be met, and there had to be a reason to go to the next book in the trilogy. That was a daunting task.

But I knew where the trilogy would begin and where it would end. With support from my publisher, editors, and “alpha” readers, I grew. I turned to successful writers to learn more (Stephen King, Ken Follett, Dan Brown, Robert Ludlum, and John Grisham). And, of course, the act of writing “grows” an author. We soon learn that our characters take over. We are taken places we never planned. That was the greatest lesson learned as a new author.

Book I, Bluff City Butcher, is a dark story about a hideous serial killer. It sets the stage and tells the reader there is far more going on than you think. Book II, The Skies Roared, develops another beast, a sinister secret society on an even more horrific mission than the monster in Book I. And Book III, Blood Lions, is about a world-changing biologic and the collision of good and evil. The climax reveals a truth: the universality of the human struggle and our inner strengths.

Fair to say that this story could only have been set in Memphis? That the city acted not only as inspiration but as a character itself?
“The Bell Trilogy” had to be based in Memphis for reasons that become obvious in Book III. My intimate knowledge of the region allowed me to bring settings alive and provided the trilogy with a plethora of ideal venues for the capers to unfold: Beale Street, Mud Island, the Peabody hotel, the Mississippi River, the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, and more.

Now that the trilogy is complete, what are you working on? Is it Memphis-set, and are you already missing any of the characters you created in “The Bell Trilogy”? Your writing goals, in general, for the new year?
I’m writing a stand-alone suspense/thriller that draws upon my experience as a forensic investigator and biotechnology entrepreneur. In my next novel, advanced forensics, serial death, the paranormal, and clandestine government collide. The story begins in Henryetta, Oklahoma, and jumps to Memphis on a timeline three months after the last act of Blood Lions. My new story is an offshoot of “The Bell Trilogy,” with references to past events and key characters. Memphis homicide detective Tony Wilcox, a popular trilogy character, will have a role.

My 2015 writing goals are to release two stand-alone suspense/thriller novels and five short stories that will appear in horror, suspense, and mystery anthologies. And based on growing reader interest in “The Bell Trilogy” and its characters, I’m considering continuation of the series.

Regarding reader interest: What are you hearing from readers now that “Blood Lions” has been out for a while? And what about your readership outside of Memphis?
As a new author today, writing a novel is only half the challenge. Marketing that novel is the other half. I’m pleased with my steadily growing audience. Those who have been with me from the launch of Bluff City Butcher in 2012 have devoured Blood Lions. The most consistent feedback from readers is that they cannot put the books down.

I draw great personal satisfaction from those readers who have discovered me and find my brand of suspense/thrillers worthy of their time. Some have commented on my growth as a writer. Others are fascinated by the forensics and advanced biotechnology in my novels.

Most of my sales are ebooks (Amazon and B&N), and as expected, my primary audience is in the Mid-South. But it’s growing in other parts of the U.S. as awareness builds via social media, my website, radio talk show, book tours, and promotion. My 2015 objective is to expand the range of book-signings and promotion and to get an agent.

And you’ll continue to speak before writing groups on the suspense/thriller genre?
I’m building my travel plans with attention on visiting book clubs and organizations and participating in writing groups like Malice in Memphis, State of Horror, and CCWriters. I’ll increase book tours outside the Mid-South with an emphasis on independent bookstores. I’ll be involved with Southern Writers Magazine, writing a bimonthly column to help mystery/thriller authors with modern-day forensics and writing crime fiction for a savvier world. And I’ll increase my attendance at writers’ conferences (Killer Nashville, for example), at comicons, and at book festivals.

When I started writing “The Bell Trilogy,” I felt I knew my strengths and weaknesses. As a successful businessman, I’d learned to recognize and leverage assets and to seek help from experts to grow.

But launching my writing career with a trilogy was like catching an 80-foot wave the first time I surfed. What began as an awesome idea soon turned into a death-defying act. My determination helped me find what I needed each time the wave blocked the sun. •
Follow Steve Bradshaw on his website, through his radio talk show, on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

The year’s not yet over, but it’s not too early for Literacy Mid-South to announce its Books of Choice for 2015. They are, for adult readers, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (W.W. Norton) by Mary Roach (on what science knows of eating and digestion, including Elvis Presley’s death); and for young readers, The Fourteenth Goldfish (Random House) by Jennifer L. Holm (a coming-of-age tale about an 11-year-old and her scientist grandfather, who’s traveled back to being a teenager).

Literacy Mid-South’s goal with its annual Books of Choice program: to get Mid-Southerners of all ages reading — and in 2015, reading about science.

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Thanks to funds provided by the International Paper Foundation, Literacy Mid-South will be distributing 600 free copies of The Fourteenth Goldfish to local schools, community organizations, and nonprofits in March 2015 to serve as a jumping-off point for reading groups. That’s in addition to Literacy Mid-South distributing 5,000 other new books.

According to Kevin Dean, executive director of Literacy Mid-South, “I personally have been a longtime fan of Mary Roach’s work, so I was especially excited when this year’s theme — science — was chosen and we could include her as one of our authors. Gulp is one those water-cooler books that will have everyone talking. It’s fun and smart — and there’s one chapter involving an eel in a dog’s stomach that had my eyes bulging.

“When the publisher sent us an advanced reader copy of The Fourteenth Goldfish, I knew we had found our match,” Dean added. “Not only is the story engaging for kids and families, the kids will learn about famous scientists along the way. Even though the book was written for kids (and is begging for a Disney show based on the premise!), I had a great time reading it. Families will have a fun time reading it together.”

Look for Literacy Mid-South to be hosting several events in March for Read Across America Month, including, Dean said, science experiments for kids, special giveaways for book clubs, and a whole lot more. •

At 674 pages, Tom Clancy Full Force and Effect (Putnam) is a big book by any measure or any genre, and the author doesn’t need reminding of it. Mention the fact, however, and Mark Greaney good-naturedly replies, “Tell me about it!”

This latest novel of Greaney’s follows on the heels of his Tom Clancy Support and Defend (also from Putnam and at 503 pages), which came out this past July, and that book followed on the heels of Greaney’s latest in his own Gray Man series, Dead Eye (at 479 pages), which came out last December.

That puts Memphian Mark Greaney at a remarkable 1,656 pages for the year, and in a recent phone interview with the Flyer, Greaney reported that he’s already got another Clancy and another Gray Man lined up for next year. In the meantime, his only Memphis book signing for Tom Clancy Full Force and Effect falls on the book’s official publication date, which is today: Tuesday, December 2nd. Barnes & Noble at Wolfchase (2774 N. Germantown Parkway, 386-2468) is hosting the event beginning at 7 p.m.

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Greaney co-authored three action-suspense thrillers with Tom Clancy before Clancy’s death in 2013. And with the backing of the Clancy estate, he’s continued the enormously successful franchise by authoring two more novels using Clancy characters.

And so: Full Force and Effect brings back both Jack Ryans — Ryan Sr. (U.S. president) and Ryan Jr. (operations officer for the Campus, an under-the-radar U.S. intelligence agency) — and the cause of the conflict is today’s front-page news: North Korea, which is, under the leadership of the young, untested son of the country’s former leader, in the process of developing a long-range, nuclear-war-headed intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the West Coast of the United States. Capable, that is, if only a North Korean mining site rich in rare-earth minerals can be harnessed to supply the materials for that weaponry and if only the science can be brought in to get that missile going.

East European geologists are needed for their technical expertise. The very shady Sharps Global Intelligence Partners (headed by former FBI agent “Duke” Sharps) is supplying the know-how to get those geologists into North Korea. Jack Ryan Jr. and his cohort at the Campus are charged with getting to the bottom of it. Annette Brawley, “imagery specialist” at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, is doing a damn good job fielding satellite photos. And Jack Ryan Sr. is set to be assassinated by a North Korean sleeper cell.

It’s a classic Clancy setup, and Full Force and Effect is a good, solid read. Its globe-trotting combination of above-board and rogue elements is in Greaney’s equally good hands. Thing is, though, the book — as in all of Greaney’s books, whether Clancy-connected or not — was at least partially written in an East Memphis coffee shop. The East Memphis home that Greaney moved into six months ago has its own office for writing too, but as Greaney reported, when you’re on deadline, you do what you can, you write where you can.

“I try to write 1,000, 1,500 words per day,” he said. “But I spend a lot of time researching at the beginning of a novel, and that due date [to my publisher] doesn’t move. I was up in D.C. for a month and in New York City for location research in the mornings. I was writing all afternoon and into the night. So some days I wrote 20 pages a day.”

But when Greaney’s in Memphis, is he writing inside that coffee shop? Or is he at home?

“Fifty-fifty,” he admitted. “I was also in Algeria two weeks ago. Los Angeles last week. I’m writing wherever I am.”

Which leads to the question whether Greaney’s actually been inside North Korea. That question is not far-fetched. Greaney considered joining a tour group there, because visits to North Korea by Westerners can be done — but Westerners, as recent headlines confirm, can get into major trouble getting out.

Turns out, Greaney didn’t go to North Korea, though as Full Force and Effect demonstrates, he’s been especially interested in introducing to readers another side of “The Hermit Kingdom” — a more personal side — because two of the novel’s lead characters are North Koreans who have to carefully negotiate the politics of doing business there. Their lives depend on negotiating it. The lives of their families do too. And that’s one reason this novel’s so big.

“I looked into going to North Korea,” Greaney said, “because I wanted to create legitimate reasons for the action of the ‘bad’ guys … personal reasons to give the story more depth. Otherwise, those characters would have been like aliens from another planet. It would have been too easy to make the characters pure evil, beyond parody.

“But I also wanted to expand the story to take in the American private intelligence that was working with the North Koreans. And yes, there really is a mine in North Korea — rare-earth minerals that the Chinese are mining — and there are conflicts now between China and North Korea. I envisioned a scenario where things got so bad that North Korea kicked China out. And North Korea is developing ICBMs. That’s the reality. I just took it to another level, went from there.

“And there are definitely private intelligence organizations all over the U.S. that do contract work for the U.S. I’ve always been fascinated by these agencies, because some of my real-life contacts are ex-CIA and ex-FBI. I’ve learned a lot about that world.”

Greaney has also learned the difference between writing according to his own cast of characters and those of Tom Clancy. Both writers made their names in the same genre. What separates a Greaney thriller from one by Clancy?

“The Gray Man books are more narrow in scope,” Greaney said. “Readers have the feeling they’re looking over the shoulder of the hero. Clancy is wider in scope. It’s fun to do both. And it was fun for me in Full Force and Effect to wonder in one scene, for example, what it’s like to be in the White House, to be the president in an intelligence briefing, to not be getting the intelligence you want.

“In the Gray Man series, it’s interesting to have this hero and think about all the personal things he’s having to deal with, the objectives he has to achieve. With Clancy, it’s a different type of fun, a different type of challenge. With the Clancy books, I start to wonder: If the plot goes here … then maybe now we can look at things through the eyes, say, of a Navy Seal. Let’s put the camera there. Let’s see what things look like.

“But I don’t try or think too hard about writing like Clancy, though there are definitely expectations people have. I’ve been reading him since the mid-1980s. A lot of my development as a writer comes from reading those books of his. It’s the reason I don’t expect the series to veer off in some strange direction, because, one, I don’t think anybody would let me do that. And two, I used to love seeing how Tom Clancy would tie all these different threads together — the threads in the first and second acts: How could they all possibly come together in the third act? That’s a Clancy hallmark. As long as I’m writing a Clancy book, that will never change.”

What has changed since Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October appeared in 1984? Speed of storytelling. “People are not as interested in the minutiae of detail that they were 15 or 20 years ago,” Greaney said. And as for Clancy’s core audience?

“The vast majority of readers,” Greaney said, “are very glad the Jack Ryan novels are continuing. And the vast majority are glad that the guy who worked with Tom on his last three books has been brought in to continue the series.

“There are naysayers. People who think the books should have been put to bed with Tom’s death. I understand that. But people like the books. The Clancy estate wanted to continue. The publisher wanted to continue. From the very beginning, I knew there would be some pushback. But the one thing I can do is to make the books as faithful to people’s expectations as I can. Make the books as good as I can. If I get close enough, then everything’s going to take care of itself.”

But does Greaney have in mind for the next Clancy book a global conflict even more pressing than North Korea?

“I’m looking at Syria, which means looking at Iran, Russia, and ISIS. That’s a whole lot to slip into one book, in addition to the Clancy characters. I don’t have a plot yet. But you don’t have to look hard to come up with world conflicts to write about.”

Nor do you have to look far to stay close to today’s home-grown headlines. That phrase “full force and effect”? It applies to a presidential executive order, which carries the full force and effect of law, aside from Congress. Unlike the up-to-the-minute, real-world immigration debate right now in America, it applies, in Tom Clancy Full Force and Effect, to President Jack Ryan’s challenge to North Korea.

A reminder, then, at 674 pages, that this is the way we live now. Mark Greaney, inspired by the late Tom Clancy, is simply, in fiction, heightening the stakes, taking things to another level, going from there. •

Poet Ashley Roach was right. When she referred in an email last week to the rainy, chilly day Memphis was having, she called it “definitely reading weather.” Friday night’s forecast for freezing temperatures makes it real reading weather. And John Bensko, TJ Jarrett, and Christina Stoddard will be doing just that: reading their own poetry on November 14th beginning at 7:30 p.m. at Story Booth (438 N. Cleveland).

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The event is part of the Impossible Language poetry reading series, which is spearheaded by Roach, who added in her email that Memphis poet Heather Dobbins has been instrumental in bringing these three writers to Story Booth.

Jarrett, who lives in Nashville, is a senior editor at Tupelo Quarterly and author most recently of Zion (Southern Illinois University Press), a collection that recalls 1960s Mississippi and her family’s ties to the civil rights movement. Stoddard also lives in Nashville and is an associate editor at Tupelo Quarterly. Her debut collection, Hive (University of Wisconsin Press), is scheduled to appear in the spring and addresses issues of religious belief — the faith in question: Mormonism.

There should be no need to introduce John Bensko to local readers and writing students: He teaches (along with his wife, the fiction writer Cary Holladay) at the University of Memphis. He’s the author of the short-story collection Sea Dogs. His debut poetry collection, Green Soldiers (1981), was winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. And his latest collection, published earlier this year, is called Visitations (University of Tampa Press).

It’s where we find Bensko revisiting the wounded of the Civil War and some of America’s 19th-century painters and writers. And though the sea may be “the oldest home we know” (in Bensko’s poem “To the Ocean”), it’s the landscape — plant life, animal life, throughout the seasons — that has drawn Bensko’s greater attention.

Frost is still on the window pane in late spring in “At Concord,” and illness is in the air in “Yellow Fever: Holly Springs, Mississippi, September 1878.”

It’s hanging time for the Confederate commander at Andersonville in “Henry Wirz, November 1865.” Autumn is candle-making time in “Bayberry.” And it’s cold at hog-killing time in “November Frost.”

More than frost, the waters of Niagara Falls have turned ice-solid in “Niagara: Winter 1878,” but “Snow Day” means more than a break in routine. It leads Bensko to meditate on that final break, not in routine but from life as we know it. What do we know of death? Disappearance, but what of us remains, what do we become, and what does the soul — should the afterlife exist — awaken to? The poet can’t answer. Enough that he raises the questions. And is it too much to ask that Bensko read the somber but lovely “Snow Day” at Impossible Language on Friday night, when snow just might be in the nighttime air? •

“Art is passion. You do it because you have to; it is your breath, your lifeline. But how far would you go for your passion? Would you kill for it? Steal it? Destroy it? Or protect it at all costs?

Enter Adolf Hitler.”

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International journalist Lisa Barr, who once served as an editor at The Jerusalem Post, wrote the above words in an essay on Huffington Post this past July — an essay on the so-called degenerate modern art despised by Hitler, the same art that was looted, when not destroyed, by the Nazis and is being recovered to this day.

Barr’s essay also touches on historical events and universal themes that her fictional characters face in her debut novel, Fugitive Colors (Arcade). Those characters include an American painter in Paris in the 1930s, his two artist friends, and the woman who serves as model and muse and source of jealousy. Meanwhile, the father of one of those friends is ready to carry out the campaign against modern art — and artists — in Hitler’s Germany, with his son soon to join him in that campaign.

The novel, which came out in the fall of last year, won the Independent Publishers Book Award gold medal for Best Literary Fiction 2014. And on Wednesday, November 12th, Memphians will have the chance to meet Barr when she visits the Memphis Jewish Community Center.

Fugitive Colors is MJCC’s first “community read,” and Barr’s visit is part of the center’s 2014 Jewish Literary and Cultural Arts Festival, which continues through November 23rd. Barr will be on hand to discuss Fugitive Colors, answer questions, and sign copies on Wednesday the 12th. The event begins at 7 p.m.; tickets are $13, $10 for MJCC members. For more information, call the center at 761-0810 or go to jccmemphis.org.

• • •

International adventurer Richard Halliburton was a best-selling travel writer in the 1920s and ’30s, and it’s no exaggeration to say he was at that time the most famous Memphian in America. Relive his life — cut short when Halliburton, age 39, was lost at sea — in the compact biography The Forgotten Adventures of Richard Halliburton: A High-Flying Life from Tennessee to Timbuktu (The History Press) by R. Scott Williams. Have a good look at his life too in the book’s more than 70 photographs (many of them previously unpublished) archived at Rhodes College, where Halliburton tower serves as a memorial.

Like Lisa Barr, Williams is a journalist (degree from the University of Memphis), and he went on to become director of marketing at Graceland. Today, he heads marketing and communications initiatives at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. And again like Barr, he has a book signing in Memphis the night of November 12th.

Williams will be signing and discussing The Forgotten Adventures of Richard Halliburton at the Cotton Museum (inside the Memphis Cotton Exchange Building, 65 Union) on Wednesday from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. The next day, he’ll be in Brownsville, Tennessee (birthplace of Halliburton, before the family moved to Memphis), at the West Tennessee Delta Heritage Center, from 5:45 to 7 p.m.

On Saturday the 15th, 2 to 4 p.m., the Booksellers at Laurelwood will be hosting a book release party for Williams and for Bill Short, associate director of library services at Rhodes, who guided Williams through the school’s Halliburton collection.

And to wrap things up on Saturday, Williams will be at Earnestine & Hazel’s (531 S. Main) beginning at 7 p.m. in support of the Cotton Museum, which will be having its eighth annual Harvest Party fund-raiser. Tickets are $75 for Cotton Museum members; $100 for nonmembers.

For more information on the Harvest Party and for tickets, call the museum at 531-7826 or visit cottonmuseummemphis.org. For an excellent preview of The Forgotten Adventures of Richard Halliburton, go to HalliburtonBook.com.

• • •

In April 1931, Richard Halliburton and his pilot, Moye Stephens, set off in their biplane, the Flying Carpet, from a French Foreign Legion airstrip in Algeria. Their destination was Timbuktu, and to get there, they flew over the Sahara, a journey Halliburton went on to describe in his book The Flying Carpet.

Sixty years later, Algeria wasn’t the setting for a couple of adventurous Americans. It was the scene of a decade-long civil war pitting Islamists against the Algerian military, democracy against authoritarianism. Numbers are hard to arrive at, but one BBC report estimated more than 150,000 people died in that war.

James D. Le Sueur, professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a senior associate member of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford, undoubtedly has his own estimate of the number who died. And it’s a question bound to be raised when Le Sueur visits Rhodes College on Thursday, November 13th, at 6 p.m. His lecture, inside Blount Auditorium in Buckman Hall, will draw from his book Algeria Since 1989: Between Terror and Democracy.

Le Sueur’s visit continues this fall’s “Communities in Conversation” series at Rhodes. For more information on his lecture, go here or contact Jonathan Judaken at judakenj@rhodes.edu. •